the shawl criticism

Ozick contributes to the “About Books” column in the New York Times Book Review, and writes articles, reviews, stories, poems, and translations from Yiddish for such periodicals as Commentary, the New Republic, Partisan Review, the New Leader, Ms., Esquire, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Harper’s. This is a story about the oppression of women: there is no mention of Magda’s father, and the only male referred to is the guard who murders Magda, a faceless monster described in terms of a helmet, “a black body like a domino and a pair of black boots.”. She denies her daughter’s death and fantasizes that Magda is a married woman, a successful doctor or professor. Andrew Gordon believes the shawl is a “transitional object,” an object that helps an infant make the transition from the state of being one with its mother to the recognition that it is an individual, separate from its mother. The story derives much of its power from ironic contrast. But she was jealous of Magda. She feels no pity for her fellow prisoners, not even Stella. . Set in a Nazi concentration camp, the story does not focus on the political decision to exterminate an entire race, nor on the crimes and their perpetrators, but on the mind of Rosa and her struggle to keep her infant alive, despite the fact that the child’s only future is certain death.

This Study Guide consists of approximately 42 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Stella’s resentment of Magda grows to the point where Rosa imagines that “Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs” (2). Characters are never seen whole but reduced to body parts or things: Rosa is “sore breasts” and “a walking cradle,” Stella has elbows like “chicken bones,” Magda shows “one mite of a toothtip . Each seizes upon Magda’s shawl as a magical object, a substitute for the good mother, the only thing on which an assurance of survival or a sense of identity can be grounded. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs. Ozick has continued to win many prestigious awards for her fiction. Themes Rosa is afraid that “someone, not even Stella, [will] steal Magda to eat her” (emphasis added). Readers witness Magda’s death through Rosa’s eyes. Death is omnipresent in “The Shawl.” Death is introduced in the opening paragraph, when the narrator explains that Rosa’s breasts do not have enough milk to feed the baby Magda—who sometimes screams because there is nothing for her to suck except air—that Stella is also ravenous, and that Stella has knees that are “tumors on sticks” and elbows that are “chicken bones.” Later, twice in quick succession it is stated that Rosa thinks Stella is waiting for Magda to die. Plot Summary Stella is always cold, always hungry, and jealous of Rosa’s baby, who at least has the comfort of her mother and her shawl. Ozick takes the reader into the minds of fictional characters, but these fictional characters walk in shoes we can easily imagine to have been inhabited by Jews living in Europe during Nazi rule. Her death moves even closer: “Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die.” Finally, Magda screams and the time of her death is present: Rosa “saw that Magda was going to die.” The repetition causes an echo in the reader’s mind: Magda is going to die, Magda is going to die. CRITICAL OVERVIEW In 1938, Jewish passports were marked with a “J,” all Jewish businesses were closed down, Jewish students were removed from German schools, and Jews were no longer allowed to attend plays, movies, concerts, or exhibitions. Stella, then, is a burned-out—a dead—star. Critical Overview Yet no one reports her presence. Critic Suzanne Klingenstein, writing in the Fall, 1992, issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature, says that “the shawl functions in place of speech for both infant and mother and also as a kind of umbilical cord between the two characters. Her milk is gone; her body is going; she is reduced, a “walking cradle,” to instinct alone. In the following excerpt, Gordon analyzes the function of the shawl in Ozick’s story in terms of concepts drawn from psychoanalysis. Characters. It is “her baby, her pet, her little sister.” She hides in it, laughs at it when it blows in the wind, and sucks on it for sustenance. CRITICISM Sources Criticism. The issues of motherhood are more complex. Stella was ravenous. which may be a bit of cloth or a security blanket, comes at an intermediate stage of development between thumb-sucking and attachment to a toy or doll. Though Rosa tries to recapture the “cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva,” she cannot, and she “drank Magda’s shawl until it dried” (3). She fears that someone, perhaps Stella, will kill Magda to eat her, or that she will be discovered somehow. The Nazi state becomes a cannibal, annihilating and devouring its offspring. The shawl is now a banner representing life and faith and hope. Rosa’s soreness and Stella’s jealousy create an atmosphere of impossibility; they will not survive. Halperin, Irving. By 1939, Jews had to hand in their driver’s licenses and car registrations, leave the universities, sell their businesses and real estate, and hand over securities and jewelry. Then Stella steals the shawl and Magda walks out into the square. Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms. When Magda is killed, readers witness the scene from the position of a mother watching as her daughter is murdered. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the German Reich. During the march to the concentration camp, Rosa struggles. You can examine the characters who people the story: what can you learn from who they are and what they do? Finally, to survive such intolerable circumstances, these desperately needful characters resort to magical thinking. She guarded her shawl. A forerunner of the cannibalism motif is the imagery of nourishment introduced in the first paragraph: thin, dry breasts; a hungry babe; a walking cradle; tiny lips sucking air. The keynotes of oral deprivation, inadequate mothering, and the desire to revert to infancy are established in this opening: Rosa is defined as a mother with sore breasts who can no longer adequately feed her infant. Rosa’s breasts are dry, so there is nothing for Magda to eat; she could die of starvation at any moment. terrorized mother, exposure to a hostile, constantly life-threatening environment, premature weaning and starvation—and the hysterical mutism that she develops, her attachment to the shawl seems to partake more of the neurotic fetish than of the healthy transitional object. The final third of the story covers only a few moments. According to Phyllis Greenacre, the transitional object is an aid to growth that results from healthy development when the child has a good-enough mother. But we are also told that the concentration camp they are in is “a place without pity” and that “all pity was annihilated”—a word associated with death—“in Rosa.” The hell is all around them and inside them. Ozick does not describe the camp itself until some description of it becomes necessary to the story, and then she describes only what the reader absolutely needs to know. GENDER, RACE, AND PEDAGOGY IN MOTHER…, SANDRA CISNEROS

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