The Cloth of Life

The Cloth of Life

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Given the vast expanse of subject area and effected people the Holocaust encompasses, it was in some ways refreshing to see a more narrowed yet no less powerful take on the event. Ozick takes the opposite position as most when discussing this event, ascribing an infinite expanse of sorrow and pain to the smallest objects and briefest experiences.

Told from the perspective of a young Jewish mother, Rosa, The Shawl takes the pain and loss that the event has created for her family, and distills it down into a reduction of a family unit to its most basic needs. These needs are not met by captors represented only as “…a helmet, a black body, and a pair of black boots” (Ozick, 9). This description is telling in that it distils those who have control over Rosa into their most basic, robotic format. There are not soft edges, no leniency, and no chance for escape or return to normal. Instead, the only thought going through her head constantly that if she does anything, she will be unequivocally shot. In this way she and her two charges, Stella and baby Magda, are forced to become much the same as their captors-robotic, uncaring, and looking after themselves first, and others second. Clearly baby Magda is unable to do this forced censorship for herself, even the simple act of remaining quiet in the face of captors seems impossible for an infant. Yet Ozick introduces the element of the Shawl, and through this the improbability of life where it by all means should have long been snuffed out exists, in the form of inextricably surviving baby Magda.

Clearly the most prominent and overarching object in the story is the shawl itself. Ozick devotes more description of it or having to do with it than anything else in the text. Not to say that this is saying a tremendous amount due to the brevity of the story alone, but the entirety of the plot does seem to revolve around this one object. For Thus, it should be argued that the shawl in this story is meant to represent this culture, this family, and these individuals most basic humanity in the form of an otherwise common object. However in this place and at this time the shelter that it has to offer, the smells, the textures, are all anything but commonplace. It represents the difference between life and death. With it, even a newborn can miraculously survive, yet without it they may die. This seems to be an allusion to the power and importance of maintaining one’s own culture and who they are despite the current surroundings. The idea of shawl could have been represented by any number of objects; the point is that without it, or by giving in to the soul crushing environment, you are as good as dead

This point is clearly illustrated by the variety of forms that death takes when Stella at long last steals the life giving shell that is the shawl from Magda. Magda immediately wanders directly to her doom on the electric fence, powerfully illustrated by Ozick “her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling” (Ozick 10). Thus the “steel voices” of uniform robotic doom have claimed the first of the family. Rosa looses her voice, her will to cry out, to collect the remains of her child our of fear, fear for the same fate and the end of what remains of life at this point. Thus she suffers another form of death. Finally Stella, taking away her kin’s shawl suffered a form of death. She took the cloth not have been due to her own situation, but out of sheer jealousy for the situation of Magda. She realized that Magda's relative imperiousness to the conditions in concentration camp were directly relating to the fact that she possessed the shawl. Thus taking it would give her an escape physically (cold) and mentally (happiness or remembrance of a time before the war. However, by finally succumbing to an act that she knew would kill her own family member out of selfish disregard due to the dehumanizing situation she was put in, she lost touch with her humanity, and suffered a form of death as well.

The Shawl

As I was re-reading Cynthia Ozick's short story "The Shawl," I couldn't help but think of how the author may have subtly shown the differences of the amount of suffering each character was facing. For instance, Magda was represented with the least amount of suffering, Stella was represented with the most amount of suffering, and Rosa wasn't really characterized as suffering- maybe because it was like she was already dead.
Though, this is just a thought, maybe the author really was trying to characterize the characters with different amounts of suffering. There are a few quotes that show that Magda may have had the least amount of suffering. One being: "She looked into Magda's face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shale's windings." Another quote that shows she may have suffered the least is, "Magda laughed at the shawl when the wind blew its corners." There could be many reasons why Magda suffered the least, but what I thought of was that she might be suffering the least because her life has always been this way; she was growing up in the time of the holocaust, and that's all she knew life to be. "Sometimes she laughed, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh."
Stella may have suffered the most because she was old enough to potentially remember what life was like before the holocaust. Or maybe she was suffering more because Magda had the shawl, and the shawl protected Magda from the Nazis. Stella seems to be the most bitter about it all, "Rosa saw that Stella's heart was cold." And there's the one quote in the story that perhaps is the most significant quote in the whole story, "Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die."
To me, Rosa was not a very significant part of the story, and I think that maybe it's because Rosa did not seem afraid or sad, she seemed like she knew life was over. "Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already..." Another quote that shows Rosa knew that they would die is, "Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosa's two palms..."

The Yellow Wallpaper Ending

        I think I have finally understood the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. At a first look, this story seems like it’s simply about a crazy woman that absolutely loses it at the end. However, once you reread and go into a deeper analysis, you see that is not the case at all. The ending of this story was very perplexing because it seems like it leaves the reader hanging, wondering why John has fainted or if maybe his wife killed him. It’s all very confusing, but to understand the ending you have to go back to the beginning.

         The narrator’s tone in the story is completely different compared to how she speaks to other characters. When she is writing her private thoughts, she has a lot of discontentment with how she is being treated and there is a sarcastic tone in her writing. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency-what is one to do?”(Gilman, pg. 1). She places emphasis on the fact that her husband is also a physician because it gives him more power and control over her. It justifies why she can’t make her own decisions of how she wants to deal with her condition. Its also important to note that she puts dashes around “a slight hysterical tendency” because it creates more of a sudden cut in the flow of the language compared to if she had just put commas there. The dashes create an annoyed tone and illustrate her frustration and anger with how she is being diagnosed.

         When she is interacting with other characters she does not have this sassiness and succumbs to the rules that John and Jennie set up for her. “But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished,”(Gilman, pg. 7). She has ambitions to do something other than stay in the house and when she asks to fulfill them she cannot even keep herself together long enough to ask for it. Which is completely contradictory to how she writes in private thoughts in her journal. Up until the end of the story it seems there are two different versions of the narrator. The one that writes and has opinions and goals and the one that sleeps all day staring at a wall.

         In the end, she finally is able to keep her cool around John when she is not doing what he wants. “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it! How he does call and pound! Now he is crying for an axe. It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door! ‘John dear!’ said I in the gentlest voice, ‘the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!’”(Gilman, pg. 15).  In this scene, the narrator has locked herself in the room and John is frantically trying to get in. John and the narrator seem to have almost switched personalities. The narrator is thinking very rationally and has a calm head, while John is making an absolute scene to get into the room. She even calls him a young man, which lowers his authority over her. This is a critical moment because after she tells him where the key is, eventually he listens to what she says and follows her instructions, which is something he has yet to have done in the entire 3 months that they are in the house. When he finally gets into the room and sees that she is simply rubbing herself against the wall while crawling he faints. “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman, pg.15). John had probably assumed the worst, that his wife was trying to kill herself in the room, but discovers that she was simply tearing the wallpaper down. He had made such a fuss to get into the room only to discover that what she was doing wasn’t even that bad. Yet he was still shocked enough to faint. This is probably from the shock that his wife would do anything that would disobey what he said. Then when she ends the story saying that she had to crawl over him every time, that symbolizes how he was always in the way of her wants and needs even after he has no control over her.

            This entire story symbolizes the fight for woman’s rights especially for the time period that this story was written. By writing how a man is in charge of every little detail of her life when he barely understands her, shows how men can’t be the ones that make all the decisions for all women because they do not understand what it is to be a woman. Most men don't even realize that there is an issue with women’s rights until they themselves see it and experience it. Just as John is in the way of the narrator’s path even when he has lost his control over her, men are a hurdle that women must always get through to get what they want. The narrator’s continuous failing attempts throughout the story to gain some control over her life symbolize the difficulty that comes with fighting for your rights. How it is not only difficult to argue with others, but also with yourself. There can be the part of you that wants to have wishful thinking and be taken care of, but there is also the part that says enough is enough, it is time to be independent.

Sylvia Plath

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath invokes frightening images of the holocaust in order to illustrate her feelings of turmoil and acceptance of death. This poem’s main goal is to illustrate the speaker’s comfortability with death, displayed not only by her holocaust metaphors, but also by the fact that she gloats about her ability to not only die, but to do it well. The poem’s speaker first calls up the great tragedy when she states that her skin is “bright as a Nazi lampshade”. This use of holocaust imagery immediately conjures images of death and despair. The fact that the despair belongs to the speaker becomes evident when she refers to her face as a “Jew linen” in the next stanza. The speaker as identified the fact that in the metaphor of the holocaust, she plays the part of the victim. Throughout the poem, she refers to figures often associated with death (God, Lucifer) as “Herr”, which is German for Mister. The speaker furthers the metaphor that she is a holocaust victim by using the same language and titles that holocaust victims would have to use when they met their captors. The speaker goes on to welcome death saying that she’s got “nine lives”, and that she’s already used up two of them. The language refers to one near death experience when the speaker was only a child that was an “accident”, but also to a purposeful attempt on her life in which she tried to “last it out and not come back at all,”. The speaker not only has experience with dying, but welcomes death as a personal talent. She states that she “[dies] exceptionally well,” indicating the fact that she does not meet death with fear, but rather with eagerness. The speaker of this poem is not only comfortable with death, but she welcomes it. Not only does this poem’s speaker welcome death, but she believes there are certain degrees of difficulty to the act of taking one’s own life. She states that “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell,” and then goes on to make a point that it’s the “theatrical” type of death that she prefers.

In “Daddy” the speaker takes up a similar position as she once again relates herself to the part of a holocaust victim. Her father is at first compared to a black shoe in which she’s been forced to live, and then his massive size, from the California coast all the way to the Atlantic, is alluded to before the speaker finally comes out and begins speaking German again. She conjures up images of conquered Poland, and then lists the concentration camps in which she feels like she’s been imprisoned by the presence of her father. She brings forward the image of Adolf Hitler as she refers to her father’s “neat mustache”, and then to his “luftwaffe,” the Nazi air force and Hitler’s most powerful weapon. Her father’s long-lasting effect on her becomes evident when she states that she “though every German was [him]”. The speaker’s relationship to her father is equated to that of a Jew and a Nazi, and because of that she sees every man as a German. The severity of the speaker’s trauma can be noted when she begins to describe the man she found to take her father’s place as Hitler, as she states that she made a model of him with a “Meinkampf” attitude. Here the speaker alludes to Hitler’s famous literary work which started the Nazi movement in Germany. The speaker wraps up her interpretation of the horribleness that was her father by referring to him as a vampire that she has slain. Her resolution seems to be clear as she states that there is a “stake in [his] fat black heart,” indicating that she has slain the demon’s of her father that had haunted her. The speaker’s final opinion on her “daddy” seems to be that she has overcome whatever power he once held over her as she ends her poem simply with the line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

Murder? No Big Deal.

After class on Tuesday I found myself perplexed on the great group discussion that occurred. As a class we somehow began talking about why the misfit decided to murder the family. This discussion escalated quickly and reached reasons that were hotly contested. One proposed idea of why the misfit killed the family was because of the grandmother while another was because the misfit simply wanted their clothes. After class I thought to myself, Wow... We were able to talk about murder like it was nothing. We were more focused on the motives behind the murder to even realize that it was MURDER we were discussing! Like professor Oster and the group presenters pointed out, the class seemed to be completely desensitized to the idea murder, that is, the taking of someone else's life!

I don't think that Flannery O'Connor intended for this to be the discussion of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Rather, O'Connor wanted us to realize that the misfit received no joy from murdering the family. In fact, the misfit only murdered one person in the even while his accomplices took take of the rest of the family. At the end of the story the misfit explains that there is "no real pleasure in life." The misfit had just shot the grandmother because she reached out to him after proclaiming that all the misfit needed was Jesus. The misfit's accomplice, Bobby Lee, assumed that it was fun shooting the grandmother. This is when the misfit informs him that life has no pleasure. 

The last sentence of the story speaks to more than just the scenario at the time. O'Connor is attempting to illustrate that the serial killer does not enjoy murder. Rather, he is a product of the justice system. The misfit spent time in prison for no specific reason, according to the story. This raises the question, did the misfit become this way because of the judicial system? That is left up to the reader to decide, however, I assume the judicial system is the exact reason. 

This post has traveled the entire world in respect to topics, however, I think the class accidentally became focused on something that is contemporary to our time. We became so focused on murder that we missed one of several other underlying ideas. To conclude this post I will leave you with one question. What does murder mean to you?

Thank you for reading!

Brandon Rominger

Religion in the Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass

          The “Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave” is an autobiography that gives one of the best first hand experiences of slavery. Douglass is extremely honest with his experience as a slave. Even when it is not something everyone wants to hear. He is most honest when he is presenting conflicting ideas. Douglass makes a huge point about religion in the south. “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,— and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection,” (pg. 117). Right off the bat, Douglass uses the words “unhesitatingly” and “assert” to show that he means business, that this is real talk. He then combines words that are typically used in a more positive context, “justifier,” “sanctifier,” and “shelter” with words and ideas that are extremely negative, such as “dark,” “appalling barbarity,” and “hateful frauds.” By doing this he shows how easily something that is supposed to be positive such as religion is twisted into something negative. Douglass sees how religion is used as a way for slaveholders to justify their actions and shows how the slaveholders use different sins as reasons to punish a slave when in reality the slaves hadn’t done anything truly wrong. “Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out,”(pg. 118). Slaveholders use religion as a excuse for how they treat slaves, yet that is not how they treat other white people who look “dissatisfied.” They would never think to do the same thing to another white person. It is ironic how in Douglass’s world a religious white person is the worst kind of master that a slave can have. It should be the opposite because of the installment of God’s morals.

         Religion has been used as an excuse to commit horrible acts of brutality for as long as it has been around. Entire wars have repeatedly occurred because of people that do not truly understand the religion they are devoted to. Almost all religions have the same core values, to behave in peace with your community, to be just, to do the right thing, etc. It is so simple yet humanity continues to fail even with multiple books that show exactly how that is possible in many different ways.