The Shawl | Function of the Shawl
In the following excerpt, Gordon analyzes the function of the shawl in Ozick's story in terms of concepts drawn from psychoanalysis.
Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" (1980) is a Holocaust story about a mother struggling heroically but in vain to save her baby in a death camp. Brief and poetically compressed—two thousand words, just two pages in its original publication in The New Yorker—it has a shattering impact. Ozick manages to avoid the common pitfalls of Holocaust fiction: on the one hand, she does not sentimentalize, but on the other, she does not numb the reader with a succession of horrifying events. She works largely through metaphor, "indirection and concentration'' [according to Joseph Lowin,...
[The entire page is 2812 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:
Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Tell a friend about The Shawl at eNotes.
