Hi readers, I have a confession to make. I read today’s story, “The Shawl,” by Cynthia Ozick, before I chose it for this month’s challenge. But I’ve always meant to go back and read it more carefully. It is one of those stories that packs a dual punch: technical prowess and a subject matter that will cleave your heart in two. There are certain stories–Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” comes to mind, Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day”–that stay with you long after you have read them, that touch on something so real about the human experience, that they refuse to recede in your memory. This story is one of those.
It is still devastating, but on a second reading I was able to see so much more about it too.
One Thing I Noticed: The poetry! With a few well-placed line breaks, whole passages of “The Shawl” could be poetry. Just look at the first two sentences:
Stella, cold, cold,
the coldness of hell.
How they walked
on the roads together,
Rosa with Magda curled up
between sore breasts,
Magda wound up
in the shawl.
Ozick also uses a number of poetic devices throughout the story.
Metaphor: saying that something IS something else, to suggest a likeness between the two things
- Stella’s knees are tumors, her elbows are chicken bones
- Magda, wrapped in the shawl, “is a squirrel in a nest”
- Rosa’s dried-up milk duct is an “extinct, dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole”
- Magda’s tooth is an “elfin tombstone of white marble”
- a “long viscous rope of clamor” spills from Magda’s mouth when she finally makes a sound
- when she sees what will happen to Magda, Rosa’s skeleton is a ladder that her scream (and not just any, but a wolf scream) ascends through
Simile: comparing one thing to another thing as a way of describing it
- Magda has “a pocket-mirror face” and “little pencil legs”;
- her eyes are “blue as air” and “horribly alive, like blue tigers
- her “smooth feathers of hair are nearly as yellow as the star sewn on Rosa’s coat”
- she used to be “as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion”
- the soldier has “a black body like a domino”
- flung by the soldier, Magda is “swimming through the air … like a butterfly”
Personification: giving inanimate objects human (or maybe animal) characteristics
- the lilies in the distance are “innocent … lifting their orange bonnets”
- the electric fence sounds like “grainy sad voices–they lament, they “chatter wildly”
- the “sunheat murmur[s] of another life”
And finally, there are just some really unusual verb/subject/object combinations:
- Rosa learns from Magda “how to drink the taste of a finger in one’s mouth”
- Magda’s “little pencil legs” are “scribbling this way and that”
- “[a] tide of commands hammer[s] in Rosa’s nipples
One Idea: Write a story in which a character is going through some incredible ordeal. Use metaphor, simile, and personification to draw the reader into the physicality of what the character is experiencing.
