Free as a bird. From The Beatles to Lynyrd Skynyrd, American nomenclature to artistic symbolism, this birds equal freedom mentality has been shoved down our collective consciousness to the point where most of us probably want to shoot the bird down instead of fly away with it.
Not here. Ozick, in a dramatic subversion of common cliches, equates birds to ugliness. "The big gold mirror, you look in it at your bitter face," begins Rosa as she describes Stella from her point of view. "I don't care how pretty, even so it's bitter - and your forget who gave you presents." Though Stella may be considered an attractive woman to all but Rosa, Rosa still looks upon her niece with the same birdishness she presented in the internment camp. Between using words like "knobbiness" and "gawkishness" to describe Stella's appearance as a child, as well as the juxtaposition of the family's hopeless situation against birds usually flying united and without ties, birds are not beautiful in Rosa's perspective. They are fragile, loud, ugly, and dependent creatures. For example, swans may be beautiful to look at, but they're also amongst the most violent and territorial creatures in the animal kingdom. Ozick gives dualities to normally glazed-over symbols when no one else cares to indulge realism in favor of their own vision. These are the negative and wholly realistic aspects of birds which are never given a voice outside Audobon journals and National Geographic editions. Allegorically, the realistic depiction of birds versus the sensationalized, culturally-infused view of the animals mirrors Ozick's damning look at what it means to be a "survivor" of the Holocaust brought in direct opposition to whatever Hollywood or less forward-thinking authors could think up about the same topic.
The bird comparison is not aimed at just Stella. Not even Magda escapes Rosa's subversive damning of these creatures - or, rather, the inaccurately flattering portrayals of these creatures. In words which sound more like a scared fledgling leaving a nest for the first time, rather than a young child escaping from their mother's watchfulness, Magda hobbles or lopes or skitters away from whatever safety she may have had to "howl" for her mother. Magda is mute, may be deaf, and might be dumb (at least from Rosa's unreliable perspective), much like a newborn hatchling. Children don't behave this way, but Ozick's metaphor is so elaborately constructed that the audience can virtually imagine Magda, long-necked, beaked, and strident, crying out for the comfort of her mother in a comfortless situation. Anthropomorphisizing a character who has more in common with another species than their own humanity is not only a brilliant way for Ozick to subvert commonly held beliefs, but to reinforce others - that it's sometimes easier or less emotionally trying to relate to animals than it is to humanity - as well.
With so much breath given to crucifying Stella the audience . This is intentional. Ozick wants us to blame Stella to prove Rosa's point - that "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." That no one can understand Rosa unless "thieves took it," 'it' being the essence of your purpose. It's a direct challenge to the audience. Since Rosa never outright blames the Nazis for her troubles, Stella is the closest target. She is the subject of Rosa's revenge. Though Rosa may be an unreliable narrator cut from the same cloth of other famous examples like Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye or Alex from A Clockwork Orange, readers often take the relationship between themselves and the protaganist at face value. Ozick could very easily have made the audience feel betrayal - build up trust with the audience and swiftly turn the protanist into the antagonist as the story progresses to some kind of climax - but she ultimately never does because we are never intended to fully trust Rosa, even from the beginning of The Shawl. The fact that the story never officially ends also has something to do with this ambiguity. "Her Polish was very dense," says Ozick when describing Rosa's speech. "You had to open it out like a fan to get at all the meanings." This description applies not only to Rosa's character, but also to Ozick's writing style, as well. Since we can not hear Rosa actually speaking, Ozick's writing style is the closest example we have to "very dense" Polish. It's elaborate, intellectual, and vastly layered to the point where multiple readings are necessary to dissect the novella.
Even close dissections, however, do not reveal a definitive reason for why Rosa never outright blames the Nazis - the only party responsible - for her hardships in Poland. "In Poland there used to be justice," muses Rosa to Persky. Not when the Holocaust came around. Referring to Nazis only as "Germans" or "S.S. men" in both pieces, these are abnormally kind euphemisms coming from a woman who "was forced by a German (there's that euphemism again), it's true, and more than once." Rosa turns whatever hatred she should 'probably' feel for the Nazis into revenge against Stella and contempt against a Jewish hotel owner, referring to Mr. Finkelstein only as "the red wig," a title suggesting clownishness or, at an even more extreme level, transsexuality or crossdressing. It's I against I from Rosa's perspective, and it's a striking subversion against the 'birds of a feather flock together' mentality that is toyed with and twisted by Ozick's cleverness earlier in The Shawl.
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