Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Animal Instincts
Throughout her short story, Ozick plays around with the ideas surrounding human action during survival. The situation is so tough for them that the animal instincts start to show. "She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs" (517). The image of a human sinking its teeth into another human seems crazy, but when it comes down to survival, one is looking out for itself and itself only. When Ozick describes Magda's eyes, shes says that they were "like blue tigers" and that she always "watched like a tiger" (518). If you have eyes like a tiger, you are always on the prowl looking for ways to advance yourself above others. Tigers are also solitary creatures, so they only look out for their own well being. The animalistic actions that Ozick introduces helps the reader understand the severity of the situation. The actions also show what happens when humans are left with nothing to survive.
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In our class, we also discussed the animalistic qualities that arise in Stella and Rosa. As the Jews were brutalized and starved in the concentration camps, they began to lose their human qualities such as emotion and feeling, and become more primal animals. This animalism can be seen at the end of the story, when Rosa supresses her "wolflike scream". Here Ozick chooses to associate this expression of emotion with being animalistic because Rosa no longer feels any emotion so it is a foreign quality no longer connected to Rosa. As Will mentioned, Rosa is no longer concerned with her baby, as she must fend for herself to survive, and therefore does not express emotion upon seeing her child brutally murdered.
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