Wrapped in Pain: The Shawl as a Narrative of Gendered Suffering
Keywords:
Holocaust, Gendered suffering, double victimization, survival,, Nazi brutality, motherhoodAbstract
The present article is an attempt to present the Holocaust from a gendered perspective with special focus on The Shawl written by Cynthia Ozick. The text seeks to foreground the mental agony and suffering experienced especially by women during the event. The narrative focuses on Rosa who, despite struggling hard to protect her infant daughter Magda, fails miserably in the face of Nazi brutality. The text also provides a sense of the dehumanizing impact of the Holocaust and the physical and mental toll it takes on individuals through the character Stella, Rosa’s niece. This study, taking into account this key aspect of the Holocaust, aims to establish the need for a gendered understanding of the event.
References
Andrews, Sue. “Remembering the Holocaust – Gender Matters.” Social Alternatives, vol. 22, no.2, 2023, pp. 16-21.
Kahane, C. “Dark Mirrors: A Feminist Reflection on Holocaust Narrative and the Maternal
Metaphor.” Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, edited by E. Bronfen and M. Kavka. Columbia UP, 2001, pp. 161-188.
Kremer, S. Lillian. Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Literature. Wayne State UP, 1989.
Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. Random, 1990.
Ringelheim, Joan Miriam. “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Ed. Michael Rothberg and Neil Levi. UCP, 2003. Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. Routledge, 2000.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 The Voice of Creative Research
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
