A Study Of Rosa’s Traumatic Memory In The Shawl

Cynthia Ozick’s award-winning short story The Shawl: A story and a Novella (1989),consists of two stories The Shawl and the novella Rosa. The novel tells a powerful andtouching story, takes the concise writing style, and has a tremendous impact. It portrays aJewish mother’s failure to protect her infant daughter in the Holocaust and her livingcondition after the war. The past life was a burden preventing the heroine Rosa from livingsmoothly. The novel descripts Rosa’s spiritual hardship in struggling with her traumaticmemory.This thesis applies the theory of the traumatic memory in analyzing Rosa’s memory ofthe traumatic event Holocaust, and revealing its physical and psychological harm to thesurvivors. In the thesis, the traumatic memory mainly refers to an anxiety disorder that resultfrom experienced of witnessed a traumatic or terrifying event in which serious physical harmoccurred or was threatened, these traumatic events challenges a person’s natural ability tocope with stresses and consequently produce ongoing emotional effects. The study of Rosa’straumatic memory in the novel will provide the useful reference for the survivor to curetrauma and to face up to history, and the historical lesson for the peoples in the world toeliminate racial discrimination and to avoid disastrous recurrence.The thesis mainly discusses Rosa’s traumatic memory from its main manifestations,narrating behaviors and healing approaches. The first chapter analyzes the presenting ways ofRosa’s traumatic memory. Rosa is rejected due to her Jewish identity, obsessed with theexperience in Holocaust and terrified by death so that she is unable to face up to reality.Through the presentation of Rosa’s traumatic memory, Ozick strengthens the physical andspiritual trauma that Holocaust has brought to the Jews, especially to Rosa as the other ofbeing a woman and mother. The second chapter explains Rosa’s narrating behaviors. In hermemory, Rosa expresses her ideal life through illusions, tells the relevant persons herexperience through story-telling, and re-tastes the traumatic events and their harm throughsenses. The third chapter seeks the effective approaches of remembering the past and tracingthe other. From the approach of returning to the Jewish community, to that of recovering thewoman’s repressed sexuality and to that of recalling the death of Rosa’s infant daughter Magda, Ozick attempts to prove, the solicitude of ethnic minority groups and the love of manand woman would bring the courage to squarely face the past and the sound strategy toreconstruct self to the survivors.Finally, the thesis points out that in The Shawl Ozick ingeniously combines the personallife of a Jewish character and the national history of the Jewish people, and warns the peoplesto deeply rethink the significance of human’s co-existence and to positively seek the strategyof the harmony of the whole world through the historical tragedy of Jewish people.