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Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner
Yet the fact that Sevigne's literary self-expressiveness took the form of extravagantly passionate letters to her daughter must be viewed in the context of seventeenth-century French social and cultural mores. As Katherine Jensen has observed, Sevigne's correspondence manifests the one literary genre considered appropriate to women: "the mother's correspondence becomes the pragmatic solution to the paradox of being a virtuous woman/writer"(20) Interestingly, this paradox is a version of the same dilemma to which Brill attempts to reduce Hester.
Terrified by the challenge of her learned and provocative writing, awed by her success, he chooses to view her work not as the contribution of an outstanding and original intellect, but as the exploitation of a flawed child by an unnaturally clever mother. Jensen speculates, as Virginia Woolf did before her, that a Sevigne unbound by the limitations of sexist assumptions "would have written something other than letters, something willfully literary, something professional."(21) Ozick's ironic comment here, I think, is that although Hester is free, as Sevigne was not, to express herself as an ambitious intellectual, she is subject to the same charge as the seventeenth-century French woman who confined herself to "women's" writing: she is accused of self-aggrandizement masquerading as its opposite, selfless mother love. Because Brill cannot deny the power of Hester's work, he conjures up a clever attack on her motivation for writing--the need to rationalize her child's apparent deficits--and characterizes the process as cannibalization. Ozick thus asks us to ponder why the motivation or inspiration for writing has been thought to diminish the quality of a woman's work, but is seen as irrelevant to the quality of a man's. Ironically, Brill's ingenious rationalization of Hester's creativity is the most inspired idea he has had in years; sadly, it reflects more about his own narrow vision than Hester's.
