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Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner
Brill's childhood fascination with the Museum's statue of the renowned nineteenth-century French actress Rachel (whom he at first mistakes for the Biblical Rachel) is also rich with thematic implications. The young boy's confusion of Rachel, Mother of Israel, with Rachel Felix, the nineteenth-century theatrical phenomenon of the Comedie-Francaise, invokes the role of the femme artiste, and (as in the case of Madame de Sevigne) the conflict in females between "public" and "private" selves.
Like letter-writing, which as a "female" art form is both public and private, establishing connectedness but predicated on distance, acting is by definition a kind of role-playing that is most successful when its artificial or "constructed" character is least apparent, when the audience connects with it in the least mediated way. (It is notable that Rachel at one point hoped her letters might encourage the public to consider her as another Madame de Sevigne.)(22) In the mid-nineteenth century environment that celebrated the genius of Rachel, this paradox of "acting natural" resonated in particular ways for women. Rachel Brownstein, Rachel's most recent biographer, has succinctly assessed the historical gender implications of performance art: "On the one hand actresses were condemned for pretending to be who they weren't--and weakening what characters they had by pretense. They were also rated for merely playing themselves. In the misogynist imagination, actresses are false--artful, artificial, duplicitous, like women in general--and on the other hand excitingly, transgressively true to the passions and the imagination. In a culture that confusedly conceived of female sexuality as an excess of either nature or artifice, they were taken to stand for Woman."(23) The assumptions with which Brill approaches the women in his life, whether teachers or parents, reflect similarly misogynistic and contradictory attitudes: he views the teachers as "a species of low theater folk, vaudevillians" who also wish "to dominate and to crush." Although he is disgusted by what he views as their stupidity, his main hiring criterion is vivacity because the lively ones "made the best impression on the parents" (86-87). As for the mothers, whom he both fears and despises, he sees them as a "would-be gynecocracy" who are themselves ruled by the indomitable power of raging hormones (94). On another level, Brill's attraction to the sculpted form of Rachel portends his own self-limitations and ultimate failure. His sense as a boy that the statue of Rachel is about to come alive recalls the Pygmalion myth, in which the transformative power of human desire rivals that of God.(24) The allusion is thick with irony, given the mediocrity of Brill's educational enterprise and the hollowness of his pretense that the Edmond Fleg School's curriculum cultivates genius and distinction, nurturing and shaping young minds that will ultimately flower dramatically. Indeed, he must acknowledge as he ages that he has cultivated not genius but ordinariness and that he has been guilty, most particularly in the case of Beulah Lilt, of "the sin of withholding his hand." Thus he is a kind of reverse Pygmalion, seeing only dullness where imagination waits to be kindled and refusing to recognize profound potential, including his own.
