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Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner
The reader's reaction to Brill's misogyny is complicated by Ozick's choice of his perspective as the controlling one. On the one hand, the limitations of his assessments of Hester and her daughter are revealed in several ways: by his conversations with the mother, in which his own egoism and insecurity are betrayed; by her lecture on pedagogy, which both fascinates and nonplusses him; and by the story's outcomes, in which certain predictable ironies are realized, validating Hester's theories.
But Hester is an exception, unlike any woman whom Brill has ever met. And while Brill's attempts to "explain" her are shown to be woefully distorted and inadequate, such is not the case with his portrayal of the other mothers, who are therefore left unredeemed. Their arrogance and aggressiveness, their "exuberant reformist ferocity" (101), their insistence that each of their ordinary children is exceptional, their extravagant judgments (e.g., an unpopular teacher is called a "fascist" [96])--these and other elements are the stuff of caricature. And because the caricature remains "uncorrected," these women seem as much the object of a wicked satire as a vehicle for betraying the schoolmaster's blindness. The following judgment passed by Brill, for example, uncharacteristically melds the schoolmaster's point of view with the narrator's: "[I]t was as if each of the mothers floated inside a darkened doll's house bobbing in the dark dangerous middle of the Phlegethon, and anyone could come and lift the roof on its silvery hinges and look inside--and inside each house there was a bitterness, a hope never to be resolved, crippled ambition, bad books, querulous old parents outliving the cruelty of their prime, the best table ware, an Oriental rug or two, an antique tobacco box, a tragedy, a tragedy!" (97). Brill, the fearful ruler of this tribe of desperate Lilliputians, is both intimidated by and contemptuous of his subjects, and some of this contempt is shared by Ozick as well. The dollhouse image, of course, recalls Nora, but, whereas Ibsen's heroine elicits sympathy in trying to make a virtue of a terrible necessity, the mothers of the Edmond Fleg School make necessity itself the virtue. Like Brill, they attempt to define the end too quickly, rejecting the natural unfolding of events in time and behaving as though they can foresee and control the destinies of their children through sheer force of desire and assertion of will, what Brill calls "motherhood red in tooth and claw" (40). The bitterness and crippled ambition Brill attributes to them is only partly a case of projection. Brill sees in Hester a "mirror image" but it is the other mothers whom he most resembles. It is because he himself feels "incarcerated" (52) that he perceives the tragedy of the mothers trapped in the little bobbing boxes, dedicated, as he is, to inscribing their own direction and their own fate while actually rudderless and powerless. Furthermore, Brill knows that the mothers know his "tragedy"--his failure as scholar and teacher and the inadequacies of his romantic life. It comforts him to nurture the fantasy that he is immeasurably superior to them, the distance between himself and these women as great as the "abyss" between himself and his heroes--Freud, Spinoza, and Einstein. But he knows this sense of superiority is a sham, and he knows they know. The hostile collaboration between Brill and his students' mothers is the means by which they use--or "cannibalize"--each other, each fostering the other's illusions in order to maintain their own.
