Jane Heir to the Glimmering World: Cynthia Ozick's Victorian Vision

Critics often focus either on the Jewish content of Cynthia Ozick's fiction, such as her short story "The Shawl" (1980), with its brutal depiction of the Holocaust in heartbreaking miniature, or on the postmodern interweaving of Kabbalistic elements with contemporary absurdities, such as The Puttermesser Papers (1997), with its fiercely funny invention of a feminist golem.¹ Certainly these aspects of Ozick's work reward extended analysis. But what interests me about Ozick is the way in which several of her novels operate as palimpsests of Victorian stories. As a young writer, Ozick set out purposefully to imitate the fiction of Henry James, as Ozick herself points out, and as several literary critics explore.² But Ozick weaves many nineteenth-century British authors into her novels. A well known instance is The Puttermesser Papers. The title recalls The Pickwick Papers, but it overtly re-inscribes George Eliot's end-of-life union with John Cross onto Puttermesser's late quasi-marriage in a chapter about the ambiguity in distinguishing an original artist from a copyist, an ironic commentary on her own play with imitation and innovation. Hardly less overt is the way in which her latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), draws on Victorian literature to explore a variety of inheritances, including literary legacies that invite and problematize the meaning and validity of interpretation.³ So replete is the novel with literary allusion that Susanne Klingenstein imagines how for some time "future critics will enjoy picking Heir apart to identify its literary heritage" (107).

In Heir to the Glimmering World, the eighteen-year-old orphaned heroine's gothic plot of childhood deprivation and subsequent employment assisting a professor whose crazy wife lives on the top floor strongly recalls Jane Eyre. So does the interplay between spiritual and material concerns, as the impoverished refugee professor studies an obscure, defunct Jewish sect while the physical and emotional needs of his family go unnoticed. The irony and futility of Professor Mitwisser's trying to interpret the long-gone Karaites—who as fundamentalists deny the validity of textual interpretation—is clear. But the novel further implies not only that its own internal interpretations of embedded Victorian literary artifacts are suspect, but also that all our literary interpretations, including Ozick's novel itself, are equally suspect. Further manipulation of literary legacies comes via the character of the Bear Boy, the professor's benefactor. Based on Christopher Robin Milne, James A'Bair never escapes how he has been memorialized in a famous children's book, a first edition of which turns out to be both his own and the young protagonist Rosie's material inheritance.

This physical volume of the first edition hides the death certificate of Rosie's mother; its discovery frees her by confirming her own denied memories. Both via the plot's focus on the materiality of books and the prose's continual allusions to nineteenth-century literature, the heroine learns that she must be read and must read herself through novels such as Jane Eyre, even if they come from cultural antecedents unrelated to one's own memories or one's own ancestors' experiences or one's own nation's history. Heir to the Glimmering World ultimately suggests that despite the dangers of interpretation, the books we inherit, read, or remember shape us as much as the physical world we come into, and that, nevertheless, we make ourselves by choosing which inherited story to inhabit.

While drawing on George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma, and John Ruskin's Praeterita (among others), Heir to the Glimmering World most obviously and self-consciously remembers, mimics, undermines, and transforms Jane Eyre.⁴ The eighteen-year-old orphaned heroine Rose Meadows (whose cheery, punning Dickensian name, reminiscent of Rosa Bud's from Edwin Drood, belies her bleak existence) narrates much of the bildungsroman herself.⁵ Later chapters periodically interrupt Rosie's narration with a third person omniscient voice (recalling Bleak House) following the plot of James A'Bair as he grows up and...