Cynthia Ozick on Artistic Theft - The New Yorker

In your story “A French Doll,” a twelve-year-old girl is asked to do errands by a widow who lives down the hall. The widow introduces the girl to a strange doll that has a music box in the shape of a piano locked in its chest. When a key is turned and the doll’s hands are positioned correctly, the music box plays a tune. The doll, we discover, is, at least in the widow’s mind, the embodiment of a theft. Her late husband, she claims, composed the melody, which is used without acknowledgment. How does this play out in your story?

The key to the story is, in fact, the theft and deception of art, of the making of culture itself. This notion came to me long ago, when I first learned of the Nazi book burnings of Jewish works in May of 1933. “Die Lorelei,” a poem by Heinrich Heine, rooted in German Romanticism, set to music, was spared the pyre on the pretense that it was purely a folk song, could be attributed to no one, and had grown out of native soil. How many other such thefts, I wondered, had, innocently or not, usurped the imaginings and suppressed the identity of individual artists in the name of a collective folk heritage?

Were you thinking of a particular doll you’ve seen, or was this one entirely imagined? Why is it vested with such eeriness?

Is it possible that I did once see such a doll? I think I may have, in childhood. I can call it up, a sprawling weird thing no child would be drawn to, lying splayed with its painted face and long tangled arms on a shiny satin bedspread—but where and how, and in what unknown grownup’s private bedroom, would I have come upon such a scene? It’s with uneasy feelings much like these that the narrator encounters the doll, a mood intensified by the witchlike widow’s obsession with it. And more: the doll’s chest can be opened up, like that of a cadaver. And still more: the girl witnessed the deceased husband’s doll-shaped body, on a gurney, being carried down three flights of stairs and away.

When the widow eventually invites the narrator into her apartment, she is intrigued by the exotic furnishings she sees. What is it about the style of the apartment that excites her so much?

All this takes place in a modest five-story building in the density of the Bronx of an earlier era. The girl’s mother is also a widow, overworked as a typist, supporting a fatherless daughter, living sparely. What the girl sees in her neighbor’s apartment is apparent luxury—deep carpeting and carved chairs and damask cloths—signifying a superior life of a kind she can never aspire to, a life where beauty reigns and music has meaning. Only later will she notice the decay in all that seeming splendor.

Once the secret of the doll has been revealed, the girl is not invited back into the widow’s apartment. Why is that? Is the widow’s speech a kind of exorcism of her grief? And should we believe what she asserts—that her husband’s legacy has been stolen—or is it possible that grief has made her imagine it?

Here I must confess that I fully believe in the widow’s belief—partly because her rage, the rage of injustice, outweighs, and outclamors, her grief, and partly because all around we see historic instances of this process of suppression. Not that this story is meant to carry a lesson (if it did, it would be a noisome sermon or tract, and not a small, invented fiction), but the songs of the cotton fields, the songs of the hymnals, the songs of the sweatshops, the songs of the prairie guitars—weren’t they the creations of singular voices, each one erased by custom’s consent?

As for why the girl is kept away after the widow cries out her complaint, it’s not only because of the catharsis of exorcism. She, like her surroundings, is in decay, and very soon it will be the widow herself who is carried on a gurney down the three flights of stairs.

The story is set, as you say, in a five-story walkup in the Bronx, in a neighborhood that was later razed for the construction of a highway. Does it resemble the area where you grew up?

I grew up in the then sparsely populated northeast corner of the Bronx, in a little house abutting a vast park with marble statues, and a fountain noisy with frogs, and paths that led down steep grassy hills to the water, and a First World War memorial with a golden angel at the top of a Doric column, accompanied by a buttercup-speckled meadow that stretched on and on. But I knew, and was related to, and went on the trolley to visit, the tenants of the walkups, in whose bedrooms I never saw a French doll.♦

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