The motif structure and images of glass paperweights in the fairy story ‘The djinn in the nightingale's eye’ by A. S. Byatt

The article analyzes a new aspect of the well-known fairy story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by the contemporary English writer A. S. Byatt. The authors of the article focus on the essential part of the story’s motif structure associated with the images of glass paperweights. These embody the leitmotifs of glass (water, mirror and so forth), flower (garden, Paradise, youth) and snake (wisdom, temptation). They express a complex nature of art, biblical narratives about the Creation and the Fall and the miraculous story of the main character’s rejuvenation. The Turkish paperweight symbolizes the world before the Creation and the heroine before the transformation, the Canadian paperweights signify the process of the Creation and the transformation, the millefiori is a miraculous result that is the beauty of Paradise and the eternal youth, the American paperweights embody the story of the human who is doomed to grow old and die but is presented with a gift of imagination. Ironically and aesthetically considering her own predilection for glass paperweights, Byatt emphasizes the ambivalence of the female author (the conflict between the inner and the external, profession and family, art and reality, the mystical and the rational, love and death) through the many-sided nature of glass and glass objects. The parallels between collecting paperweights and gathering stories point out their narrative potential and explain the autobiographism of Gillian Perholt’s image. The descriptions of other real and fictional glass objects (television, museum showcases, bottles with books inside, bottles with Djinn, etc.) create a comic effect, expand the symbolism of glass and build a complex ‘web of motifs’ (term by B. M. Gasparov) which are directly and indirectly connected with images of glass paperweights.