Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the
Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Jennifer Bess
The article of Jennifer Bess who is an assistant professor of Peace Studies at Coucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, starts with a quotation from Alice Walker’ s book The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart:
A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one's experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it.
This quotation is a kind of foreshadowing of what Bess puts forward in her article. The article starts with the background of the Miranda complex which is stated in the article’s title. It is mentioned that there is a girl named Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She has all the privileges of her father’s administration over an island; however she states that “ I have suffered/ with there that I saw suffer! “ because of his father’s authoritarianism. From the gender point of view, she carries the burden of oppression and powerlessness of Caribbean people and also the burden of oppression “the benefits and protection offered by colonizing father and husband.” She is a victim and an inheritor of the forces of colonialism at the same time. According to the article, Julia Alvarez studies this complex inheritance in her autobiographically based novel How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Alvarez’s characters tell many truths about their history and shared identity through Garcia girls. At the beginning of the novel, Alvarez goes back to the history of Garcia family to the time of Miranda .There were conquerors “encircling her own wrists” and she passes on these conquistadors to the Garcia sisters in the novel. The novel then emphasizes the themes of loss and violation; on the one hand there is a comfort and strength when the
Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Jennifer Bess
The article of Jennifer Bess who is an assistant professor of Peace Studies at Coucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, starts with a quotation from Alice Walker’ s book The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart:
A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one's experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it.
This quotation is a kind of foreshadowing of what Bess puts forward in her article. The article starts with the background of the Miranda complex which is stated in the article’s title. It is mentioned that there is a girl named Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She has all the privileges of her father’s administration over an island; however she states that “ I have suffered/ with there that I saw suffer! “ because of his father’s authoritarianism. From the gender point of view, she carries the burden of oppression and powerlessness of Caribbean people and also the burden of oppression “the benefits and protection offered by colonizing father and husband.” She is a victim and an inheritor of the forces of colonialism at the same time. According to the article, Julia Alvarez studies this complex inheritance in her autobiographically based novel How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Alvarez’s characters tell many truths about their history and shared identity through Garcia girls. At the beginning of the novel, Alvarez goes back to the history of Garcia family to the time of Miranda .There were conquerors “encircling her own wrists” and she passes on these conquistadors to the Garcia sisters in the novel. The novel then emphasizes the themes of loss and violation; on the one hand there is a comfort and strength when the