A Woman's Time and Space That Collapses the Family

Alexander Macias
A Woman’s Time and Space That Collapses the Family
Chicana writers are those that will publish work with various themes that will connect majorly with the female audience. Some like Helena Maria Viramontes will write stories that have a theme of time and space for the character usually involving the child bearer. Many do not realize that the mother in the group is what keeps the clan running, and by having her fall off reality is when that unit will be wounded. This is known as fragmentation which is defined as the disintegration, collapse, or breakdowns of norms of thought, behavior, or social relationship. There are many reasons a family can undergo fragmentation such as illness of a family member, violence, conflict, and so on. However what does this do to the protagonist of the story who is dealt with a disease that continuously is living in the past? For example in Viramontes short story “Snapshots” and another who continues a horrible cycle that must be shattered in her other work known as “The Broken Web”. Through the use of time and space are these stories told to identify the collapse of the women’s relationship behavior. When Alzheimer disease begins to develop for Olga, in “Snapshots”, who would look at her photo album where she would be “haunted by the frozen moments and the meaning of memories” (Viramontes 100), is where majority of her thoughts lie and as Rosaura Sanchez scholarly essay “Deconstructions and Renarrativizations: Trends in Chicana Literature” states “space and time are congealed in photographs and in her mind” (54). She is stuck within the timeframe when the photograph was taken which she begins to reminisce to the events that occurred in during those days where the woman believes to be “a habit much more deadly” (Viramontes 101). It does not help that she has to continue to remember that her husband had left her and has remarried. She is constantly denying herself the absence of her significant other especially during late at night when the mother will call her ex-husband’s store bothering her daughter with questions of what she ate that day. One can notice how the family unit has broken down by the breakdown of the marriage and a disease stricken family member. The mother is stuck in her own reality that she calls nostalgia where Olga will stay in remembrance of the event that occurred in the picture, but having trouble by constantly asking herself questions and losing since “she faded into thirty years of trivia” (Viramontes 104) by not being able to remember. Friction begins to develop with her daughter as she is seems tired of her mother’s lack of memory. The type of food that her daughter brings to her shows how much of her love is gone by bringing her leftovers that even her own mother can identify. Through all this it shows that she has gone from being a housekeeper to a former shell of herself. The woman attempted to be the perfect wife that every man fantasizes but was unable to maintain it once her husband decided to leave the marriage and there after found someone else leaving her abandoned. It made her feel obsolete since she felt that the behavior is what defined her, in which she got stuck in the past in which she “feels dislocated and unable to move beyond configurations of spaces from the past” (Sanchez 54). Olga’s fantasy involved catering to Dave’s every need but the reality was that he decided to end the marriage through unspecified reason. This seems to insinuate that he may have gotten fed up with her illness especially since his wife wasn’t the same woman he fell in love with. The time that he is living in is in the present while Olga is stays in the past through the photographs from the result of her Alzheimer as Sanchez states “the woman feels totally dislocated and unable to move beyond configurations of spaces from the past” (54). Her space is the home where everything began with her ex-husband where she will receives the occasional visit from her daughter to have lunch with that seems to end up badly. Dave’s space is with his new wife, when he had remarried, and the job he works at. However not all that involves the theme of time and space are related due to illness but through the act of one man using two women. In Viramontes “The Broken web”, there are two different families on both sides of the border that have past and present spaces. We have Tomas who has a wife and on the other side of the border he has the barmaid Olivia. The families on both sides are dysfunctional with their spaces being “torn apart by infidelity, overwork, patriarchal structures, abuse, and violence” (Sanchez 54). We have Olivia who is beginning to realize that over time she is aging to an older woman where she “always avoided looking at herself completely in the mirror” (Viramontes 57). This shows that she is not accepting the aging process that occurs over time as Tey Diana Rebolledo’s “Game Theory: A Typology of Feminist Players in Latina/Chicana Writing” states “ a woman must have a clear sense of who she is” (200). This is a woman whose time is getting the best of her and is trying to maintain her youth as long as possible until she receives the attention from her crush. The reality that is that she is using provocative clothing to hide away her current age, and has not accepted the woman that she is becoming over time. By doing so she is neglecting her parental duties that the sons need from her. Her space should be with her children since it became apparent that “It was a silent contract that they had with one another” (Viramontes 58) of not being a proper mother, but more of an individual that left them food and money. She continuously attempts to receive the reciprocation from her crush but fails even though the reality he does so by getting drunk and having Olivia undress him to sleep naked with each other. Then there is Tomas’s wife who has a different time and space than the barmaid. His wife was a woman that was proud of the reflection she saw in the mirror which is the opposite of Olivia who was not. This female “enjoyed the luxury of time and the full view of herself” (Viramontes 56) as she would travel with Tomas from time to time while he did his job as a coyote. Her space was being Tomas’s wife but at the same time she would cheat on him while he was gone doing his job that could last weeks. Tomas’s wife would become “the woman who is independent must see that love is business” (Rebolledo 189), since she suspected that he was seeing another woman and during her time alone would be with another man. Through these actions the family unit would crumble as the daughter, Martha, would learn the secret that she was conceived through adultery. However the wife time would show that she was a woman that knew how to play this game since she was a young woman causing her current space some consequences when this is revealed to her daughter. The biggest consequences would be how Martha would view her mother from then on this not including that she murdered Tomas during a dispute. Viramontes has shown within these two short stories how a woman’s time and space can collapse the family unit. On one side we have the protagonist going through an illness that causes her to remain in the past while her loved ones are living in the present. While each of them have their own spaces which was created when Olga’s was collapsing after being diagnosed with Alzheimer disease. Then the other side there is the story of two different women that have completely different perspectives of time and space. We have Olivia who denies herself the women she has become through time, and keeps her space revolving on a crush while neglecting her children. Then there is Tomas’s wife who has accepted the woman she became over time, and has her space with two different men that will cause a secret to come out involving her child. This analysis comes from a male perspective that attempted to view two different stories from a Chicana writer.

Work Cited
Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “Game Theory: A Typology of Feminist Players in Latina/Chicana Writing”. The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras: essays on chicana/latina Literature and Criticism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Sanchez, Rosaura. “Deconstruction and Renarrativizations: Trends in Chicana Literature”. San Diego: University of California.
Viramontes, Helena Maria. “Snapshots”. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995.
Viramontes, Helena Maria. “The Broken Web”. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995.

Cited: Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “Game Theory: A Typology of Feminist Players in Latina/Chicana Writing”. The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras: essays on chicana/latina Literature and Criticism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Sanchez, Rosaura. “Deconstruction and Renarrativizations: Trends in Chicana Literature”. San Diego: University of California. Viramontes, Helena Maria. “Snapshots”. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995. Viramontes, Helena Maria. “The Broken Web”. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995.