La mujer latina en las novelas de Julia Álvareztradición y modernidad

Résumé

Dominican-American author Julia Álvarez has become a leading figure of Hispanic literature in the United States. Since Homecoming, her first collection of poems published in 1984, she has reached increasingly wider audiences. She has published more than twenty books which have been translated into more than ten languages including Turkish and Hebrew. Some of her books have been adapted for film and stage. Julia Álvarez has undoubtedly reinforced the visibility of Dominicans and Hispanics in the United States. Today, she is considered, along with Chicana author Sandra Cisneros, a pioneer of Latina literature in the United States, a literature written in English by women of Latin American origin. The present study is based on this essential role played by Julia Álvarez in the fields of Hispanic and Latina literatures in the United States. It offers a structural and thematic analysis of her five adult fiction novels: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), ¡Yo! (1997), In the Name of Salomé (2000) and Saving the World (2006). It focuses on common aspects between the novels in the way gender roles are addressed and the Latina is represented. It is based on the following hypothesis: “The modernity of Latinas in the novels of Julia Álvarez is characterized by a rift with tradition. This rift makes them more free but also causes identity issues”. The validity of this hypothesis was tested through four main lines of research. In the first part, a feminine dimension was underlined as much through the omnipresence and the centrality of female characters as through the narrative structure. In the second part, on the one hand, the study of gender roles showed how many female characters reflected the traditional role of women in Latino culture and, on the other hand, how the machismo of men was often reinforced by a submissive attitude of women defined as “marianismo”. The results of the third part of the study contrasted with those of the second part since they indicated that Latinas in the novels of Álvarez sometimes also appeared to be modern women who would drift apart from tradition. Possible ways of liberation for the Latina such as the importance of exile, the questioning of male authority, education and political militancy were also highlighted. Finally, in the fourth and last part of this study, the results showed how all female protagonists in the novels somehow experienced an identity crisis. The main findings of this study provided a partial validation of the initial hypothesis. Indeed, whereas in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo! it was found that the identity crisis of the protagonists was indeed associated to a rift with tradition, in the case of In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé this crisis was caused by a close relationship of the heroines with their families and their past. In Saving the World, the heroine experienced a different kind of crisis based on a feeling of being caught in a traditional life and on a longing for more freedom.