Choose one of the first four stories in The Moths to write about. Discuss anything you’d like concerning this story. What do you find interesting in it? Are you confused by anything that happens? What do you think it is about? Are there particularly memorable images, metaphors, or descriptions that appeal to you? How does it seem to fit into what you’ve read of the collection as a whole so far or into themes in the course that we’ve been discussing?
Susan Farrell
26 Glebe Street #205
farrells@cofc.edu
(843) 568-0873
Of the first four Viramontes short stories I’ve read, “Birthday” was to me the one that had the most content to unpack and analyze. All of Viramontes stories so far have enormous amounts of religious, nature-related, and feminist themes and imagery both in the text and subtext, but I loved the addition of inner thoughts from the narrator (and her baby?) that was conveyed through poetry-like parentheses, italics, line breaks. Especially in this story but also in others, the author seems to use a technique that gives the reader pieces of information but doesn’t give the “key” to thematically piece it together until later. This allowed a story like “Birthday”— which isn’t a mystery, and really doesn’t even have typical plot points but rather follows an emotional story as if it were a journal— to be “unlocked” as if it had clues.
Viramontes begins by directly showing us Alice’s thoughts: “I want to sleep so badly that I am angry at their conspiracy to keep me awake.” At first the raw emotion and tiredness in this combined with the reference to a “knotted stomach,” “the fluids that thicken like jelly,” and the “brimming baptism roll” led me to wonder who our narrator was— the pregant woman or the baby, or possibly both separately. Of course we then learn that Alice is the tired woman, though she feels that she will not “stay Alice” if she were to “become a mama.” From the reaction of her partner and the older (though young) woman she goes to for advice, I assumed that she does very much live in a culture which only allows her a few options for her roles in life, and even those few decisions “seemed already decided” for her. My favorite part of the story, the one that was most eye-opening to me when given a new “key,” was at the end when Alice is getting an abortion and we see the return of the italics, the quiet yet unrelenting voice in her head. Again I was forced to wonder if this voice was only Alice or if it in some way was also her baby, or what she imagined her baby would be thinking at least. The voice says it is “reaching up to the vastness” and “calm.” This feels like the voice of a fetus in a womb, but the voice also says “Forgive me, Father,” possibly Alice’s own feelings of guilt. By the end, the quick alternations of the voice and the actions going on in the outer world led me to think that this voice is Alice’s inner thoughts, but she’s very strongly dissociating from what’s going on. We get such a strong feeling of anxiety as she enters the clinic room and we see the doctor and nurse’s words drift off into these thoughts, an escape.
I’m not sure what to call the technique Viramontes is using here, but she seems to lean very much on these italics, varied lineations, and parentheses to convey new meaning. I try to analyze stories within their own universe, but reading this story along with the other three I couldn’t help but notice that the other short stories didn’t have as much (or any, at times) use of this poetry-like writing style. This story was the one that focused the most, in my opinion, on inner voice, choice, identity as a physical being and also an emotional one. Because Alice’s choices in the physical world are so halted by a sexist culture, by her young age, by the people around her, all she really has to herself are her inner thoughts— and even those can by conditioned by culture. She seems at first to be against having an abortion. In our modern politics when we discuss a woman’s choice in this situation we’re typically discussing her right to have an abortion, to be independent as an adult woman. Alice, however, represents a separate culture with similar struggles: she does want to be an independent adult, to “stay Alice,” but her society offers her no option to be both herself an aa mother. She does want a child, but she lives in a world where you cannot be both a mother and a person. This was so interesting to me given the religious, particularly Catholic imagery present in the other short stories we’ve read. The Virgin Mary was a young woman with complete personality, history, but because of centuries of religious developments there is a tendency, in my experience, for her to be idolized as simply a virgin, a mother, and nothing else. She often isn’t seen as this strong young woman who made a choice to have a baby that biblical texts portray her as, but rather she’s seen through a societal lens that can limit her to several broad stereotypes of what all women “should” be. This to me perfectly aligns with Alice’s struggle, but in this version Alice is swayed by unfortunate circumstances to not have that same ability to choose.
In the four stories that we read in The Moths, one aspect that was shared in the four stories was that the perspective kept switching. The timeline, the person, or narrative point of view would change without notice. This writing choice causes the readers to pay extra attention and put in extra thought while reading the story. Of the four stories, the one that I think illustrated what I’m saying the best was The Broken Web, because of the organization of chaos. The story itself is split into five parts, and although you need to use context clues throughout the story to figure this out, the perspectives of each part would switch between both timeline and character’s personal point of view.
The story starts with a daughter confessing to a priest about her ‘unnatural dreams’, when actually they are the nightmarish reality of her parents arguing (and eventual murder/death) that she becomes paralyzed for. The next three parts focus on the mother (murderer), father (adulterer/deceased), and mistress (hopelessly in love). Finally, the fifth part goes back to the daughters perspective in far future events. It’s all dialogue from her aunt, who, in old age, confesses that her mother attracted many men, but in order to trap her father into a marriage, she slept with another man to get pregnant. She later revealed this pregnancy to her father when he comes back from travels, and claims that it is his, in order for him to rush a marriage with her.
I wanted to briefly summarize The Broken Web for my blog post because each part is like a new story, but yet it all collides in the end to become one larger story. Part I is (mostly) told in third person POV, but focuses on the inner monologue and feelings of the priest. Same goes for the next two parts, but it focuses on the father and mistresses’ relationship. Finally, in the last two parts, we gather a better understanding of the wife/mother, who is a complex and insecure woman that gets pushed to her limits, ultimately resulting in her committing homicide. The switch in how the story is narrated causes readers to sympathize with all the characters to (at least) some degree. I think this was the author’s purpose, because every human has had some kind of event happen to them that pushes them to do bad things. The mistress wasn’t a villain, and neither was the father or mother, even though they all did terrible things for their own gain.
One of the themes I picked out amongst the stories in The Moths book was Viramontes’ attention to nature and architecture. She is intricately linking the environments both natural and manmade to develop the spiritual relation within a particular character or between multiple characters. This is not just a writer’s way of symbolism but also a framework by Chicana and African/American womanists alike. This womanist framework is coined as ecowomanist and interlinks the spiritual epistemology with the feminist knowledge of existing in a world where patriarchal social dynamics and hegemonic institutional systems are dominant oppressive forces. In the first story “The Moths” this was evident by the imagery created in the description of Abuelita’s porch as it was “shielded by the vines of the chayote” (p. 4) because the vines created a barrier to the outside world keeping this home safe and sacred for multiple generations of women. This imagery is even more potent because of the way Viramontes writes it as a sensory flashback while the narrator is sitting at a chapel looking at “the coolness of the marble pillars and the frozen statues with blank eyes” (p.3). The coldness of this institutional religion is why the narrator feels spiritually disconnected from it. Throughout the story, she reiterates numerous ways that she labors the land and her Abuelita’s body tending to the land and reciprocating care to the woman who has nurtured her she finally cries again at the end of the story expressing both sadness at the passage of her grandmother but also the spiritual rebirth of herself.