150 Amis, Kingsley
trained to be (a good Catholic girl who is deferential
to her husband).
Even as an adult, Yolanda continues to struggle
with this stereotypical understanding of who she
should be. Her partner at one point explains that
he feels “caught between the women’s libber and the
Catholic señorita.” This struggle between her “mor-
als” of chastity before marriage and rejecting those
values because they oppress women plagues Yolanda
in her struggle to be her own woman. Indeed, as
the novel opens, she has returned to the Dominican
Republic in the hope of symbolically returning to
the person she left behind. What she hopes for is to
attain the same “authority in their voices” that her
Dominican aunts and cousins have. But in order to
do that, Yolanda knows that she must be able to “let
the mighty wave of tradition roll on through her life
and break on some other female shore.” If Yolanda
were to be able to do that, she would have to make
a choice between the two women that she is aspires
to be rather than to find a way to combine these
identities.
Nancy Cardona
traditiOn in How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents
Julia Alvarez’s novel about four Dominican women
who arrive in the United States as girls explores
the clash of traditions as the girls grow up strad-
dling two cultures. The novel begins with the third
daughter, Yolanda, as she travels to the Dominican
Republic in an effort to return to her “roots.” But
this return is more about how the women have dealt
with the traditions with which they were raised, as
the novel shows how the women have strayed from
these roots even as they believe they are held hostage
to them.
Yolanda’s return to the island illustrates her dis-
comfort with the tradition that the island represents.
Although she hopes to be able to return to the island
permanently, she recognizes that this move will be
difficult, as she thinks that she has learned “at last, to
let the mighty wave of tradition roll on through her
life and break on some other female shore.” In many
ways, Yolanda idealizes the island and the life it rep-
resents, as she can only see the struggle that she and
her sisters have waged in order to fit in in the United
States. Her parents, too, idealize the island, sending
their daughters there for the summer to ensure they
do not become too Americanized.
Over the course of the novel, the reader sees that
the four daughters struggle with sex and sexual-
ity, ethnicity, and language. The first stems from a
number of different sources, but other characters in
the novel all seem to believe that it is a combina-
tion of ethnicity and religion that forbid them
from being true to themselves sexually. As one of
Yolanda’s lovers notes, he “[feels] caught between
the woman’s libber and the Catholic señorita.”
These two identities focus on the clash between the
two traditions with which the women have been
raised, an understanding of the status of women
based on U.S. standards and those of the Dominican
Republic.
It is this ability to live up to these two standards
that causes problems for Sandra. She can “pass” as
a woman of European ancestry with her fair com-
plexion and blue eyes, but even she cannot escape
the feeling of being between two cultures. When
she is in graduate school, Sandra suffers a nervous
breakdown, eventually starving herself by feeding
herself with books, believing that she is becoming
a monkey. Her crisis is one of feeling fully human.
Sandra’s breakdown symbolizes the women’s
struggle with language as well. Language becomes
a marker of inclusion that allows the women to
be fully accepted as Americans. When Yolanda is
dating a young man in college, his parents note
that Yolanda does not have an accent, which would
mark her as an outsider, a foreigner. As the narrator
explains, their accents had been “ironed out.” At one
point, language is seen as a comforter, a place of
safety, where others cannot “catch” her.
Nancy CardonaAMIS, KINGSLEY Lucky Jim (1954)
Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim, remains one
of his best-known works as well as a superb example
of the comedic novel of manners. Published in
1954, Lucky Jim is often credited, along with Mary
McCarthy’s Groves of Academe (1952) and Randall
Jarrell’s Pictures of an Institution (1954), as crystalliz-
ing the form of the academic novel genre, particu-