12/15/2023 0 Comments Julia alvarez poemsSeveral more acclaimed works of fiction have followed. Her reading audience continued to grow with her second novel, In the Time of Butterflies, published in 1994. She explored this in her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). The theme of being caught between two cultures can be found throughout Alvarez's work. The narrator has no contact with the outside world she does not question her parents’ decisions and submissively accepts her role in the house, a secondary position that distances her from true human contact except with their clothing.Julia Alvarez is a Dominican American poet, author and essayist. Because of this detachment and feeling of displacement, she gives higher value to domestic scenes and sees ironing as a refuge, as a way to express the emotions and feelings restrained by the circumstances of her family. The feeling of alienation overcomes the protagonist of the poem she feels detached from reality and clings to her family clothing and familiar scenes of her past in an attempt to come to terms with her present life, a reflection for the most part of her lonely childhood. Paradoxically, her care and diligence seem to be unnoticed her housework is constantly taken for granted by her family, who apparently only establish communication with the narrator to scold and warn her of the possible consequences of getting distracted from her daily routine. The narrator highlights the importance of her task, her responsibility to her family, who are expecting her contribution to the domestic tasks, so that they can wear freshly ironed clothes every morning. Thus, the narrative voice does not complain about the absence of love in her family but their lack of time to express it, a working routine that makes her feel abandoned and alienated from the other members of the family. The second stanza recalls memories of an always busy mother, doing strenuous domestic work that occupies a precious time her daughter claims as hers. The memory of this narrator, undoubtedly Alvarez’s alter ego, moves to the fore images of her father’s back “cramped and worried with work,” of “the collapsed arms” waiting to be hugged by his loved ones in the first stanza or part of the poem. The clothes she irons still carry the imprint of overworked bodies, yelling for a long night’s rest and showing the history of a long life of effort and hard labor. The domestic scene is transformed into a time of longing and reflection upon the history written on the family’s bodies. She presses the wrinkles of her parents’ clothing, trying to liberate them from their problems, pains, and conflicts while she maps her childhood in a household too busy for love. These sketches deal exactly with doing the family housework: she sweeps, dusts, makes the beds, does laundry, and, in this story, irons the laundry of her family both literally and symbolically. The first part of Homecoming, entitled “Housekeeping,” to which “Ironing Their Clothes” belongs, is composed of sketches. Alvarez creates an alter ego to review her childhood, contemplating it from the distance that age provides. The collection is narrated by an adult female voice trying to recompose scenes from her childhood and coming to terms with current events in her present life. This poem-a short story in prose-first appeared in an issue of the journal 13th Moon, devoted to American women’s writing. “Ironing Their Clothes” belongs to Homecoming, the first poetry collection published by Julia Alvarez, a collection of narrative poems that focus on domestic life, where the author uses family images to reconstruct her family’s past. Analysis of Julia Alvarez’s Ironing Their Clothes
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