Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Eurasian Conference on Educational & Social Studies 4, Gostivar, Makedonya, 31 Mayıs - 2 Haziran 2024, ss.110-111, (Özet Bildiri) , Gostivar, Makedonya, 31 Mayıs - 02 Haziran 2024, ss.110-111, (Özet Bildiri)
The present study scrutinizes the ways in which the Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez’s two historical novels, viz. In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) have become extremely subversive texts, contesting the traditional and male dominated Latin American official historiography. In so doing, Walter Benjamin’s theory delineated in his “The Storyteller” (1936) and “On the Concept of History” (1940) is employed here to explore Alvarez’s focus on the ameliorating power of storytelling, and the vitality of reconstructing various voices and images from the past, in an effort to highlight exclusively the lives, struggles and voices of various charismatic Dominican women. The focus of this study is the female-oriented constituent to Dominican history which Alvarez utilizes in her reconstruction of the lives of these subjugated yet steadfast women, who challenge their marginalized position. Respectively, the first novel portrays the revolutionary lives and deaths of the four Mirabel (“Butterfly”) sisters — Minerva, Dedé, María Teresa and Patria — during the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo from whence Alvarez’s own family had narrowly escaped their lives when they emigrated to America prior to the murder of the Butterfly sisters. The second text concentrates on Salomé Ureña, a Dominican national poet who deals with political themes to inspire others, and her daughter Camila, a participant in Castro’s revolution in Cuba. In amalgamating fiction with history, the author foregrounds the multifaceted role of the story-teller, and historian as the sole mediator who remembers and re-writes the turbulent and often traumatic history through the female perspective to affect change within the Dominican Republic. In lieu of reporting solely the factual data in the continuum of such history, Alvarez fictitiously re-writes the lives of these powerful women, creatively imposing her own stamp on the personalities and thoughts of these women, as she also resorts to first and secondhand testimonial accounts.
The women presented in both texts are first and most individuals with human traits, but they are a huge part of a national collective memory, without whose legendary efforts that history would be incomplete. On the other hand, they constitute the redeeming aspect of an otherwise isolating and silencing disposition of their patriarchal society which mutes them to the extremes of oblivion. However, it is dueto Julia Alvarez’s fictional experimentation with that past that the stories of these women have finally found an outlet with the potential and future possibility to affect other oppressed and marginalizedgroups. Thus, Alvarez’s rewriting of the tales of such revolutionary women in Dominican history brings about the resistive potential to offer means of dealing with similar forms of oppression such as patriarchy, dictatorial governments, fascism, imperialism, and economic inequality all over the world.
Keywords: Julia Alvarez, US Latina Literature, History, Politics, Rewriting.