Helena Maria Viramontes’ The Moths Essay -- Moths Viramontes Essays

Helena female horse Viramontes The Moths I was initially drawn to Helena Maria Viramontes story The Moths due to the striking similarities between the fabricators experience and my ownexperience with being thrust into the role of caretaker for a dying lovedone. By tracking a young girlfriends transformation through dealings withsubjugation (by her culture), freedom (through her grandmother), death (ofher grandmother) and grief, Viramontes successfully paints an endearing tale of change. The Moths emphasizes the narrators oppression by her family lines religion and by the social structures associated with it,juxtaposed by the freedom for development available within the nativecurandera custom taught by her grandmother. Through promising yet subtle symbols, the author weaves a complex web with which to showcase the narrators oppressive upbringing. Two literarycritics whose methods/theories allow us to better comprehend Viramontes kernel are Jonathan Culler and Stephen Gree nblatt. Culler points out that we read literature differently than we read anything else. According to the intertextual theory of how people read literature, readers make assumptions (based on details) that they would not make in real life.During these leaps within which we transform facts into values/themes, thereader creates supplementary meaning to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opposition. Culler describes this crop in his statement The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them (294). though supplementary meaning created within the text can take many forms, within V... ...eedom was found and cultural boundaries were not shattered, simply battered, the narrators room was much preferable to that of her sisters (those who conformed to cultural boundaries). Through this story we can see how oppression in certain cultures ch anges individuals differently, creates tension between those who do not longing to be subjugated and those doing the subjugating, and we see the integral opposition between the path of Catholicism and that of curandismo.WORKS CITEDContexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. New York McGraw Hill, 2003.________________. Jonathan Culler. Structuralism and Literature.288-297________________. Stephen Greenblatt. Culture. 436-441The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Cassel & Bausch. New York W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. Helena Maria Viramontes. The Moths 870-874