Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

In her autobiographically based novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez honors the complexities of Dominican history through her refusal to classify the Garcías clearly as victims or oppressors. Instead, she reveals that the protagonist (her own alter-ego) is simultaneously a casualty of and an heir to the forces of colonialism; Yolanda has inherited what Donaldson has called the Miranda Complex, referring to Prospero's daughter in The Tempest. Unlike Miranda, Alvarez's characters cannot recover the losses that have victimized them and their countrymen in the past; however, their inheritance does offer a means of memorializing the absence of collective history, thus revealing the cost of that loss to victims and perpetrators alike. Alvarez reifies this historical theme through the novel's structure, its gaps and omissions, its pervasive motifs of loss and alienation, and its heteroglossic nature.

Melting Pots & Mosaics: Children of Immigrants in US-American Literature

“…These admonitions find their copious, self-reflexive inflections in the novel as well, even before the actual narrative commences: of all the essays on How the García Girls Lost Their Accents I was able to find, only one (Bess 2007) more than summarily discusses the family tree that precedes the novel. While the illustration is certainly helpful regarding the immediate family members and some of the extended family, a closer look reveals ample, clearly jocular, uncertainties.…”