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

Helena Maria Viramontes The Moths I was initially drawn to Helena Maria Viramontes fib The Moths due to the striking similarities surrounded by the bank clerks experience and my ownexperience with being twitch into the role of care runr for a dying lovedone. By tracking a young girls transformation through dealings with seduction (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 herhouseholds religion and by the kind structures associated with it,juxtaposed by the freedom for development available within the intrinsiccurandera custom taught by her grandmother. Through vivid yet subtle symbols, the creator weaves a complex web with which to showcase the narrators oppressive upbringing. Two literarycritics whose methods/theories allow us to better comprehend Viramontesmessage are Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt. Cul ler points pop out that we read literature differently than we read anything else. According to the inter school textual theory of how hatful read literature, readers make assumptions (based on details) that they would not make in genuinely 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 routine in his statement The process of thematic interpretation requires us to bring from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition in the midst of 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 path was much preferable to that of her sisters (those who conformed to cultural boundaries). Through this story we can see how oppression i n certain cultures changes individuals differently, creates tension amidst those who do not wish to be subjugated and those doing the subjugating, and we see the intrinsic opposition between the path of Catholicism and that of curandismo.WORKS CITEDContexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. New York McGraw Hill, 2003.________________. Jonathan Culler. structural linguistics 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