Abstract
Julia Alvarez’s latest book of poems The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004) is her best effort yet at a melancholy form of writing that she practices throughout her work. Alvarez’s writing is a form of melan-choly regression to an archaic negation that is both depressive and constitutive of subjectivity. Similar to Freudian melancholia, Alvarez’s poetic writing is determined by the loss of a loved object, which sometimes takes the form of an abstract ideal (like the nation or the motherland), and at other times remains invisible to the subject, tak-ing instead the form of an indeterminate all-encompassing grief. Her writing is an example of what Kristeva calls an intimate revolt, an experimental and poetic mode of Freudian melancholia and negation.1
“Keep it to yourself!” my mother said, which more than anything anyone in my childhood advised turned me to this paper solitude
—Julia Alvarez By Accident
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© 2006 Benigno Trigo
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Trigo, B. (2006). From Revenge to Redemption: Julia Alvarez’s Open Secrets. In: Remembering Maternal Bodies. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8338-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8338-1_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-99967-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8338-1
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