From Revenge to Redemption: Julia Alvarez’s Open Secrets

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