Abstract

Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictional depiction of three sisters who are lauded for their role in ending the supremacist, womanizing, and terror-inspiring reign of Trujillo. While, one character, Patria, seems to represent the traditional, and at times cloistered, life of a Dominican wife and mother (reflecting the Malinche and sufrida archetypes), the text also shows her transformation into one of the most vital figureheads of the revolution. I find that when she joins the revolution, she comes as a transformed Marian-figure. Unlike Ibez Gomez Vega and other feminist scholars who have categorized Patria as one torn between two ways and who chooses to replace the old ways with new ways, I argue that Patria finds a way to live pluralistically, as she inhabits the role of a revolutionized and evolved Madonna whom Gloria Anzaldua would refer to as a "new mestiza." This term changes its Aztec root "mestiza," meaning torn between ways into, a new mestiza who "copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, [who] operates in a pluralistic mode–nothing is thrust out…nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else". In doing so, she reconstructs a Marian identity by returning to the Marian and Indigenous Goddess figures whose sexuality and equality with God have been buried by centuries of patriarchal and colonial fathers. This thesis demonstrates that Patria does not have to face the rigidity of certain feminist and secular standards. As a new mestiza. Patria can live beyond the rigidity of borders, and create something new, something that is truly Patria, out of womanhood.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; English

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