27 pages • 54 minutes read
Julia AlvarezThe Daughter of Invention
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Yoyo
Yoyo’s character is introduced as the “Big Mouth” and the “spokesperson” for her sisters (243). Early on, she advocates for her and her sisters to no longer have to attend a school where they are ostracized for being Dominican. Her first solution to their difficulties at school is just to no longer attend. Laura doesn’t allow this, so Yoyo is left to find her own route to acceptance. Yoyo, short for Yolanda, translates to “I, I” in Spanish, signifying the multiple selves Yoyo must invent in this stage of her life. Part of her is a poet, one that emerges in the evenings when she is alone in her room. This time is written about as a private, special one: “[S]he wrote secret poems in her new language” (245).
Yoyo realizes, though, that mastery of English can help her connect to and succeed within her school environment. If she can’t leave school, she might as well find a place to settle within it. Yoyo “took root in the language” (245). When Yoyo is asked to give the speech on Teacher’s Day, she can no longer remain private with her writing and has to choose between the irreverence and independence of Walt Whitman and the traditional Dominican values of her parents. When she writes like Whitman, she “finally sounded like herself in English” (246). When this self meets her father’s resistance, however, she must adhere to a self that includes the values taught to her by her family and country of origin.
Laura (Mami)
Laura García’s character opens the story with a spirit of inventiveness and independence. She subverts the expectations of a stereotypical domestic woman, as demonstrated when she takes her daughters to the department store’s housewares section to watch demonstrations of how the machines work rather than shop. Laura acts in service to her inventive spirit for the first half of the story, as opposed to being at the service of her children. This spirit is driven by her desire to be acknowledged for something independently hers, an invention that no one has thought of before. In the Dominican Republic, she is known because of her maiden name, de la Torre, and the renown attached to her family. In America, though, she seeks self-determination and to be known for something created by her own hands.
Laura is committed to doing as the Americans do. This is expressed in her use of English despite her slipping into mixed idioms. Laura’s desire to invent is thwarted when someone else gets recognition for something she draws in private, representing the ways that despite her ambition, her status as an immigrant and a woman will likely prevent her from being known in the way she desires. Laura accepts this reality quickly and then offers a similar lesson to Yoyo when she helps her with her speech. She initially admires Yoyo’s speech for its celebration of the self and of independence, but she is able to adapt swiftly to the reality initiated by Carlos: To survive as immigrant women in America, she and Yoyo will need to compromise the truest parts of themselves.
Carlos (Papi)
Carlos is first described in the story as a “disembodied bodyguard” sleeping with Spanish newspapers on his chest while Laura draws inventions next to him (242). When Laura wakes Carlos up in the middle of the night, he bolts with a fear that indicates his dreams bring him back to the terrors of living under Trujillo. Carlos offers an example of a traditional, patriarchal figure who adheres to the old ways. He insists they speak their native tongue, so they hold onto their Spanish language. While Laura and the girls move toward expressing American values and especially American independence, he resists that possibility. Carlos left the Dominican Republic because he had to, and he expresses his dream of returning after he finds out Trujillo was assassinated.
When Yoyo insults Carlos by calling him a name reserved for Trujillo, the reader also witnesses the girls’ fear of his authority, as Yoyo runs and locks the door behind her. Carlos’s distance from his family increases as time passes in America, and he remains adherent to the old ways. The girls can no longer understand Carlos’s formal Spanish, for instance. Even when Yoyo and Carlos find a place of resolution at the end of the story when Carlos offers her a typewriter, their exchange is short. Carlos holds the memory and trauma from their life before, but the girls have new fears that have nothing to do with SIM or Trujillo. He is “disembodied,” as though despite being present in the home, he is really somewhere else.
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By Julia Alvarez
