Pat Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is a work in which the narrator expresses her sense of isolation from her children. Elena pinpoints language as the source of this growing divide, faulting her Spanish as insufficient, and demonstrating the problems in understanding that the English language generates in her household. Her children speak English well; she does not. Yet underlying the overt conflicts created for the narrator by language is another, more subtle reason for the isolation Elena feels. The poet hints at transitions in Elena’s household, transitions that are not confined to the homes of Mexican immigrant families. Elena’s children are not only being transformed by their conversion from Spanish speakers to English speakers and by their assimilation to life in America. Elena’s children are also growing up. Mora contrasts Elena’s memories of her children’s youth in Mexico with their teenage life in America; while the contrasts between Mexico and America, between . . . Read More
Elena by Pat Mora: Themes
Language and Languages
Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is concerned with the narrator’s native language of Spanish and the English language of her adoptive country, the United States. For Elena, these two languages are symbolic of the conflict between the familiarity of her native land and the challenges posed by relocating to a new country. The Spanish language for Elena is comfortable and familiar, the language in which she recalls the early years of her children’s lives. It is the language of memory for her. Power over the English language is something Elena’s children, now in high school, have achieved. Elena’s inability to master the new language is a source of shame, embarrassment, frustration, and fear. Elena can no longer comprehend everything her children say to one another, and she is left out of their jokes. She is uncomfortable with being unable to understand her children’s recounting of the day’s events. Elena feels . . . Read More
Elena by Pat Mora: Poem Summary
Lines 1–7
Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ does not follow any patterns in terms of formal structure and is not divided into stanzas (a stanza is a unit of poetry, or a grouping of lines that divides the poem in the same way that a paragraph divides prose). There are, however, lines that are linked in terms of the subject matter they treat. The poem opens with the narrator of the poem declaring that her native language, Spanish, is insufficient. In the next six lines, Elena recalls her life in Mexico with her children. She remembers listening to her young children and smiling at what they would say. During their time in Mexico, Elena observes, she was able to understand everything her children said. She was empowered by their common language to laugh at the jokes the children told, to delight in the songs they sang. Nothing, not even their secretive childhood plans, was unknown to her. Elena recalls overhearing them plotting to get something . . . Read More
Classic Ballroom Dances: Analysis
‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances’’ consists of four four-line unrhymed stanzas. The poem has no strict metrical form. It consists of a single incomplete sentence, using semicolons to link together a series of images that, together, form a gloss (an interlinear explanation, or a description inside the poem’s lines) on the poem’s title. The title itself is important, for it announces the subject matter of the poem and suggests that the people referred to in the body of the poem are engaged in daily activities that can be compared to dancing. The dances, though, are of a specific type: They are ballroom dances that are said to be classic. Ballroom dancing, as opposed to more free-form rock and roll dancing, implies the notion of fixed, predictable steps, suggesting that the people in the poem take part in activities that are likewise fixed and predictable. Further, the dances are classic, suggesting that they have been performed over a long period of time and, as classics, they . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Analysis
Although “The Wives of the Dead” is a story about events surrounding two widows in early eighteenth century colonial America, it is the narrator who sets the tone of the story and filters information in such a way as to shape the reader’s understanding of events. The narrator is not Hawthorne but a persona created to tell the story. Think of a persona as a mask. Hawthorne puts on a mask and tells the story from behind it. Readers must suspend their own doubt and believe the mask is a real person. The persona that Hawthorne uses as his narrator to tell the story of Mary and Margaret is one of a wise, gentleman who is nonetheless intrusive. This means that he not only reports on the action but also comments on it, evaluating events and the motives of the characters. By doing so, the narrator becomes a character himself, effectively helping to shape the tale’s meaning.
The narrator introduces himself in the opening paragraph, telling readers, . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Setting
Eighteenth-Century Newspapers
Hawthorne sets his story in the early eighteenth century in Massachusetts’ Bay Province, and his two principle characters, Margaret and Mary, learn of their husbands’ fate through men who visit them at their home. As one can imagine, news traveled slowly more than three hundred and fifty years ago. British censors kept a tight grip on what could be printed, and attempts to disseminate information that was not sponsored by the British government was forbidden. In 1690, for example, the governor of Massachusetts shut down Benjamin Harris’s independent newsletter, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, almost immediately because of its perceived threat to power. The first successful newspaper publisher in the colonies was William Campbell, postmaster of Boston, whose News-Letter was launched in 1704 to keep people in the Bay Colony apprised of world events. This changed to the Boston Gazette . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Imagery – Literary Devices
Romance
“The Wives of the Dead” is an American romance. The term “romance” emerged during the Middle Ages and often referred to stories with farfetched plots and exotic settings, involving knights and their quests, and chivalric behavior. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term became synonymous with stories emphasizing emotion and subjective experience. Classical romance includes intricate plots, mistaken identity, random events, and separated lovers, most of which Hawthorne’s story contains. American romantics, especially Hawthorne, occasionally digressed from the traditional formula and incorporated Gothic features such as ghosts and the supernatural into their writing. The romance, however, should not be confused with the romantic movement, which literary historians date from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. In their treatment of original subjects, their focus on . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Central Ideas – Themes
Loss
Hawthorne’s story illustrates how a person’s response to death and loss reveals true character. Both women mourn the loss of their husbands. However, Mary’s “mild, quiet, yet not feeble character” and her faith enable her to endure the emotional torment of her husband’s death with more equanimity than Margaret. She prepares a meal and sets the table soon after the mourners leave, and tries to help her sister-in-law calm down. Margaret, on the other hand, of a “lively and irritable temperament,” cannot accept the loss and remains bitter, dwelling on the past and taking no comfort in her faith. Later, Mary drifts into sleep with relative ease, while Margaret stays awake “groan[ing] in bitterness.” The motivation of each in not waking the other after hearing their respective news reflects their characters. Margaret is more worried about how Mary’s response would diminish her own . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Characters
Margaret
Along with her sister-in-law, Mary, Margaret is one of the wives referred to in the title. Both are “recent brides,” and still “young and comely”; that is, attractive. She has a “lively and irritable temperament,” and is bitter, virtually inconsolable, about her husband’s death. She declines eating the meal Mary offers her, saying, in reference to God, “Would it were His will that I might never taste food more.” She cannot sleep and stays up listening to the rain, looking at the hearth and the furniture in the living room the two couples shared, grieving her loss. When she hears a knock on the door, she answers it with apprehension, saying to herself, “I have nothing left to fear, and methinks I am ten times more a coward than ever.” Agitated, she screams at Goodman Parker, asking him what he wants. When Parker tells her that her husband, in fact, was never killed in the . . . Read More
The Wives of the Dead – Summary
Part One
In the first part of “The Wives of the Dead,” the narrator assures readers his tale is “scarcely worth relating,” then proceeds to tell it in detail. A hundred years ago, in the early eighteenth century, two “young and comely” (attractive) women in a Massachusetts seaport town married brothers and set up house together. In “two successive” days, they learn of their husbands’ deaths: one is lost at sea, while the other is killed fighting the French and Indians in Canada. The British battled with the French for control of North America at this time, and colonists from the Bay colonies often fought on the Canadian frontier. Though many townspeople turn out to offer their sympathy, the women want to be left alone to console each other. After the mourners leave, Mary, the more practical and disciplined of the pair, prepares dinner, but Margaret, distraught and bitter, cannot eat. The two go . . . Read More