Literary Analysis The Kiss

In the story “The Kiss” by Julia Alvarez, we see a family with four daughters, a father and mother. The father, who is old-fashioned and strict, has his own ideas of what he wants from his daughters. The daughters except for Sofia, the youngest one, have always done what he has asked for. Sofia does not agree with her sisters and she does what she wants. She runs away with a man, a decision her father cannot forgive. Although Sofia tries to reconcile with her father with no luck, she lets her father know that she has her own way of thinking.

No matter how much the father tries to change Sofia’s way of seeing life, in the end he could not. Trying to control a person does not guarantee that the other person will always do what we want. The father of this story is a strong man, trying to control his daughters as if they were small kids. Even when they were grown-ups and married, he always tried to control them. “They would gather together, without husbands, would-be husbands, or bring-home work, the apartment was too small for everyone, the father argued. ” (Alvarez 416) His daughters will do anything to please their father. Even after they’d been married and had their own families and often couldn’t make it for other occasions, the four daughters always came home for their father’s birthday. ” (Alvarez 416) They were raised in an old fashion way, and they respect their father. “But standing up to their father was a different matter altogether. Even as grown women, they lowered their voices in their father’s earshot when alluding to their bodies’ pleasure. ” (Alvarez 416) Sofia was different she had her own way of living and did not agreed with her father. She ran away from her house and since then her relationship with her father was not good.

Her father did not forgive her for what she did. “And yet, she of all the daughters, did not want to be the absent one because for the first time since she’d run off with her husband six years ago, she and her father were on speaking terms. ” (Alvarez 417) Sofia had always lived her life as she wanted. She had many boyfriends; she also dropped out of school. Her father could not accept her way of living. He found out after searching into her letters that Sofia had an active sexual life. For him this was not acceptable. “After his initial shock, the father regained his own fury.

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Are you dragging my good name through the dirt? ” (Alvarez 418) After six years Sofia’s father still could not forgive her. Sofia tries to reconcile with him by preparing her father’s birthday party at her house. Sofia prepared everything to please her dad. But after everything that she did, he would still not forgive her. Sofia let her dad know that she had her own way of doing things and her own way of thinking, and he could not change that after all. “After all her had work, she was not to be included in his daughter count. Damn him! She’d take her turn and make him know it was her!

Quickly, she swooped into the circle and gave the old man a wet, open-mouthed kiss in his ear. She ran her tongue in the whorls of his ear and nibbled the tip. ” (Alvarez 422) Sofia was different from her sisters and her father never accepted it. I think this made her attitude worse, and when she found out that he would never forgive her, she did not care anymore, and let him know that she would never change. David T. Mitchell comments: Throughout the novel, numerous commentators remark on the poor fortune of a family that consists entirely of girls--"what, four girls and no boys? while each daughter struggles to free herself from the limitations of a communal designation that strips them of their uniqueness and individuality. Because the label "Garcia Girls" stands in for the plural identities submerged beneath the faceless anonymity of daughters (who, unlike their male counterparts, do not need to be individuated as distinct human beings) “The novel's second chapter deals with Sofia, the youngest of the sisters, who leaves home when she gets pregnant on a vacation trip to South America, and then goes to Germany to convince the baby's father to marry her.

Although the couple returns to the U. S. with the baby, the result of this stain on the family's honor is almost complete silence: their father does not mention Sofia's name for months, and even after a reconciliation of sorts the two rarely speak. ” (Castells)

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