Behold, the final of my 9th grade year. In assigned reading groups, we wrote essays on the expectations of young men and women in the Dominican Republic.The highlighted words were to fill the quota of necessary vocabulary usage.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a book hinged on gender stereotypes in Dominican culture. Oscar, the male main character, is expected to be a macho man, get all the girls, and not care about what others think. The case for Oscar is an interesting one, however, because Oscar does get his Dominican redemption at the end. After going through his life as a miserable, overweight “nerd”, he finally gets the girl in the end. However, one character who never lowers herself (or, raises herself) to the standards of Dominican culture is Oscar’s sister, Lola.
While growing up in New Jersey, Lola often feels marooned by her mother, Beli, who was revered for her beauty and “secondary sex characteristics”. Despite this, Lola is a character that never submits to the roles required by Dominican culture, and remains resolute in her beliefs about sexuality. Diaz, in turn, illustrates Lola as this kind of character because of his distaste for and disagreement with female gender stereotypes in Dominican culture.
Lola de Leon, the daughter of Belicia and sister of Oscar, lives in a world with an interesting melange of restrictions put on her. These expectations that are placed on her come mainly from her mother, Beli. Beli, in her glory days, was one of the most “desired” women in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s rule. To give the reader insight to the gravity of Beli’s desirability, Diaz writes, “… Beli was transformed overnight into an underage stunner, and if Trujillo had not been on his last erections he probably would have gunned for her like her poor dead sister” (Diaz 91). Beli was revered around the Bani community for her “secondary sex characteristics”, and as a result, Lola feels lost in a sea of expectations that her mother places on her. Lola feels as though she will never be able to live up to her mother’s shadow.
During her chapters, Lola laments, “The last time she tried to whale on me it was because of my hair… She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter, the one she raised up by herself with the help of nobody…” (55). The “hair” that Lola is alluding to is her new, short hair cut. Lola cut her hair close to her head out of frustration, and Beli did not approve. Beli told Lola that her short hair made her look like a Lesbian, a taboo subject in their household, and an insult to Beli. Lola feels that because her mother raised her on her own, her mother’s overbearing beliefs about what a girl should look like leaves Lola caged. This, in addition to Beli’s tendency to be irascible, leads Lola’s relationship with her mother to continue straining. At this point in her life, Lola has not received all of the life experiences that will shape her perception of the world.
Lola has harrowing experiences as she enters the world for the first time on her own, and some make her feel diminutive. As she travels south, Lola meets a man named Aldo, who she lives with for a period of time, a refugee from her New Jersey home. Lola shares one of her experiences by saying, “…because that was what I imagined you were supposed to say while you were losing your “virginity” to some boy you thought you loved” (64). This is one of the most memorable lines from the book, and illustrates just what kind of a crisis Lola is having, regardless of whether or not she acknowledges it at the time. This is also one of the moments where Lola’s most imprudent behaviors shine through. While there are moments in which Lola’s choices seem to reflect some inner paradigm shift, the end of the book leaves Lola more resolute in her beliefs than in the beginning.
In the latter half of the book, the majority of the information we are given is second hand from Yunior, the narrator. He dated Lola on and off for several years, which is how he got into Oscar’s life to begin with. After the unfortunate events of Oscar’s death, Yunior loses touch with Lola. However, the reader can infer that Lola is in a much better relationship with her husband, Cuban Ruben, than she was with Yunior. To illustrate Lola’s new, permanent life, Diaz writes, “She, Cuban Reuben, and their daughter moved back to Paterson a couple of years back, sold the house, bought a new one, travel everywhere together… Her daughter, though, is always there… A little reader too, if Lola is to be believed” (327).
At the end of Lola’s story, she has found herself. In the case of Lola, finding herself does not mean being trapped in a toxic relationship, or being docile to a destructive patriarch. Instead, Lola found herself in a marriage with a daughter. In the end, Lola managed to keep herself from falling into the rut of typical Dominican female life. Interestingly, the trait that Yunior uses to describe Lola’s daughter is an avid reader. This was left as a bread crumb trail, meant to lead the reader to the conclusion that Lola is also breaking the cycle of her own toxic mother-daughter relationship. Earlier in the timeline of Lola’s life, the young girl wanted nothing more than to leave her mother’s house, and desired atlases and maps to visualize a world away from her.
The fact that Lola’s daughter has a love of reading reflects fittingly on the fact that Lola was able to overcome the relationship she had with Beli. She did not continue the vicious cycle of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, and instead rose above what she was raised on to create a new future.
Lola’s journey through her life from young-womanhood to motherhood also reflects Diaz’s views on the quintessential Dominican female. Lola, a woman who consciously defies gender roles in Dominican culture, ends up happy in the end. That is to say, she ends her story in a happier place than Beli, who conforms directly to Dominican beauty roles. Beli makes many mistakes over the course of her young womanhood, and has to pay gravely for them. As an adult, Beli contracts cancer, has a bad relationship with her daughter, and has a son who tries to commit suicide on multiple occasions. It seems a fair evaluation to say that Diaz is illustrating his discontent with Dominican female gender expectations by writing his more defiant character into a happier place than his complacent one.
While the book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Diaz is fundamentally about Oscar de Leon and the stereotypes associated with the Dominican Male, the book also has a large commentary on female roles. Both Beli and Lola, the two largest female characters in Oscar’s life, illustrate two strong but opposite examples of a resolute female will. The person who goes above these stereotypes and expectations, of course, is Lola.
Works Cited
DiÌaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, a Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007.
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