Blog 10

Reading Gender Essay

I completely shuddered when reading the dialogue between Lupita and her mother. The dream of Lupita and her mother reminded me not necessarily of my experiences with my own mother, but of feelings that I have had towards her. These are feelings that all mother-daughter couples have. On the mother’s side, their daughter must be brought up to some standard (which is different for every mom). On the side of the daughter, feelings of alienation, being controlled, and worry of becoming their mother surface in the slightest conflicts.

Castellanos places us in the perfect situation to learn the true context up Lupita’s fears. Lupita is dreaming of “what the future holds”. Instead of dreaming in fairytales, Lupita dreams in terms of what she doesn’t know, and how she has always learned what she now knows; Lupita doesn’t know how to be a good wife, what her husband will expect of her, what to think of sex in her marriage, how quickly she may get pregnant, and how she should take care of an unborn child... she answers these questions in her dream with the imagined angry reactions from her husband and the scorning reason of her mother. The way that Lupita resorts to answering the questions in her dream shows how innocent she really is. Her innocence is juxtaposed with what she figures real motherhood is at the send of this section: darkness. The flow from innocent newly-wed to the all-knowing grandmother is very prominent in our culture. This is the path that is hard for women to stray from because it is what they are told to do. It isn’t very often that we see women seeking out what other possibilities there are, more correctly, it isn’t very often we encourage women to do so.

Castellanos takes care to define how powerful Mama is in Lupita’s life. Not only does Mama dictate how Lupita is feeling, what she should do, and how she should act, but she controls Lupita’s husband. Lupita experiences her pregnancy with no control over it. Mama is able to manipulate Lupita’s husband because he doesn’t know how to be a proper father. Both Mama and her husband control Lupita’s pregnancy because she has no clue. The most interesting gender relation from this is the womens' ability to blatantly manipulate Lupita’s husband. It is interesting that the only time that Lupita is able to manipulate her husband to such an extent is with the help of her mother.

Lupita’s lack of control over her own pregnancy parallels the lack of control many women have over their pregnancies today. One parrallel is in education. As discussed in the F-Word, sex education in the US is not properly provided everywhere. When Lupita’s mom tells her that she must wear loose clothes, and feed her cravings, it becomes apparent that neither of them know what really contributes to the health of a baby, so the one with more experience is the only one who should be bossing. Lupita is also completely bossed around by her husband and her mother. This may have represented her lack of understanding since she eventually listened to everything that she was told to do. There was also no talk of Lupita wanting to have a child, it just happened. The issue of a contraceptive didn’t enter the picture at all. It seems that the lack of knowledge about being a good wife was the very thing that was making her a good wife; she just had to listen to two people and she was fulfilling her duties. Many times in our society people are considered good when they don’t ask questions about a taboo subject like sex and pregnancy.