Gertrudis Gómez de Avellanda’s Sab is an account of a mulatto slave bound to a white family in nineteenth century Cuba in the province of Puerto Prícipe. Although he is tightly knit within his master family, the “de B----s,” the amiable Sab has an even closer relationship with his adoptive mother, Martina. Martina is an old mysterious woman of unclear decent. Like her ethnicity, her identity, as Avellanda describes, is also ambiguous. She seems to be the only kind of parental force in Sab and her grandson. What is also odd about her parental aspect is the fact that Martina is only motherly figure that is ever mentioned in the novel (with the exception of Mother Teresa the nun). Another strange quality of Martina is the fact that everyone close to her ends up dies. She is an ill-fated woman whose house burns down and entire family perishes before her eyes, even her beloved adoptive son, Sab. Her ambiguity lurks throughout several of the chapters of the story, and her motherly tenderness towards Sab, even as he is a grown man, is the only true parental affection and compassion the mulatto receives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Lyndon,you bring up a lot of ideas in this paragraph that you will want to develop on more fully later in your paper. You might even consider taking some of them out of the intro so that you can pull them out for the reader later. When you are writing a paper, always keep an ace up your sleeve to pull out and wow the reader at the end. Most importantly, this paragraph doesn't make clear to me what your thesis is. You say "X, Y and Z are true, indisputable facts about the text", but you never follow it up and say "Because X, Y and Z are true, the reader understands A and B." You've pulled out some of the interesting aspects of this character that need discussing, now you've got to connect the dots and tell us what picture you've drawn.
Post a Comment