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None Provided n her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Dominican author Julia Alvarez demonstrates how words can become strange and lose their meaning. African American writer Toni Morrison in her novel Sula demonstrates how words can wound in acts of accidental verbal violence when something is overheard by mistake. In each instance, one sees how the writer manipulates language, its pauses and its silences as well as its words, in order to enhance the overall mood of each work. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the reader meets the protagonist, Sula, and her friend Nel when both girls are roughly twelve years old. Both girls are black, intelligent, and dreaming of their future. Early on in the novel, two events occur which change Sula's worldview. First of all, she overhears a conversation in which her mother says that she loves Sula, but she does not like her (Morrison 57). Sula is deeply wounded by the off hand remark. Soon afterwards, she and Nel are playing near the river when they encounter another friend-Chicken Little. The children begin to play together. Sula is swinging Chicken Little around when she accidentally knocks him into the river. "The pressure of his hand and tight little fingers were still in Sula's palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing" (Morrison 61). This incident, combined with what feels to Sula like her mother's rejection, cause the child to turn away from the conventions of society and to avoid even the trauma of her own emotional reactions. Morrison writes that Sula was: As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life-ever since her mother's remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river...The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow" (Morrison 118-119). For Sula, there is no "other" against which she can then define herself. Having rejected her community and her family, she wanders, trying somehow to define who she is. Sula turns to Shadrack, the local madman, at first because she worries that he saw what happened to Chicken Little, but then because his words truly do comfort her. Here again, one seems the way that Morrison manipulates language and its meaning in that what Shadrack doesn't say are just as significant as what he does say. Shadrack makes Sula a promise- "Always." Morrison writes, "...he tried to think of something to say to comfort her, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes. So he had said 'always,' so she would not have to be afraid..." (Morrison 157) This promise, which conveys to Sula a sense of her own permanence, serves to take away from her two essential components of a healthy conscience-fear and compassion. Julia Alvarez also uses language to show how the four Garcia girls adjust to living in a new, and to them alien, culture. The protagonist in this novel is the family Garcia de la Torre, a wealthy, aristocratic family from the Santo Domingo, who can trace their genealogy back to the Spanish conquistadors. The plot emphasizes the relationship between the four Garcia sisters, Carla, Sandra (Sandi), Yolanda (Yo, Yoyo, or Joe), and Sofia (Fifi). The narrative follows their lives as S.A.P.s-Spanish American Princesses-as they move from their "savage Caribbean island" to elite schools in New England from there to their lives as middle class American citizens in the Bronx. It is basically a story of assimilation as the girls cope with discrimination and linguistic misunderstandings. The way that English idioms manage to make the girls stumble as they struggle to "lose their accents" and become fully Americanized is symbolic of the whole process of assimilation. The Garcia girls try to fit into the American concept of adolescence. They iron their hair and buy bell-bottom pants with fringe. What is distinctive about Alvarez's narrative is that she manages to convey not only the Garcia's girls' longing to fit in, but also their sense of unrecoverable loss as the girls remain conscious of the advantages of their Dominican selves. Through her use of language, Alvarez conveys the ambivalence that many Hispanic Americans feel as they adapt to the idiosyncrasies of Anglo-Saxon America. While this book is a novel, each of its sections can be read as independent unit. The opening chapters begin in 1988, but the succeeding chapters go back to 1956. As if the Garcia girls were traveling back in time to their Hispanic origins, the book tells their story in reverse order, as the girls navigate from maturity to adolescence. The reader observes the slow deconstruction of the Garcia girls' adult personalities as they reflect upon their past and their Catholic education and upbringing. The title of this novel refers to the fact that language can serve as a metaphor, a symbol, for cultural abandonment. Alvarez, consequently, uses language to dramatize the transition from an ancestral vehicle of communication to an active, convenient one. While Morrison and Alvarez both deal with characters who are not readily included in mainstream American culture-protagonists from both novels have to deal with prejudice and the vagaries of the English language-the mood, the feel, of these novels is very different. The feel of Alavarez' novel is lighter than that of Morrison's. The Garcia family is buffeted, first by the political circumstances that exile them from Santa Domingo, and then by their experiences in the US, but the Garcia girls are essentially whole. To a certain extent, they rebel against their parents, but this is not a dysfunctional family. For example, in "Daughter of Invention," what could arguably be called the best story in the book; Yoyo has to deliver a commencement speech. In search of inspiration, Yoyo finds Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and takes a particular liking to "Song of Myself." Inspired by Whitman, Yoyo writes a speech celebrating egotism and self-interest. The theme infuriates Yoyo's father, who tears up the speech in a rage. However, Yoyo's mother offers support and urges the girl to deliver the speech anyway. Yoyo takes her mother's advice and delivers the speech-quite successfully. Even her repentant father congratulates her and gives her a congratulatory gift of a personal typewriter. As can be seen from this example, the Alvarez family deals with its problems with language and its use and moves on. Behind disagreements is the understanding that the actors in this family drama operate from a basis grounded in love. This is not true in Sula, where Sula grows up damaged emotionally and spiritually by the events of her childhood. Sula becomes so detached from her emotions that her feelings of separateness become translated into a permanent lack of compassion. This separation is so severe that Sula can watch-fascinated-as her mother burns to death. The tragedy in Sula's life is that no experience from the most mundane to the most profound has any meaning for her. Sula has lost one of the primarily functions of language-she has lost the ability to take on another person's perspective. This serves to keep Sula emotionally frozen at age twelve. She still seems relationships and people only in terms of herself. Nevertheless, one cannot remain in stasis forever. With her love for Ajax, Sula once more tries to connect emotionally with another human being. She attempts, in her own hesitant way, to come back from her Cain-like exile by, once more, taking responsibility for another person. She feels the desire to have possession, exclusive rights to another and to attempt to know someone other then herself. To Sula, their lovemaking is symbolized as a tree in loam-fertile, rich and moist (Morrison 130-131). She has the desire to search through all the layers of rich soil and find the center of Ajax. Unfortunately for Sula's emotional growth, Ajax doesn't return the feeling for he desires the Sula who is so distinctly separate and complete in her solitude. When Sula asks that Ajax to lean on her, she means to limit him, to bind him to her. Understanding Sula's use of language immediately, Ajax rejects the relationship at this point. "He dragged (Sula) under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of man about to leave for Dayton" (Morrison 134). Soon afterward, she finds his driver's license and realizes that she never even knew his real name. This loss, combined with the others, destroys Sula. Alvarez's book is, more or less, a gathering of memories-an attempt to make sense of the past and the process that led from the Garcia girls' past to their present. In so doing, Alvarez illustrates the realities of assimilation for the Garcia family. It is a poignant story as Alvarez dramatizes the multiple complexities that permeate family life, but it remains a story of ordinary life-not tragedy. Morrison's book, on the other hand, is a tragedy. Sula becomes trapped in a downwardly spiraling cycle of negativity that causes her to become the personification of evil in her community of Medallion. It is not until Sula commits suicide, and her consciousness lives on that she fully realizes that she was not intrinsically evil, but that there is good and evil in everyone (Morrison 146). Thus, it can be seen that while there are similarities between these two novels in their basic orientation, the way that each author uses language results in very different perspectives. n her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Dominican author Julia Alvarez demonstrates how words can become strange and lose their meaning. African American writer Toni Morrison in her novel Sula demonstrates how words can wound in acts of accidental verbal violence when something is overheard by mistake. In each instance, one sees how the writer manipulates language, its pauses and its silences as well as its words, in order to enhance the overall mood of each work. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the reader meets the protagonist, Sula, and her friend Nel when both girls are roughly twelve years old. Both girls are black, intelligent, and dreaming of their future. Early on in the novel, two events occur which change Sula's worldview. First of all, she overhears a conversation in which her mother says that she loves Sula, but she does not like her (Morrison 57). Sula is deeply wounded by the off hand remark. Soon afterwards, she and Nel are playing near the river when they encounter another friend-Chicken Little. The children begin to play together. Sula is swinging Chicken Little around when she accidentally knocks him into the river. "The pressure of his hand and tight little fingers were still in Sula's palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing" (Morrison 61). This incident, combined with what feels to Sula like her mother's rejection, cause the child to turn away from the conventions of society and to avoid even the trauma of her own emotional reactions. Morrison writes that Sula was: As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life-ever since her mother's remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river...The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow" (Morrison 118-119). For Sula, there is no "other" against which she can then define herself. Having rejected her community and her family, she wanders, trying somehow to define who she is. Sula turns to Shadrack, the local madman, at first because she worries that he saw what happened to Chicken Little, but then because his words truly do comfort her. Here again, one seems the way that Morrison manipulates language and its meaning in that what Shadrack doesn't say are just as significant as what he does say. Shadrack makes Sula a promise- "Always." Morrison writes, "...he tried to think of something to say to comfort her, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes. So he had said 'always,' so she would not have to be afraid..." (Morrison 157) This promise, which conveys to Sula a sense of her own permanence, serves to take away from her two essential components of a healthy conscience-fear and compassion. Julia Alvarez also uses language to show how the four Garcia girls adjust to living in a new, and to them alien, culture. The protagonist in this novel is the family Garcia de la Torre, a wealthy, aristocratic family from the Santo Domingo, who can trace their genealogy back to the Spanish conquistadors. The plot emphasizes the relationship between the four Garcia sisters, Carla, Sandra (Sandi), Yolanda (Yo, Yoyo, or Joe), and Sofia (Fifi). The narrative follows their lives as S.A.P.s-Spanish American Princesses-as they move from their "savage Caribbean island" to elite schools in New England from there to their lives as middle class American citizens in the Bronx. It is basically a story of assimilation as the girls cope with discrimination and linguistic misunderstandings. The way that English idioms manage to make the girls stumble as they struggle to "lose their accents" and become fully Americanized is symbolic of the whole process of assimilation. The Garcia girls try to fit into the American concept of adolescence. They iron their hair and buy bell-bottom pants with fringe. What is distinctive about Alvarez's narrative is that she manages to convey not only the Garcia's girls' longing to fit in, but also their sense of unrecoverable loss as the girls remain conscious of the advantages of their Dominican selves. Through her use of language, Alvarez conveys the ambivalence that many Hispanic Americans feel as they adapt to the idiosyncrasies of Anglo-Saxon America. While this book is a novel, each of its sections can be read as independent unit. The opening chapters begin in 1988, but the succeeding chapters go back to 1956. As if the Garcia girls were traveling back in time to their Hispanic origins, the book tells their story in reverse order, as the girls navigate from maturity to adolescence. The reader observes the slow deconstruction of the Garcia girls' adult personalities as they reflect upon their past and their Catholic education and upbringing. The title of this novel refers to the fact that language can serve as a metaphor, a symbol, for cultural abandonment. Alvarez, consequently, uses language to dramatize the transition from an ancestral vehicle of communication to an active, convenient one. While Morrison and Alvarez both deal with characters who are not readily included in mainstream American culture-protagonists from both novels have to deal with prejudice and the vagaries of the English language-the mood, the feel, of these novels is very different. The feel of Alavarez' novel is lighter than that of Morrison's. The Garcia family is buffeted, first by the political circumstances that exile them from Santa Domingo, and then by their experiences in the US, but the Garcia girls are essentially whole. To a certain extent, they rebel against their parents, but this is not a dysfunctional family. For example, in "Daughter of Invention," what could arguably be called the best story in the book; Yoyo has to deliver a commencement speech. In search of inspiration, Yoyo finds Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and takes a particular liking to "Song of Myself." Inspired by Whitman, Yoyo writes a speech celebrating egotism and self-interest. The theme infuriates Yoyo's father, who tears up the speech in a rage. However, Yoyo's mother offers support and urges the girl to deliver the speech anyway. Yoyo takes her mother's advice and delivers the speech-quite successfully. Even her repentant father congratulates her and gives her a congratulatory gift of a personal typewriter. As can be seen from this example, the Alvarez family deals with its problems with language and its use and moves on. Behind disagreements is the understanding that the actors in this family drama operate from a basis grounded in love. This is not true in Sula, where Sula grows up damaged emotionally and spiritually by the events of her childhood. Sula becomes so detached from her emotions that her feelings of separateness become translated into a permanent lack of compassion. This separation is so severe that Sula can watch-fascinated-as her mother burns to death. The tragedy in Sula's life is that no experience from the most mundane to the most profound has any meaning for her. Sula has lost one of the primarily functions of language-she has lost the ability to take on another person's perspective. This serves to keep Sula emotionally frozen at age twelve. She still seems relationships and people only in terms of herself. Nevertheless, one cannot remain in stasis forever. With her love for Ajax, Sula once more tries to connect emotionally with another human being. She attempts, in her own hesitant way, to come back from her Cain-like exile by, once more, taking responsibility for another person. She feels the desire to have possession, exclusive rights to another and to attempt to know someone other then herself. To Sula, their lovemaking is symbolized as a tree in loam-fertile, rich and moist (Morrison 130-131). She has the desire to search through all the layers of rich soil and find the center of Ajax. Unfortunately for Sula's emotional growth, Ajax doesn't return the feeling for he desires the Sula who is so distinctly separate and complete in her solitude. When Sula asks that Ajax to lean on her, she means to limit him, to bind him to her. Understanding Sula's use of language immediately, Ajax rejects the relationship at this point. "He dragged (Sula) under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of man about to leave for Dayton" (Morrison 134). Soon afterward, she finds his driver's license and realizes that she never even knew his real name. This loss, combined with the others, destroys Sula. Alvarez's book is, more or less, a gathering of memories-an attempt to make sense of the past and the process that led from the Garcia girls' past to their present. In so doing, Alvarez illustrates the realities of assimilation for the Garcia family. It is a poignant story as Alvarez dramatizes the multiple complexities that permeate family life, but it remains a story of ordinary life-not tragedy. Morrison's book, on the other hand, is a tragedy. Sula becomes trapped in a downwardly spiraling cycle of negativity that causes her to become the personification of evil in her community of Medallion. It is not until Sula commits suicide, and her consciousness lives on that she fully realizes that she was not intrinsically evil, but that there is good and evil in everyone (Morrison 146). Thus, it can be seen that while there are similarities between these two novels in their basic orientation, the way that each author uses language results in very different perspectives. Bibliography:

Word Count: 3216