The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao: An Analysis
Nicole Martinez
P.2
2.23.17
In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot utilizes female sexuality as a form of power. Lola uses the power her sexuality to escape from her problems. While in Santo Domingo, Lola finds out her mother wants her back home. When she hears this, she tries to seek a way to make money so that she can run away and she does this by sleeping with an older man and asking him for two thousand dollars, “That was my big puta moment. I knew he had the money, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked, and it’s not like I was robbing from him. I think we did it like nine times in total, so in my opinion he got a lot more than he gave” (Díaz). Lola used sex so that she could manipulate a man to get her what she needed. This
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Beli took advantage of this body when she realized that she could use it to control men, “Beli, who’d been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. […]. Hypatía Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had” (Díaz). The idiom “sent over the moon”, expresses how content she was that she finally gained power. She was pleased and happy to be starting a new chapter in her life. Beli quickly realized what she can do with her new body, she would be able to get any man she wanted. A boy she had liked before barely acknowledged, however when she became a woman, every man was drooling over her. She finally got the boy she wanted and believes she falls in love with him. In this novel, the only sense of power given to women is through their sexuality, without it they are seen as nothing. The men are mostly given the power because of their natural “masculinity” They are supposed to be the ones getting all the ladies. Junot Díaz did an outstanding job in portraying power through Beli and Lola’s sexuality. He picked to two woman who both had a goal and
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