Empress of the Splendid Season

by Oscar Hijuelos

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With Empress of the Splendid Season, Hijuelos presents the tale of a frustrated immigrant, a melancholy story of downward mobility that serves as a counterpoint to the American Dream of personal advancement. In her native Cuba, Lydia España grew up as the beautiful spoiled daughter of a mayor and successful businessman. However, when she returns home late from a sexual encounter with a middle-aged married man, her furious father expels her from the household. The headstrong girl who had never deigned to tidy her own room ends up in New York, a newcomer forced to earn a living by cleaning other people’s apartments.

The novel begins in 1957, when Lydia, thirty-two, has already been in the United States for a decade. Married to a waiter named Raul and the mother of two, she is obliged by her husband’s heart condition to be the principal breadwinner. Raul had proposed marriage while reciting a poem that called Lydia “the Empress of my love . . . of the most beautiful and splendid season.” Despite the straitened circumstances in which they live, in a shabby Manhattan tenement, Lydia continues to regard herself regally. She ponders the privileged life that she left behind and daydreams about glamorous alternatives to her arduous reality. She daily travels the subway as part of the city’s invisible army of cleaning ladies. By making Lydia his visible protagonist and her prosperous employers peripheral, Hijuelos reverses the usual literary priorities.

Empress of the Splendid Season provides a charwoman’s perspective on the dirty linen of the affluent. When Lydia is hired to clean for the Ospreys, a wealthy family on Park Avenue, she enters an enchanted realm of luxury and poise. During decades of cleaning their posh apartment, she becomes especially fond of kindly Mr. Osprey, a prominent attorney, and he of her, though both remain acutely aware of their social divide. When Lydia’s son, Rico, is arrested, Mr. Osprey obtains his release and finances his tuition at an expensive private school, the first step toward Rico’s success as an expensive psychiatrist. He and his sister Alicia, who marries a man named Douglas Johnson and moves to a distant town upstate, have little to say to their immigrant parents.

The epilogue, set after the widowed, weary Lydia’s death, recalls a transcendent moment when she was lifted out of drudgery by a glimpse of the famous actor James Mason. Empress of the Splendid Season takes the full measure of a life marked by disappointment. Yet while recognizing that wealth and status do not guarantee happiness to Mrs. Osprey either, it suggests that the novel’s title is not entirely ironic. Though life turns out quite differently from what Lydia wished, it was in a way a splendid season and she its empress.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 95 (December 1, 1998): 619.

Library Journal 124 (January 1, 1999): 150.

The New York Times Book Review 104 (February 21, 1999): 5.

Publishers Weekly 245 (December 14, 1998): 56.

Time 153 (March 15, 1999): 92.

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