Julia Alvarez

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Summary and Rising Action of Julia Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention"

Summary:

In Julia Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention," the story follows a young immigrant girl struggling to adjust to life in America while her inventive mother tries to assimilate through her creations. The rising action involves the protagonist's conflict with her traditional father over a speech she writes for school, highlighting the generational and cultural tensions within the family.

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Can you summarize "Daughter of Invention" by Julia Alvarez?

This story, which is told from the first-person point of view, focuses on the narrator's immigrant family from the Dominican Republic. The story reveals interrelated conflicts that arise out of the family's Dominican heritage: the pressure to assimilate into US culture, and the creative ambitions of both the narrator and her mother. The story opens with the narrator's recollection of her mother's nightly "inventing" of time- and labour- saving gadgets and of how the rest of the family scoffed at them. When the narrator is chosen to deliver a speech at school, she puts off preparing the speech for weeks. Finally, some lines by Whitman inspire her to write a passionate and personal speech. Although her mother approves, her father is infuriated by the speech, which he sees as dangerously disrespectful of authority. In the story's climax, he tears up the manuscript. The narrator's mother intervenes and helps her daughter construct a new speech saying all the "right" things. The next day, the narrator's revised speech is a success. That night the narrator's contrite father brings home an electric typewriter, which the narrator will use to become a writer, following her mother's creative tradition.

This story is interestingly very like the fiction of Amy Tan, which focuses on the experiences of immigrants moving to America. Key to this story then is conflict. It takes its strength and much of its fun from the clash between the anxious values of Latin American parents and the liberated values of their New York - raised daughter. Each major character experiences internal and external conflict, and if you are wanting to analyse this story further, this would be a great place to start.

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What is the rising action in Julia Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention"?

Julia Alvarez's "Daughter of Invention" is a short story about the cultural adjustments of a family who flee the revolutionary Dominican Republican and immigrate to New York. In the family's enthusiasm to assimilate into American culture, the mother strives to invent something useful to Americans in their daily lives, while the daughters simply desire to be accepted and not called names.

However, in her enthusiasm to breathe and exhale the free-spirited air of independent America, the narrator enthusiastically embraces Walt Whitman's avant-garde celebration of "the self" and writes a speech in a tone that her father feels is entirely wrong for its occasion, Teacher's Day. This assignment and the daughter's efforts to compose a speech inspired by Whitman is the rising action of Alvarez's story. When the father, who cannot overcome his fear of the political leaders in his own country who drove him into exile, overreacts to his daughter's speech, the climax of the story occurs. After this emotional and frightened outburst of the father, who tears the speech into pieces, the mother's misquoted adage, "Necessity is the daughter of invention" goes into effect. For, she and her understanding mother--of both her husband and her daughter--work throughout the night piecing together a speech. The next day, the "daughter of invention" reports that the faculty was delighted with the speech. The father, who regrets his emotional and fearful outburst, buys his daughter a long-desired typewriter. 

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