Jennifer Cilia
American Lit 1800-1915
10/2/2003
Dialogic Journal
La Llorona, The Unfaithful Maria, and La Malinche, and the Devil Woman
I felt that the authors of these two stories, even though their families and friends told them stories about women and men who the devil possessed, are passing on stories that can be told over and over again. The stories that have been handed down from generation to generation are now in our generation. The first story about the Unfaithful Maria was pretty interesting. I thought it was pretty sad that the woman was so jealous about what was going on with her husband that they had to kill themselves. The maid was pretty stupid to give the ring to her daughter, because what I got out of the story, whomever put on the ring would kill their children. The evil spirit in the ring stayed in the ring. The second story was just bad luck. I think that the even though the man was going to marry the next day, he knew that something was going to happen. And something did. He saw the devil. I wanted to know at the end of the story when he died, if he went to Heaven or Hell.
Authors, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the early 19th century wrote more about nature and how it affects man. He writes, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature” (693). Emerson basically says that nature makes man young again. He also says that nature makes man feel more alive.
“Self-Reliance” by Emerson was about romantic nature. It was about being true to one’s nature, to one’s own voice. It’s also about being one with nature, being one with the Divine Spirit. To be true to one’s self, the Divine would have to be one with the Divine Spirit. The Spirit is also identified with Nature, since Romantics generally show a reverence for Nature.
Thoreau’s building of the house in “Walden”, is very similar to God’s creation of life. Just as the book of Genesis said that God did all of these things, so did he. Everything that God did so did he. He mentioned a stream: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in” (775). When you swim in the ocean, it gets deeper and deeper and eventually, you can’t stand anymore on the ocean floor. This shows that Nature has a higher power than anything else and that it can be changed when God wants it changed. Thoreau wanted his readers to think that since God created his own world, so can we, his people. His point is not to say that he can say these things, but to say that we have the divine ability to create our own world, or “a” world.