37 pages • 1 hour read
Julia AlvarezIn the Name of Salome
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Salomé’s Papers
As a poet and letter writer, Salomé amassed a large quantity of papers over the course of her short life. Extracting meaning from them is the task that falls to Camila. In the opening chapters of the book, the reader learns about a trunk of papers that Camila is taking with her when she retires from teaching. Her brother has sent it and charged her with a weighty responsibility. The narrator says of Camila, “She is to sort out what to give the archives and what to destroy. The irony of his request is not lost on her—she, the nobody among them, will be the one editing the story of her famous family” (38). Camila is tasked with piecing together her mother’s published works, letters, random thoughts, and unfinished poetry. These are all supposed to be arranged into a flattering portrait of her famous mother’s life.
Over the course of the novel, we see the papers emerge in Salomé’s narrative as she is writing the words herself. In other instances, Camila picks up one or another of her mother’s writings and uses it as a springboard to jog her personal memories. As a teenager, Camila rummages through a different trunk of papers and discovers the entire sordid affair related to her father’s French mistress as well as Salomé’s unhappiness during this time. The Paris letters from Salomé to Pancho are repeated verbatim in the novel. Because she expresses her deteriorating mental and physical state so clearly in them, no further interpretation is needed.
Over the course of the story, it doesn’t appear as if Camila does any editing or deletes any of the contents of the trunk. She merely uses them as a device to jog her memory about past events. The trunk follows Camila through the rest of her life, like an albatross around her neck. It isn’t until she feels death approaching that she relinquishes the burden and sends the unedited contents of the trunk to their final home in an archive in Havana. The papers stand as the record of Salomé’s life in its entirety.
Patriots in Exile
The novel focuses intensely on the topic of nation-building. All the major characters are concerned with the shape the Dominican Republic will take in the future. Therefore, it’s ironic that practically none of these people remain in their homeland. After Salomé dies, her husband, children, and his new family move to Cuba to escape political persecution. The older sons eventually disperse to other countries.
After stepping down from the presidency, Pancho stays in the United States, vainly trying to regain his country’s autonomy. Pedro spends time as a lecturer at Harvard before returning to Argentina. Camila teaches at Vassar and doesn’t return home, even after retiring. She goes to Castro’s Cuba to help with the revolution there. All these characters voice their dismay about the corrupt military regimes running their country, but they can only observe its instability from a distance. All of them continue to define an idealized version of what the Dominican Republic ought to be, but none of them have any real power to effect the changes they want to see in their homeland.
The disjointed and ghostlike nature of their experience is articulated best by Camila after she listens to Pedro urging her to stay in America rather than return home. The narrator depicts Camilla observing Pedro: “What she sees is an old man’s face—weary and spent, the eyes full of longing, the terrible moral disinheritance of exile, which he is now urging her to partake of” (126). The Dominican Republic has still not coalesced into a stable nation in 1960 when Camila is ready to retire from teaching. She needs to go to Cuba to participate in a revolution that has any chance of succeeding. It is only after she has assisted in the creation of that new nation that she goes home to die. The rest of her relatives gave up decades earlier and simply look on in longing from afar.
Tactics of Self-Effacement
Camila’s instinct from her earliest years is to hide. As a three-year-old, when adults quarrel around her, she burrows under the house. Later, on board the steamer that will take her and her brothers to El Cabo, another argument breaks out, and she ducks into the boiler room to avoid it. Camila’s reticent nature is a poor fit for her flamboyant family. Her mother rose to prominence while still in her teens. Her father was president of the country for a brief time. Her brothers have held government posts. Pedro was a lecturer at Harvard. Camila is surrounded by people everybody knows, yet she uses every conceivable tactic to efface herself.
She is the peacemaker among her fractious brothers. She is the caregiver who assumes tasks that no one else wants to do, like sorting through her mother’s papers. These services can be interpreted as a stand-in for her mother’s own behavior had she been alive. It isn’t simple shyness that prompts these actions. Because Camila defines herself as an extension of her mother, she can’t afford to eclipse her famous parent. To do so would be to assert an identity that is distinct from Salomé’s and might be memorable it its own right.
Camila’s search for obscurity also shows itself in her love life. In her affair with Marion, she says that what she was seeking was a mother’s touch. To commit to Marion would destabilize her commitment to Salomé. She retreats from both Domingo and Scott for the same reason. They want to create a life with her, but her life has already been claimed by Salomé. Camila only acts in the name of her mother.
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By Julia Alvarez
