The Virgin

The Virgin

                   by Kerima Polotan Tuvera

Summary

Having spent most of her adult life caring for an ailing mother, Miss Mijares is past her youth. She realizes to her disappointment that love and marriage have eluded her. She lives a dull life and behaves with stiffness and aloofness, camouflaging her tiredness and loneliness with ruffled and pastel-colored clothes. When a new carpenter applied at her agency, she is unwittingly drawn to the man. After a confrontation, the two find themselves stranded on an unknown street in the rain, and Miss Mijares allows herself to be led by her feelings for the carpenter and responds to his invitation.

Analysis: A Feminist Approach

 The main character of the story live up with expectation of the society towards women. She is a virgin- a word often associated with the dignity of a woman. In the Philippine setting, women are expected to be a virgin until the night of her marriage. Women are so tied up with this norm that it became a ground for husband's ridicule if you failed to live-up with this societal expectation.(aside for those men who have  broader perspective). She also has the inner struggle to be the ideal woman, physically. She was described as the skinny type, bony if you call it, but her desire to portray the physical attributes of the ideal woman- with curves on the right places and a bosom, she started wearing clothes with ruffles in the front to conceal her flat chest. She liked poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastels to achieve the illusion of hips and bosom.

 She had  undergone the three stages of women's history namely the feminine, feminist and female stage. The scene of the story which depicts  the character  in her feminine stage was when she spend most of her young life taking care of her old and sick mother, sending her niece to school and being responsible for the family. She's so selfless that she even  put  her dreams of having a man in her life on hold. When she reached the feminine stage, she started to realize  that she can't go on forever doing these things. She realized that love and marriage are slowly eluding her.She developed inner protest. She no longer feel the satisfaction she once felt doing the sacrifices for the family. After nine long years, her mother died. Surprisingly, she feel not only grief but also gratitude.

The scene in the story wherein she got lost on her way back home, having seen a new and much easier route to get back  is a symbolism of her- self discovery. She now reached the third stage which is a female stage. in this stage she no longer struggle with her inner protest. She's now entitled with her long-suppressed emotions, freed from the societal roles she used to follow.