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Love In 'Death And Transfiguration Of A Teacher'

Decent Essays

Love can take on many different meanings in literature depending on various factors. These include author perspectives, bias, experience, culture, and tradition. In class, an assortment of magical realism stories has been covered and discussed. Love appears as a metaphor in some way or another in each of them. In “Death and Transfiguration of a Teacher”, by Maria Teresa Solari, and “In the Family”, by Maria Elena Llano, love represents power and the danger of it. Love takes on a mighty symbolism in the story, “Death and Transfiguration of a Teacher”, by Maria Teresa Solari. In the text, the main character is a teacher who has a magnificent passion for poetry. “She often talked about poetry. She tried to explain the power of poetic utterance” …show more content…

In the text, deceased ancestor spirits are present in the mirror of a family’s home. There is an “equator” described as “separating what was from what was not”(Llano 140). This can be connected to the fact that there is a line that cannot be crossed when it comes to power, and if that line is crossed, negative results will occur. For example, when Clara crosses that line by eating the salad given to her by the ancestors, she dies. Clara asks for that salad. She blurs the vital separation that the equator provides and is punished as a result. The following quote shows the previous statements to be true. “Clara asked Eulalia to pass the salad...Clara gobbled up...Clara collapsed against the mirror”(Llano 140). If power is handled the wrong way, people will die. Another concept dealt within this story is that power is so dangerous that it’s repercussions last forever. Clara’s relative, near the end of the tale, describes how more than anyone else in the family she is the target of Clara’s machinations. This is because they are joined by a special bond, they are the same age, they play together during childhood, and they share the “first anxieties of adolescence”(Llano 141). Clara has been punished for messing with the equilibrium, but now those close to her will be directly affected too. A real world application of this concept is

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