Women's Attempts to Gain Control in Diaz's Works

There are multitudes of issues surrounding Diaz's works; masculinity, social mobility, and the objectification of women are shown throughout, with violent and clear examples of each.  However, Diaz's theme that strikes me as most poignant is the different methods that the women depicted in Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her employ in order to gain some semblance of control over their living situations.  These women are dominated by their male counterparts and their cultural expectations of how a woman should behave.  There are not many options on how they will gain power for a woman in these situations.  I will focus on Aurora from Drown, Lola from Oscar Wao, and Nilda from This Is How You Lose Her.

Aurora is a very young woman, young enough to be sent to "juvie" for her behavioral issues, and yet she is already into heavy drug use, sexual relationships with much older men, and even physical abuse at the hands of our narrator.  Throughout the story, we never see Aurora make moves or plans to improve her situation.  We do, however, see Aurora dream about a different life. On page 65, Aurora describes to the narrator her dream of their future life that she imagined while serving her sentence, "I made up this whole new life in there.  You should have seen it.  The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing." In this scene, the reader sees one of the options that a young hispanic woman faced with so much adversity and disaster can do to escape, dream. This dream serves as an insight into just how hopeless of a situation that Aurora is faced with; she and our narrator never act on this dream, and within a few weeks they are back to their old ways of physical and mental abuse.

Lola is the one woman that we see in these three Diaz works who is able to reject the treatment that her boyfriend, Yunior, who does love her very deeply, puts her through.  On page 324 of Oscar Wao, we see Lola's rejection of this abuse, "One day she called, asked me where I'd been the night before, and when I didn't have a good excuse, she said, Good-bye, Yunior...".  Lola has a very powerful, fiery independent spirit.  This enables her to banish the treatment that most of the women we see in Diaz's work face, and to finally gain a beautiful, more healthy life. 

Nilda is a very beautiful girl, and from a very age comes to the realization that this beauty has some degree of power over the men who dominate these Dominican relationships.  From a young age, she bounces from man to man, attempting to use her physical beauty as a means to capture her own happiness.  On page 32, we see the typical outcome of her attempts, "Before I even knew she was back from the group home she got scooped up by this older nigger from the back apartments. He kept her on his dick for almost four months...Then the old dude bounced."  Nilda's attempts to use her looks for financial and family stability are totally unsuccessful.  She does manage to land the men she wants, but they do not respect her and use her solely as a sexual object.

From these three women, we see that Lola is the only one who manages to succeed in improving her life.  Why is this the case? Lola has something that Aurora and Nilda do not though, she has a college degree and family who love her.  What separates Lola from these other two women, beyond her natural will, is her situation.  By analyzing these three different women and their situations one can infer that Diaz suggests that in order to have social mobility in such devastating circumstances, the women must have more than just will power and work ethic.