Poetic conflicts in Julia Alvarez’s “Dusting”

            In her poem “Dusting” Julia Alvarez uses the poetic forms and different words to expose variations in repetition of each line to emphasize her conflict between her mother and herself. Particularly when she states, “practicing signatures like scales, while Mother followed squirting” (5-6) she wants to show that event though she has emotional problems with her mother, she keeps mapping her identity through her works.  

The second stanza continues shows that there are some contradicted principles between her mother and herself.  For example, “she erased my fingerprints from the bookshelf and rocker” (9-10), this exhibits that there is no harmonization between the mother and her daughter.   The other line, “scribbled with my alphabets” (12), shows that the mother intensely erases for whatever the daughter creates.

Eventually, for what the mother does exhibits that there are strong opposite attitudes between the two women, mother and daughter.  The daughter is searching her identity through writing, while, on the other hand the mother creates her identity through dusting.  This can be seen from the expression: “My name was swallowed in the towel with which she jeweled the table tops” (14).  This statement improves that the mother keeps dusting for whatever the daughter does.  While, on the other hand, the daughter keeps creating her painting ignoring for whatever the mother does.  Briefly, this poem shows the complexity emotion between her, a daughter, and she, a mother. The complexity comes from the way she call a mother till she change into she.