Miss Lora by Junot Diaz

Are you trying to seduce me Miss Lora?

Narrative Voice and Masculinity in Junot Diaz’s ‘Miss Lora’

The second-person narrative voice in Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her, should not be overlooked simply as a stylistic flourish; rather, the pronoun “You” is an effective rhetorical technique allowing the narrator to self-fashion his own identity through a retrospective and critical lens. Many of the stories revolve around the character of Yunior and his failed relationships, especially ‘Miss Lora’, an unsettling yet emotionally resonant account of his sexual relationship with an older woman. This particular story marks a crucial turning point in Yunior’s life as he navigates family tragedy, his first love and community. With the recent death of his older brother, Rafa, who personified Dominican machismo, Yunior struggles to assert this inherited hegemonic masculinity over the more dominant Miss Lora. Additionally, the Dominican cultural ethos that fosters hypermasculinity prevents him from fully articulating his feelings and processing the painful grief from the insurmountable loss of his brother to cancer. Hence, the second-person narrative voice provides Yunior an opportunity to achieve catharsis and heal through the power of writing by maintaining a critical distance from himself.

Diaz is less concerned with establishing narrative continuity throughout these stories in favor of sketching out Yunior’s bildungsroman--namely, his complex emotional and psychological development from adolescence into adulthood. Instead of being written in the first-person that might otherwise come across as solipsistic, Diaz evokes playful humor and wit as Yunior becomes the narrator of his own life while addressing himself self-reflexively with the pronoun “You.” Diaz seamlessly conflates the subjective with the objective so that it becomes ambiguous whether Yunior as the narrator is reconstructing the past from an empirical perspective or through a literary imagination. As a writer himself, this elevated perspective is advantageous since Yunior is keen on examining his tumultuous life through reflective introspection, especially in understanding the “how” rather than “why” so many failed relationships with women like Miss Lora ended in heartbreak. 

This story begins with Yunior in the present contemplating the ramifications of a question his past self would later ask himself about his relationship with Miss Lora, which in essence becomes the short story: “Years later you would wonder if it hadn't been for your brother, would you have done it?” (149). Rafa’s influence on Yunior’s life and masculine identity in the Dominican diaspora is made explicit right from the opening rhetorical question. Within this specifically framed narrative structure, Yunior in the present becomes the omniscient narrator as he re-examines past experiences to figure out the manner or conditions behind “how” these different relationships with women inevitably resulted in loss. One way to grasp Diaz’s methodology is to distinguish Yunior as a self-conscious narrator interrogating his former self with what literary critic and scholar Wayne Booth refers to as “aesthetic distance” (156). Indeed, Yunior’s second-person narrative voice exists in this liminal space between objective and subjective reality that often becomes blurred. Since the narratee is himself, Yunior the “author” narrates a highly self-aware diegesis; that is to say, he is conscious of constructing his own personal narrative. An overt linguistic narcissism is engendered by this modality with particular emphasis on the transformative function of language. By establishing this “aesthetic distance” between his present and past self, Yunior attempts to achieve a certain level of closure or perhaps even catharsis through the creative writing process.

Moreover, Diaz effectively critiques hegemonic notions of Dominican masculinity through Yunior’s various relationships and sexual experiences with women. The narrator reflects on his younger days during those impressionable teenage years when hormones were raging: “You were at an age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma--she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you. That’s what happened with Miss Lora, too” (154). To simply label Yunior as a typical male teenager obsessed with sex would be to miss the important underlying subtext--he is trying to follow in the footsteps of his older brother and father who personified Dominican machismo. Yunior is sexually frustrated with Paloma and feels utterly rejected since she constantly refuses to sleep with him. For example, he makes a sexist comment about Paloma not conforming to cultural stereotypes: “Only Puerto Rican girl on earth who wouldn’t give up the ass for any reason” (155). Yunior’s misogyny towards women is indicative of gendered cultural norms and remains consistent throughout most of these stories in the collection. The narrator self-fashions a Dominican masculine identity by adopting ubiquitous and culturally imposed gender scripts. Yunior’s refusal to eschew his inherited Dominican machismo inevitably leads to Paloma leaving him. 

Yet, early on in their relationship, she still seeks intimacy but is afraid of getting pregnant. Her future plans do not revolve around having children and struggling in poverty, which happens to be the case for many young Latin-Caribbean women such as her mother. She lives in a tiny cramped apartment with four younger siblings and is focused on making a better life for herself and family. Paloma is hardworking and determined to achieve a certain level of social mobility by pursuing higher education: “Imagine if I don’t get in anywhere, she said. You’d still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable” (150). Paloma is a strong independent woman with enough foresight to recognize that Yunior is only interested in having sex with her rather than focusing on building a life together. The narrator humorously pokes fun at his former self for even trying to convince Paloma that he is serious about their relationship and will take care of her needs. She is keenly aware of his lascivious mind and prurient interests, even warning him about Miss Lora who has built a reputation for being a promiscuous woman or sucia (slang for “filthy” or “dirty” with lewd connotations): “You’d better not fuck her” (157). Paloma consistently undermines Yunior’s tentative masculine authority and remains steadfast in her convictions. Of course, despite this ultimatum, Yunior still goes ahead and cheats on her with Miss Lora, a schoolteacher in her mid-forties who also lives in the same neighborhood. Both Paloma and Miss Lora highlight the different ways in which Latin-Caribbean women subvert the hierarchical masculinization of power. Moreover, they refuse to merely assume a passive role and maintain control over their own sexuality.

The gender dynamics in this story are not entirely fixated on women being sexually obedient towards men in accordance with patriarchal gender discourses. Rather, Diaz emphasizes that while Yunior tends to embody this norm, he also ironically occupies a more submissive role, especially with Miss Lora since she is the one who seduces him and readily asserts more power in the relationship. He can barely comprehend the unorthodox situation of having an older woman being attracted to him but is more than willing to see it through if it means the possibility of sex: “It is the first time any girl ever wanted you. And so you sit with it. Let it roll around in the channels of your mind. This is nuts, you say to yourself” (156). Despite having reservations, Miss Lora’s sexual allure is far too tempting. However, it is important to note that Yunior is not initially attracted to her on a physical level, perhaps suggesting that they both share a much deeper and emotional connection: “Miss Lora was too skinny. Had no hips whatsoever. No breasts, either, no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade. She had her eyes, sure, but what she was most famous for in the neighborhood were her muscles” (153-154). Notice that Yunior’s superficial attitude towards Miss Lora (including women in general) also shows that she does not conform to specific female gender roles or feminine standards of beauty since she is perceived as being masculine for having a muscular body.

The yearning for a physical relationship with Paloma and being rejected perhaps initially attracts Yunior to Miss Lora. However, it is their mutual interest in post-apocalyptic science fiction that draws them closer together. The story takes place in 1985 during the height of the Cold War when nuclear annihilation seemed inevitable. After the recent death of his brother, Yunior is both haunted by the impending apocalypse along with Rafa’s ghostly presence. His dreamlike visions of the world coming to an end can be linked to the inability to properly process his grief along with repressed feelings of loss and guilt. Suffering from depression and feeling isolated from those around him, Yunior misguidedly seeks solace in Miss Lora: “Maybe if you were someone else you would have the discipline to duck the whole thing but you are your father’s son and your brother’s brother” (158). According to the narrator, the decision to sleep with the older woman is already predetermined because of his cultural inheritance where Dominican men are socially conditioned to epitomize sexual virility. Once again, Yunior’s second-person narrative voice is highly critical of his younger self for upholding hegemonic notions of Dominican masculinity. In essence, this narrative technique provides Yunior with enough critical distance for the opportunity to critique his own character flaws as a young man struggling to assert his manhood:  

"Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it’s official: you are one, too. You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself." (161)

Here, the narrator articulates young Yunior’s inner conflict between embracing his own individualism and self-fashioning an identity that embodies Dominican machismo. On the surface, he projects hypermasculinity but underneath that exterior front is a sensitive and impressionable science-fiction nerd who loves post-apocalyptic movies. Despite efforts to distance himself from being a “sucio” like his father and brother, Yunior cannot fully renounce this hegemonic masculinity that he considers to be genetic. The older Yunior is condescending towards his younger self for being naive and thinking that he would avoid becoming a womanizer just like the other Dominican men in his family. While he legitimizes his masculinity by having sex with Miss Lora, Yunior also fails to realize that she is the one using him for her own sexual fulfillment. After several romantic encounters she quickly leaves him for an older gentleman and eventually moves away once Yunior graduates high-school where he never sees or hears from her again. Yunior is heartbroken and angry at Miss Lora but these feelings are repressed since he conforms to the ideologies of Dominican machismo. Thus, it is only through the second-person narrative voice that a more mature Yunior emerges and offers perspicacious insight into his own shortcomings as an emotionally vulnerable youth.

This dichotomy between Yunior as the narrator and narratee focalized through a second-person narrative voice highlights his self-fashioning of identity. He learns about himself by reconstructing his own personal narrative and telling himself this story. Through this creative process, Yunior develops a deeper understanding of himself, especially in relation to hegemonic notions of Dominican masculinity. Moreover, both Miss Lora and Paloma represent female resistance against such rigid gender norms. Having gone through such tremendous loss, whether it be the death of his brother or the tumultuous relationship with Miss Lora, this narrative framework provides Yunior with a literary space for artistic and emotional expression.