Old Heroines by Julia Alvarez
"Old Heroines" is a poem by Julia Alvarez that explores the lives and struggles of women through the lens of an aging heroine reflecting on her existence after the narrative of her life has ended. The poem opens with a poignant question about the fate of these characters once their stories conclude, highlighting the limited roles available to women in a historically male-dominated society, such as marriage or longing for past love. Alvarez uses vivid imagery to portray the old heroine on a train, symbolizing her isolation and the fleeting nature of dreams against the backdrop of a mundane reality.
In contrast, the poem juxtaposes her experience with that of ordinary women, depicted as housewives engaging in daily chores while briefly escaping into dreams of glamour and excitement. These women momentarily assume the role of heroines in their fantasies but are quickly awakened to the reality of their lives. Alvarez's work addresses themes of identity, societal expectations, and the unacknowledged stories of women who exist outside conventional narratives. Through this exploration, she invites readers to consider the complexities of female identity and the varied experiences that shape women's lives, urging a reflection on their status in society.
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Subject Terms
Old Heroines by Julia Alvarez
First published: 1984, in Homecoming: Poems
Type of poem: Narrative/verse essay
The Poem
In “Old Heroines” and in the other poems in her first collection, published when she was thirty-four, Julia Alvarez tests, develops, and polishes the incipient feminist voice that emerged clearly in her subsequent novels, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), ¡Yo! (1997), and, most particularly, In the Name of Salome (2000). In her afterword to the 1996 edition of Homecoming, Alvarez claimed, “The only models I had been given by my mother and aunts and the heroines of novels were the homemaking model and the romantic model, both of which I had miserably failed at by age thirty-four.”
In “Lost Heroines,” Alvarez combines the homemaking model and the model provided by the romantic novels mentioned in her afterword. The poem begins with the simple question “Where do heroines go when their novels are over?” In the first ten-line stanza, Alvarez outlines the possibilities: Marry or board a train that will take the lost heroine to an old lover. These are the alternatives open to the heroines of novels. These were the two alternatives long available to women in a male-dominated society.
Alvarez’s heroine boards a train that races through a countryside, perhaps Russia, perhaps Iowa. Place does not matter. Women everywhere face the same kinds of problems. The old heroine “looks out the window, the dark fields rolling by,/ or maybe the night sky grainy with stars. . . .” Seeing her face reflected in the window, she muses about her future, wondering, “how long must I still play this part?” She questions whether women are submissive pawns in a game controlled by men.
The second ten-line stanza transports the reader from the train to what lies outside its windows in the dark night. The tracks carry the train past “farmhouses bathed in pale porchlight.” Alvarez ruminates on what lies behind the facades and on “the unstoried women who formed the mere backdrop/ to her beauty.” These are not the heroines of novels. These are house-cleaning, bread-baking, child-tending women, the kinds of women of whom Alvarez speaks in her afterword.
Who are these women, and what are their inmost hopes and dreams? As they “drift off to sleep/ in the arms of their husbands,” they become the heroines of novels, bedecked in beautiful furs, being whisked off to the excitement and sophistication of Chicago or Moscow or some other fabled city. Momentarily, they are queens—or at least princesses—in their own right. Yet the dream abruptly ends: “They wake with a start/ turning on lights to make sure of their status,” and the lost heroine on the train sees the brief lights in their windows,
from her jailhouse train
The poem, while it poses many questions about the identity of women and about their status in society, also, in twenty succinct lines, explores some of the sources of that status.
Forms and Devices
In the first stanza of “Old Heroines,” Alvarez presents a generalized portrait of an old heroine, a woman who was the centerpiece of a novel that has run its course and that has probably been remaindered. In the second stanza the poet juxtaposes this portrait with that of more conventional women, farm wives whose lives are filled with domestic chores, women who dream briefly in the night that they are glamorous and lead exciting lives. They waken from their dreams jarred by the realities of their own mundane lives. As the old heroine looks from the train window to their lighted windows, however, it is she who is confined and isolated. The dichotomy of these two stanzas heightens the contrasts between the two types of women.
This poem has no consistent meter. It begins with iambs, many of them containing eleven or twelve syllables to the line. As the poem progresses, however, some of the lines, such as “though it’s clear from the ending he has broken things off,” are hypermetric and some deviate from iambic to anapestic lines. Only two of the poem’s twenty lines rhyme, and even then the rhyme is not sufficiently close to call it exact. Line 1 ends with the word “over” and line 3 with the word “lover,” which gives the suggestion of rhyme, although the o in each word is pronounced differently so that the rhyme is inexact.
Although Alvarez seldom depends upon such poetic devices as rhyme and alliteration—only infrequently are words in the poem alliterative, such as “She sees,” “pale porchlight,” “beauty, betrayals,” and “wake with”—she engages her readers through strong, vivid visual imagery such as a “night sky grainy with stars” and through her use of unique diction, as “in that afterward light.” The author uses effects of this sort sparingly, electing to write simply and straightforwardly, often choosing generalities over specifics to reinforce what she is saying. Certainly the center of the poem, the lost heroine, remains a generality, never emerging in detail because she represents a general type. As such she delivers a significant impact. This sort of presentation also permits and encourages readers to shape the old heroine within their own minds into whatever form they wish.
The first stanza is one of motion. The train rolls through the countryside. Images flash by, and impressions pile up in rapid succession. The second, contrasting stanza is static. It is about simple people inhabiting simple houses in rural settings. The women in Alvarez’s farmhouses dream of a life they cannot experience, then wake to “make sure of their status.” Alvarez uses this sharp contrast as an effective device for enhancing the impact of her poem.