The Four Sisters Characters By Julia Alvarez

This book by Julia Alvarez takes place in the Dominican Republic during the time of Trujillo, the dictator of the country. The readers are introduced to a family of four sisters and their parents and are able to read about their experiences throughout their lives and how their oppressive government affected them. The four sisters names are Patria, Dede, Minerva, and Maria Teresa. As the reader progresses into the book, these names start to form characters and personalities that, quite frankly, are shaped in retaliation to the government. In the postscript, Alvarez explains that these girls were real along with the events that happened between 1930 and 1961. These personalities were merely an imaginative work of Alvarez in order to make a story

Everyone knew the sisters from the time they were little girls and they could all see how different their personalities. Patria, the oldest, was very strong in her faith and at one point considered becoming a nun and devoting her life to the church. However, she fell in love with the son of a farmer from the next town over while she was washing his feet. Patria and Pedrito married three days before her seventeenth birthday, making her the youngest one to marry.

Dede was the second oldest and was told by her papa that she would be the one to bury all of them, which she was. She was a very cautious but loving mother while being an obedient but trapped wife. She married her cousin Jamito and while she was in love with him, he would find other girls to create affairs with and would be very controlling of Dede. She would be the one to hold the family together and bring them to reality when their ambitions reached dangerous or outrageous

The entire book was leading up to the murder of the notorious Mirabal sisters which also put into perspective how oppressed these people were. Not only did this book give the reader an insight on the life of a citizen of the Dominican Republic between the years of 1930 and 1960 but, it showed how an oppressive government could affect the people in both negative and positive ways, using the sisters as examples. Obviously, negative aspects included citizens being jailed and killed by their own government. In a situation such as this, fear was in every person, whether they were brave enough to join the resistance or not. Families were torn apart, as shown in the book. Minerva, Maria Teresa, and their husbands, along with Patria’s husband, were taken from their children, home, church and family to be jailed for going against the government. Alvarez vividly describes the hurt that came to the families when they were broken apart. In jail, the sisters and husbands were also physically ill. They were being starved and being diagnosed with pneumonia which was not unheard