Feminist Critism Approach
Paz Marquez Benitez's "Dead Stars" is a cheating story. It highlights how men fall into temptation and give up years of engagement to their important others for the enjoyment and lust of another lady they just met. It's truly sad. Because of this, so many relationships, weddings and years of love are being lost and shattered. Some men are simply unable to get enough. They discover another lady or mistress, meaning, another world, another adventure, a fresh kind of experience. The legal female has to discover ways to make her husband remain and be a fool. Isn't it sad and frustrating? For decades, this has been an issue, and this story of the 20th century demonstrates that cheating is widespread in every age, location, and culture.
The story serves as a literary time machine for readers as it allows them to realize how courtship, marriage and fidelity were regarded through the norms of the early 1900s.
Women have been meek in the tale and males have been superior. They are loyal and simple to love while men are rational and unsure. The story broke the patriarchal system concept as society considers males as a rational type or in line with logic while females are the emotional sort.
Although comparison and contrast provide a strong critical basis, the primary character, Alfredo Salazar, is involved in another extremely important element of this short story. His confusion, weakness, and unreasonability are inherent human defects. Maybe one of the many reasons this work is timeless is that readers never fail to see a portion of it in the personality of Alfredo Salazar, making the short story a wealthy source of severe ruminations about culture, love and mankind.
The story is familiar to many of us: A man falls in love with a woman who is vacationing with the family next door. Unable or unwilling to break a nearly four-year engagement with another woman, he enters into a loveless yet "not unhappy" marriage. However, through the eight years of the marriage, he is unable to forget the other woman. When his work necessitates a visit to the lake town where the woman now lives with her parents, he drops in on her unexpectedly. He finds her not much changed but senses that something-he doesn't know what-had gone from their relationship. By the end of the brief visit, he realizes ruefully that all those years, he had been seeing the light of dead stars.
Alfredo symbolizes the greed and indecisiveness of men when it comes to dealing with the matters of the emotion. He had entertained the pull of an anonymous feeling. Anonymous since he never really ventured to understand it but he clung to it anyway. And in the process he lost a part of himself and deprived that part to Esperanza as well.
At this point we may concede that the story does dramatize a reversal of the stereotyped sexual roles. In other words, the characterization of Alfredo raises a question of his masculinity. He was torn between doing what is right and what is in his heart.
The story is basically a compilation of the complicated circumstances that every man has to go through in life. Alfredo was once in love with Esperanza, no doubt, but there comes a time when love fades, and the only thing holding you together is the vow you gave your fiancée, that which you cannot take back. Why can't you take it back? It’s because you are afraid of what will be the reaction of the people around you, especially during the time of the story. What's visibly wrong about this is that most often than not, men refuse to listen to their own yearnings and simply submit to further dehumanization.
Therefore, once you are already committed; never fixate your eyes on someone other than your significant other. Your girl or man trusts you wholeheartedly and sincerely, and he or she deserves the same treatment.
