She could have spoken up to her father that she didn’t want to play the piano at his every desire and that she was maturing into a woman, transitioning from “daddy’s little girl” as her developing breasts suggested. Inés settled for Richard, an “adequate lover” who “lacks imagination” instead of Manolo, who she enchantingly characterized as the pelt-skinned, mesomorphic Cuban that engaged in dark elaborate rituals in the bedroom. Inés allows the men in her life and their desires to overshadow her own. Once again, the selfless sacrifice of a woman presents itself. Richard, Inés’s husband, imposes high standards of beauty and expectations that are dangerous and unrealistic for a pregnant woman even though he himself is not particularly physically attractive. In an interview from Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writer, Garcia commented that in some ways her writing of “Inés in the Kitchen” reflected muffled feelings of her own marriage at relation to “what [she] saw around [her], cousins of [hers] getting married, moving to the suburbs, having, as the old phrase goes, quietly desperate lives”(Kevane and Heredia,72). The author realized the trend of women being unhappy and silently settling into miserable lives and wove it into Inés’s
She could have spoken up to her father that she didn’t want to play the piano at his every desire and that she was maturing into a woman, transitioning from “daddy’s little girl” as her developing breasts suggested. Inés settled for Richard, an “adequate lover” who “lacks imagination” instead of Manolo, who she enchantingly characterized as the pelt-skinned, mesomorphic Cuban that engaged in dark elaborate rituals in the bedroom. Inés allows the men in her life and their desires to overshadow her own. Once again, the selfless sacrifice of a woman presents itself. Richard, Inés’s husband, imposes high standards of beauty and expectations that are dangerous and unrealistic for a pregnant woman even though he himself is not particularly physically attractive. In an interview from Latina Self-portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writer, Garcia commented that in some ways her writing of “Inés in the Kitchen” reflected muffled feelings of her own marriage at relation to “what [she] saw around [her], cousins of [hers] getting married, moving to the suburbs, having, as the old phrase goes, quietly desperate lives”(Kevane and Heredia,72). The author realized the trend of women being unhappy and silently settling into miserable lives and wove it into Inés’s