Expectations In Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory

To achieve certain goals, people will go about life with high expectations. Therefore, pleasing the general population can be difficult, but so is living a life that follows every details from a rule book. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat, she portrays the concept of high expectations being thrive onto an individual in its true form; conflicting with relationships, culture and beliefs. She takes this aspect that people can connect to and reflect it back through allusions, cultural references and characterizations to present the characters with two decisions; breaking free from all the expectations or slowly being suck into a picture frame to the point of insanity and then realizing too late to leave. Expectations can start to pile up right at the beginning of life. When Sophie is commencing her journey, she …show more content…
This can be hard to live up to since Sophie still do not understand Martine is coming from. Since Martine grew up with her mother telling her that “from the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If [you] give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame [our] family, speak evil of [us], even bring her back to [you]” (156), with this knowledge Martine “feels she must...It’s not love. It is duty” (168) as the mother to her child because “if your child is disgraced, you are disgraced. And people, they think daughters will be raised trash with no man in the house” (156). Martine just want the best for Sophie, even in the end she realized it was not. It also showcase the fact that she wants their relationship to depend on each other. However, this puts a greater dent in their relationship, opposite to what Martine actually hoped for. Doing the testing to Sophie was by the cause of the culture that is surrounds Hatiai and their ways of respecting