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Personal Identity In The Gilda Stories By Jewelle Gomez

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The experiences you go through in life help form your personal identity . In the novel The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, the main character, later named ‘Gilda’, goes through a lot. This novel follows the life of Gilda; the girl, the first chapter being in 1850. We see her 200 years of life as a vampire. Gilda experienced a lot of trauma and was lost. She obtained separation anxiety and then Gilda had to get used to her new life. Gilda went through alot of trauma but overcame, had she not gone through what she went through, she would be a completely different person. Gilda experienced a ton of trauma. The girl escaped and “had traveled by night for 15 hours before daring to stop”(9). In those 15 hours she had a knife held close to her chest. She found a barn and decided to stay there but a bounty hunter came in and “she looked up at the beast from this other land as he dragged her leg from the concealing straw” (11). The bounty hunter was about the rape her as “he rubbed his body against her brown skin and imagined the closing of her eyes as a need for him and his power. He started to enter her, but before his hand finished pulling her open, she entered him with her heart, which was now a wood handled knife”(11). Gilda was now severely traumatized which mentally matured her in at such a young age. …show more content…

She brings the girl back to her home to ‘Woodards’ which is a diverse building where Gilda and her girlfriend Bird live, but it's also where eight other women work as sex workers. The girl was taken very young so she never got to learn to read or write so “it was Bird who decided she would teach the girl to read” (20)because Bird thought now would be a good time to teach her. Gilda found herself a family and was no longer a lost

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