Angeles Mastretta: Textual Multiplicity (Monografias A)

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Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 217

ÁNGELES MASTRETTA TEXTUAL MULTIPLICITY This work seeks to demonstrate the rich complexity and range of the fiction and essays of the Mexican novelist Ángeles Mastretta (1949–). In the tradition of Post-Boom Latin American women’s writing, Mastretta’s texts are motivated by a desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women. Two of her novels, referential and testimonial in style, can be placed within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition and explore the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives. The hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in Mastretta’s texts are also considered. Her feminist works avoid facile simplifications; heterogeneous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic. The originality of Mastretta’s writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities: shimmering surfaces are often interrupted by unexpected depths and proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. JANE ELIZABETH LAVERY is Head of the Spanish Section and lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent.


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JANE ELIZABETH LAVERY

ÁNGELES MASTRETTA TEXTUAL MULTIPLICITY

TAMESIS


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© Jane Elizabeth Lavery 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Jane Elizabeth Lavery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2005 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 1 85566 117 9

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lavery, Jane Elizabeth, 1975– Ángeles Mastretta: textual multiplicity / Jane Elizabeth Lavery. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías; v. 217) Summary: “The first major study on the works of the Mexican novelist, Ángeles Mastretta, demonstrating the rich complexity and range of the authors’s fiction and essays” – Provided by publisher. Includes biblographical references and index. ISBN 1–85566–117–9 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Mastretta, Ángeles, 1949 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ7298.23.A795Z74 2005 863⬘.64 – dc22 2005005398

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshed, Tyne & Wear


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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3. Arráncame la vida: The Borders of Fiction and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4. Mal de amores: History from a Feminist Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5. Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 6. Literary Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 7. Shimmering Surfaces, Immeasurable Depths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 8. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book could not have been written on my own and I would therefore like to express my deepest gratitude to those who have helped me in this arduous project. This project began as a doctoral thesis at the University of Swansea Wales under the supervision of Dr Lloyd Hughes Davies. I feel a special debt of gratitude to my academic supervisor and friend, who patiently guided me and inspired me with his wealth of knowledge. I am especially grateful to Professor Peter Beardsell, former Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Hull, whose decisive encouragement, careful reading and constructive comments helped me transform my thesis into a book. I would also like to thank Peter for having led me to a sense of renewal by helping me to rediscover the pleasures of research and writing. I extend my thanks to both Professor Derek Gagen and Mr John Hall for their invaluable help and also to Dr Irma López who generously offered her expert advice. I am grateful to Dr John Morgan for his assistance with specific etymological information. Special thanks to my colleagues from the Spanish Section at the University of Kent for their support, and to Dr Montserrat Roser-i-Puig for her valuable contribution. I thank Professor Stephen M. Hart for believing in my work. I also wish to thank both Girton College at Cambridge University where I graduated in 1997, and the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, for their financial contribution towards the production costs of this book. A heartfelt thanks to my beloved mother, Dr Claire Firth, who unselfishly offered her invaluable time and knowledge, and, of course, to all the members of my family who helped enormously with their untiring encouragement. I am forever grateful to my husband, Dr Simon D. Cox, for his loving support, encouragement and constant interest in this project. I am indebted to Ángeles Mastretta whose generosity, passion and writing have provided the basic ingredients for this study.


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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BHS

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’

Jane Lavery, ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: La escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad texual’, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 29 (2001), 313–40

LAP

Latin American Perspectives

MLN

Modern Languages Notes

NRM, I/II

Luis Castro Leal, La novela de la Revolución Mexicana, Vol. I, 7th edn (1967) and Vol II 5th edn (1964) (Mexico City: Aguilar)

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

RI

Revista Iberoamericana


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To Simon, family and friends


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Introduction Biographical aspects Ángeles Mastretta was born in 1949 in the state of Puebla, which is located on Mexico’s plateau, surrounded by rugged mountains and volcanoes to which the author makes frequent reference in her works. She moved to Mexico City, following the death of her father Carlos Mastretta in 1971. His passing left a lasting effect on her and his influence on her writing emerged in her portrayal of strong paternal figures, as will be seen in this study. Mastretta graduated in journalism at the Universidad Autónoma de México (Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales) and subsequently contributed to newspapers and magazines such as Excelsior and Unomásuno. She had a regular column, Del absurdo cotidiano, in the cultural review, Ovaciones, to which she contributed articles on politics and feminism. Following the award of a scholarship from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in 1974, she published La pájara pinta (1975), her only collection of poetry. For three years, from 1975 to 1977, Mastretta was director of both Difusión Cultural of the ENEP-Acatlán and from 1982 to 1985, she formed part of the editorial council of the feminist magazine, Fem, to which she has also contributed several articles.1 All Mastretta’s major works have been translated into English as well as into many other international languages and she now enjoys a worldwide reputation as a leading feminist writer. However, Mastretta’s writing may give an impression of being rather conservative in style and structure. Certainly her work has the advantage of being more accessible than that of her literary predecessors of the Boom generation and its engagement and warmth appeal to a wide variety of readers. Mastretta’s first book, Arráncame la vida, which won the Premio Mazatlán, was published in 1985 and has been translated into over ten languages. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of Catalina Guzmán, the wife of a powerful and corrupt politician who becomes the governor of Puebla. 1 According to Carlos M. Coria Sánchez the feminist movement of the seventies and eighties exercised considerable influence on the literary sphere. Its main mouthpiece was the feminist magazine Fem, founded in 1976. Though she is not a militant feminist – indeed she often gives the impression of ambivalence where feminism is concerned – Mastretta is genuinely committed to promoting active female participation in social change, as emerges clearly in Mal de amores. See Carlos M. Coria-Sánchez: ‘Contextualización del feminismo en México en la narrativa de Angeles Mastretta’. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Georgia U, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2000. 9949490.


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The novel traces Catalina’s fight to define her own sense of identity in a male and politically oppressive society, and offers incisive comment on postrevolutionary Mexico. Catalina’s first-person narrative conveys the concrete daily reality of patriarchal repression with vivid and often theatrical immediacy. Mastretta’s second work Mujeres de ojos grandes, followed in 1990. At three generations removed from the contemporary reader, the world of this text is populated by a series of aunts who appear to lead normal lives and to fulfil stereotypical roles and social norms of behaviour as expected in their milieu, but who are in fact sexually subversive. These stories, or vignettes, are notable for their lightness and frivolity: Mastretta uses laughter as a strategy for both criticism and liberation.2 Here Mastretta’s poetic, sensuous prose emerges clearly. Mastretta’s versatile narrative comes to light with the publication of Puerto libre 1993, a book of literary and journalistic vignettes reflecting today’s festive postmodern world of multiple surfaces: ‘he querido llamar Puerto libre a la región impertinente y ávida desde la que escribí los textos que hacen este libro, como un homenaje menor a esas zonas de la euforia y el desafuero que languidecen sin remedio a la orilla del mar’ (Puerto libre, ‘Abrir un puerto’, p. 15).3 Mastretta’s most accomplished work to date is Mal de amores, published in 1996 and awarded the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 1997. Significantly, Mastretta was the first female writer to receive this award. The time frame of the novel overlaps the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, extending from the last years of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911 and beyond. But the novel is not merely – or even mainly – historical since the plot centres on personal passion and disillusionment in the revolutionary period. The protagonist is Emilia Sauri, whose upbringing, no less warm and indulgent for being unconventional and liberal, prepares her for her positive feminist contribution to the revolutionary struggle. The plot traces her relationships with two men – based on passionate attachment for the first, and grateful affection for the other. Mal de amores is very much written in the style of nineteenth-century realist novels and like Arráncame la vida, has a close affinity with the novelists of the Mexican (post)-Revolution such as Martín Luis Guzmán, Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro and Rosario Castellanos. El mundo iluminado, similar in tone, style and thematic concern to Puerto libre, was published in 1998. This work comprises a collection of short stories and essays that reflects Mastretta’s own personality and literary priorities more closely than Puerto libre. It offers an impressionistic account of love, death and nostalgia for the past written in a hybrid style combining the literary and the journalistic. Mastretta’s most recent publications include Ninguna eternidad como la mía (1999), Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos and El cielo de los 2 See Dianna Niebylski, ‘Transgression in the Comic Mode: Ángeles Mastretta and Her Cast of Liberated Aunts’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995 (ed.) Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 29–40 (p. 37). 3 For details of first editions and of later editions used here, see Bibliography, p. 235.


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leones, both published in 2003. Isabel Arango from Ninguna eternidad como la mía is the protagonist of this short story and is another of Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes. Set in Mexico City in the early twentieth century, the plot centres on the frustrated love of a ballet dancer, Isabel, for Javier Corzas, a poet and telegraphist. The sensuous movement of Isabel’s body inspired by the rhythm of the music is reflected in the sensuous flow of Mastretta’s prose.4 Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos comprises a collection of thirteen short stories by Julio Cortázar, Anton Chekhov, Marcelo Birmajer, Marco Denevi and Katherine Mansfield, among others. These short narratives centre on individual passion and romance, loyalty and friendship, unrequited love and loss, frequently arousing in the various characters an array of contradictory emotions. The prologue, written by Mastretta, describes these zealous texts as a celebration of life and love and as ‘un testimonio audaz de cuan bello es lo efímero, lo casual, lo que resulta inexorable’ (p. 12). El cielo de los leones is another collection of short stories and essays in which passion and desire, the hallmarks of Mastretta’s writing, are used to narrate the world and celebrate the quotidian. Mastretta delves into her private thoughts about a variety of subjects that excite, interest, trouble and amuse the author: in the style of El mundo iluminado, many of the texts are autobiographical, the central focii being the daily events of the author’s life, the role of memory and nostalgia for the past, and her celebration of love and the anguish caused by death; but the work also provides some useful insights into Mastretta’s strong family relationships, her views on feminism and politics, and particularly her ideas about writing. Some of the essays and short stories in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones have been published in the Mexican literary magazine, Nexos. Within Mexico, Mastretta is a well-known and popular figure, particularly in literary circles, but also with the general public. She has made various appearances on Spanish and Latin American television as well as participating in the chat show La almohada in 1988. Mastretta currently sits on the editorial board of Nexos which was edited by her partner, the writer and essayist, Héctor Aguilar Camín, from 1983 to 1995. They live with their children in Mexico City. A proud and caring mother, Mastretta often refers to her children in her publications. As well as contributing a regular column (Puerto libre) to Nexos she frequently writes for international journals such as Die Welt and The Country.

Chapter Contents The work of Ángeles Mastretta has only recently received significant critical attention, partly because her work has been seen as ‘popular’ and therefore inappropriate for serious academic study. The aim of the present study is to

4 For further comments on Ninguna eternidad como la mía, see my ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338–9.


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demonstrate the rich complexity and range of Mastretta’s narratives. Although their ‘light’ content may be subject to criticism (as I shall explain), Mastretta’s major works are underpinned by serious intent, fulfilling social and documentary functions, by showing particular sensitivity towards the position of women within Mexican history. The critical period of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) left a deep impression on Mexican literature, and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel has clearly influenced Mastretta particularly in her use of neorealist, testimonial and journalistic techniques. Mastretta’s two main literary works, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, restore some of the lost voices of the past, especially those of women. These novels offer a radical revisionist history of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, in the light of female experiences and perspectives, challenging patriarchal ideologies and seeking to redress gender imbalance. Within the narrative structure of these novels the creative memory works to reshape the historic past, transcribing and re-transcribing the peculiar processes of female self-discovery. To understand the historical context of both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, Chapter Two will provide an outline of Mexican history from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Mastretta’s revision of Mexican history from a non-official perspective provides a direct link with New Historical writing. Chapter Two also offers a brief survey of twentieth-century Mexican literature, analysing in particular the canonical texts of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel. I then go on to examine the works of Mexican female writers who have both developed the themes explored by the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and moved beyond this tradition by engaging with issues such as history and gender from a feminist/female perspective.5 Although writers like Mastretta acknowledge the cultural and political importance of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition, their main aim is to enable the hitherto silent voices of Mexican history, particularly those of women, to find expression and to be heard. Mastretta’s feminization of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores is her most notable achievement. Chapter Three analyses Arráncame la vida and Chapter Four, Mal de amores. Throughout these two chapters, a comparative analysis of both works will be offered, for while both (particularly the former) have drawn

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Showalter identifies three major phases in the historical development of women: 1. The ‘feminine’ denotes imitation of the male tradition and the internalization of its standards of art; 2. The ‘Feminist’ represents a protest against these standards and the promotion of minority rights and values; 3. The ‘Female’ – the most advanced phase – relates to self-discovery and a search for identity. All three stages are found in the works of Mastretta. I follow Showalter’s use of the terms ‘feminist’ and ‘female’. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brönte to Lessing (new revd edn) (London: Virago, 1982), p. 13.


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critical attention, there has been little sustained critical analysis of their interrelationship. Here the close parallels which emerge between Catalina (Arráncame la vida) and Emilia (Mal de amores) shed new and often ambiguous light on Mastretta’s postmodern feminism. Here the theme of female power and emancipation is frequently concomitant with sociohistorical and cultural change. Ultimately, Mastretta’s personal statement that the political is personal and the personal political emerges powerfully in these two texts. Arráncame la vida falls broadly into the category of testimonial narrative. The final section of Chapter Three will also seek to establish the links between the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Testimonial narrative as represented by the work of Ángeles Mastretta and that of Mexican female writer Elena Poniatowska. The peculiar nature of testimonial narrative as borderland discourse between the documentary and the fictional will be analysed in conjunction with the two main critical approaches to the Testimonial tradition (associated with John Beverley and Elzbieta Sklodowska). The last few paragraphs of Chapter Four will focus on the diverse styles and techniques developed in Mal de amores. Mastretta’s ability to incorporate apparently incongruous narrative modes – the social realist and the historical are combined with the magical realist and the folletinesque – is a further aspect of her literary individuality and complexity. Chapter Five focuses almost exclusively on Mal de amores, which has not been analysed as extensively by critics as Arráncame la vida. I examine the hitherto unexplored themes of Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival, highlighting the multiplicity of Mastretta’s work. The ambiguous treatment of the carnivalesque, the mythical and the magical – which appear both positively and negatively – contribute to the reader’s sense of instability and uncertainty. A major aspect of Mastretta’s fiction is her emphasis on the textual and sexual body of her narratives. My focus in Chapter Six is on those private spaces, and my treatment of ‘physical’ reality leads to a consideration of the ‘body’ of the text, highlighting the links and parallels between these literal and metaphorical spheres. Chapter Six examines Mastretta’s emphasis on the importance of female loss of power and empowerment through bodily erotics. In the last section of this text our consideration of the ‘body’ of the text will lead us into a treatment of the erotics of the text, demonstrating Mastretta’s self-conscious indulgence in linguistic play and her versatile style and technique. From this extended account, Ángeles Mastretta emerges as a serious and stimulating novelist. Her work bears comparison with other Latin American female writers who share an interest in female sexuality such as Mastretta’s more politically-engaged compatriot, Elena Poniatowska, who has arguably received the most fulsome critical acclaim in recent years. Chapter Seven analyses Mastretta’s works with specific reference to Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998) and El cielo de los leones (2003) within the context of postmodernist writing giving particular emphasis to her intricate style which interweaves the biographical and the fictional, the ‘high’ discourse of authority and the ‘low’ discourse of the street, the ‘lightness’ of being and the burden of survival. It may be argued that the apparent spirit of


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frivolity expressed in Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998), and El cielo de los leones (2003) does not do justice to Mastretta as a socially committed author. This emerges in her main texts Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores which have helped her to gain the status as a writer of international standing. The conclusion, draws attention to Mastretta’s plural writing and to her position within the Mexican literary canon.

Light Writer Although Mexican women’s writing and publishing has a long and prestigious history, only a few Mexican women writers – Rosario Castellanos (1925–74), Elena Garro (1920–98), Elena Poniatowska (1933–) – have been taken seriously by the critics. Not until the late 1980s with the commercially successful novels of Ángeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel (1950–), were women accorded the serious critical attention they deserve. Despite the commercial and critical success of her best-selling testimonial novel, Arráncame la vida, Mastretta is still considered a popular writer whose literary credentials remain unproven. Mastretta is accorded only a fleeting reference in Verity Smith’s Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (1997) and is not even mentioned in Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction.6 Her experience in this respect parallels that of the young Manuel Puig and is clearly reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s critical reception in Chile in the 1980s. As Mastretta has herself observed, the bestseller status of her works has led to their dismissal as ‘easy literature’ by many high-brow critics.7 In one interview, Mastretta explains that someone said about her writing that ‘esta señora es simple, hace literatura light, es fácil, no le cuesta trabajo, escribe deliberadamente para vender’ or ‘se entienden y se venden mucho, deben ser una porquería’.8 Aralia López González, for example, finds little to commend Arráncame la vida: ‘here everything is linear: the life, the story, and the course of events. There is no surprise or poetry, no original character or situation’.9 It is true that Mastretta has little knowledge of critical practice and is often self-deprecatory, thus reinforcing,

6 See Verity Smith’s Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), p. 550, and Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 7 See Gabriela de Beer, ‘Interview with Ángeles Mastretta’, Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, 48 (Spring 1994), 14–17 (p. 15). 8 See Arturo G. Hernández, ‘Galardón a Mastretta’, La Jornada, 5 July 1997 http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1997/jul97/970705, (Last accessed: 8 pm, 19 Dec. 2004). 9 This is taken from Kay S. García’s translation of a quotation from Aralia López González’s ‘La huella de lo reprimido: fisuras y suturas’, Signos: Anuario de humanidades, 5:1 (1991), 239–48 (p. 323). See Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 67.


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perhaps, critical prejudice against her writing with its supposedly emotional rather than intellectual appeal. Mastretta’s reliance on traditional story-telling techniques, on ‘light’ entertainment and ‘marriage plots’, coupled with her scant interest in formal experimentation, has led critics to classify her as a popular writer.

Mastretta and the Post-Boom/Postmodern Unlike some of her contemporaries such as Damiela Eltit (Chile, b.1949), Mastretta is a traditional writer who is not known for her flamboyant experimentation. Nonetheless she has developed a unique style notable for its diversity which ranges from staid literary description reminiscent of the realist novel to racey fast-flowing narrative peppered with the colloquial and the obscene, typical of popular genres. The mythical, the magical and the carnivalesque also feature prominently in Mastretta’s work, often in counterpoint to authoritative historical discourse. In both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, Mastretta divides her attention between the real and the fictitious as Allende does in La casa de los espíritus:10 historical characters such as Porfirio Díaz and José Olmos y Contreras share the same fictional world as Emilia Sauri and Catalina Guzmán. Despite its stylistic and thematic playfulness, Mastretta’s writing does not conform to the central ‘illusion-breaking’ orientation of postmodernist fiction as identified by Brian McHale.11 She does not purposefully allude to the artificiality of her textual world nor to the elusive character of language, even though these features are suggested in all of her works. In Mastretta’s texts ‘what happens’ is of prime significance: Mastretta takes pride in belonging to a family of storytellers. As a fervent feminist she is keen to make her books accessible and, far from indulging in philosophical and technical game-playing, often relies on first-hand experiences (as in Arráncame la vida). In this sense her writing can be associated with the Post-Boom narratives which straddle generic boundaries, treading an ‘uneasy path between the Barthes-Tel-Quel-Sarduyan notion that the text can have no exterior referent and the old-fashioned idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely unproblematic’.12 According to Aníbal González, documentary narratives concentrate on key polar opposites: fact and fiction, justice and injustice, society and the individual.13

10 See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000), p. 40. 11 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 221. 12 See Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 57. 13 See Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 24.


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Mastretta often resorts in Mal de amores (as in Arráncame la vida) to journalistic matter-of-fact documentation: ‘El azaroso año de 1920 vio levantarse contra el gobierno a una mayoría de generales inconformes con la calma restauradora del carrancismo, liderados por Álvaro Obregón’ (Mal de amores, p. 381). However, while Mal de amores is a notable example of resistance writing (like Arráncame la vida), dedicated to the disclosure of lo no dicho, to the ‘unofficial’ history,14 it also revels in the frivolous and the ludic. As we will see in Chapters Six and Seven, the excesses of the female body, which is fluid and multiple, become a metaphor for the excesses of the textual body. Mastretta has often spoken of her passion for words and their sounds, which enable her not only to express the suffering of a nation in political turmoil, but also permit her to engage in carnivalesque discourse. Just as Arráncame la vida is notable for its self-referential playfulness which blurs the boundaries between the fictive and the factual through Catalina’s ‘real’ narrative, so Mal de amores indulges in a carnivalesque play of discourses combining the neorealist and the neoromantic on the one hand and magical-realist features reminiscent of García Márquez’s narrative on the other. Moreover, Mal de amores is punctuated by an often chaotic proliferation of references to other texts, ranging from medical works, encyclopaedias, fashion magazines to popular children’s songs, verse and ‘corridos’. Although her style is perhaps less innovative and experimental than some of her female contemporaries such as Elena Poniatowska, Mastretta clearly belongs to the tradition of the Latin-American Post-Boom writing.15 In its accessibility and less flamboyant experimentation, Post-Boom writing may be seen as a counter-project to the Boom. Shaw (The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, 1998) suggests that many Boom writers have gravitated towards the Post-Boom. Typical of Mastretta and of Post-Boom writing in general is the gravitation towards the anecdotal, and towards plot-centredness and chronological structure, which provide for greater accessibility than did the typical Boom novel. In comparison with their Boom predecessors, the new generation of writers such as Ángeles Mastretta, Laura Esquivel or Guadalupe Loaeza are more concerned with the everyday issues than with complex philosophizing. As Antonio Skármeta puts it: ‘nosotros nos acercamos a la cotidianidad con la obsesión de un miope’ (Shaw, p. 138). The most salient feature of Mastretta’s writing is, without doubt, its accessibility because all of her works can be appreciated by the ordinary reader. Indeed, the remarkable popular success of Mastretta’s novels can be attributed in part precisely to her engagement with the mundane, the presence of popular references (romance, novela rosa elements, boleros) and of certain traditional characteristics such as uncomplicated story-lines. The appreciation of her writing does not depend upon that sophisticated literary competence 14 For an insightful analysis on such writing, see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (London: Methuen, 1987). 15 For a discussion of the Boom and Post-Boom see Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (1998) and Phillip Swanson, Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990).


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demanded of the Boom reader. Mastretta’s fictional worlds reflect – uncomplicatedly – the cultural diversity of Mexican society, together with its social discrimination, patriarchal dominance and feminist rebellion. Mastretta shows little interest in complex issues such as literary theory, philosophy or technical creativity – the hallmarks of ‘serious’ narrative as represented, for example, by writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and, to a lesser extent, by some early Post-Boom writers such as Elena Poniatowska. It is tempting to use such a term as postmodernism when analysing Mastretta’s works. Postmodernism is characterized according to Laura García Moreno by a cognitive shift from modernism and ‘emphasizes the end of philosophical foundationalism and consequently epistemological uncertainty’.16 Language and its difficult relationship with representation, together with the displacement of binary concepts (fact/fiction, mind/body, man/woman, etc) and predetermined sexual identity are a central concern in postmodernism. Postmodern narrative views language as a means of communication by stressing linguistic texture through techniques such as etymological word play. Postmodernism, unlike modernism, undermines monological meaning, and proposes plurivocity in its place. This study will highlight, within a broad postmodern context, the plurality of Mastretta’s literary vision which focuses on the blurring of traditional boundaries between high culture and mass culture, the displacement of binary concepts and monological truths, and the role of language. However, critics should be cautious when applying European and North American critical concepts to Latin American writing. The term ‘postmodernism’ is itself problematic. Attempts at precise definition have usually failed partly because the concept has a kind of in-built elusiveness, embracing as it does such slippery territories as ‘border’, ‘margin’ and ‘hybrid’. Postmodernism, like feminism and magical realism, has lost much of its critical focus through excessive and often indiscriminate use. Latin Americanists such as Santiago Colás, Raymond L. Williams, García Moreno, George Yúdice and Donald Shaw advise against the unguarded use of postmodernism.17 Santiago Colás cautions

16 As García Moreno remarks, this shift towards epistemological ambiguity: ‘coincides with [. . .] the pluralization of “legitimate” knowledges from both within and outside dominant cultures of advanced industrial societies arising from a crisis of legitimization with hybridization, that is, the disruption or “softening” of traditional boundaries between high culture, mass culture, and vernacular culture: and with the intensification of cultural crossings between the first and third world (Yúdice et al.). Most attempts to define postmodernism, which remains an elusive, contradictory term, highlight hybridity, textuality, and ambivalence as some of its most recognizable characteristics’. See Laura García Moreno, ‘Situating Knowledges: Latin American Readings of Postmodernism’, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 25:1 (Spring 1995), 63–80 (p. 63; pp. 63–4). 17 See Raymond Leslie Williams, The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture and the Crisis of Truth (New York: St Martin’s, 1995). The introductory chapter highlights the influence of European theorists such as Gadamer and Ricoeur on Latin American writing. The exact relationship between the Postmodern and the Post-Boom is not investigated in Williams’ study since the latter term is not employed.


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against the vague assimilations which exclude ‘specific social and political conditions out of which that (Latin American) culture has emerged’.18 Donald Shaw’s reservations about applying Western critical concepts point to the usual framework of debate about postmodernism – socio-political rather than specifically literary. The postmodernist emphasis on the mediated nature of reality and celebration of the disappearance of the ‘real’ world, go counter to the social agenda of some Post-Boom writers such as Allende or Skármeta. In this sense the problem for Shaw of linking postmodernism to the Post-Boom is that ‘the whole notion of postmodernism is in essence a critique of the modernist position and of all-encompassing explanations of the collective social and historical process’ (p. 177). This again is an inadequate representation of the Latin American literary arena for the work of many Post-Boom writers such as Valenzuela, Allende, Poniatowska and Skármenta proves that there is no strict boundary between formal experimentalism and the employment of fantasy and myth on the one hand, and social and political commitment on the other. Significant contributions to Post-Boom writing have been made by Elena Poniatowska (testimonial and autobiographical narrative), Isabel Allende (social commitment and feminism) and more specifically by Ángeles Mastretta herself whose work incorporates many of these diverse elements which alternate between seriousness and frivolity. Some similarities between Skármeta, Allende and Mastretta can be deduced from Shaw’s assessment of Skármeta as devoted to both ‘la aventura de la palabra’ on the one hand and to conventional writing and ‘observed’ reality on the other.19 Shaw suggests that the Latin American context should be seen to ‘enter the postmodern age to some extent on its own terms, and that these include acceptance of the notion of the aesthetic as subversive’ (p. 177). Consequently, Latin American theorists seek to locate alternative responses to current theoretical practices in European and North American academic settings (García Moreno, p. 74).20

18 See Santiago Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. xi. Colás explores Latin American manifestations of postmodernism and refers to the work of critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson. Octavio Paz has affirmed that ‘postmodernism is another imported grand récit’ that does not fit in the Latin American context. See Laura García Moreno (p. 64) and Octavio Paz, ‘El romanticismo en la poesía contemporánea’, Vuelta 11.127 (1987), 26–27. ‘Puede hablarse de Postmodernidad en América Latina?’ Yúdice asks, expressing the reservations shared by many critics who question whether the ‘transfer of European paradigms pertaining to modernity, not to mention the debated postmodern crisis or “overcoming” of modernity’ is relevant within Latin American contexts. See García Moreno (p. 68) and George Yúdice, ‘¿Puede hablarse de posmodernidad en América Latina?’, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 4:1 (1990), pp. 105–28. 19 See Donald Shaw, Antonio Skármeta and the Post Boom (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1994), pp. 16–17. 20 Opinions, of course, differ considerably on where to locate these alternative responses but according to García Moreno there are two extremes between which Latin American


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Feminisms: ‘lo privado es público y lo personal es político’ Although some may wish to see Mastretta’s texts merely as examples of ‘light’ writing, a major objective of this study is to highlight how her texts are socially engaged narratives, frequently concerned with questions of gender within a broad socio-political context. In the writer’s texts what emerges most powerfully is the desire to construct self-defined images of womanhood, a breaking away from the fixed notions of gender identity and from the feeling of inferiority imposed by a patriarchal society with its accompanying religious and legislative restrictions. Mastretta’s desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women puts her works in direct line with Post-Boom Latin American female writers such as Marta Traba, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska and Carmen Peri Rossi.21 Mastretta may have little formal knowledge of critical theory and her treatment of gender issues seems to remain largely unaffected by the academic theorizing on the subject produced in Europe as well as in Latin America and the United States, but her work nevertheless displays important feminist principles. Postmodern feminism, through its double-edged discourse, postulates a radical critique of master narratives. On the political front, it defies patriarchal logic and society, while at the epistemological level, it queries ‘natural’ systems of representation. It ultimately serves as a powerful discourse for the marginal and repressed. Like postmodern feminists, Mastretta criticizes totalizing structures such as History and celebrates Otherness and those repressed discourses relating to the female body and sexuality. Feminism, the most radical language of postmodernism, assumes a peculiar resonance in the context of Latin America where women have been doubly marginalized, both in terms of class and gender and even today remain largely marooned on the periphery. Postmodern Feminism recognizes the need for radical change and ‘by shifting its gaze from men to women, by taking women’s lives and their writing seriously, feminist critics crack the bedrock of traditional scholarship’.22 Western thought can no longer be at the

perspectives on postmodernism oscillate: (1) ‘wariness towards the continuing role of Eurocentrism in its current disguise of dispersion’; and (2) ‘cautious attraction to the acknowledgement of alternative legitimate knowledges’ (pp. 73–4). Like Shaw, Santiago Colás and George Yúdice are wary of the undiscriminating application of these Western critical concepts to Latin American writing which often downgrades or excludes the sociopolitical and cultural aspects of the Latin American context. Yúdice and Colás seek an alternative Latin American Postmodernism in a common Latin American form of writing: testimonial narrative. As shall be discussed in depth in Chapter Three, Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida falls within the testimonial narrative mode which often excludes the experimental in favour of socio-political purpose, seeking to record the testimonies of the marginal voices of people speaking from the periphery. Typical of testimonial writing and Mastretta’s text are their chronological structure and general accessibility. 21 See Stephen M. Hart’s Companion to Spanish-American Literature (London: Tamesis, 1999), pp. 144–65. 22 See Amy Katz Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 52. Also see


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centre for ‘we have not simply moved the centre, we are denying its existence’ (Kaminsky, p. 19). Feminists like Mastretta challenge social ideas and injustices as well as the structures upon which they are based, the discourse in which they are thought. As a critical assessment of the master narrative, feminism ‘is a political and epistemological event – political in that it challenges the order of patriarchal society, epistemological in that it questions the structure of its representations’.23 As will be shown later, in the context of Mastretta’s texts, this questioning of the structure of representation is achieved through the dislocation of binary concepts (history/fiction; good/evil; woman/man) and the blurring of fixed gender and sexual identity. Feminism not only questions phallocentric ideologies – particularly those concerning male prejudices about women and their roles – but also male critical evaluations of literature – particularly of women’s writing. Rosika Parker and Griselda Pollack suggest that ‘feminism explores the pleasures of resistance, of deconstruction, of discovery, of defining, of fragmenting, of redefining’.24 Such a discourse has led to numerous and complex debates in contemporary postmodern feminist criticism. It began in 1975 when feminist criticism took two theoretical directions: two contending positions (to make a crude but clear distinction) as represented by the ‘essentialists’ or French feminists;25 and the ‘relativists’, the Anglo-American feminist critics.26

Anny Brooksbank Jones, ‘Latin American Feminist Criticism Revisited’, in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 201–37. 23 Hal Foster (ed. and intro.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New York Press, 1998), p. xiii. 24 See Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 199. 25 According to Alice Jardine, Anglo-Americans focus on the specificity of women’s writing (‘gynocritics’) and French criticism explores the textual consequences and representations of sexual difference (‘gynesis’). See Alice A. Jardine, ‘Gynesis’, Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1982), 54–65. See also her Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 4th edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). According to Elaine Showalter, Gynesis repossesses ‘as a field of inquiry all the space of the Other, the gaps, silences, and absences of discourse and representation, to which the feminine has traditionally been relegated’. See Elaine Showalter, ‘Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism’, in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (1987) ed. Shari Benstock, pp. 30–44 (p. 37), and ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm 1979), pp. 22–41 (p. 28). For Alice Jardine (Diacritics, p. 59) ‘the space “outside” of the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in Western thought’. Based on socioeconomic, psychological and to a certain extent biological determinism, French feminism maintains that there is an écriture féminine, that is, a peculiarly female mode of expression independent of male language and discourse. French feminists criticize totalizing structures such as language and knowledge and celebrate woman’s Otherness – of being marginalized and excluded – by exploring its advantages. For further details on French feminism and écriture féminine in the context of Mastretta’s writing, see Chapter Six, pp. 162–96. 26 Whereas French feminist critics are almost entirely concerned with écriture féminine, Anglo-American critics have a purely woman-centred approach to the work of women writers. Unlike French feminism, they do not see any essential differences separating male from female


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Critical reservations about the unreflecting application of postmodernisms to Latin American literature considered earlier in this chapter extends to feminism.27 For Nelly Richard the downside of postmodernism, from a Latin American angle, is its ability to co-opt the margins and include diversity – political, racial, cultural, sexual – in a ‘new, sophisticated economy of “sameness”, thereby neutralizing the “other” ’.28 This perception of postmodernism also applies to postmodern feminism within the Latin American context. In her pioneering Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992), Debra Castillo uses diverse literary and theoretical texts to highlight the ongoing process of constructing a Latin American feminist criticism that can embrace the multiple, and often contradictory perspectives offered by Latin American feminist writers.29 Castillo makes reference to Victoria Ocampo’s letter to Virginia Woolf in which the Latin American writer and critic celebrates

writing although they acknowledge persistent male underestimation of women’s writing. Anglo-American critics go beyond pure literary analysis to examine the oppressed socioeconomic status of women as well as women’s economic position as authors and the problems they frequently encounter in the world of publishing. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brönte to Lessing (new revd edn) (London: Virago, 1982). See n. 5, p 4, above for Elaine Showalter’s definition of ‘feminist’ and ‘female’. Also see Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. and intro. Terry Eagleton (London: Longman, 1991). Eagleton provides a coherent overview of feminist literary criticism and its developments in the previous 20 years. 27 In Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), Toril Moi’s provocative analysis of the strengths and limitations of the Anglo-American and French feminist perspectives have contributed to the construction of a Latin American feminist theory. In her discussion of Elaine Showalter’s feminist criticism, Moi highlights one of the problems with Anglo-American theory in general. Moi objects that Showalter’s exclusivity, like that of Gilbert and Gubar in Madwoman in the Attic and other Anglo-American critics, mirrors the patriarchal values she opposes: ‘all forms of radical thought inevitably remain mortgaged to the very historical categories they seek to transcend’ (p. 88). She notes on the other hand, however, that ‘our understanding of this historically necessary paradox should not lead us complacently to perpetuate patriarchal practices’ (p. 88). Rosalind Jones strikes a similar, cautionary note in relation to French feminism which she sees as apolitical, essentialist and, like Anglo-American theory, tied down by the very system it claims to undermine: ‘A monolithic vision of shared female sexuality, rather than defeating phallocentrism as doctrine and practice, is more likely to blind us to our varied and immediate needs and to the specific struggles we must coordinate in order to meet them’. Such criticism of AngloAmerican and French feminist theories has some point and has influenced Latin American feminists in the construction of an alternative theory of feminism within a Latin American context. See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 357–70 (p. 365). 28 Nelly Richard comments perceptively on this element of postmodernism. See ‘Postmodernism and the Periphery’, in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 463–70 (p. 468). 29 See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).


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Woolf’s discovery and unlocking of a private ‘room of her own’, but acknowledges the fact that the key will not necessarily fit a Latin American keyhole.30 In her response to the British writer Ocampo suggests that it would be a grave mistake to appropriate Woolf (and implicitly, we might add, de Beauvoir or Julia Kristeva or Hélène Cixous or Showalter or any other theorist) uncritically for a Latin American practice, for her theories and her conclusions derive from specific conditions that may not be duplicated in Latin America, where circumstances of race, gender, class, and cultural relationships exist which may not obtain in the Anglo-French sphere. (Castillo, p. xvii)

Castillo reinforces the view that Latin American feminists should be cautious when applying academic feminist theories produced in Europe and the United States to a Latin American context by drawing from Elaine Showalter’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’. It offers a highly appealing schematic summary of several major trends in recent feminist criticism: ‘English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression.’31 Castillo considers that Latin American feminist criticism resists such simple categorization, for Latin American feminisms are developing in various directions which are ‘not always compatible with the directions taken by Anglo-European feminisms and frequently discord with one another’ (p. xxii). Latin American feminist critics are seeking to locate alternative responses to contemporary European and North American feminist theoretical practices. Characteristically antihegemonic, Latin American writing contests a totalizing view of literature and assumes a polyphonic function, operating ‘within a field of sinuous and shifting positionalities rather than from a single, fixed position’ (p. xxii). For Castillo, the focus on specific strategic interventions in fictional texts seems to offer the most productive mode of reading Latin American literature without the reductionism underlying much of the overarching academic theorizing of European and North American feminist practitioners (p. xxii). Jean Franco, Anny Brooksbank Jones, Amy Kaminsky and other specialists in Latin American feminism have all made useful suggestions as to what must be appropriated and discarded from European and North American feminist criticism in the construction of a valid and practical theory of feminism. Amy Kaminsky calls for a Latin American theory which combines Latin American materialist criticism, which is representative of an oppositional politics, and feminist criticism,

30

See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back (p. xv), and Victoria Ocampo, Testimonios, 10 vols (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1935–77). 31 See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back (p. 1) and Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 381–402.


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which locates the female body at the centre of its analysis. In doing so, Kaminsky is able to construct a Latin American feminist discourse which is regionally and politically motivated in its commitment to eradicate gender oppression (p. 21) but also is in current dialogue with North American and European feminist practices. By employing different practices and extracting whatever is useful from them, Kaminsky proposes to achieve ‘the feminist demetaphorization of the language of sexuality for Latin Americanists and Latin American derhetoricization of the language of politics for feminists’ (p. 135). Kaminsky’s project is significant because of her insistence on the connection between feminist practice and the social context that produced it. For this latter objective Kaminsky borrows the term presence from the Latin American rhetoric of oppositional politics – ‘a notion that posits the sense of self in the quest for transformation’ resulting in a ‘conscious positioning, enabling choice and agency’ (p. 25). For Kaminsky, Latin American feminist criticism is a return to the concrete. Language is an important feature in our reading of Latin American texts by women, where we understand Latin American feminist scholarship ‘needs to keep women firmly at the centre of its analysis [. . .]’ (p. 135), retaining the notion of sexuality as a key to gender hierarchy and consequently as a site of oppression ‘without pushing women back into the little corner in which they are nothing but sex and have nothing to say about anything but sex [. . .]’ (Kaminsky, p. xiii). Unlike French psychoanalytical feminist criticism which focuses purely on women’s bodies and their pleasure, Latin American writers/ critics offer the reinsertion of that body into the political arena, which after all it can never avoid (Kaminsky, p. 20). Kaminsky sums up what she believes to be the Latin American alternative to American feminist criticism: When North American Feminists made the extraordinary theoretical discovery that the personal was the political – that the intimate lives of individuals responded to cultural structures of hierarchy and dominance, they did not stop to consider to what extent the political might also be the personal: that the public institutions housing and channelling and deploying state power express themselves in our individual lives. In much of Latin America, the official and unofficial policies of the state are played out on the bodies of the citizens, thus becoming the intimate personal experience and shaping the unique vision of the individual that gets expressed in what we recognize as the writer’s particular voice. Just as Latin American feminist criticism needs to make room for readings of sexuality that go beyond labelling and dismissal, it must take the political, in all its complexity, into account. (pp. xv–vi)32 32 Brooksbank Jones claims that, in Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers, Kaminsky is guilty of ‘untheorized distinctions between theory, practice, pure theory, and material reality’ and of treating ‘experience, race, class, and gender as givens’ (p. 212). However she acknowledges the tension between micro-political and macro-political issues as a fundamental concern in contemporary Latin American feminist debates. See Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 212–13.


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As will be investigated throughout this study, Ángeles Mastretta’s works are also a powerful representation of these converging practices proposed by Kaminsky: ‘Yo creo que soy una feminista en tanto que sí acepto y promuevo [. . .] que lo privado es público y lo personal es político’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 333). Her texts are multiple and linguistically supple, offering ‘readings of sexuality that go beyond labelling and dismissal’ but also ‘take the political, in all its complexity, into account’ (Kaminsky, p. xvi). In Mastretta’s texts the personal is the political: the intimate lives of individuals, particularly of women, respond to cultural structures of hierarchy and dominance and public institutions ‘housing and channelling and deploying state power (which) express themselves in (their) individual lives’. Writing is a revolutionary practice particularly for female writers, and ‘to write in Latin America is for them more than verb, transitive or intransitive – it is a revolutionary act’ (Castillo, p. 20). Mastretta facilitates a form of self-representation for those women and marginalized groups that challenges patriarchal discourses. Following the French tradition, she examines the words, the syntax and the genres that traditional (male) language and representation use to regulate women’s self-knowledge. Her work offers glimpses of new unspoken spaces unclouded by phallagocentric constraints.

Critical Reception of Mastretta’s Texts Mastretta’s literary stock has grown following her award of two major literary prizes: in 1985 she was awarded the Premio Mazatlán for Arráncame la vida and in 1997 she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos for Mal de amores. Interest in Mastretta has increased of late, but much critical investigation remains to be done. Critical work on Mastretta is to be found in the form of articles and Ph.D. theses, most of which relate to her first novel, Arráncame la vida. Kay García’s book, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (1994) includes an interview with Mastretta and a chapter on Arráncame la vida which explores the implicit intertextual relationship between Mastretta’s account and the official record of Mexican history. Diane Braun’s thesis, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, María Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’ (1994), also includes a useful chapter on Arráncame la vida and explores silence and dream as textual strategies with transgressive and feminist potentialities. Mastretta’s other works, notably Mal de amores, have received relatively little attention. One of the few comprehensive studies available is Lee Ann Sheryl Laffey’s ‘Power and Rebellion in the Narratives of Ángeles Mastretta’ (1998) which analyses the ways in which Mastretta’s protagonists redefine their identities in response to their repressive patriarchal society.33 33 For details of critical studies on Mastretta referred to here, see Bibliography (pp. 235–47).


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This work aims to fill the obvious gaps in the critical appreciation of Mastretta’s work. Although I will concentrate on Mastretta’s most important works, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, I also hope to shed new light on her other fictions. I have found that some of the critical works published on Mastretta unthinkingly accept those institutionalized gender norms which Mastretta herself is at such pains to challenge – though without committing herself unambiguously to the feminist cause. I have also sought to place Mastretta’s work within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition by focusing on her referential and testimonial style. A further aim is to explore the significance of the female body and sexuality in Mastretta’s work. What I also hope to convey is the view that Mastretta’s feminist works avoid facile simplifications: heterogenous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic, the frivolous and the serious. The originality of Mastretta’s writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities whose shimmering surfaces are often interrupted by unexpected depths and whose proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis.

Interview with Ángeles Mastretta34 My analysis of Mastretta’s texts has been guided by several new insights gained from a wide-ranging, extensive interview with Mastretta in December 1999, one of the few to cover in depth her œuvre. That interview represents a key feature of this project since it offers new insights into Mastretta’s postmodern multiple narratives: ‘Creo que esa multiplicidad en mí es inevitable [. . .] Yo soy muy desordenada y atisbo la vida en fragmentos’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320). On 2 December 1999 I arrived in Mexico City where Mastretta had agreed to meet me for our interview. Mastretta also asked me if I wanted to accompany her to a live radio programme in which she was to participate the day after my arrival. I agreed and the next day I went to her home. I waited in her beautiful guest room. It was spacious and the wide French windows looked onto a sunny patio surrounded by thick foliage and overhanging creepers. The strains of a bolero – a Romance sung by Mexico’s Rey de los boleros, Luis Miguel – filled the house. Bolero singers – and the bolero itself – play an important role in Mastretta’s fiction.35

34 See Jane Lavery, ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: La escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad textual’, Anales de literatura hispanoamericana, 30 (2001), 313–40. In references to the interview I use the shortened title ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’. 35 There are many references throughout Mastretta’s narratives to boleros – Temor, La noche de anoche (Arráncame la vida, pp. 148–9) – and to singers such as Luis Miguel (El mundo iluminado, pp. 59–63). As Arráncame la vida indicates, its title is inspired by Agustín Lara’s bolero which Catalina Guzmán cites in the novel: ‘Arráncame la vida, y si acaso te hiere el dolor [. . .] ha de ser de no verme porque al fin tus ojos me los llevo yo’ (p. 149).


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As I sat there absorbing the setting, Ángeles swiftly entered the room followed by her rather stuck-up grey and white poodle. ‘Este Gioco siempre me está siguiendo, ¡es un encanto!’, she remarked airily. Her sensuous diction reminded me of the poetic rhythm of her prose. I immediately realized that this playful grey and white ball of fluff was one of her fictional personages: ‘¡Ah! éste es el “Perro de Quevedo” en El mundo iluminado ¿verdad?’ Ángeles nodded in amusement. Dressed in a dark green suit and impeccably made up, Ángeles flurried around the room in half-hearted pursuit of her dog. Her big, dark eyes, so full of life and laughter are her most striking feature. She is a whirlwind of charm. It is easy to picture this intelligent and attractive woman as the host of a television talk show or as a famous Italian screen star. There is much about her that still suggests her Italian heritage (her paternal grandfather arrived in Mexico in 1910): the cheekbones, the rich chestnut hair, the animated gestures, the husky sensual voice. She is at the same time avowedly Mexican.36

Kay S. García remarks that, during her second encounter with Ángeles, she saw a different and more personal side: suffering from an ulcer and wearing no make-up, Mastretta proceeded to paint herself ‘para no agredirte’ (p. 66). According to García: ‘I recognized in this statement an explanation of her fictional strategies, as well as the creation of her public image. Hard edges were softened and reality was safely covered up with a playful yet dramatic mask’ (p. 66). The next chapter provides a brief synopsis of Mexican history and Mastretta’s historical portrayal of Puebla, the setting of Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, within the national process of change prompted by the Mexican Revolution. It also considers the importance of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel represented by key male writers as well as those female writers whose narratives explore the Revolutionary period and its aftermath from a radical revisionist feminist/female perspective.

36 See Kay. S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 65, and Margaret Sayers Peden, Out of the Volcano (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 87.


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2

Contexts Historical Background: The Mexican Revolution and its Aftermath It may appear surprising that an author born in 1949 – over 30 years after the end of the ‘military’ phase of the Revolution – should set Arráncame la vida in the 1930s and 1940s and Mal de amores between the 1890s and 1965. But such retrogression is not uncommon in contemporary Mexican writing – indeed it is almost the norm – since the Revolution was to provide the central point of reference for the remainder of twentieth-century Mexican history and fiction.1 It is in the revolutionary period that the roots of the country’s current malaise are to be found.2 The Mexican Revolution and its aftermath provide Mastretta with the historical backdrop to her two novels. Mastretta offers a feminist revision of the historical record, giving voice to suppressed marginal perspectives – particularly of women. The author considers the often unacknowledged function of women during and after the Revolution, a role which was to undermine entrenched patriarchal attitudes and machista domination of women in Mexican society. It is important to consider Mexican history and politics as both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores offer a faithful representation of the historical circumstances of women in Mexico and of the nation’s political machinations. Her critical examination of the past has clear relevance for the present. As many have observed, Mexico’s tumultuous history is marked by an almost cyclic pattern of growth and decline, hope and disappointment, life 1 For a further analysis of Mexican history, see Brian R. Hamnett, A Concise History of Mexico (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000); D. C Hodges and R. Gandy, Mexico 1910–1982: Reform or Revolution (London: Zed Press, 1983); D. Villegas Cosío et al. (eds), Historia mínima de México, 6th edn (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1981); Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–87, Latin American Studies (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990); and David G. LaFrance, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: the Maderista Movement and the Failure of Liberal Reform (Wilmington: SR Books, 1989). 2 In the 1990s with the revelations about large-scale pilfering from the public coffers during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94), the PRI, which had been the party of government since 1940, came to an end. Its stronghold was finally broken in 2000 with the democratic election of Vicente Fox Quesada of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), instilling new hopes in the nation that the violence and corruption instigated by the Mexican Revolution might finally come to an end. Nevertheless, corruption and violence continues to be entrenched in Mexico’s traditions and structures, as it has become an unchallenged feature, accepted by everyone.


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and death, peace and violence.3 Mastretta’s fictions reflect in many ways the political and social mood of Mastretta’s own era, in the last twenty-five years, which also express this pattern.

The Historical Setting of ‘Arráncame la vida’ and ‘Mal de amores’ The action of both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida takes place primarily in the city and state of Puebla which lies to the south-east of Mexico City. Mastretta mentions the names of surrounding districts in the State of Puebla such as Izúcar de Matamorros and Cholula, but the city of Puebla is the location of most relevance to both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida. Puebla has played an important role in Mexican history. The city of Puebla, where Ángeles Mastretta herself was born in 1949, developed an important agricultural and industrial base in the late nineteenth century. As in Arráncame la vida, the historical credentials of Mal de amores are enhanced by ample references to historical figures such as Benito Juárez, Francisco I. Madero, Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza, Governor Mucio P. Martínez, Porfirio Díaz and Aquiles Serdán. The historical context is also enhanced in both novels by the frequent references to geographical locations both Mexican (Isla Mujeres, Mexico City, Quintana Roo, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, Zacatlán, Tlaxcalantongo, Puebla) and foreign (New York, Israel, Paris, Madrid). There are references to Mexican historical sites – ‘estatua de Colón’ (Mal de amores, p. 223), names of real streets – ‘Avenida Reforma’ (Mal de amores, p. 223; Arráncame la vida, p. 81), ‘calle de Alcalcería’ (Mal de amores, p. 148) ‘Portal de Mercaderes’ (Mal de amores, p. 148); shops – ‘Sanborns’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 130); city districts – ‘barrio de Xonaca’ (Mal de amores, p. 234), and other urban locations – ‘Puente Iturbide’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 35), ‘parque de la concordia’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 75). The aura of historicity found in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida is further enhanced by references to journals such as Avante run by Juan Soriano (Arráncame la vida, p. 55) and the director of La voz de la verdad, José Olmos y Contreras (Mal de amores, p. 81). References to political parties such as CTM and PRM (Arráncame la vida) reinforce this effect.

‘Mal de amores’ The time frame of Mal de amores extends from the late nineteenth century to 1965, although its primary focus is the events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the revolutionary period in Puebla and its environs. Nineteenth-century 3 Caciquismo y poder político en el México rural, eds Roger Bartra et al., 1st edn, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de UNAM (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975).


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Mexico is marked by a national struggle against occupation by foreign powers and a desire for political and economic independence. In Mexico, as elsewhere in Spanish America, the War of Independence began as a form of political subversion against the Spanish monopoly of power which had prevailed for more than three hundred years. Having lost almost half of Mexico’s territory to the US during the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the Liberals, who had gained a measure of ascendancy over the Conservatives during the earlier independence period, recognized the need to provide Mexico with the stability and productivity which its northern neighbour, the United States, enjoyed.4 Without these measures, the future of Mexico as an independent nation-state would remain in the balance (Katz, p. 49). Under the leadership of Mexican Liberal Benito Juárez, the Constitution of 1857 was instituted as a means of attacking the power of the Church and creating a different governmental structure. This reform was part of the underlying political capitalist-democratic ideology of Juárez’s followers whose main aim was to make Mexico a progressive nation. The conservatives, whose personal interests were threatened, reacted violently. Following the victory of the liberals in the War of the Reform (1857–60), Napoleon III seized the opportunity to establish an empire in the New World by conspiring with Mexican conservatives to place Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne of Mexico.5 But the incursion by the French unleashed popular resistance throughout the country which ensured that Maximilian’s ascendancy was short lived (1864–67). The Mexican Liberals regained the political initiative and Benito Juárez resumed as president in August 1867. In spite of the newly awakened sense of nationalism brought about by the military triumph over the French (Katz, p. 4), Mexico faced economic chaos and was far from being the stable and integrated nation Juárez had dreamt of. Porfirio Díaz, who became president in 1876, continued the efforts of the Reforma, instigated by the political initiatives of Juárez, to construct a bourgeois society but the dominant ideology was now positivism – which placed order and progress above personal freedom. Díaz adopted an export-based economic policy and endorsed foreign investment, particularly from the US.6 During Díaz’s

4

See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico Since Independence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 49–124 (p. 49). 5 During the first year of his term, Juárez was forced to suspend debt payments to Mexico’s chief European creditors France, Britain and Spain as a result of the financial toll incurred by the Reform War. In London on 31 October 1861, these powers signed a Tripartite Convention in favour of military intervention in order to seek redress. Although military intervention soon ensued, both Spain and Britain withdrew their forces when they learned that the occupation of Mexico represented for the French a desire to establish a Mexican empire under French rule. See Jan Bazant, ‘From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821–1867’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.) Mexico Since Independence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–48 (p. 43). 6 Ironically during the first two years of his regime Díaz carried out a series of antiAmerican propaganda campaigns in light of the border land disputes between Mexio and the


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regime Mexico underwent a huge increase in foreign political and economic control as a result of the government’s foreign policies. Under Porfirio Díaz, foreigners had a privileged role, for Mexico had increasingly come to depend on other countries for her products and economic growth.7 Many rich Mexicans actively embraced foreign dependency by ‘aping nearly all things foreign at the same time as they deprecated their own nation’s history and culture’.8 The porfiriato had also benefited the Mexican middle classes and the rich, and in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida the powerful and affluent sectors of society are conspicuous consumers of foreign goods. The economic growth and relative political stability maintained by the Porfirian regime is evidenced in the wealth of Puebla and specifically in the middle-class Cuenca and Sauri families of Mal de amores who are certainly portrayed as a product of Porfirian prosperity. Emilia, the main protagonist, is brought up in a comfortable middle-class family which flaunts its wealth. The poet Rivadaneira is rather bohemian and is committed to the anti-porfiriato movement even if it is only because of his fervent love for Milagros, a woman who is active in the revolutionary cause (p. 146). But Rivadeneira’s political stance is ironic in that he is a rich hacendado with an expensive taste for foreignmade clothes and cars. He dresses like a French dandy (p. 148) and drives an imported 1904 Oldsmobile: un auto verde oscuro que en lugar de volante tenía una dirección a la cual Rivadeneira llamaba correctamente manubrio de tiller steering [. . .] Para 1910 esos autos ya no eran la última palabra, existían automóviles más caros y modernos, sin embargo aquel pequeño curved dash hacía las delicias de Milagros Veytia. (p. 146)

US. But faced with the possibility of yet another Mexican-American war, Díaz had to keep political stability at all costs. What eventually placated the crisis was Díaz’s persistent encouragement of US American investors. See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 68–69. 7 The US would become the country with the greatest foreign domination of the economy in Mexico, its preponderance overshadowing previously important shareholders in the Mexican economy such as Great Britain, France and Germany. Nevertheless Díaz’s foreign policies with its generous economic concessions extended not only to Americans but also to European investors and promoters. The Mexican government was keen to restore its diplomatic relations with Europe in order to balance American influence in Mexico. Until around 1900, the application of such policies resulted in economic growth, relative political stability and strengthening of the Mexican State. But they would also represent the undoing of his regime culminating in the Mexican Revolution. See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 69–70. 8 See David G. LaFrance The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: The Maderista Movement and the Failure of the Liberal Reform (Wilmington: SR, 1989), p. xxvi. Friedrich Katz (‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 49–124) explains that Porfirio Díaz had re-established diplomatic relations with France and that both during and after the Porfiriato: ‘France was to become more than just ‘another’ European country in the eyes of Mexico’s elite. French fashion, culture and architecture were models they sought to imitate’ (p. 71).


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Emilia, the protagonist in Mal de amores, herself does not escape similar ironic treatment: she wears ‘un traje de seda clara, idéntico al que ilustraba la penúltima portada de La Moda Elegante’ (p. 85) and is described elsewhere as being adorned ‘como una muñeca de magazine’ (p. 148). Mastretta also uses irony in her treatment of the rich elite. The hacendados, or rich landowners had been protected by Porfirio Díaz’s agrarian policies and were determined to retain as much land as they could. While their prosperity increased, Indian and peasant groups became even poorer, and more marginalized. In Mal de amores, Milagros, the liberal activist, is critical of the García couple who have married off their daughter, Sol, Emilia’s best friend, to the richest hacendado family in Puebla. Sol’s mother talks with a false sense of modesty of her daughter’s newly acquired wealth: ‘Van a tener dos haciendas, una casa en la capital, un atelier en Paris y otros lugarcitos. Les harán falta, no creas – dijo la madre de Sol, fingiendo bañarse de sencillez cuando no cabía en su piel’ (p. 169). Milagros reflects that the money spent on lavish wedding presents could have been better used to feed an entire regiment (p. 168), or to help revolutionaries to be freed from prison (pp. 169–70). Milagros predicts that there will be much famine in the coming years and attacks the capitalist mentality of this hacendado family and its blindness to the consequences of the Revolution. Her ironic sense of humour emerges when she tells Josefa to urge Sol’s mother to marry off her daughter quickly (p. 119). Despite substantial growth in Puebla, all is not well, owing to over-expansion, increased competition, the deterioration of worker’s living standards and political corruption leading to economic depression (LaFrance, pp. xxx–xxxii). The process of modernization seemed to heighten the contrast between excessive wealth and dire poverty, a feature that marks twentiethcentury Mexico. The starkness of this situation emerges forcefully in Mal de amores. Accustomed to relative political stability, the Sauri family are shaken by these ever-growing problems. Resguardados por la costumbre de la paz, habían llegado al país más novedades de las que Diego Sauri hubiera podido imaginar. Veinte mil kilómetros de vías ferrocarrileras cruzaban frente a las minas y los campos sembrados de henequen, hortalizas y granos para la exportación. Yacimientos de oro, plata, cobre y zinc creaban pueblos de la noche a la mañana. Compañías inglesas y norteamericanas contendían por la fertilidad endemoniada de los pozos petroleros. Se multiplicaron las plantas de textiles [. . .] Todo esto a una velocidad incontenible que iba convocando catástrofes al tiempo que florecía [. . .]. (p. 78)

Although the middle classes in Mexico gained materially, they also started to resent the closed political and social systems of the porfiriato. Several key factors led to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910. Although the age of Díaz was one of relative stability and economic prosperity based on increased foreign investment, Díaz permitted the Church to regain power and the bourgeoisie to prosper at the expense of the poor. Dissatisfaction grew among the poor, who


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were prepared to act on such issues as social injustice. In spite of rapid economic growth, Mexico faced growing food shortage and famine as production of agricultural exports increased and urban and rural labour protests were crushed by the military. Whereas Mexico had to deal with increasing backwardness, other Latin American countries had made greater advances in social reform, particularly in education. During the final decade of the porfiriato, the rich became richer in Puebla but the majority found themselves more and more marginalized (LaFrance, p. xxx). Much of the underlying discontent in Puebla can be attributed to the impact of modernization on traditional patterns of life and institutions. Foreign involvement in the modernization of Mexico provoked a nationalistic reaction against outsiders (LaFrance, p. 240). Eager to attract foreign capital, Díaz adopted the abhorrent policy of paying foreign employees more than Mexicans for the same work. This move was one of the principle reasons for the Mexican miners’ strike at the Cananea Mining Company in Sonora, ruthlessly suppressed by the US military, resulting in the death of many Mexicans. In Mal de amores (p. 79), Mastretta alludes to political opposition to the Díaz regime with his foreign policies following the death of the miners at Cananea. Despite the fruits of success for many during the regime, the riches almost invariably ended up in the hands of foreigners. Railroads, petroleum, banking, mining, communications and commercial farming were primarily foreign-dominated, frequently resulting in the displacement of local businesses.9 The desire for change among Mexicans of all classes took on anti-capitalistic and nationalistic characteristics, resulting in attacks against the wealthy and against foreigners. Antiyanquismo and antiespañolismo are represented in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores (as they are in many Mexican Revolutionary novels). Mastretta’s writing often seeks to express lo mexicano and to recapture the nation’s authentic past and autochthonous history by making frequent references to Mexico’s indigenous past: Diego, for example, is obsessed with his Aztec origins (Mal de amores). Anti-Spanish feelings crop up on occasions in Mal de amores (p. 67 and p. 173). Mastretta’s antiyanquismo places her alongside many novelists of the Mexican Revolution (Muñoz, Guzmán, Fuentes) whose project was to express strong nationalistic views by drawing on indigenous symbolism

9 According to John Mason Hart the unequal economic relationship Díaz had formed between American investors and Mexicans laid the basis for the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (p. 5). While displaced peasants and unemployed workers faced utter depravity, the pequeña burguesía and the provincial elites saw their economic opportunities ever more threatened and their federalist-democratic principles undermined by a government that was reluctant to curb foreign competition (p. 2). See John Mason Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, 10th edn (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). For further comments on European and US foreign political influence and economic control in Mexico during the porfiriato age see ‘The Crisis of the Porfirian Economy and the American Intrusion’, pp. 177–86.


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and rejecting all things foreign.10 Despite the exploitation of Mexican raw materials by the US, it failed to give any real military help during the Revolutionary period. The US was quick to urge its citizens to leave the country in the face of the coming Revolution and its lack of interest in Mexican affairs is subtly highlighted in Mal de amores. Anti-American sentiment is expressed when Daniel, the protagonist’s lover, becomes a journalist for a US journal, writing a column on the Revolution in 1912. To Daniel’s surprise, the chief editor, Howard Gardner, does not conform to his preconceptions: ‘no esperaba encontrarse con alguien así, había previsto dar con un gringo de ánimo indiferente’ (p. 276). But despite Howard’s keen interest in the Revolution he remains ignorant of its real meaning: ‘Howard resultó ser un apasionado de los artículos escritos por Daniel, le contó entre risas el modo en que había llegado a necesitar la llegada de una de sus historias cuando el tedio quería comerse las tardes, le preguntó más de siete veces cómo estaban las cosas down there’ (p. 276). Mastretta ironizes the American’s naive enthusiasm for the Revolution emphasizing his paternalism and ignorance. In many ways the tragedy of war and violence is trivialized by Howard’s remark that news from Mexico serves to alleviate his boredom. The historical has become almost a form of fictional entertainment delivered to the editor in the form of entregas. His insensitivity is highlighted in his complete failure to understand that the Revolution has been a harrowing event for Daniel and the Mexican nation in general. Anti-US sentiment is also implicit in Arráncame la vida. Following the expropriation of the foreign oil companies, Catalina is surprised to see two American ladies donating cash to charitable causes: ‘hasta unas señoras gringas hablaron en contra de las compañías petroleras’ (p. 56). Gringos, a term of disrespect, is applied to Heiss, the businessman who has shady business dealings with Andrés Ascencio (pp. 64–5). The stereotyped Mexican idea that American women are superficial and ‘easy’ is expressed by Catalina: ‘Las gringas estaban bien para un rato, pero nadie les entraba para todos los días’ (p. 71). The US and other countries such as Britain have always been considered superior. Andrés feels strongly that the expropriation of the foreign oil companies will only serve to alienate them: ‘Andrés estaba furioso, le parecía una necedad eso de meterse en pleitos con países tan poderosos nada más para expropiarles lo que él llamaba un montón de chatarra’ (p. 56). Andrés is well aware, however, of the dangers of US materialism – which he expresses with eloquence and humour in a tirade against a political opponent. Ese cabrón hasta las esperanzas va a subastar. En un ratito enlata el suspiro de tres mil desempleados y se los vende a los gringos para cuando quieran sentirse deprimidos. Va a vender el Ángel de la Independencia [. . .] y si se descuidan hasta la Villa de Guadalupe. Mexican souvenirs: las olas de Acapulco, pedacitos de La Quebrada en relicarios y nalgas de vieja Buena en papel celofán. Todo 10 See Marta Portal, ‘Nacionalismo’, in Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1977), pp. 269–78.


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muy moderno y muy nais, que no se nos note lo rancheros, lo puercos, lo necios, lo arisco. Otro Mexsicou. (p. 228)

Anti-foreign sentiment is also explicit in Catalina’s reference to her friend’s marriage: ‘total se casó con el español, que resultó ser un celoso enloquecido. Tanto, que a su casa le mandó quitar el piso de los balcones para que ella no pudiera asomarse’ (p. 29). But Mastretta avoids falling into the trap that many Realist writers and particularly Mexican Revolutionary Novel writers did by their excessive and biased nationalism. She trivializes the issue of colonisers versus colonised by frequent recourse to humour (Mal de amores, p. 67, and Arráncame la vida, p. 85) or by showing that the gringos are not so bad after all (p. 276). Indeed, as we shall see later on, Emilia travels to the US to study medicine and meets many generous Americans who will give her emotional support. Middle-class disillusionment with the ageing Díaz is evident through the Sunday tertulias held at the home of the Cuencas in Mal de amores: cedieron los espacios de inocencia musical y literaria que tuvieron alguna vez, a la discusión sin tregua de los desperfectos acarreados por la bonanza modernizadora y el autoritarismo del régimen que la prohijaba: los salarios compraban cada vez menos, el país se liaba sin remedio a los ires y venires de la economía estadounidense, el ferrocarril socorría el enriquecimiento de los más ricos, los mineros discriminaban la mano de obra de los mexicanos, el progreso de la república se daba en desorden y las reglas de la política estaban regidas por la improvisación y el capricho. (p. 79)

Revolutionary stirrings in Mexico occurred well before the outbreak of the Revolution itself.11 Towards 1910, many of Puebla’s discontented inhabitants sought to change the political and socio-economic structure of the state. They joined the opposition to Díaz led by Francisco I. Madero, whose publication, ‘La sucesión presidencial en 1910’, set out a series of political reforms based on liberal principles, including universal freedom of suffrage and the restriction of the presidency to one term.12 The Revolution was an uprising against the old order, promising to fulfill hopes of change: to bring about political and economic reform 11 LaFrance explains that since the 1900s the ‘cumulative effect of capitalistic modernization, population pressure, governmental policies (on land, labour, taxes, and personnel), and the post-1907 depression had been to squeeze the populace and stimulate its activist tendencies’, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, p. xxxv. 12 One of the major factors contributing to Díaz’s defeat was not a popular revolution but the dispute between two ruling elites over whom Díaz had previously exercised a successful policy of divide and conquer. On the one hand there were the científicos, a circle of Europeaneducated intellectuals in Mexico City. The other comprised a provincial coalition of businessmen, landowners and generals. The latter thought that the científicos, with their predisposition to all things European, were overly acquiescent to foreign entrepreneurs at the expense of Mexican businesses. The provincial power structure was bolstered when a significant middle-class sector comprised of businessmen and professionals joined Madero in


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by introducing a system of party politics, dismantling the ‘hacienda’ system and limiting the level of foreign, in particular US intervention. Madero was an astute tactician and his ability to play upon the general discontent of Mexicans of all classes was one of the keys to his success (LaFrance, p. 2). His manifesto, which promoted the formation of Anti-re-electionist clubs in Puebla, is mentioned in Mal de amores (p. 114). In Puebla opposition was coordinated by Madero’s ally, the radical Aquiles Serdán (see Mal de amores, p. 79). The Cuencas and Sauris are involved from a very early stage in the anti-re-electionist movement: Milagros engages in furtive escapades at night to distribute pamphlets and to aid prisoners escape while the twenty-year-old law graduate, Daniel Cuenca, organizes liberal opposition to the Díaz regime (p. 82) and becomes Madero’s right-hand man. Emilia also defies the government during the curfew which followed the elections of 1910. She helps a family to find their son who is in danger of imprisonment and death (p. 205). The Porfirian regime sought to suppress revolutionary activities by imprisoning journalists, closing down newspapers and silencing or killing people through systematic terror. In both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, there are references to actual newspapers such as El Universal, El Demócrata and La Regeneración. Some journalists were killed such as the director and pro-Maderista José Olmos y Contreras of La voz de la verdad (Mal de amores, p. 81). In Mal de amores, there are allusions to the Puebla State Governor, Mucio P. Martínez, who had served as a military officer to Díaz during the recapture of Puebla from the French in 1867. Martínez was governor during the last decade of the porfiriato and was notorious for the severity and corruption of his rule: ‘llevaba muchos años haciendo su voluntad sobre la gente y las tierras’ (Mal de amores, p. 80). The death of the editor José Olmos y Contreras (Mal de amores, p. 81), was attributed to him (LaFrance, p. xxxiii). Martínez asked Díaz to ensure that prisoners were sent to remote prisons such as Yucatán (Mal de amores, p. 170). Even the 1910 elections were manipulated by the government to ensure that Madero did not triumph: ‘desde antes de las elecciones ya estaba claro que serían un fraude’ (Mal de amores, p. 204). In Puebla many anti-re-electionist sympathizers did not register to vote because they were fearful for their lives. Those who did register discovered that their names were missing from the voting lists. Others never received the documents which entitled them to vote (LaFrance, p. 36). This situation is reflected in Mal de amores: ‘ni Diego, ni Josefa, ni Milagros, aparecieron en las listas que por ley se publicaban en los periódicos ocho días antes de las votaciones primarias. Como ellos, muchos otros nunca recibieron las tarjetas que los autorizarían a votar’ (p. 204). Following the elections, police patrolled the streets of Puebla and many people were arrested. But the movement against the Porfirio political machine was impossible to suppress as Mastretta indicates: ‘entre semana, los tambores

the anti-Díaz cause. Madero himself came from one of Mexico’s richest families typifying the provincial elite that the old dictator had alienated towards the end of his career.


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escondidos el domingo llamaban a guerra de boca en boca y de carta en carta’ (Mal de amores, p. 82).13

The Failure of the Maderista Movement Although Mal de amores echoes the historical fervour of the nation in the grip of political revolution, it also portrays the strong disillusionment which followed early euphoria and triumphalism. Mastretta’s often ironic account succeeds in placing the revolution in perspective. Madero became president in 1911. Madero’s initial progress was promising but the movement failed to maintain and consolidate its power (LaFrance, p. xxxvi). Madero is sometimes depicted as a victim of circumstances beyond his control, as a sincere democrat who was unsuccessful because of conservative and foreign plotting, press opposition, the impatience of the Left and because of his own flawed idealism (LaFrance, p. 241). The empty rhetoric of maderismo was keenly resented in Puebla. Madero supported the Club Central at the expense of the anti-re-electionist Executive Electoral Committee; he tolerated the jailing of rebel officers and the deportation of labour activists; he interfered in various state and local affairs, including elections. He even tried to distort the history of his movement in order to justify the persecution of his followers in the state. The first fissures within the maderista movement in Puebla occurred when Madero formed an alliance with the moderate liberals from Puebla. This bypassed the radical groups represented by Aquiles Serdán. Serdán’s death at the hands of federal troops on 18 November 1910 (Mal de amores, pp. 211–15) triggered more internal divisions.14 Madero had won the election in May 1911 thanks to a combination of lower-class and radical middle-class support. But in government, Madero abandoned his natural

13 Garner, in Porfirio Díaz (London: Longman, 2001), identifies three broad categories in Porfirian historiography: Porfirismo, anti-Porfirismo and neo-Porfirismo. While Porfirismo can be understood as the representation of both Díaz and his regime in a positive light (p. 2), anti-Porfirismo emphasizes the authoritarianism and tyranny of a regime which distorted Mexico’s nineteenth-century liberal traditions (p. 6). For Garner the latter interpretation contributed to the mythification of the Revolution (p. 5). Neo-Porfirismo, the latest trend in historiographical orthodoxy, refers to the benevolent reinterpretation of the Díaz era. This re-evaluation coincides with current social and political trends in Mexico with its neoliberal endorsement of foreign investment, and an economy policy based on exports, hallmarks of Porfirian policy before 1910. Díaz did in fact achieve many things for his country such as great material development and national consolidation by maintaining order and stability in a nation defined by its dual political culture of authoritarianism and liberalism (pp. 222–9). The immediate demise of the porfiriato can be attributed to its own internal contradictions and tyrannical strategies seen by many as undemocratic and detrimental to the nation’s interest (p. 229). 14 See Wil Pansters, ‘Mexico and Puebla: a Historical Introduction’, in Politics and Power in Puebla: the Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987, Latin American Studies (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990), p. 39.


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supporters and sought to establish an outdated concept of democracy in a country which was experiencing the unsettling impact of socio-economic modernization (LaFrance, p. 242). The seeds of the Revolution’s own destructive impulse were evident before its actual outbreak (LaFrance, p. 237). In Mal de amores, both Milagros and Diego are sceptical about the prospects of meaningful change under the leadership of Madero. Diego wonders whether the candidacy of Madero with his ‘sueños espiritistas’ (p. 114) will ever succeed. For her part, Josefa believes – rather naively – that he will succeed because he looks like a man of peace: ‘porque tiene cara y actitud de paz’ (p. 114). Diego is appalled that his wife can be deceived by appearance and links her superficial approach to history with her superficial second-guessing of literary plots: ‘yo he reconocido siempre el talento con que puedes adivinar la trama de una novela, pero esto es distinto, no lo rige la lógica de la literatura en que tú eres experta: Madero va a perder’ (p. 115). It is rather ironic that he too is anticipating Madero’s failure. Diego expresses the view that the course of history can be manipulated and believes that the old dictator might intervene as he had in the past when General Reyes posed a threat to his power: porque Díaz quiso impresionar a un periodista gringo diciéndole cosas como que él acogería como un signo del cielo el hecho de que en su país surgiera un partido de oposición. [. . .] les duró poco el gusto [. . .] Díaz llamó a Reyes, Reyes [. . .] Negó su candidatura [. . .] Como premio le quitaron el gobierno de Nuevo León y lo mandaron a Europa a aprender nuevas técnicas de guerra. Es un zorro el famoso presidente Díaz. (pp. 115–16)

Madero quickly gained the reputation of being a poor leader. Mastretta describes his electoral campaign in Mal de amores as an ‘espectáculo’ (p. 221) where ‘los vivas a Madero corrían como un jolgorio y todo era un bullicio sin orden y sin tregua’ (p. 223). Mastretta subordinates his visit – ‘Madero cruzó el aire unos minutos’ (p. 225) – to the melodramatic encounter between Emilia and Daniel which she describes with some irony: hasta Rivadeneira y su cámara quedaron envueltos en la euforia de tanta gente celebrando una esperanza. Nada era cierto todavía, más que el futuro. De ahí para adelante estaban solo los límites de un sueño, y por entonces pocos imaginaban que nada es tan limitado como un sueño que se cumple. (pp. 225–26)

Despite his landslide triumph, Madero was soon faced with revolt. Daniel, ‘harto de representar la tibieza maderista’ (p. 263) joins the opposition to a government which was not fulfilling its promises of change: No querían una paz de a mentiras, no podían salirle a su gente con que tras tanto muerto y tanto grito, los peones seguirían siendo peones y las haciendas tendrían los mismos dueños. No había palabra, ni mensaje, ni orden con los que convencer a los campesinos de quedarse conformes y en las mismas. (p. 263)


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These groups contributed to the continuation of the violent struggle in Mexico until the end of the Revolution in 1917, leaving the nation exhausted and disillusioned.

‘Arráncame la vida’ Arráncame la vida is set in Puebla in the 1930s and 1940s.15 Following the demise of Francisco Madero in 1913, Mexico became embroiled in a bloody power struggle marked by shifting alliances and competing ideologies under the leadership of Lascuráin, Huerta, Carbajal, Carranza and others. During the early and late twenties there was an atmosphere of instability caused by the fact that the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 failed to satisfy the needs of the majority of Mexicans. The late 1920s through to the 1940s is marked by widespread disillusion with the institutionalization of the Revolution. Some reforms were implemented which complied with the rules of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 such as those concerning land reform, but there remained much public cynicism about the revolution and its capacity to achieve meaningful social changes. Towards the end of the 1920s tensions between regional and federal power groups increased (Pansters, p. 41). The Cárdenas presidency (1934–40) implemented far-reaching social and political reforms but was itself not immune to corruption. President Cárdenas’s large-scale political reforms facilitated significant changes in agricultural policy. In the early 1940s Mexico was experiencing the process of modernization and industrialization. According to Pansters, the ‘sociopolitical transformations of the 1930s laid the foundation for the succeeding economic “miracle”, which in turn contributed to the consolidation and stability of the political system during the post-war period’ (p. 77).16 Nevertheless under Cárdenas, organized labour was manipulated by the government whose expropri15 It is of no surprise that Mastretta has chosen the mythification of the institutional Revolution of the 1930s and 1940s as a central point of reference for Arráncame la vida. Although the novel was published almost 45 years after the events described in the text, the legacy of the Mexican Revolution was still felt in the 1980s in Mexico. In the 1980s land redistribution programmes were planned as a result of the Revolution but still were not fully enacted. Living standards in Mexico were falling and social inequality was increasing. Under President de la Madrid (1982–1988), attempts to liberalize the economy were sincere but ineffective and his promise to promote political reform and to open up the prevalent authoritarian system came to nothing. The year 1987 was the last year of de la Madrid’s sexenio and in both political and economic terms, his last months in office were tumultuous. By the end of the 1980s the PRI had been in power for over 60 years and undemocratic practices such as vote rigging continued unchecked. The military remained a powerful institution, but political leadership was transferred to lawyers and professional politicians. Corruption and murder were an intrinsic part of the political machine. 16 Decisions taken at that time affected the future direction and orientation of Mexico’s economic and social development – as Héctor Aguilar Camín has pointed out: ‘Lo que llamamos hoy el Milagro Mexicano fue una mezcla eficaz de dominación política tradicional —-clientelar, paternal, centralizada, autoritaria– puesto al servicio de un proyecto económico particularmente exitoso——modernizador, industrial, urbano, capitalista.’ Aguilar Camín quoted


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ation of the foreign oil companies had resulted in damaging repercussions. Many foreign countries broke off diplomatic links with Mexico. But Cárdenas managed to pay his debts – thanks to the contributions of the masses in Mexico which included workers giving away part of their modest wages and women donating jewellery. Even the Church, with its history of hostility towards the government, approved of this national fund-raising effort. This event is powerfully depicted in Arráncame la vida (p. 56). There was much resentment towards foreigners at this time and antiyanquismo became an important literary theme. The socio-political commotion at national level between 1920 and 1940 was reflected in the regions. Maximino Ávila Camacho’s governorship heralded a new period of Puebla history in the mid-1930s which came to be known as the era of the cacicazgo avilacamachismo. In 1935, following the deportation of Calles, Cárdenas’s reorganization of jefes militares in order to fortify his position in Mexico led to Maximino Ávila Camacho’s position as the new jefe militar in Puebla in 1935 (Pansters, p. 47). Once Maximino assumed this post he started to reorganize the first layers of what would become a long-lasting power structure. Maximino restructured the military organization and was able to form a rural para-military force which would support him for many years to come. The mid-1930s were marked by many clashes between two political factions, one led by Maximino Ávila Camacho and Gonzalo Bautista Castillo and the other by Gilberto Bosques and Leonides Andrew Almazán, who fought for the nomination of a new governor and senator in the state of Puebla. But the Ávila Camacho clan resorted to questionable practices to remain in power by using the support of various local newspapers and congresses and resorting to violence – a wave of violence against the opposition which resulted in various deaths. Maximino’s nomination as the governor of Puebla was seen by Cárdenas as a powerful strategy for his political stronghold. This of course is connected with the fact that Cárdenas and Maximino’s brother Manuel, who in 1933 had become Official Mayor of the Secretariat of National Defense, had a close relationship. According to Pansters, the personalist relations between avilacamachistas and Cárdenas ironically contradicted the ideals of cardenismo which favoured full-scale institutionalization and bureaucratization. In this respect, Ávila Camacho’s governorship exemplifies some of the excesses of caciquismo since it was marked by continual violence against political adversaries.17

in Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), p. 89. 17 According to Pansters (p. 74) avilacamachismo was marked by ‘a predilection for informal clientelistic networks through the appointment of family members and friends on crucial political positions; the shrewd manipulation of meanings in the avilacamachista discourse and the performance of a mediating role on dealing with the national powerholder (Cárdenas) and the local populace’. Maximino’s governorship represented contradictory ideals and was riddled with nepotism and corruption, but it formed the first stable post-revolutionary power bloc in Puebla. Indeed, following the nomination of Maximino, avilacamachismo would dominate Puebla for the next 35 years.


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Towards the end of the Cárdenas régime in 1940 political power became centralized in Mexico City but the caudillo system survived, as demonstrated by the Ávila Camacho brothers. Like many soldiers, they were looking for power. Both Maximino and Manuel had used their military profession as a steppingstone to political office – a pattern frequently repeated in the post-Cárdenas era. Once in power, Maximino soon started to appoint family and friends to key positions in Puebla and within the party bureaucracy. Maximino abused his power – unlike his brother Manuel who was considered an affable man. He was a womanizer (as was Andrés in Arráncame la vida) who dispensed public funds at will. Maximino prevented many collaborators from building their own clientele so that he might become the most important figure within the clientelistic network. (Pansters, p. 74). His hold on power was consolidated by political control freakery and careful cultivation of his links with the bourgeoisie which were further strengthened by his daughter’s marriage (Pansters, p. 61 and p. 63). In Arráncame la vida, Andrés forces his daughter, Lilia, to marry into an affluent family (Ch. XX). Like many corrupt men in positions of power, Maximino remained immune to journalistic and judicial pressures. Maximino Ávila Camacho helped his brother Manuel to become president of Mexico in 1940. Any semblance of democracy was extinguished by authoritarian, nepotistic rule. Under Ávila Camacho, inflation grew and the affluent bourgeoisie increased their wealth by questionable practices, but the nation moved forward. Mastretta attacks Maximino Ávila Camacho. His unprincipled practices are represented in Arráncame la vida, notably through her portrayal of his fictional counterpart, the unprincipled Andrés Ascencio, who allows no moral consideration to interfere with his ruthless pursuit of power. This will be examined in depth in Chapter Three.

Literary Fathers: The Mexican Revolutionary Novel The critical period of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath runs deeply through the literature of Mexico. The unrest of the Revolutionary period itself deeply influenced writers who tried to capture the great social changes that were taking place around them, and this influence can be felt even today. The novel relating to Mexico’s history often offers an alternative vision to official history as well as being a receptacle for the uncertainties of Mexican consciousness, the testing ground for questions about the identity of Mexican culture. Nowhere is the male domination of Mexican society portrayed more vividly than in the literature, particularly the Revolutionary literature, of the nation. Yet Mastretta’s novels, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores – similarly to the novels of other contemporary Mexican female writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Silvia Molina – are central to a living literary tradition, drawing their inspiration from the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and from Testimonial writing. Although their feminist perspective is distinctive, their


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work can still be seen as part of this tradition.18 A brief survey of the canonical texts of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel will enable us to contextualize the work of Ángeles Mastretta, whose writing has been heavily influenced by such literary currents as costumbrismo, Romanticism, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel (with its neorealist, testimonial and journalistic techniques) and the New Historical novel. When critics talk about the ‘novel of the Mexican Revolution’ – as John Rutherford points out – their interpretation is usually significantly different from that of other critics.19 For some critics, such as F. Rand Morton, the term Mexican Revolutionary Novel can be applied to any text that embodies the rather vague notion of ‘espíritu de lo mexicano’;20 John Rutherford, on the other hand, gives the term concrete significance, relating it to ‘those basically artistic wideranging prose narratives written by Mexicans which deal in their entirety or in a part of considerable importance with events which took place in Mexico between November 1910 and February 1917’ although they need not ‘necessarily deal with military actions’ (p. 46). Ángeles Mastretta’s novel Mal de amores clearly pertains to this last category, for she focuses almost entirely on the events of the upheaval and although she makes passing historical references to the actual military action, she does not deal with it directly apart from, for example, the assassination of the historical figure Aquiles Serdán (Mal de amores, pp. 209–15). The Mexican Revolution marked the start of new attitudes among novelists which extended far beyond the ‘creolism’ of an earlier generation and helped shape a tradition which would culminate with the great regionalist novels of the 1920s. The Mexican Revolutionary Novel, which dominated the first half of the twentieth century, engages with the question of identity – which is paramount in Mexico, as it is elsewhere in Spanish America (Portal, p. 12). Its focus remains firmly fixed on social injustice while racial, linguistic and geographical diversity

18 In Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (1977), Marta Portal points to the importance of the impact of the Revolution on twentieth-century Mexican fiction: ‘La Revolución Mexicana dio el ser a la novela mexicana del presente siglo, sea ésta revolucionaria o no.’ Marta Portal, Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1977), pp. 15–16. 19 See John Rutherford, Mexican Society During the Revolution: A Literary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 45–6, and ‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: the Twentieth Century, eds R. González Echevarría and E. P. Walker, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 213–26. The Mexican Revolution itself is susceptible to many interpretations, for it was at once an anticlerical, bourgeois, proletarian, social and cultural movement, a power struggle in which ideologies differ. The fact that there were shifting alliances adds to the complexity of the Revolution. As a result of this ambiguity and instability, the Revolution offered writers a wealth of material which could be exploited from different perspectives, which in turn, offer critics the possibility to interpret their works from various angles. 20 See F. R. Morton, Los novelistas de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Cultura, 1949), pp. 13–25.


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were celebrated as an expression of difference.21 The Revolution changed the social and intellectual climate of the country and the literary response, though often technically limited, was remarkable for drawing inspiration from lived experience rather than exclusively from European sources. In keeping with the style of testimonial narrative, much of the writing is non-literary and therefore confined to the literary margins: documentary modes of writing such as documentation and (occasionally) autobiography leave little room for mythical allusion or for stylistic experimentation. None the less the diversity of the discourses it employs places the Mexican Revolutionary Novel directly in line with postmodern testimonial narratives such as those of Poniatowska and Mastretta. Mastretta’s interest in the Mexican Revolution, in the implications of its institutionalization and in indigenous cultures on the one hand, and her use of both stark dialogue and lyrical description on the other, indicate her broad affinity with the writers of the Mexican Revolution.22 Most critics point to the dominance of ethical questions over aesthetic considerations in pre-1925 texts. It is true that the vast majority of these early novels show little technical awareness but there are, as always, exceptions to the rule such as the pioneering testimonial novel, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela (1873–1952). Mexican Modernism offered a strong social message but was also notable for its experimentation, and its use of ambiguity and fantasy. Mariano Azuela’s employment of such techniques foreshadows the works of later Mexican writers, including Ángeles Mastretta.23 After 1925, literature following the Revolution was generally defective in technique. Structure and writers in the main showed little concern with social problems. Indeed, escapist

21

See Jean Franco, ‘Regionalism in the Novel and Short Story’, in An Introduction to Spanish-American literature, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 193–4. 22 While acknowledging continuities between the various currents of twentieth-century writing, contemporary critics make a clear distinction between the representatives of the Regionalist novel and those authors writing after the 1940s, the decade which marked the emergence of the New Novel. Earlier commentators took the view that the Regionalist novels bore little or no influence on later writing and some critics remain openly dismissive of pre1940 texts. D. P Gallagher, for example, states that the reader is no longer treated like an ‘incompetent simpleton for whom the aim of a novel had to be spelt out on every page. The new novelists rather trust the reader’s intelligence and invite his active participation. He must disentangle the novel’s complexities [. . .] life is puzzling, so why should not a novel be?’ Modern Latin American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1973), p. 92. Also see Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Primitives and Creators’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1968, pp. 1287–8, and Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, eds John Dunkerley et al., Critical Studies in Latin American Culture (London: Verso, 1989), p. 38. For a survey of works up to the late 1940s see J. F. Arias Campoamor, Novelistas de Méjico: esquema de la historia de la novela mejicana (de Lizardi al 1950) (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1952). 23 Although Los de abajo was first published in serial form in El Paso, Texas, Azuela’s subsequent revisions show that, in its final form, it is a carefully planned narrative and anticipates later postmodern writing.


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fiction of the novela rosa variety was soon in the ascendant; perhaps the Revolution was too recent and stirred memories too poignant to be confronted directly. But Mexican writers gradually saw a need to come to terms with social change through a reassessment of the past. With the growing awareness of the importance of ‘the meaning of being Mexican’, sociocultural reassessment began in earnest in 1925 when attention focused on the meaning of lo revolucionario and the concept of a modern literature was seriously debated.24 The ‘afeminamiento’ of literature was linked with the demand to create ‘una literatura “viril” y “mexicana” ’ (Díaz Arciniega, p. 16) representative of Mexico’s immediate sociohistorical and political realities. A deep sense of social responsibility, conditioned by Marxist ideology, had developed in Mexican writing and prevails to this day in Mexican fiction.25 One of the most significant novels in the development of this genre is El águila y la serpiente (1928) (NRM, I, pp. 209–423) by Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976). It is an account of revolutionary activity and could best be described as a literary documentary in that Guzmán does not fictionalize his narration and uses the journalistic technique of recording more or less directly the testimonies of various people he encountered. Guzmán’s sustained aesthetic distance permits him to have a clearer vision of recent history, which anticipates the central thrust of testimonial narratives. A direct link between the work of Guzmán and Mastretta’s narrative may be seen in the way in which grand historical events are often subordinated to the personal and private. Mastretta acknowledges her affinity with Guzmán: ‘Yo tengo gran admiración por él por el modo en que cuenta, por el modo en que trivializa la política, y el modo en que la vuelve crucial también, en que sabe que es crucial’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 330). Guzmán is not concerned with actual battles but offers a series of often humorous anecdotes of personal experience of the Revolution. However, as a middle-class writer Guzmán was somewhat removed from the popular feelings and expectations generated by the Revolution.26

24 See V. Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), p. 16. 25 Brushwood sees social realism as a response to the dissipation of Revolutionary ideals by successive governments which showed greater enthusiasm for political power than for the welfare of the people – at least until the Cárdenas era. This naturally led to the disenchantment of Revolutionaries and writers who increasingly turned to introspection and social analysis. See J. S Brushwood, Mexico in its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 202. 26 Another important author of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition is Rafael F. Muñoz (1899–1972) whose employment of journalistic, biographical and Bildungsroman techniques (Se llevaron el cañón para Bachimba (NRM, II, pp. 781–856) (1941)), his linear chronological account of events, his use of popular discourse and the collective perspective (¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (NRM, II, pp. 691–778)) and the greater psychological depth he gives his characters all foreshadow the techniques employed by testimonial writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Ángeles Mastretta.


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Many authors of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel questioned the relevance of a Revolution which had had little impact on a corrupt society in which disadvantage and depravation appeared to be worse than ever (Rutherford 1971, p. 67). Mastretta, as we have already seen, is also concerned with portraying a less than idealistic picture of the Mexican Revolution and its frequently devastating effect on the middle- and lower-classes. According to John Rutherford, the negative vision offered by the novelists of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel could be attributed to the exhaustion of the Revolution as a viable literary topic in the 1940s (1996, p. 225). However, the prevalence of the Revolution in subsequent prose fiction indicates otherwise. Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1947) signals a continuing interest in the topic of the Mexican Revolution.27 Critics have drawn attention to its innovative techniques in the style of Faulkner, Joyce and Dos Passos, which foreshadow the experimentation of the Boom generation. Sexuality versus religion, temptation versus chastity, basic human instincts versus social taboo are relatively fresh thematic configurations all treated by Yáñez. Foreshadowing a recurrent theme found in Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores, Yáñez portrays the quest for sexual freedom and the desire to adopt an uninhibited life style linked to the yearning for political change.28 In this sense Yáñez might be seen as setting the standard in the literary depiction of the revolution: short-term pessimism is not allowed to obscure the more positive long-term prospects. As we shall see in Chapters Four and Five, though manifestly judicious of the Revolution, the optimism in Mal de amores derives from the hopes for change that the Revolution will bring. Later writers who have enriched the Mexican Revolutionary Novel include Juan Rulfo (1918–86) and Carlos Fuentes (1928). Rulfo’s El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955) together with Carlos Fuentes’ La región más trasparente (1958) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) introduce greater experimentation, including archetypal patterning and stream of consciousness.29 27 See A. Yáñez, Al filo del agua, 15th edn (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1978). Marta Portal has classified Yáñez’s work as ‘la otra novela de la Revolución’ (1977, p. 165) since it reflects ‘un nuevo aspecto del nacionalismo [. . .] es una respuesta histórica, acaso inconsciente, a la religión del señor, del conquistador, impuesta a la fuerza, como lo fue la lengua’ (1977, p. 173). Yáñez’s novel is representative of the so-called New Novel which – according to Vargas Llosa – was inaugurated in 1939 with the publication of Juan Carlos Onetti’s El Pozo. See ‘Primitives and Creators’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1968, 1287–8 (p. 1287). The experimental New Novel can be seen as essentially a literary movement which reacted against traditional Realism and conventional representations of reality that were found, for example, in the early Mexican Revolutionary Novel. 28 Indeed, although the Revolution seems to play only a peripheral role, the title – meaning ‘just before the rain’ – suggests the contrary: rain brings more fertile times. See John Hall, ‘A Fuenteovejuna for the Sandinistas?: Some Thoughts on Antonio Skármeta’s La insurrección’, Tesserae, 1: 3 (1995), 337–45 (p. 338). 29 Juan Rulfo: El llano en llamas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953) and Pedro Páramo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955). Carlos Fuentes: La región más transparente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962).


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The works of both these writers concentrate on the historical issues of the Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary years and represent a more pessimistic view than the earlier Mexican Revolutionary novels. They offer a deconstruction of the national myth of Revolution and a critique of post-revolutionary Mexico and are much preoccupied with the theme of Mexican identity, which had been theorized by Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in his El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Texts which continue the Mexican Revolution tradition in the sixties include Los relámpagos de agosto (1964) by Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928–1983)30 and José Trigo (1966) by Fernando del Paso (1935–).31 Ibargüengoitia introduces an element of originality and ‘freshness’ to the theme of Revolution. Rather than depicting the failure of Revolution in the mode of Fuentes and his predecessors, Ibargüengoitia adopts a more playful Post-Boom approach in his caricature of the Mexican Revolution. The novel is described as ‘el reverso humorístico de la novela de la Revolución’ in the introductory note to the 1964 edition of Los relámpagos de agosto which questions the heroic status which many of the revolutionary leaders have since acquired. Ibargüengoitia’s carnivalesque exaggeration and his trivialization of politics foreshadow the often playful PostBoom approach of Ángeles Mastretta as seen in Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores. As we shall see further on (pp. 78–83), female testimonial novels such as Arráncame la vida and Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío may have emerged partly in response to Ibargüengoitia’s sardonic views of the possible ideas and causes behind the Revolution.

Literary Mothers and Daughters: Dissonant Women Disrupt Male History The corpus of Mexican Revolutionary texts has been produced in the main by male writers. Nevertheless, there are many female writers who have also written, and continue to write, on such wide-ranging issues as the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Many of the texts produced by Mexican female writers manifest broad similarities with the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, particularly in its

30

Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Los relámpagos de agosto (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1964). For an analysis of Del Paso’s work see Marta Portal’s Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (1977, pp. 237–47) and Robin W. Fiddian’s The Novels of Fernando del Paso (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2000). Del Paso’s novels are particularly interesting since they exemplify various New Historical features which can be seen as a possible influence on Mastretta’s own works. Mastretta clearly shows a strong interest in Del Paso’s work as indicated in her interwiew with the author in ‘Ecos del imperio: Una conversación de Fernando del Paso y Ángeles Mastretta’ in 1989 published in Nexos. See http://www.nexos.com.mx/archivo_nexos, Nexos Virtual, July 1989: no. 138. (accessed 4:30 pm, 23 Dec. 2001). In addition to crime fiction, testimonial narrative and women’s writing, the New Historical novel emerged in Latin America as an important feature in the 1980s, represented by Fernando del Paso’s monumental Noticias del imperio (1987). Among the novels written in the same tradition are El general en su laberinto (1989) by García Márquez (b.1928) and Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores (1996). 31


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ideological and historical outlook. However they differ in the way they feminize the historical space. Adriana Litwin applies this term specifically to Mal de amores, but it can be applied to the vast majority, if not to all, of the texts written by Mexican female writers to be discussed in this section. Mal de amores feminizes the national historical space which, according to Rivera Villegas, ‘ha sido construido, representado y sacralizado por sus respectivas sociedades patriarcales’.32 Rivera Villegas uses the term feminizar as a means of demonstrating that writers such as Mastretta, Poniatowska and others ‘privilegian la psicología, las experiencias y la conducta del ser femenino para representar literariamente un aspecto histórico, cuya representación ha sido reservada exclusivamente para la supuesta seriedad y profesionalismo crítico de la cultura masculina’ (p. 9). Villegas refers to an interview with Adriana Litwin where Mastretta considers the issue concerning female power: ‘Yo creo que lo que pasa es que hay que impregnar de algo femenino el espacio público. Se van volviendo mejores cuando esto sucede a tanto mujeres como hombres.’33 Later in the same interview, Mastretta echoes the views she expressed to me about the feminist dictum that the private is the public and the personal the political: hay que llevar lo privado al mundo público; los hombres no expresan con facilidad sus emociones, no dudan en voz alta, no temen en voz alta, no lloran ostensiblemente. Yo creo que a la vida pública le hace falta eso, nos hace falta que quienes gobiernen duden, así serían más democráticos los gobiernos. (Villegas, p. 46, n. 1)

History has typically been the sphere appropriated by male writing where women ‘sólo aparecen representando un papel ínfimo y desfigurado por estereotipos y arquetipos que difuminan su realidad histórica’ (Villegas, p. 37). But female culture remains pivotal in the construction and reconstruction of history. From this perspective: la mujer, como agente socializadora, es manipulada por las fuerzas progresistas y liberales de su nación para transmitir los esquemas y los programas ideológicos que adelantan la causa política de la cultura patriarcal en cuestión. De ahí [. . .] se convierten (las mujeres) en historiadoras comunales y nacionales, no privilegiadas por la oficialidad masculina pero sumamente necesarias para la formación cultural de los ciudadanos. Sin embargo, además de llevar a cabo la tarea de criar patriotas, muchas mujeres han dedicado su vida a causas políticas, que las han llevado a cruzar la frontera de lo privado hacia lo público. Es aquí cuando se inicia el conflicto que enfrenta contra la cultura patriarcal

32 Carmen M. Rivera Villegas, ‘Las mujeres y la Revolución Mexicana en Mal de amores de Ángeles Mastretta’, Letras Femeninas, 24: 1–2 (1998), 37–48 (p. 37). 33 Rivera Villegas (p. 46, note 1) and Adriana Litwin’s interview with Mastretta entitled ‘Lo privado y lo público según Ángeles Mastretta’. La feria del Libro de Buenos Aires, May 10, 1997, http//www.bigital.com (Last accessed: 20 Dec. 2004).


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nacionalista ya que para ésta la mujer tiene que hacer patria pero desde la casa. (Villegas, p. 38)

As Villegas indicates, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel is representative of lo mexicano and employs the stereotypical concept of woman as the vehicle for the transmission of ideological discourse. The central characters of these male writers are habitually male and very few writers – with the exception of Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Laura Esquivel and now Ángeles Mastretta – have focused on women’s experience in revolutionary and post revolutionary Mexico. In the past, historical narratives have focused solely on the exploits of men and ignored the female contribution. However, recent publications have gone some way towards correcting this imbalance, as will be seen. Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México (1931, NRM, I, p. 929) is the best-known female revolutionary novel of the 1930s.34 Campobello (1909–1986) narrates from the perspective of an innocent child (as does Rafael F. Muñoz) the events of the upheaval. Nellie Campobello can be seen as the outstanding precursor of testimonial writers such as Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Ángeles Mastretta. Cartucho has strong testimonial features – oral narrative based on lived experience of the Mexican Revolution told from a first-person perspective (a child). The prominence accorded to a marginal figure anticipates the New Historical practice. As Rutherford remarks (‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, p. 223) the artistic power of the novel lies in the juxtaposition of the violence of the Revolution and innocence which is achieved through brief, matter-of-fact descriptions of the war and the memories of the female narrator as a child. Furthermore, the fragmented voices in Cartucho, which Campobello recorded from the testimonies of people who lived through the upheaval, foreshadows the testimonial techniques employed by Castellanos in Balún Canán (1957). Cartucho’s employment of the first-person narrative not only represents the individual ‘I’, the child Nellie, but as Doris Meyer points out, the Mexican pueblo.35 An important aspect of Cartucho (as of Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! and Se llevaron el cañón para 34 Nellie Campobello is the only woman writer of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition to be included in official volumes such as J. Rutherford’s ‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: The Twentieth Century, 3. vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 213–26. 35 Doris Meyer, ‘The Dialogics of Testimony: Autobiography as Shared Experience in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho’, in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, Oxford Hispanic Studies (Oxford: Calderon Press, 1996), pp. 46–65 (p. 53). Meyer observes that through the work’s multiple perspectives, Campobello ‘colectivizes her testimony and shares the narrative function with others. The true protagonist thus becomes the pueblo’ (p. 53). Such collectivization of the narrative voice is not found in Arráncame la vida nor indeed in Mal de amores, although the latter work does represent the voice of the pueblo, notably in its treatment of the soldaderas.


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Bachimba) is that it often diverts attention from ‘official’ history, dominated by great historical figures such as Villa or Madero, to the story of ‘ordinary’ people. In her narrative, Campobello repeatedly refers to alternative versions of historical events, and her emphasis on the multifaceted nature of reality anticipates postmodern writing. Her personalization of history links Campobello to Mastretta. Texts produced by female writers on the topic of Revolution prior to Campobello’s pioneering work are limited.36 Their texts, like Campobello’s, show little interest in feminist issues. Rather, like many of the early Mexican Revolution novelists, these female authors were intent on portraying the Mexican Revolution as they had experienced it and portraying the psychological impact of the upheaval on the pueblo rather than on the individual. Their lack of interest in feminist matters may be linked to the fact that between 1850 and 1950 Mexican feminism had little impact on traditional attitudes towards women.37 Until very recently Mexican feminists had to fight against severe odds in order to modify the role of women, and enable them to contribute more significantly to society and politics. Previously their influence was limited to the ‘narrow yet crucial sphere of the home’ (Macías, p. xiii). Various factors explain the limited impact of Mexican feminism on women and writers. Machismo is of course one of the main problems (Macías, p. xiii). Mexican sociologist, María Elvira Bermúdez, states that ‘if Spain has her Don Juan, and England her Othello, Mexico has her machos. And these, without a doubt, are more punctilious than Othello and less suitable than Don Juan’.38 Women, have accepted their role as ‘champions of suffering’, passively allowing their men to play a dominant and domineering role.39 Although women in Mexico started at the beginning of the twentieth century to fight for suffrage approximately at the same time as their North American and European counterparts, they encountered various events and obstacles which frustrated the accomplishment of feminist objectives and the development of a strong feminist movement.40 During the porfiriato regime, women had few

36 Other women who have written on the subject of Revolution include: María Enriqueta Camarillo de Pereyra, Rosa de Castaño and Magdalena Mondragón. De Castaño’s work is notable for its costumbrista description of regional customs. 37 See Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940, Contributions in Women’s Studies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. xiii. 38 Anna Macías (p. 3) and María Elvira Bermúdez, La vida familiar del mexicano, México y lo mexicano, 20 (México: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1955), p. 86. 39 Anna Macías (p. 3) and Juana Armanda Alegría, Psicología de las mexicanas (México: Editorial Samo, 1974), p. 180. In the 1880s the Mexican church discouraged feminism for it was seen as destructive of traditional values. Between 1900 and 1930 women received almost no support from the government and the national leaders were indifferent to feminism or suspicious of it because of prevailing machismo (Macías, p. xiv). 40 In 1904 women started to organize themselves. The publication of feminist journals such as Mujer Mexicana (1904) which demanded greater educational opportunities for women and an end to the sexual double standards, also helped raise female consciousness. Although


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political rights. Male opponents assumed politics would continue to be an exclusively male preserve and saw women as too emotional and therefore too politically unreliable. Political activity would corrupt women and impede their duties as wives and mothers (Macías, p. 153).41 The Mexican Revolution, however, was to have a significant impact on the growing feminist cause.42 In ‘Women and the Mexican Revolution: 1910–20’, Macías alludes to a Mexican census in 1910 indicating that females made up only 8.8 per cent of the economically active population (p. 60).43 The Revolution however gave women the incentive to participate actively in the economic development of the country. The vital role women played in the Revolution contributed to the emergent feminist cause which started to take shape towards the end of the nineteenth century. A large number of peasant and lower urban class women became soldaderas, and participated in the military struggle. Even middle- and upper-class women became involved in the anti-porfirista movement. Turner explains the impact of female participation: ‘la técnica militar permitió que la mujer portara armas sin dificultad y es así como las soldaderas vinieron a pelear al lado de los hombres en los ejércitos revolucionarios’ (p. 603). Other women who were not in the front line also contributed indirectly. They worked as doctors, journalists, teachers, secretaries, spies, weapon smugglers and businesswomen proving themselves to be as strong as any man: ‘los avances asociados con la Revolución Industrial le proporcionaron un sinnúmero de empleos detrás de las líneas, y en ellos probó ser tan capaz como el hombre’ (p. 603). Emilia (Mal de amores) contributes to the revolutionary cause through her work as a doctor. Her contribution to the struggle often overshadows that of her novio, Daniel, as will be shown in Chapter Four. In spite of the predominance of machismo, some revolutionary leaders encouraged women’s participation in the Revolution. In their desire to abolish

there was considerable support for feminist ideals and some legislative effort to improve women’s position in Mexican society, the full recognition of women as equal citizens proved elusive. According to Accettola, one of the prime reasons that Mexican women were denied the right to vote was the belief, or rather excuse, of the strong anti-clerical Revolutionary leaders that the Catholic Church would control the government through its female support (p. 1). It was not until 1927, however, that women achieved legal equality with men. See Jennifer. R. Accettola, ‘La flor de un sexenio: Women in Contemporary Politics’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tulane, 1995; Dissertation Abstracts, 1995, 1376436, http://www.planetx.org, (Last accessed: 10 Sept. 2004), p. 1. 41 But many women themselves were not in favour of female enfranchisement. The press ridiculed feminism and feminist activities were virtually ignored. Most Mexican feminists were middle-class and had to work for a living. They neither had the means nor the time to devote themselves to organizing a feminist movement or raising female consciousness (Macías, Against All Odds, p. xv). 42 According to Turner, the Revolution changed the whole social structure and the nature of nationalism. See Frederic C. Turner: ‘Los efectos de la participación femenina en la revolución de 1910’, Historia Mexicana, 16: 61–4 (1966–67), 603–20. 43 See Anna Macías, ‘Women and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920’, Americas, 37:1 (1981), 53–82 (p. 60).


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Porfirismo and incorporate liberal values in Mexican society, the revolutionary leaders promised women equal rights and privileges in recognition of their important participation in the upheaval (Turner, p. 608). They also promulgated laws which would support women by eradicating practices such as prostitution. As depicted in Mal de amores, the effects of the Revolution on women were not always positive: hundreds of women of every class were among the rape and casualty victims of the upheaval (Turner, p. 617). After the Mexican Revolution, the Constitution of 1917 gave little consideration to political rights of women but Carranza’s divorce decree of 1915 had at least improved women’s legal status (Accettola, p. 8). In practice, however, women remained dependent on their husbands, as the case of Catalina (Arráncame la vida) indicates. In the 1920s and 1930s several Mexican states allowed women to vote and hold office at municipal level. During the Lázaro Cárdenas régime (1934–40), women played important roles in national political life (Accettola, p. 9). In Arráncame la vida, Mastretta talks about about women who are depicted as having little say in public life. It offers quite a faithful representation of the historical circumstances of women in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless Mastretta alludes briefly in Arráncame la vida to women’s right to vote at municipal level: ‘En casi todos los estados las mujeres no tenían ni el pendejo derecho al voto que Carmen Serdán había ganado en Puebla. Por primera vez éramos la avanzada, así que el 7 de julio amanecí más elegante que nunca’ (p. 107). Although in this instance Catalina knows that her husband’s associate Fito will win the elections, she votes for the opposition, as a means of opposing her husband and expressing her independence (p. 107). It is only in the past forty years or so that women’s participation in the Revolution has become recognized as an important factor contributing to social change. According to Turner the origins of Mexican feminism have been traced – belatedly – to women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle. Mujeres de todas las clases sociales en México de hoy consideran a la Revolución de 1910 como la iniciadora de sus derechos políticos y de su emancipación social. [. . .] Estudios sobre la psicología de la mujer mexicana que enfatizan su pasividad, sumisión y obediencia familiar, describen no obstante su osadía y encuentran en la Adelita y la Valentina, heroínas legendarias de la lucha revolucionaria, la esencia de la feminidad mexicana. (p. 616)

The incorporation of women in the military campaign helped them assume positions of responsibility in many fields traditionally reserved for men (Turner, p. 616). Since 1953 – when they were granted equal rights and privileges of citizenship – women have been making their mark on Mexican politics (Accettola, p. 1). Today, women enjoy the right to vote and to divorce and their presence in the workforce has encouraged changes in social attitudes. There are growing numbers of women with degrees in politics and law who are playing a full part in the professional life of the nation. However the cult of machismo, which has hindered social change and renewal throughout Latin America, persists in Mexico.


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Even today, women who do not marry suffer social stigma. Gender prejudices have proved resistant to change and domestic violence is still commonplace, particularly in working class households. While male involvement in extra marital affairs is tolerated, no such indulgence is shown to women who transgress in the same way. Nevertheless, patriarchy’s configuration of Mexican history has been disturbed, changed by a recent awareness of women’s presence and recognition of their contributions. This recognition can be attributed in part to Mexican feminist writers who are at pains to write women into history and to celebrate women’s emancipation during and after the Revolution. The work of Elena Garro (1920–1998) Mexican novelist, journalist and dramatist, and an established Boom writer, continues the main thrust of the Mexican revolutionary novel. Garro’s influence on writers such as Poniatowska, Mastretta, Molina and Esquivel runs deep, particularly her playful and parodic inversion of gender roles. Like Rosario Castellanos, Garro has signalled new directions in women’s writing by offering female alternatives to history. In the vein of many of the Mexican Revolutionary novels, Garro’s work offers a poignant social focus by highlighting the failure of the Revolution and exposing the opportunism of political power. Garro’s masterpiece, Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), can be seen as an important precursor of the feminist and New Historical currents as exemplified in the work of Poniatowska, Molina and Mastretta.44 In Los recuerdos del porvenir, historical event often takes second place to more personal situations such as Julia’s unrequited love for General Francisco Rosas. Other examples are seen in the way Calles’ desire for re-election is mentioned ‘casi con frivolidad’ (p. 98). This technique is frequently exploited by Mastretta in Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, where the political is relegated to the margins in favour of depicting the private lives of the characters. Garro’s female characters keep alive the individual and collective memory of the past – as do Mastretta’s women in Mujeres de ojos grandes (p. 186) and Mal de amores (p. 261) – although their scant contribution to female emancipation, aligns them rather with Castellanos’s ineffectual female characters.45

44 Los recuerdos del porvenir is an intricate novel which tells the story of reality and unreality surrounding the town of Ixtepec which speaks of itself in the first-person. The protagonist in Los recuerdos del porvenir is not an individual but rather the town and the novel can be seen as an early example of ‘feminine magical realism’ – to be developed later by writers such as Isabel Allende. Garro’s work enriches the Mexican Revolutionary Novel as well as magical realism. The villagers of Itxtepec are anti-revolutionary and are literally caught in a time warp: Garro uses fantasy to make serious historical points. For an examination of the magical realist and New Historical techniques employed by Garro, see Daniel Balderston, ‘The New Historical Novel: History and Fantasy in Los recuerdos del porvenir’, BHS, 66 (1989), 41–46, (p. 42). Balderston argues that the novel is groundbreaking in its use of the fantastic to undermine historicity. 45 Stephen Hart also sees Garro’s novel, like the short stories of Rosario Castellanos, as holding out little hope for the female cause. In Los recuerdos del porvenir, women seem to be destined to be the losers in the gender conflict. See White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century


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Rosario Castellanos (1925–74) also continues the tradition of the Mexican revolutionary novel in her pessimistic views regarding the institutionalized Revolution and her concern with social issues such as indigenismo as we see in Balún Canán (1957).46 Balún Canán provides the link between earlier writing and the work of the Boom generation. Its social preoccupations anticipate the works of Garro, Poniatowska, Mastretta and Esquivel. She records the voices of the marginalized and the injustices they suffer as a result of the betrayal of revolutionary values. Castellanos’s direct experience of life in the indigenous communities makes her testimony more ‘authentic’, although her vision is enriched by her own brand of magical realism reminiscent of Juan Rulfo.47 Castellanos, whose literary influence extended well beyond the frontiers of Mexico, stressed that the role of literature should not be purely aesthetic, but should have an important social and moral dimension. It should contribute, for example, to the liberation of women whose ways of life were often ‘forms of death’.48 The writing of Castellanos can be seen as a riposte to the female stereotypes found in both the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950), foreshadowing the concerns of writers such as Laura Esquivel and Ángeles Mastretta. According to Furnival: ‘if Octavio Paz was one of the first to draw attention to the masked nature of the Mexican character, then Castellanos was one of the first to show in her fiction and nonfiction alike that those masks were very suffocating indeed for women’ (p. 54).49

Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America, Támesis, Serie A: Monografías, 156 (London and Madrid: Támesis, 1993), and Cary Nelson, ‘Men, Feminism: The Materiality of Discourse’, in Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Julian Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 153–72 (p. 162). 46 Balún Canán focuses primarily on the lives of women, especially of Indians and mestizas. The focus on the marginalized indigenous Other is an important link between Castellanos and Mastretta. In Balún Canán, women transmit oral Indian history from generation to generation. The Indian nana’s stories transmit indigenous cultural knowledge and memory which serve as a counterpoint to the ‘official’ authoritative versions of history inculcated in the young Castellanos by her parents and teachers. In Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores, Emilia Sauri’s mother and aunt, Milagros, pass on indigenous popular knowledge to their daughter which counters the ‘masculine’ (political and medical) knowledge Emilia’s father transmits to her (Mal de amores, p. 27). In Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes, the bigeyed aunts transmit female values and memories which permit the next generation of women to survive oppressive behavioural norms and to see beyond patriarchal restrictions (p. 187). 47 Other works by Castellanos, where the focus continues to be centred on the Mexican Revolution seen in the short stories of Album de familia, expose the sexism, racism and opportunism that persisted in Mexico’s post-Revolutionary ‘utopia’ (Furnival, p. 53). 48 See See Joanna O’Connell, Prospero’s Daughter: The Prose of Rosario Castellanos, Texas Pan American Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 81. 49 See Chloe Furnival, ‘Confronting Myths of Oppression: the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos’, in Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, ed. Susan Bassnett (London: Zed Books, 1990), pp. 52–73 (p. 53). Castellanos’s collection of essays, entitled Mujer que sabe latín (1973), constitutes a powerful indictment of female inequality: history has been exclusively reserved for the male voice – what lies beyond is consigned to the sphere of the mythical and the unknown – (wo)man. However, Mujer que sabe latín is more than a


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Castellanos does not attack the territory of masculinist culture from the outside but smuggles into that very space her own body, her gendered gaze and voice. According to O’Connell, she is a ‘contrabandista’ (p. 35), which recalls Mastretta’s ambivalent portrayal of Catalina Ascencio in Arráncame la vida: Catalina exposes the vulgar superficiality and prejudice of masculine values by incorporating them (with irony) into her own discourse. Castellanos’s women are often complicitous with male power structure as is Catalina in Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida. For Castellanos, as for Mastretta, the male plays the part of the ‘rey de la creación [. . .] El es quien lleva a cabo las empresas comerciales, las conquistas, las exploraciones y las guerras.’50 In spite of the prevalent ironies in Castellanos’s texts, women are passive and content in the domestic sphere and rarely look beyond their horizons. We encounter women in Album de familia (1971) chatting indiscriminately about both serious and frivolous subjects – from the menopause, the pill and food to the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and social justice. The effect is to trivialize the more serious issues, a procedure also used frequently by Mastretta. Women in Castellanos’s books are complicitous in their own misfortune (O’Connell, p. 151).51 Furthermore, in Castellanos’s fiction female sexual consciousness is portrayed fleetingly and is confined to sensual experience.52 Treated like Sor Juana as one of the ‘great exceptions’ – ‘a woman who was a great writer in spite of her gender’ – Rosario Castellanos is a ‘key figure’ in Latin American feminist discourse which re-emerged in the 1970s.53 She may be seen as the founding figure of more recent feminist work by women writers born after

critique: it emphasizes the possibility of women forging an alternative system of values (O’Connell, p. 220). In short, Castellanos’s works raise the reader’s social consciousness by confronting those demeaning myths which reduce Indian women to the level of exotic creatures and represent Mexican women generally as passive beings who are typically content with their subservient position in a male-dominated society. 50 See O’Connell (p. 37) and Rosario Castellanos’s Sobre Cultura Femenina (Mexico City: Ediciones de América, Revista Antológica, 1950), p. 79. 51 In Oficio de tinieblas, Isabel is completely dependent on Cifuentes. He enjoys humiliating her but she is an accomplice in his murder of his foster brother (this again reminds us of Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida and Catalina Guzman’s complicity with her husband who has murdered various rivals including Catalina’s lover Carlos Vives). Isabel’s daughter Idolina senses that the model of female identity offered by her mother depends on female betrayal and humiliation. 52 In ‘Los convidados de agosto’, Emelina takes pleasure in her body, abandoning herself ‘al peligro y al placer’ (O’Connell, p. 184) as she takes a bath. The links with Mastretta’s sexually liberated female characters are evident. But while Mastretta’s female characters escape retribution for their corporeal ‘sins’, all the young female protagonists of ‘los convidados de agosto’ are punished whenever their transfer from the paternal to the marital home is not accomplished smoothly (O’Connell, p. 175). 53 See Joanna O’Connell (Prospero’s Daughter), p. 23; p. 1. For a discussion of Castellanos’s work and her desire for women to construct their own image beyond the terms of patriarchy, see Aurora Ocampo, ‘Rosario Castellanos and the Mexican Woman’, La Palabra y el Hombre, 53 (1985), 101–08 (p. 210).


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the 1930s such as Elena Poniatowska (b. 1933), Brianda Domecq (b. 1942), María Luisa Puga (b. 1944), Silvia Molina (b. 1946), Guadalupe Loaeza (b. 1946) Ángeles Mastretta (b. 1949), Laura Esquivel (b. 1950), and Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954).54 All these writers base their work on strong female protagonists who call into question the female stereotypes identified by Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Some of their works also coincide in their radical revisionist history of the Revolution and Post-Revolution seen from the perspective of the marginalized female. Through their female characters, these writers seek to reconstruct history from a feminist perspective and to question how lo mexicano as defined traditionally by male writers has characteristically undervalued female identity: ‘contrario a los novelistas de la revolución, las novelistas centran su trabajo en la cuestión epistemológica, peculiaridad discursiva que distingue a la prosa postmoderna de nuestros días’ (Villegas, p. 39). The feminization of national and revolutionary discourses has led writers such as Poniatowska and Mastretta to speak of the repressed female Other, placing their works in direct line with New Historicism.55 Within this new wave of postmodern writing, Villegas includes ‘la anécdota cotidiana de la mujer en su entorno’ (p. 39) which challenges the traditional ‘fluir histórico que, desde la perspectiva masculina, debe separar el espacio público del privado’ (p. 39). Despite their literary merits, many Mexican women writers born after the 1940s have been classified – to a greater or lesser extent – as ‘popular’ writers of fiction, highlighting their still relatively marginalized position within the Mexican literary establishment.56 In many cases they have received greater recognition abroad.57 54 For an outline of Mexican female writing see Spanish American Women writers: A BioBibliographical Source Book, ed. D. E. Marting (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) and Gabriela De Beer, ‘Letras mexicanas en su tinta: escritoras mexicanas de hoy’, Nexos Virtual, www.nexos.com.mx/internos/saladelectura, 1994: 199 (Last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). 55 See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). See also Chapter Eight (p. 229, n. 9). 56 Despite their emphasis on ‘light’ issues in their writing, all of the female authors I have mentioned are committed to the social cause of the marginalized Other and some also continue to write on such broad issues as the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Two relatively recent volumes of the Spanish literary magazine Ínsula devoted to ‘Prosa Mexicana’ (I & II), show little awareness of Mexican female writing. See ‘ “Águila o Sol”: Prosa Mexicana I’, Ínsula, 611 (Nov. 1997) and ‘ “Águila o Sol”: Prosa Mexicana II’, 618–19 (June–July 1998). 57 See Nuala Finnegan’s ‘ “Light” Women/ “Light” Literature: Women and Popular Fiction in Mexico since 1980’, Donaire, 15 (2000), 18–22 (p. 18). Discussing the negative reception of Mexican women writers, Finnegan alludes to Mexican women writers’ rejection by alluding to the disputes between the literary magazines, Macrópolis and Vuelta in 1992. Finnegan believes that the misogynistic views articulated in ‘Defensa de la literatura difícil’ – Vuelta, 16:188 (July 1992), 11 and 14, are a sign of snobbish disregard for women writers of popular fiction. Long established publishers are suspicious of writers such as Ángeles Mastretta, Guadalupe Loaeza and Laura Esquivel, who offer readability rather than complexity. Indeed, women’s writing continues to be perceived as lightweight despite the increased critical attention devoted to it during the last twenty years. However, the fact that women like Mastretta have received prestigious literary prizes indicates a gradual acceptance of women writers within the critical establishment.


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Both Laura Esquivel and Ángeles Mastretta have in common their interest in the Mexican Revolution from a feminist perspective as well as their best seller status. Como agua para chocolate (1989) by Laura Esquivel is another fascinating Mexican feminist work notable for both its penetrating social critique and for its technical sophistication. Set in the revolutionary period, it focuses on the household of a land-owning family, particularly on the romantic attachments of the sisters. The downside of this novel is that the political import of the novel is muted: the Revolution remains firmly in the background and there is no radical feminist message. Tita may give us the impression that she is the heroine who seeks to rebel against repressive family codes, but actually this rebellion comes from her desire to conform to traditional notions of femininity. Her only desire is to marry Pedro, bear his children and provide appetizing Mexican dishes for her family.58 Perhaps of all of the female authors treated here who deal with the subject of the Mexican Revolution from a feminist perspective, it could be argued that Mastretta provides us with the most affirmative view of the female cause, in spite of some underlying ambiguities. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores offer a critique of those male discourses, of nationalism and machismo which tarnish the male novel of the Mexican Revolution. As will be shown in depth in Chapters Four and Five, in Mal de amores Mastretta takes the struggle beyond the stage of desultory challenge – as represented in Arráncame la vida – by portraying women who are politically and professionally active, spurred by a strong selfdefined concept of womanhood. As we will see in Chapter Three, in Arráncame la vida, Catalina oscillates between the ‘feminine’ (reflection of male values) and the ‘feminist’ (rebellion against them) (see Chapter One, p. 4, n. 5). Her intellectual independence, though frequently compromised by collusion with Andrés, emerges as a countervailing force to her husband’s unreflecting pursuit of personal power and wealth. Her ambivalence disrupts the univocal world of male power and privilege despite her occasional absorption by them. Emilia of Mal de amores provides a far more substantial counterweight and refuses to adopt the tenets of female ‘propriety’. Her dissonance emerges, for example, in her flagrant transgression of patriarchal law (she sleeps with Daniel in her parents’ house) and subsequently fails to comply with Daniel’s own patriarchal expectations of her by refusing to wait passively for his return from revolutionary activities. Her finest contravention of the patriarchal script comes when she outperforms Daniel by making a more impressive contribution to the Revolutionary cause. By refusing to conform, Mastretta’s women challenge male values and leave their personal mark on history thereby renouncing their previous anonymity: as Gerda Lerner states, they begin to perceive themselves to be part of history.59

58 See Deborah A. Shaw, ‘Laura Esquivel: Mexican Novelist’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), pp. 117–18 (p. 118). 59 See Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 201.


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Ángeles Mastretta in many ways breaks with the traditional female role in twenty-first-century Mexico. She has a longstanding relationship with a man who is not her husband and a successful career in the Mexican publishing world, which is still predominantly male. Few women enjoy such a privileged position which has provided her with a very powerful voice with which to speak from within the patriarchal system.60 This position has allowed Mastretta to speak of women whose desires and aspirations have been repressed in a male-dominated society. It is clear from the above analysis that the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath left an indelible mark on the nation. It also left a deep impression on Mexican literature, and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel has clearly influenced Mastretta. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores restore the voices of the past, especially those of women. Mastretta’s exploration of the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives coincides with the works of other Mexican women writers who provide a radical revisionist history of the Revolution and Post-Revolution from the perspective of the marginalized female. We now turn to the works of Ángeles Mastretta and to her contribution to Mexican and Latin American literature. The next chapter focuses on Arráncame la vida. Despite the somewhat ambivalent feminist message expressed through Catalina who is depicted as both colluding with, and subverting, corrupt male values, the theme of female power and emancipation is often concomitant with political, cultural and ideological change and progress. Here the central message is that the political is the personal and the personal the political. We will also analyse the importance of Arráncame la vida as representative of testimonial writing, a technique frequently used by writers of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and by Mastretta’s contemporary female writer Elena Poniatowska. Questions of testimonial narrative as borderland discourse between the documentary and the fictional will be considered in the context of the two main critical approaches to the Testimonial tradition (associated with John Beverley and Elzbieta Sklodowska).

60 See Diane Braun, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Maria Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’. Diss. Florida State U, 1994. Ann Arbor: UMI 1995. 9502800, p. 176.


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3

Arráncame la vida: The Borders of Fiction and Reality This chapter analyses Mastretta’s first major novel, Arráncame la vida, published in 1985. Although some may wish to see it as merely a popular novel, it has received significant critical acclaim, obtaining the literary prize Premio Mazatlán in the same year as its publication. It has been translated into more than eleven languages and has been analysed in a number of doctoral theses (though relatively few have focused exclusively on Mastretta’s work). Chronological in structure and narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, Catalina, Arráncame la vida offers much more than the traditional story of an unequal marriage. Diane Braun points out that the novel has a binary structure consisting of: two simultaneous and tightly interconnected stories: the official, androcentric history, as backdrop, of Andrés Ascencio and his wife, Catalina, in their upward mobilisation made possible by the Mexican Revolution, from peasantry to political elite; and the other story, that one interjected from Catalina’s point of view. The superimposed story is that of the wife of a military authoritarian leader who is at odds with her privileged position knowing that it is afforded by means of marriage with an assassin. It is the story silenced by the official story.1

In Arráncame la vida, Mastretta delves into Mexico’s tumultuous past by exploring both the Revolutionary and in particular Post revolutionary years of the 1930s and 40s. In this regard, Arráncame la vida is consistent with Seymour Menton’s description of the New Historical Novel as being set in a period prior to that of the author (p. 16). Both Mastretta’s interest in Mexico’s historical past from a feminist standpoint and the author’s preoccupation in recovering the voices of the silenced Other, aligns her with various Mexican female authors such as Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro and Laura Esquivel. Arráncame la vida is a confessional novel narrated by Catalina Guzmán. Mastretta reproduces the historical events of Puebla and the conflicts associated

1 See Diane Braun, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Maria Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of Florida, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts, 1995, 9502800, pp. 132–3.


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with Maximino Ávila Camacho and the early years of his administration as governor of Puebla, the sexenio of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) and the presidential rule of Maximino’s brother, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46).2 History and politics have often been seen as male spheres of activity but it is now evident that women writers, as Mastretta demonstrates in her novel, can tackle the issue of androcentrism with equal competence: ‘las mujeres pueden perfectamente reproducir en sus producciones culturales una perspectiva androcéntrica’ (Diane Braun, p. 133). Recounting the story of Catalina Guzmán, the wife of Andrés Ascencio, a powerful and corrupt cacique who becomes governor of Puebla, the novel offers a penetrating analysis of a woman searching for a sense of personal identity in a stagnant and corrupt society. Critics situate Mastretta’s work within the broad category of feminist resistance writing which challenges traditional gender roles. In this sense, like Mal de amores, Arráncame la vida is both a feminist and female text.3 We are introduced to Catalina Guzmán from the very start of the novel. She is only fifteen when she is wrenched from her innocent childhood and family, and married to the corrupt Andrés Ascensio. Married life is initially a novelty but she soon becomes disenchanted. She hears gossip from the local puebleños about her husband which indicates that he is not only a womanizer but a murderer. Motherhood becomes a burden particularly since Andrés brings to their household children from his previous marriages. Catalina resists her husband’s authority both by investigating his political manoeuvers and by having affairs with other men. She employs subtle and often surreptitious strategies to win a measure of personal freedom. In this chapter the interrelation between the public and private spheres and the inversion of patriarchal nationalist discourses in Arráncame la vida will be examined. Unlike the case of Emilia in Mal de amores, in Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s activities are largely confined to the private sphere, though she is sometimes drawn into the corrupt public domain. However in both novels the development of both female protagonists coincides with the socio-political awakening of a nation and its gradual disillusionment with a corrupt government. The first section of this chapter entitled Fiction and Mexican Reality: The Characters explores the role of the most significant characters and their impact on Catalina’s personality and development. Mastretta treats fact and fiction on an equal footing: thus historical characters share the same reality as fictitious characters. As we have already noted, Andrés Ascencio, the narrator’s husband, is a fictional portrayal of Maximino, governor of Puebla between 1937 and 1941, and his wife Margarita Ricardi may have served to inspire, at least in part, Mastretta’s portrayal of Catalina Guzmán. There are references to other historical figures such as Madero, Huerta and the journalist Juan Soriano. Once again

2 See Chapter Two (pp. 30–32) for details of Maximino Ávila Camacho’s governorship and avilacamachismo in general. 3 See Chapter One, p. 4, n. 5 for Elaine Showalter’s definition of ‘feminist’ and ‘female’.


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THE BORDERS OF FICTION AND REALITY

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Mastretta’s writing can be aligned with New Historical writing which is characterized – as Seymour Menton remarks – by the novelistic interaction of historical and fictional characters.4 In the second section of this chapter entitled Testimonial Narrative, I will continue to explore the often problematic interrelation between fact and fiction by placing the study of Arráncame la vida in the context of testimonial narrative, a unique mode of writing which interweaves historical and fictional discourses, undermining the validity of those binary oppositions (truth/falsehood) upon which the order of patriarchal logic is built.

Fiction and Mexican Reality: The Characters Arráncame la vida centres on two characters, the protagonist, Catalina Guzmán, and her husband Andrés Ascencio. There are frequent references to peripheral characters such as Catalina’s family, but Catalina has little time for them. Her own children, Verania and Checo, are supplemented by Andrés’s progeny from earlier liaisons: Octavio, Adriana, Virginia, Lilia, Marcela and Marta. His unthinking assumption that Catalina will take charge of them causes considerable resentment: quería ser cualquiera sin un marido dedicado a la política, sin siete hijos apellidados como él, salidos de él, suyos mucho antes que míos, pero encargados a mí durante todo el día y todos los días con el único fin de que él apareciera de repente a felicitarse por lo guapa que se estaba poniendo Lilia, lo graciosa que era Marcela, lo bien que iba creciendo Adriana, lo estiloso que se peinaba Marta o el brillo de los Ascencio que Verania tenía en los ojos. (p. 59)

Other characters in Arráncame la vida include Catalina’s egotistical female friends and her various male lovers of whom Carlos Vives, the orchestra director, is the most significant. As in Mal de amores, the most important characters in Catalina’s life influence her development – negatively in the case of Andrés who instils in her his own unprincipled egotism. Catalina’s lack of a positive female role model also accounts for her restricted and masculinized view of the world. In Arráncame la vida the traditional gender divide is more clear-cut, though there are subtle exceptions to the general rule. Men are the breadwinners and have access to power in both the private and public spheres while women are limited to the private sphere of the home. Catalina is also a hybrid combination in the sense that she is both passive and active, independent and dependent; she despises the superficiality of her female friends while emulating their mode of behaviour. Her ‘masculinized’ vision of the world thwarts any real possibility of full self-realization. As we shall see, many of her strategies of survival mimic those unscrupulous techniques used by men in the pursuit of power. Attention 4 See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 23.


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must now be given to the most important characters in Arráncame la vida – Catalina’s father and husband – who determine Catalina’s outlook on life.

Catalina’s Father The two most influential people in Catalina’s life are Andrés, her father and to a lesser extent Carlos Vives. Her father is mentioned only fleetingly but, in a book of relative lovelessness, the father–daughter relationship provides a solitary example of human love. What is interesting is that her father is portrayed almost invariably within the domestic sphere, breaking with the traditional view that the kitchen is an exclusively female preserve. As a married woman at odds with her husband, Catalina often returns to her humble home which exudes the aroma of strong coffee and a human warmth which is missing in her marital home. Catalina’s strong paternal bond contrasts sharply with her distance from her mother. The myth of motherhood in this sense is completely subverted in Arráncame la vida particularly due to the absence of the mother figure. Whereas the father is known affectionately as papá, the mother is rather coldly referred to as ‘mi madre’. She is a negative presence, a kind of intruder whom Catalina despises for her sense of social correctness. Catalina recalls once when playing with her father: nos pusimos a juguetear y estuve acostada junto a él hasta que llegó mi madre con cara de ya es muy noche para que andes fuera de tu casa. Ella nunca estaba fuera de su casa después de las cinco de la tarde, menos sin su marido. Yo le resultaba un escándalo. (p. 110)

Catalina’s love for her father is particularly enhanced when he dies shortly after this episode. Death is a recurrent event in the life of Catalina. Many of her associates meet violent deaths, which has the effect of de-sensitizing Catalina. Her father’s death, however, causes her genuine grief and leads to behaviour which is less than proper: ‘Yo no me acuerdo qué hice aparte de llorar en público como nunca debió hacerlo la esposa del gobernador. Tampoco sé cómo pasaron los últimos meses de Andrés en el gobierno. Cuando me di cuenta ya vivíamos en México’ ( p. 110). The idealization of the father figure is associated with Mastretta’s own experiences with her father. Mastretta’s recollections of her late father are reflected in her fictional world.5

5 During our interview it was clear to me how close Mastretta had been to her father and how his passing away had deeply affected her. His influence on her writing emerges in her idealization of the father figure in her works: ‘En mi mundo mítico tiene mi papá más importancia que mi mamá pero porque a mi mamá he tenido que mitificarla menos porque es más real. Ha estado más tiempo conmigo desde chica no nada más después de los diecinueve años sino, en general, desde siempre. Era más real y yo creo que uno inventa más lo que necesita más’. See ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 316.


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Andrés Ascencio It is against the historical background of the avilacamachista era, characterised by relative political stability but also by social injustice and corruption, that the plot of Arráncame la vida develops. Although the title Arráncame la vida – inspired by Agustín Lara’s bolero – might suggest the predominance of popular concerns such as melodramatic love affairs (typical of the bolero raw material), the socio-political forms the backbone of the work. In an interview with Braulio Peralta, Mastretta explains that Catalina is a fictional portrayal of Margarita Ricardi, the wife of Maximino Ávila Camacho, and Andrés Ascencio a fictional portrayal of the historical governor of Puebla.6 Mastretta told me in our interview (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 331) that the book, like the characters, was more fictional than historical. As will be discussed later in this chapter, this poses particular problems in relation to the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, an important aspect not only of Mastretta’s work but also of that of other historical novelists such as Elena Poniatowska and Silvia Molina. In The Political History of a Mexican State 1937–1987, Wil Pansters points to the close correspondence between the historical Ávila Camacho and the fictional Ascencio. A variety of circumstances – Ascencio’s appointment as military governor of Puebla in 1935, his alliance with Lázaro Cárdenas, the arranged marriage of his daughter to an influential family and his friendship with the North American entrepreneur William Jenkins – recall the life of Ávila Camacho and align the novel with New Historical practice. William Jenkins is known for the fact that he accumulated his wealth from an alleged kidnapping hoax and the expropriation of peasant’s land with the help of Maximino. In Arráncame la vida, Jenkins, the United States honorary consul, Andrés and his business partner Michael Heiss, are often involved in dubious dealings. Pansters remarks that: ‘The image of the “ruthless” macho is excellently described by Ángeles Mastretta in her novel Arráncame la vida [. . .] based on the life of Maximino’s wife Margarita Ricardi.’ When Pansters describes the co-operation between Ávila Camacho and William Jenkins, he again refers the reader to Arráncame la vida.7 Andrés Ascencio is a political soldier who sympathizes with Huerta. Through guile and ruthlessness he becomes a general and thereafter a powerful politician in Puebla. The novel, which shows Andrés’s rise and fall, follows roughly the historical emergence, consolidation and final demise of Maximino’s cacicazgo avilacamachista. A powerful structure of mediation emerged during the Mexican Revolution which allowed the bourgeoisie to consolidate its power

6 See Braulio Peralta, ‘Mi novela es una historia, no un ensayo feminista: Ángeles Mastretta,’ La Jornada, 11 June 1985, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/index.html (Last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). 7 See Will Pansters, p. 183, n. 9 and p. 184, n. 39 and Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 92, 98.


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thanks to peasant mass movements (p. 3).8 This alliance forced the middle classes to meet the demands of the rural population but ensured their control of the political process (Bartra et al., ‘Introduction’; p. 3). The local political bosses, initially the leaders of the masses, became absorbed into the middle classes. These systems of control, including caciquismo, were soon perceived as a hindrance to capitalist development (Bartra et al., ‘Introduction’; p. 3). Through Andrés we get a fair idea of the corrupt political structure of Mexico whose political stability may well have to do with the constant abuse of power facilitated by the connivance of those in positions of authority. Andrés, as we shall see, will employ a variety of tactics to maintain his position of power. Braun follows González Stephan’s definition of androcentrism to describe Andrés Ascencio: ‘Es una forma específica de sexismo [. . . .] hace referencia al sexo masculino: es más, al hombre de una determinada edad (maduro), de un determinado estatus [casado], y de unas determinadas cualidades y condiciones [tener honor, valentía, fuerza, riqueza económica] viriles’ (Braun, p. 133). Andrés embodies all of these characteristics. This masculine construct defines most of the male characters in the novel and these virile men are usually at the centre of political power (Braun, p. 133). But Andrés also incarnates the corruption of these values: he sets much store by his courage but his rise up the social ladder owes more to extortion and murder than to individual effort and merit. Andrés’s power is felt right from the start. In the first line Catalina remarks that ‘ese año pasaron muchas cosas en este país. Entre otras, Andrés y yo nos casamos’ (p. 7). The presentation of this event anticipates the structure of a novel in which the historical becomes intimately imbricated with the lives of individuals. Catalina narrates that she met him under the portales in Puebla where all sorts of events occur: ‘todo pasaba en los portales: desde los noviazgos hasta los asesinatos, como si no hubiera otro lugar’ (p. 7). This sentence is echoed throughout the novel. It becomes a metaphor of the eternal circle of Mexican violence and corruption which affects both the public and private spheres. The fifteen-year-old Catalina feels instant sexual attraction towards this 30-year-old revolutionary hero. She is overwhelmed by his manly physique: ‘me gustó. Tenía las manos grandes y unos labios que apretados daban miedo y, riéndose, confianza [. . . .] yo nunca había visto unos ojos tan vivos y no conocía a nadie con su expresión de certidumbre’ (p. 7). Andrés is vain and charismatic, to

8 See Caciquismo y poder político en el Mexico rural, eds Roger Bartra et al., 1st edn, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de UNAM (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975). The crisis stemming from these political contradictions may be related to the different goals of distinct middle-class factions: ‘se analiza esta crisis como la contradicción existente entre la fracción de la burguesía que quiere impulsar este desarrollo capitalista en la agricultura para acelerar el proceso de industrialización, aumentar el Mercado interno y a la vez frenar el éxodo rural y la fracción de la burguesía agraria compuesta de terratenientes y comerciantes que, afianzados en un sistema político como es el caciquismo, se enriquece sin promover el desarrollo regional’ (‘Introduction’, p. 3).


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be feared as well as admired. This rather ambiguous facet of this military tyrant’s personality comes across powerfully at the start of the novel. We hear rumours about him but nothing is certain. Catalina tries to ignore them at the beginning: ‘tenía muchas mujeres [. . .] Engañaba a las jovencitas, era un criminal, estaba loco, nos íbamos a arrepentir [. . .] Nos arrepentimos, pero años después’ (p. 8). The historical Maximino also had a rather ‘schizophrenic’ personality: he was corrupt and powerful yet rather charming: Except for his most docile admirers and followers, he has been described as a harsh and ruthless caudillo militar who did not hesitate to eradicate any opposition to his policy. As a dedicated admirer of bullfights and [. . .] a man not free of vanity, he responded to the image of the ‘new-self made strong-man’ needed to put the political and social instability in Puebla to an end. (Pansters, p. 48)

Andrés has a penchant for the theatrical and flamboyant: he regularly attends bullfights and offers sumptuous banquets to impress his guests. He flaunts his wealth by buying an entire edifice for his wife, as we shall see. Although Maximino Ávila Camacho took part in the Revolution, very little is known about his military career. Even one of his most faithful followers, a local journalist, was not able to provide any detailed information about him, simply saying that Ávila Camacho seemed to be ‘present at the places of utmost danger and responsibility’ (Pansters, p. 48). This echoes Mastretta’s depiction of Andrés, whom Catalina, initially sees as a hero of the Revolution: ‘Andrés les contaba historias en las que siempre resultaba triunfante. No hubo batalla que él no ganara, ni muerto que no matara por haber traicionado a la revolución o al Jefe Máximo o a quien se ofreciera’ (p. 8). But his involvement in the Revolution turns out to have been treacherous rather than heroic. Shortly after their marriage, Andrés tells Catalina a romantic story about his youth in Mexico City and his contribution to Madero’s cause. Like Catalina, the reader believes this tale until a document is delivered to their home indicating that Andrés fought not on the revolutionary side but rather for Huerta who betrayed the Revolution. In 1913, after two years in power, Madero was defeated by General Victoriano Huerta, who reinstated Díaz’s dictatorial policies. Andrés’s ‘drámatica y enternecedora historia’ (p. 44) about his past and revolutionary ideas are a complete lie and expose his empty rhetoric. As we shall see, Andrés uses the rhetoric of Revolution and democracy to get what he wants – though remaining very much a Porfirista in outlook. The inequalities of Porfirian Mexico emerge in one of Andrés’s remarks: ‘estaba harto de pobreza y rutina. Quería ser rico, quería ser jefe, quería desfilar, no ir a mirar desfiles’ (p. 37). When Andrés becomes governor, his autocratic rule will recall the porfiriato with its centralized power sustained through manipulation and terrorization of opponents, and its stark social inequalities. Andrés represents the institutionalized Revolution and the abandonment of social ideals. Pansters claims that Andrés is just another Artemio Cruz (p. 48). This analogy echoes Aída Apter-Cragnolino’s comparison of Mastretta’s fictional characters, Andrés Ascencio and Catalina Guzmán, with Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz and


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Catalina Cruz/Regina in La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). Aída ApterCragnolino describes the thematic parallels between Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida ‘con la cual [. . .] reconoce curiosas (o no tan curiosas) similitudes en los nombres, en la descripción física y en cierto modo psicológica de los personajes y naturalmente, en las acciones de los mismos en el terreno del relato’.9 Such critics seem unconvinced by Mastretta’s claim to have written Arráncame la vida (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 330–31) before reading Fuentes’s work. Apter-Cragnolino draws parallels between Catalina Guzmán and Catalina Cruz/Regina. Like Catalina Guzmán, Regina is raped and, again like Mastretta’s female protagonist, Catalina Cruz is forced into marriage. Similary Artemio might have served as a model for Andrés since both are blustering egotistical individuals who are courageous in their own ways but morally ambivalent and betrayers of the Revolution. However, these are superficial points of contact and the novels differ in important respects, notably in their technique: that used by Mastretta bears little relation to Fuentes’s triple-voiced portrayal of Artemio. Critics such as Kay S. García and Janet Gold see Andrés as a heartless assassin, but Mastretta never depicts her characters in such black and white terms. In fact, she confessed to me that she rather likes Andrés Ascencio: Es que si me descuido Andrés Ascensio me cae bien. Es un pillo espeluznante, pero hay cosas de Andrés Ascensio que a mí me caen en gracia y por eso están contadas como cosas con gracia. De repente, Andrés Ascensio es simpático porque yo no quise crear un personaje totalmente maniquea y crear un hombre malo, malo, malo. Lo que sí sé, es que ese sujeto existió o que existió un sujeto que, a pesar de ser así de arbitrario y de devastador con otros, la gente lo quería y a la gente le gustaba. A una gente le gustaba y le divertía estar con él. O sea, no solamente era odioso sino era como cualquier cacique y como cualquier dictador. Un tipo con matices. Entonces, igual pasa con Catalina. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 332)

Her sympathy is intermittently discernible throughout the book, which in many ways adds to the ambiguity of this novel and Mastretta’s masterful playfulness. Andrés’s ambiguous character is evoked in Catalina’s first impression of him at the start of the novel (p. 7). Andrés is undoubtedly a materialist and from the start we are made aware of his hypocritical nature seen, for example, in the way he acquires many haciendas – mostly through extortion. He also strives for power in the political, economic and sexual spheres. But Andrés does at times come across as a man with a sense of humour, albeit of a rather sinister and vulgar kind. He often displays an endearing candidness and lack of pretension, complemented by his genuine paternal affection for his wife, whom he treats at

9 See Aída Apter-Cragnolino, ‘Jugando con el melodrama: género literario y mirada femenina en Arráncame la vida de Ángeles Mastretta’, Confluencia, 11:1 (Fall, 1995), 126–33 (p. 128).


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times like his own child, satisfying her capricious needs and reprimanding her for her petulant behaviour. During the Bellas Artes concert where Carlos Vives performs, Andrés makes no attempt to conceal his ignorance yet his low ‘barbaric’ attitude is partly vindicated while the ‘high’ culture of the musical fraternity (p. 136) is treated with irony. Their theatricality amuses him: ‘Por fin apareció Carlos, con su saco de colas y su corbata de moño, con su varita en la mano y la cabeza recién peinada [. . .] cuando estuvo arriba volteó y nos hizo una caravana. – Qué payaso es este Vives – dijo Andrés’ (p. 135). Andrés takes issue with his wife when they discuss Carlos: ‘¿Cómo sabes que es bueno? Yo no tengo la menor idea. Es la primera vez que venimos a esto. A mí se me hace demasiado teatral. Las bandas de los pueblos son más frescas y dan menos sueño.’ Andrés finds it hard not to nod off to sleep during the performance and humorously concludes about Carlos that ‘(a) este señor Mahler le hacía falta coger’ (p. 137). This scene is a prime example of the general’s crude sense of humour, which some readers might find appealing. It does not desert Andrés even when he is on his death bed. Catalina urges him to stop talking about death, to take the pills that doctor Téllez has prescribed for him and to play poker before going to bed. Andrés retorts that he is ‘mal acostado: viendo al techo y sin nadie encima’ (p. 228). That Andrés maintains several lovers is common knowledge but his charm contrives to make his adultery more acceptable. He has great sexual appeal as Catalina remarks at the start of the novel. They both obviously enjoy sex together and often Andrés will compliment Catalina – ‘Qué buena estás’ (p. 26). On another occasion Andrés’s flattery appears to know no bounds: ‘descubrió que me había crecido el pelo y que su brillo era lo mejor que había visto en años, encontró que mis pies eran más lindos que los de cualquier japonesa, mis dientes de niña y mis labios de actriz’ (p. 128). Andrés’s paternal relationship with Catalina emerges explicitly when she describes him as ‘un papá divertido’ (p. 125). Andrés often employs the affectionate language a father would use with his daughter. He uses terms to call Catalina such as ‘m’ija’, ‘muchacha’ and diminutives such as ‘güevoncita’ (p. 18). When she is mischievous he reprimands her with paternal affection ‘–ah, qué muchacha mentirosa’ (p. 125) or ‘babosa’ (p. 114) which evokes the image of a drooling child. In the first years of their marriage, Andrés plays games with Catalina just as her father did. In the first chapter, the adult narrator recalls with nostalgia how: Me gustaba besar a mi papá y sentir que tenía ocho años, un agujero en el calcetín, zapatos rojos y un moño en cada trenza los domingos. Me gustaba pensar que era domingo y que aún era posible subirse en el burro que ese día no cargaba leche, caminar hasta el campo sembrado de alfalfa para quedar bien escondida y desde ahí gritar: ‘A que no me encuentras, papá.’ Oír sus pasos cerca y su voz: ‘¿Dónde estará esta niña? ¿Dónde estará esta niña?’, hasta fingir que se tropezaba conmigo, ‘aquí está la niña’, y tirarse cerca de mí, abrazarme las piernas y reírse: –Ya no puede ir, la niña la tiene atrapada un sapo que quiere que le dé un beso. (p. 9)


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Once married, Catalina and Andrés have a playful ritual: Orale güevoncita, ¿Qué haces ahí pensando como si pensaras? Te espero abajo, cuento a trescientos y me voy [. . .] Después corría por las escaleras con las botas en la mano, abría la puerta y ahí estaba él [. . .] Doscientos noventa y ocho, doscientos noventa y nueve. Otra vez no te dio tiempo de ponerte las botas. Vieja lenta. (p. 18)

A rare instance of Andrés’s sensitivity and paternal affection for Catalina is seen when they go to listen to Carlos Vives’s performance. Catalina becomes upset because the music Vives is playing is the tune her father used to whistle just before his death: ‘toda la orquesta era mi papá [. . .] nada mejor que la terquedad de mi nostalgia, me puse a llorar hipeando y moqueando hasta hacer tanto ruido como la orquesta’ (p.139). Like a slobbering child Catalina sits on the floor to conceal her feelings. Andrés does not know how to react but tries to comfort her: Dejé la butaca y me senté en el suelo para que nadie viera mi escándalo. Andrés, que nunca supo qué hacer en esos casos, me puso la mano sobre la cabeza y me acarició como si fuera un gato. Resultado: cuando la orquesta terminó de tocar yo tenía la cara sucia, los ojos hinchados y la melena revuelta [. . .] – Ya m’ija dijo Andrés –. En mala hora le conté a Vives que tú no sabías de música nada más que eso que tu padre cantaba todo el tiempo. (p. 139)

But Andrés, like Maximino Ávila Camacho, is a deeply divided character whose positive side is overshadowed by negative characteristics. As mentioned earlier, Andrés is a man who strives for power whether it be of a political, economic or sexual kind. He will kill in order to achieve his goals. His humble background – Catalina notes that he did not even inherit a coat (p. 8) – recalls the equally lowly position of Maximino who worked as a muleteer for his father. Andrés’s desire to exert power is as evident in the private sphere as it is in the public domain. According to Aralia López González (1991, p. 7) ‘su cuerpo (de Catalina) es expropriado por Andrés, su marido, de la misma manera que este supermacho [. . . .] se apropria de un Estado y ejerce el poder con fines personales y arbitrarios. Consume a México como consume a Catalina’. He is a macho, and is driven by his most basic sexual instincts. He objectifies women and treats them as inferior beings. Catalina is his wife and he imposes his rules on her. Catalina in this sense has no autonomy in the institution of marriage and no voice in her own destiny (Braun, p. 147). Andrés has many women thoughout Mexico and Catalina knows this but keeps quiet about it. The double irony about it is that his extramarital affairs have produced illegitimate children, some of whom he expects Catalina to care for as part of the ‘family’. Andrés’s killer instincts are even stronger than his sexual drive. Indeed, he kills his political enemies if they are perceived to be jeopardizing his political career – as is the case with the Avante director or the lawyer. Worse still he is prepared to kill women: Catalina is told that Andrés killed a lover who refused to have sex with him. Catalina is at first angered and incredulous but is finally convinced.


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Rivera Villegas draws an important parallel between Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores in relation to the patriarchal discourse embodied in Daniel, Emilia Sauri’s revolutionary lover, and Andrés Ascensio.10 Both these male characters have much in common despite the gap that separates them in the moral sphere: Andrés is corrupt and is prepared to kill others while Daniel is fully committed to the cause of the Revolution and social justice (Villegas, p. 45). Despite these differences they share the belief that the woman’s proper place is the home – not the political arena. Through Catalina and Emilia, Mastretta is able to highlight the division between male principles (or lack of them) and male practice (Rivera Villegas, p. 45). In Arráncame la vida, Catalina becomes weary of Andrés’s oppression and responds with anger to his inconsistent character. Kay S. García sees Catalina as a reliable narrator particularly when she establishes clear differences between what Andrés says and what he does, as we shall see (p. 101). Andrés’s unreliability is seen particularly in instances which reveal a vast gap between what he says and what he does: García offers examples of Andrés’s hypocrisy and duplicitous character, his lies about Eulalia (his first wife) and his deceitful speeches during his campaign for governor (García, p. 98). His public eulogies at the funerals of people whose murders he has arranged are another example of his duplicity. As García puts it (p. 100), Andrés is ‘ironically eloquent’ during Carlos’s funeral whose death he had arranged: Compañeros trabajadores, amigos: Carlos Vives murió víctima de los que no quieren que nuestra sociedad camine por los fructíferos senderos de la paz y la concordia. No sabemos quiénes cortaron su vida, su hermosa vida [. . .] Quisiera hacer cuento de sus cualidades, de las empresas en las que sirvió a la patria, a todos los trabajos con los que enriqueció nuestra Revolución. No puedo, me lo impide la pena, etcétera. (p. 186)

In this speech, the irony is heightened by Andrés’s empty rhetoric which is full of hyperbolic allusions to his ‘dear’ friend Vives and to the Revolution and by the words ‘etcétera’. Cordera, Andrés’s principal enemy, makes a speech in which he insinuates Andrés’s responsibility for Carlos’s death (pp. 186–7). This is the only speech we hear in the public sphere which directly attacks Andrés. After the funeral, Andrés and all his political allies make official statements to the police. The hypocrisy takes on an almost comic dimension when they again try to mask Andrés’s guilt by protesting their determination to see that justice is done. The police chief Pellico is accused of the murder but Andrés makes sure that he is not imprisoned. Pellico subsequently keeps in touch by sending Christmas cards to Andrés and Catalina. When Catalina describes Andrés, he has ‘unos labios que apretados daban miedo y, riéndose, confianza. Como si tuviera dos bocas’ emphasizing his 10 See Carmen M. Rivera Villegas, ‘Las mujeres y la Revolución Mexicana en Mal de amores de Angeles Mastretta’, Letras Femeninas, 24:1–2 (Spring–Fall 1998), 37–48.


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duplicitous character (p. 7). Shortly after their marriage, Andrés tells Catalina the romantic story about his youth in Mexico City when he delivered milk to Eulalia, his first wife, and about his revolutionary efforts under Madero. Madero initiated the Revolution against Porfirio Díaz in 1910. Like Catalina, the reader believes this tale until a document is delivered to their home revealing the fact that Andrés was actually fighting under the anitrevolutionary Huerta. In 1913, after two years of being president, Madero was defeated and subsequently assassinated by General Victoriano Huerta, who reinstated Díaz’s dictatorial policies. Andrés’s ‘drámatica y enternecedora historia’ (p. 44) about his past and revolutionary ideas turns out to be a blatant fabrication. In fact he is very much a Porfirista in his outlook. Indeed, Porfirio’s emphasis on materialism and prosperity is reflected in Andrés’s selfish ambitions (p. 37). Moreover Andrés’s political instincts are authoritarian, as emerges when he quotes Lieutenant Segovia approvingly – ‘Democracia que no es dirigida no es democracia’ (p. 37). This is an ironic statement since Andrés is in fact a covert huertista who will become one of the country’s leaders. Andrés’s autocratic rule will represent political regression to the inequalities and violence of the Porfirio era. During his campaign for governor, Andrés goes to Coetzalan and makes a powerful speech in favour of family unity and values (García, p. 99). Catalina and their children adorn themselves in indigenous costume, so providing an opening for Andrés: ‘Pueblo de Coetzalan, ésta es mi familia, una familia como la de ustedes, sencilla y unida. Nuestras familias son lo más importantes que tenemos, yo les prometo que mi gobierno trabajará para darles el futuro que se merecen’ (p. 48). The reader is, of course, fully aware of Andrés’s hypocrisy: rather than sustaining traditional family values, he is in fact an adulterer who has fathered several illegitimate children. In another speech Andrés urges women to join forces in order to defend the rights of women workers and peasants as well as equal rights in marriage. Catalina confesses that ‘de ahí para adelante no le creí ni un solo discurso’ (p. 46). Even worse is his speech expressing passionate support for communal landholding which is followed by his repossession on the same day of farms expropriated under the ‘Ley de Nacionalización’ (Nationalization Law) (p. 46). To highlight the blatant differences between what Andrés says and does, García draws on a political speech made by Maximino Ávila Camacho on 1 May 1937 in which he claimed to be the ‘guardian of the masses’ (p. 99). Andrés also talks as if he were a ‘guardian of the masses’. Andrés had arranged for more than twenty of his striking workers to be put to death (as Catalina realizes) but he is wholly convincing in feigning outrage at his press conference: ‘Me parece muy lamentable lo que ahí sucedió – dijo. He encargado al señor procurador que investigue a fondo los hechos y puedo asegurarles a ustedes que se hará justicia’ (p.74).11 The murder of journalist José Trinidad Mata, director of Avante, was

11 By establishing a clear difference between what the governor says and does, the narrator’s voice offers his speeches as the official discourse and her unmasking of his words


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thought to have been investigated by Maximino Ávila Camacho. According to Pansters it was generally believed that Maximino was behind the murder (p. 64). Towards the end of the novel Andrés falls ill and dies. Catalina rediscovers some of her old affection as she nurses her husband, who appears to shrink as he approaches death. Catalina is taken aback by Andrés’s descent into dependency on others. She helps him to take off his suit, so divesting him of the last remnants of his power: ‘Empecé a desabrochar aquella cosa dura, a lidiar con los botones dorados que siempre eran más grandes que los ojales. Jalé una manga y di la vuelta por su espalda para jalar la otra. Lo besé en la nuca’ (p. 225). The dying Andrés arouses compassion even as he plots the murder of his opponents (p. 228). In this regard Andrés may be contrasted with Isabel Allende’s Esteban Trueba in La casa de los espíritus who, in old age, becomes a reformed character, regretting his barbaric past as he succumbs to positive feminine influence.

Catalina Guzmán: From Innocence to ‘Cómplice Oficial’? Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores are Bildungsroman novels in the sense that they trace the development of Catalina Guzmán and Emilia Sauri from early childhood to maturity. Mastretta explores through the morally ambiguous Catalina, the ambivalent interrelation between innocence and manipulation. In Arráncame la vida, there are only a few instances of innocence. In the first chapter, Catalina is still innocent, naive and a virgin and under the protection of her family. Although her incorruptibility is short-lived, she remains child-like throughout the novel. She has her first sexual encounter at the age of fifteen and has her first child at seventeen. As we shall see in the next chapter, Emilia in Mal de amores is also very young when she is sexually initiated but she matures rapidly and takes on much greater social responsibilities than Catalina. As mentioned earlier, Andrés’s paternalistic attitude towards Catalina and the way he often spoils her might well be counterproductive to her development. She is much more dependent on material goods than Emilia from Mal de amores, who learns to survive in adverse conditions with very little. Catalina’s passage from the protection of her father to both the protection and control of her husband is a clear example of her subjection to patriarchal laws. Andrés often addresses Catalina as he would a child. Indeed, Catalina also acts and speaks like a child (p. 16). Catalina is young, acts on impulse, and experiences childish tantrums. But she is intelligent and like many intelligent children, she will resort to manipulation if her demands are not met (p. 16). Catalina has learnt how to play by the rules of the game. Following her wedding (p. 19) she is aware of the tension between her father and Andrés and takes full advantage of paternal indulgence to counter her new husband’s blatant possessiveness. as the counterdiscourse. See García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers, p. 101. García also draws attention to the enormous ‘power exercised by the PRI over the Mexican media, and the official party’s ability to create whitewashed images of their leaders’ (p. 98).


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Elsewhere Catalina’s dependence on father figures including Vives, is further highlighted by Andrés’s demonstrations of paternal affection towards her. As Braun comments (p. 149), Andrés silences his wife by infantilizing her. Catalina cannot communicate with Andrés: ‘por supuesto no le contaba yo nada. Él no quería que yo le contara, por eso se ponía a hablarme como a una niña’ (p. 61). Perhaps the defining aspect of Catalina’s character is her failure to mature and assume responsibilities. She opts for frivolous detachment – ‘los primeros tiempos del gobierno fueron divertidos’ (p. 50) – in preference to adopting a principled stand against her husband’s corrupt practices. Indeed in her personal conduct she seems to have been influenced by them since she seeks gratification in a series of extra-marital affairs. In her relations with Andrés she is not short of guile: determined to deflect him from embroiling her father any deeper in dubious business dealings, Catalina achieves her objective by staging a softer, more deferential attitude: Lo odiaba cuando se portaba como mi patrón. Pero me aguanté y cambié el tono por uno que funcionara mejor: –Andrés te lo pido por lo que más quieras. Te dejo que regales el Mapache a Heiss, pero saca a mi papá de un lío con Amed. (p. 64)

This is a clear example of Catalina’s skilful bilingualism which indicates that she is well-versed in the rules of the game. As Anderson observes: ‘Cati clearly understands the rules of the game: she cannot demand things from Andrés as an equal, and in order to achieve her goal she must shift her tone of voice to one “que funcionara mejor” and implicitly recognizes Andrés’s superiority and “begs” him to help her father.’12 Andrés treats her like a child and she plays on her ‘innocence’ by using the tone and behaviour of a child to get what she wants. As with children who often exchange goods to get what they want, Catalina is prepared to give up her favourite horse for her favourite man.

Sexual and Political Awakening In Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s loss of innocence and psychosexual awakening coincides with the rise of Andrés and avilacamachismo. Catalina is manipulated by a husband who is treacherous, and so too is the Mexican nation manipulated by a corrupt political machine, which may appear to be driven by social justice but which has in fact betrayed Mexicans. Andrés’s dominance over Catalina is clear from the outset, yet already at the beginning of the novel we see her spirit of independence when she asks him why 12 See Danny J. Anderson, ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida by Ángeles Mastretta’, Midwest Modern Language Association 21:1 (Spring, 1988), 15–27 (p. 20).


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she should take his name: ‘yo te protejo a ti, no tú a mí. Tú pasas a ser de mi familia, pasas a ser mía’ (p. 15). Catalina resents this unequal relationship: ‘quería ser cualquiera sin un marido dedicado a la política, sin siete hijos apellidados como él’ (p. 59). Gilbert and Gubar point out that, for a woman, a proper name is problematic: even as it ‘inscribes’ her into the present discourse of society by designating her role as her father’s daughter, her patronymic effaces her matrilineage and thus erases her position in the discourse of the future. Her ‘proper’ name, therefore, is always in a way improper because it is not, in the French sense, propre, her own, either to have or to give.13

Nevertheless, although Catalina ‘belongs’ to Andrés in a legal sense, she becomes adept at eluding his grasp in everyday life. Catalina, like Emilia from Mal de amores, is exposed to the world of politics from a very early stage in their lives. The difference is that Catalina’s political conscience develops ‘a escondidas’ while Emilia’s familial liberal environment actively encourages her to express her political opinions. In this sense silence plays a vital role in Arráncame la vida. As Braun remarks (Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies, p. 140), Catalina’s private life, her marriage to Andrés and her upward mobility are a reflection of the political system in the public sphere: She suffers silencing by Andrés in his capacity as husband and as a representative of military power. To voice dissent at home would threaten the comforts she enjoys in her marriage and if she dared publicly to denounce her husband or the military in general she would most likely be killed as are the other political dissenters in the novel.

At first, both Catalina and Emilia are very naïve about politics but they are both intelligent and will soon understand the intricacies of the political world. Catalina’s socio-political awakening coincides with her sexual awakening. Following her rather brutal and unromantic sexual experience with Andrés who fails to give her an orgasm, her senses are awakened and she resolves to learn to ‘sentir’. Independently of Andrés she proceeds to build upon this independence by having affairs with other men. In this aspect of her life Catalina achieves some degree of autonomy. Her desire to learn about sexuality is reflected also in her desire to learn about Andrés’s political affairs. She hears about his corruption and murderous instincts from other people, and she spends four years of married life doing the typical things expected of a Mexican woman of the time (p. 27). She is aware of his crimes and knows that he is a danger to the general public (p. 28) but finds that challenging his activities is futile: ‘me contestaba siempre que no vivía conmigo

13 See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94), I: The War of Words (1988), p. 237.


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para hablar de negocios, que si necesitaba dinero que se lo pidiera’ (p. 28). Elsewhere Catalina convinces herself that she can enjoy the comforts her husband has to offer her while remaining oblivious to his misdeeds (p. 28) (Braun, p. 141). Catalina first becomes aware of corruption when Andrés is arrested for murder. She reacts in a childish manner reflecting her selfish individualism: ‘¿Cómo iba a ver a mis amigas? ¿Qué iba a decir a mis papás? ¿Con quién me iba a acostar? ¿Quién iba a despertarme en las mañanas?’ (p. 22). Braun points out that Catalina’s concerns in this respect are equivalent to those of Maria Teresa Bombal’s female characters: ‘how to avoid loneliness without a man’ (Braun, p. 138). At this stage of her development Catalina is more interested in personal relationships than in national affairs, and her need for masculine presence is reflected in her series of love affairs. When Andrés is arrested on suspicion of murder, she runs to church where she prays: ‘Que regrese Andrés, que no le encierren, que no me deje sola’ (p. 23). A friend of Andrés fails to convince Catalina that her husband has not killed anyone (p. 24). Subsequently Catalina becomes aware of the truth about her husband but refuses to accept it (Braun, p. 138). She reveals to her friend at the cooking lesson that evening that she felt very frightened – perhaps a reflection not only of her immaturity but also of her selfish and childish fear of remaining alone. When Andrés finally returns the next day, her first priority is to check that he is still in possession of his penis, which suggests that Catalina’s life is centred exclusively on her sexual relations with Andrés: ‘Metí las manos bajo su camisa, lo jalé hasta el jardín. Ahí comprobé que no le habían cortado el pito’ (p. 26). Here Catalina emerges as a ‘phallic’ woman, more interested in Andrés’s retention of his virility than in the question of his guilt. The occasion of Andrés’s arrest and release reflects his dubious relationship with the press and more generally the corruption of the Mexican political system. The day after his arrest the papers report that Andrés has received an apology for having been wrongly accused of falsifying documents. A priest has been imprisoned for two years. Although Catalina’s attitude exposes her ignorance of sociopolitical affairs, similar incidents will arouse her curiosity about her husband’s activities. Andrés forbids her to read the newspapers but Catalina ignores him and becomes an avid reader (p. 55). She reads allegations that one of Andrés’s men had shot Carranza (p. 55). According to Soriano, the editor of Avante, Andrés ‘había estado en la Ciudadela cuando el golpe de Estado que asesinó a Madero’ (p. 55). Andrés’s response is: ‘Que se dé por muerto este cabrón’ (p. 55). Of course we must remember the narrator’s words of warning: ‘Andrés no decía nada por decir’ (p. 16). Avante publishes another article accusing Andrés and his accomplices, Heiss and Rodolfo, of plundering the state’s funds and of building land designated as ‘ejidos’ (p. 93). Despite the efforts of the press to expose the truth to the nation, the military succeed in silencing their opponents. When Soriano’s body is found shortly after, all the newspapers accuse Andrés of the murder. Andrés promises a full investigation (p. 93) but Catalina does not expect justice to be done (Braun, p. 140). She finds it difficult to confront Andrés and suppresses her suspicions, conforming in this respect to the social expectation that a woman in Catalina’s position remain silent and submissive.


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Silence in a sense has a double function in Arráncame la vida. On the one hand, like Bombal’s characters, Catalina uses silence as a weapon of resistance against male oppression.14 Catalina keeps secrets from Andrés and tries to reveal as little as possible of herself but tells the reader everything. While on the one hand, Catalina (like Bombal’s female characters), outwardly perpetuates ‘meek and powerless images of the self’ and continues to ‘reinforce a view of (women’s) sex that has historically denied women the authority to articulate their own lives’15 her narrative, on the other hand, scores a notable triumph exposing Andrés’s world of violence.16 Catalina’s curiosity about her husband’s conduct is rekindled when Checo, Catalina’s youngest child, tells her that he has heard Andrés admit to murder: ‘Matar es trabajo, dice mi papá’ (p. 69). Catalina is so horrified that she vomits in front of Checo. Selfishly, she decides to spend less time with her children (p. 70) and ‘en cambio me propuse conocer los negocios de Andrés’ (p. 71). Catalina gradually detaches herself from her husband, and engages in a series of activities which challenge Andrés’s authority.

Complicity/Duplicity Patriarchy is a term used to describe ‘the relationship of a dominant (male) group, considered superior, to a subordinate group, considered inferior, in which

14 See Stephen M. Hart, White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America (Támesis, Serie A: Monografias, 156) (London: Tamesis, 1993), p. 41. 15 See Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman, The Lyrical Vision of María Luisa Bombal (London: Tamesis, 1988) and Stephen Hart (p. 410). 16 Kostopulos-Cooperman claims that although the reader can – to a certain extent – penetrate the silent worlds of Bombal’s female characters nonetheless ‘their voices are destined to drown in the metaphysical vacuum of their own mute and insular monologues’. Hart contends this view pointing out that in La amortajada, for example, Ana María’s thoughts have got through to the reader on the printed page, in spite of the repression of patriarchy, indicating that the ‘silence of womanhood’s voice has been heard’ (p. 41). The same applies to Catalina in Arráncame la vida. Debra Castillo also sees silence as a subversive tool and quotes Trinh T. Minh-ha (p. 40): ‘Silence is so commonly set in opposition to speech. Silence as a will to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own has barely been explored.’ But Castillo also points to the limitations of silence, particularly as a political strategy: ‘Silence alone cannot provide an adequate basis for either a theory of literature or concrete political action. Eventually woman must break silence and write, negotiating the tricky domains of the said and the unsaid, the words written down [. . .] between the lines’ (p. 40). Both Arráncame la vida and, in particular, Mal de amores offer diverse possibilities for resistance with the playful shuffling of different levels of hitherto silenced realities (female sexuality and solidarity, the magical and the quotidian, the mythic and historical, the rational and irrational) which imply a powerful feminist questioning of male structures of knowledge and gender. See Trinh T. Minha-ha, ‘Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference’, Inscriptions, 3:4 (1988), 71–77, and Debra Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).


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the dominance is mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights’.17 In Arráncame la vida, women belonging to the subordinate group and men representing the dominant group collude in the creation of this system. In the novel, these divisions also separate the working classes from the ruling elite. Catalina often colludes in her own repression in order to maintain her position of security and wealth. Despite its blatant inequities, the patriarchal system has endured because it represents age-old values bolstered by biblical sanction: the central unit of the patriarchal establishment is the family, where, in the view of Saint Paul, the husband is the authority and the wife’s essential role is that of quiescent and submissive companion (Ephesians 5.23). Patriarchal organization in Arráncame la vida not only sets male against female but also female against female and to a lesser extent class against class (e.g. Catalina’s treatment of the maid, Lucina, pp. 68–70). As will be indicated further on, Catalina is in some respects a contradictory character, often struggling for personal and social improvement but also colluding with Andrés. The author exposes various weaknesses in Catalina, notably her overdependence on material goods and love of a comfortable life style. Furthermore, her commitment to the cause of the downtrodden is less than total. Catalina seldom undertakes positive social action and when she does, her efforts are half-hearted and short-lived, as in her fleeting involvement with the ‘Unión de Padres de Familia’ (p. 114), and her inconsequential role as president of the Charity Board (p. 50). As Mastretta points out, Catalina is not a feminist and her actions are usually impulsive rather than driven by conviction: ‘Ella no es una feminista. Hace las cosas de repente’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 332). Indeed, her social conscience is no more than skin deep as emerges in her reaction to Fernando’s gesture of solidarity. When she protests at the killing of twelve Indians by the Army, Andrés retorts that her concerns are typically feminine: ‘ya te salió lo mujer. Está usted hablando de su inteligencia y luego sale lo sensiblera’ (p. 83). Fernando puts his hand on her lap as a gesture of support but Catalina, unaware of Fernando’s homosexuality, interprets it as a sexual pass and her excitement banishes all other feelings: ‘puso su mano en mi pierna. La sentí sobre la seda de mi vestido y me olvidé de los doce campesinos’ (p. 83). According to Gerda Lerner, ‘women are more closely allied to men of their own group than they are to women of other classes and races’.18 This is

17 See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000) p. 43. Also see Gerda Lerner, Women and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), I: The Creation of Patriarchy, p. 217. Lerner gives a cogent analysis of the rise of the self-preserving patriarchal system and of women’s place within it. 18 Discussing the intractable nature of women Gerda Lerner observes that it is difficult to ‘conceptualize women as a group, since they are dispersed throughout the population. Except for special-interest organizations, they do not combine together. The subject is full of paradoxes which elude precise definitions and defy synthesis. Women at various times and places were a majority of the population, yet their status was that of an oppressed minority,


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completely true of Catalina. Catalina thinks and behaves like Andrés and, in the same way, is ultimately motivated by self-interest. Catalina’s altruism does emerge when she helps a working-class woman Lucina to give birth to a baby, but her generosity is short-term: once the child is born, Catalina reverts to her superior condescending stance and Lucina to her subordinate role (Anderson, 1988, p. 23). When Andrés names Catalina as his private secretary, she is given the opportunity to penetrate the political sphere normally reserved for men. Catalina could have used her position to promote women’s rights but she is more interested in pursuing her affair with Carlos Vives (p. 127). Janet Gold describes Arráncame la vida as a novel which is ‘at once personal and political, private and public, submissive and rebellious’.19 In this sense, Catalina, like Emilia from Mal de amores, is duplicitous by appearing to be complicitous both with her partner and with patriarchal structures. When Catalina claims that she is rebelling she is, in reality, covering up her complicity with Andrés’s power; when she pretends to be complicit with her husband she is rebelling in secret (Gold, p. 39). On the one hand, Catalina is Andrés’s ‘cómplice oficial’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 57), on the other, she flouts his authority by, for instance, learning how to drive behind his back, finding out about his political machinations and reading forbidden newspapers. Gold concludes that this game of duplicity/complicity is a strategy for success: ‘By so successfully entering into the Mexican publishing world, Ángeles Mastretta has, like her fictional protagonist Catalina Guzmán de Ascencio, created a liberated space from which to extend the boundaries of rebellion’ (p. 40). Gold refers to the role of bilingual duplicity as analysed by Jane Miller, who alludes to women’s acquisition of ‘masculine’ language: Bilingualism can be an asset, but its acquisition involves splits and instabilities, impersonation, a stepping out of yourself. We can expect double vision and shifting ground in the novels of women. We shall need to hold the notions of dividedness, even as we consider the more straightforward ways in which women have written about men.20

García points out that Mastretta’s strategy involves the use of the language of men. As Mastretta told me in our interview (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 322–23), she borrowed the slang expressions utilized by Catalina from a close friend of hers, deprived of the rights men enjoyed. Women have for centuries been excluded from positions of power, both political and economic, yet as members of families, as daughters and wives, they were closer to actual power than many a man’. See The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 170; p. 6. 19 See Janet N. Gold, ‘Arráncame la vida: Textual Complicity and the Boundaries of Rebellion’, Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 17:2 (November 1988), 35–40 (p. 36). 20 See Janet N. Gold, ‘Arráncame la vida: Textual Complicity and the Boundaries of Rebellion’, Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 17:2 (November 1988), 35–40, and Jane Miller, Women Writing About Men (New York; Pantheon, 1986), p. 17.


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Renato Leduc. Mastretta’s employment of Jane Miller’s ‘secret and coded signals’ are vital in our understanding of Arráncame la vida because she has: appropriated masculine language and the traditional romance plot, and transfomed them in order to transmit a strong criticism of regional and national politicians and a scathing commentary on the Mexican macho’s attitude toward women. Within her ‘masculine’ discourse, she creates an alternative discourse that gives a voice to women and challenges the official story. (García, p. 103)

Catalina’s behaviour of swaying ambiguously between duplicity and complicity can be linked to the Virgen de La Guadalupe/La Malinche paradigm. Traditionally, women’s roles have been restricted to those of Madonna or whore. Although this is a universal phenomenon, it has peculiar resonance in the Mexican context. As Luis Leal points out, these two major archetypes in Mexican Literature are La virgen de la Guadalupe and La Malinche.21 The male ideal of the virgin figure can be traced back to the Aztec era, when women’s virginity, loyalty and her reproductive ability were the most virtuous characteristics a woman could possess.22 Cypess observes that while Malinche represents the flawed woman, the Virgin of Guadalupe incarnates the most virtuous feminine characteristics. Cypess adds that: ‘Veneration of the Virgin transcends pure religiosity and has become equated with a sense of unselfish motherhood and positive national identity. La Malinche, at the opposite pole, embodies both negative national identity and sexuality in its most irrational form, a sexuality without regard for moral laws or cultural values’ (p. 7). Wowoide argues that Mastretta has gone beyond the boundaries of this duality in Arráncame la vida by discovering new paradigms in women’s relationship to themselves and the world in which they live: Usa el bildungsroman para mostrar otras posibilidades para la mujer en la sociedad, en el matrimonio, en la familia y en las relaciones personales. Crea una mujer que rompe con los arquetipos literarios mexicanos de la virgen de Guadalupe y la Malinche, mientras forja su propio destino en la búsqueda de un ‘yo’ femenino.23

Yet it could be argued that Catalina combines qualities of the Virgin Mary and those of the temptress, Eve, reflecting Mastretta’s playful ambiguity in the

21 See Luis Leal, ‘Female Archetypes in Mexican Literature’, in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 227–42. 22 See Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 25. Cypess examines the multiple meanings, both negative and positive, associated with the figure of La Malinche in Mexican culture. 23 Kristen M Woiwode, ‘El uso del bildungsroman en Arráncame la vida: La desmitificación del estereotipo femenino en la literatura mexicana’. Unpublished Master of Arts, University of Rice, 1998. See MA Abstracts, 1389134, p. 10.


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context of her feminist perspective. Catalina, appears chaste, innocent, dependent on her partner (Arráncame la vida, p. 27). She bears various children, which suggests selfless motherhood and conformity with traditional expectations. But Catalina uses duplicity to achieve her immediate desires. In this sense Catalina is deceitful and embodies in some respects the treacherous Malinche figure – at least from the male point of view. Andrés believes that women are treacherous by nature. When Catalina is going out with Carlos, Andrés remarks that women are hapless: Uno se pasa la vida educándolas, y apenas pasa un loro junto a ellas y lo creen todo [. . .] con tal de estar en contra de su marido [. . .] La hubieran conocido a los dieciséis años, entonces era una cosa linda, una esponja que lo escuchaba todo con atención, era incapaz de juzgar mal a su marido y de no estar en su cama a las tres de la mañana. (Arráncame la vida, p. 170)

Catalina is certainly treacherous. She uses a series of cunning strategies that not only affect other characters but involve the reader whom she manipulates (García, p. 101). Filtered through her ironic vision, society is revealed in its full corruption. She also highlights the inconsistencies between what Andrés says and what he does (García, p. 101). However, she simply fails to acknowledge her own moral shortcomings. Perhaps at the heart of Catalina’s treachery lies her extreme selfishness. She is obsessed with talavera (Mexican ceramics) and in every single house she owns, her crockery is made of this material. Catalina enjoys shopping at the chain store Sanborn’s because: ‘ahí me sentía yo protegida porque las paredes son de talavera. Manías de uno. Donde hubiera talavera me sentía a salvo, por eso a todas mis casas lo primero que meto es la vajilla de talavera’ (p. 122). She is not ashamed of her possessions but she retains an affection for the ‘inferior’, for talavera ceramics which is ‘poblana, tosca y quebradiza’ (p. 122) in contrast with the prized ‘porcelana de Bavaria’. Perhaps Catalina is acknowledging her own secret affinity with the material and is subconsciously aware that like pottery she is being moulded by negative male influences which prevent her from contributing to the task of moulding a new society. Her acceptance of Andrés’s extravagant gift by buying Sanborn’s for her suggests her passive status as a female consumer dependent upon male largesse. Catalina’s covetousness is reflected at the level of her personal relations and her treachery extends to those whom she most loves. If Catalina manages to love anybody, it is Carlos Vives, whose refinement and culture contrasts with Andrés’s barbarism and ignorance. However Vives is one of her many lovers, each of whom embodies, to varying degrees, that capitalist acquisitiveness which has become Catalina’s own defining characteristic. The cultured Vives is quite the antithesis of Andrés Ascencio who regards the director of the national orchestra as effeminate. Andrés had attempted to make a man of him by taking the young flute-playing boy to see men hanged in trees during the Revolution. Vives undermines Andrés’s authority in two ways: first by his affair with


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Andrés’s wife, Catalina, and secondly by feigning admiration for Andrés but in fact supporting Andrés’s political opponents. Vives is openly critical of the social elite and criticizes the manipulations and questionable practices that Andrés and his cronies employ to enrich themselves. Thus when Andrés buys the entire Sanborn’s building for Catalina, Vives overtly criticizes her for being complicit with her husband who has probably paid the bill with illicit funds. Vives might have provided a positive influence on Catalina had she not been, by then, so selfpreoccupied and so deeply implicated in Andrés’s corrupt practices. In any event Andrés’s ascendancy is crushingly asserted when he arranges the kidnap and murder of Vives. Catalina is adulterous and does not scruple to sleep with her husband’s political opponents. Her superficiality is demonstrated when she resumes relations with Andrés almost immediately after Carlos’s death. Her abandonment of her children indicates her dereliction of normal maternal duties. Catalina betrays her own gender in her open disregard for women. She criticizes wealthy women who flaunt their dresses and jewellery but ironically she is herself ‘una consentida’. Catalina’s vision of the world is so masculinized and warped that she has developed a complete lack of respect for her own gender, in many ways replicating Andrés’s own views of women. Her estrangement from her own mother – whom Catalina treats as an inferior being – is significant: ‘Mi mamá se la pasaba presintiendo’ (p. 14). She is contaminated by her husband’s immoral business sense as is evident in the advice she offers her friend, Bibi, who is considering Gómez Soto’s proposal of marriage: ‘Dile que sí pero que ponga la casa a tu nombre– le aconsejé’ (p. 99). Ultimately Catalina’s immoral conduct may even extend to murder for she is possibly implicated in Andrés’s death: has she poisoned him with an excess of lemon tea? Like Andrés, she strives to achieve power and indeed the intensity of her will to power borders on obsession. In the novel, Catalina is seduced by the size of men’s hands, a symbol of domination and strength (p. 7, p. 29). She enjoys her influential social position (‘yo tenía una corte de mujeres esposas de los hombres que trabajan para Andrés’, p. 50) but ironically, when Andrés gives her positions of power – making her director of the board of the ‘Beneficiencia Pública’ (pp. 50–1) and later his personal secretary (p. 127) – she resents the responsibility such positions entail. Catalina is an expert in the art of power relations. She loves power over others and will collaborate with her husband or conspire against him depending on which course of action serves her selfish designs. In Arráncame la vida, the Malinche myth undergoes some modification when applied to the case of Catalina. As with Malinche, Catalina is virtually forced into marriage and raped by Andrés who plays the part of arrogant patriarch, treating women as chattel in a commercial exchange conducted between men. Catalina’s father is suitably compensated and Catalina is expected to transfer her loyalty from him to her new husband. Thus Catalina plays to the ‘rules of the game’ but later she breaks the ‘sexual contract’ as she enters into several extramarital affairs. Her ‘triumph’ over Andrés is twofold: she is an unfaithful wife who breaks her matrimonial contract with impunity and, in addition, having


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survived her husband, she benefits from that financial contract whereby the widow is the main beneficiary of her husband’s estate. Catalina may be ‘sold’ to Andrés and forced into a contract characterized by both duplicity and complicity. She cannot however be resold and far from remaining a pawn in his hands, she flouts her side of the contract while making Andrés keep to his. She contributes – albeit unwittingly – to the enhancement of female power. In this respect she may be seen as a feminist, despite her ‘contamination’ by typically male egotistical principles.24 In spite of her contradictory nature, Catalina, like Emilia in many respects, knows that she must consciously strive to avoid conforming to the masculinized vision of women as passive and compliant. Both women are fighters – in their own different ways – and have achieved their own sexual and personal identity, breaking successfully out of the grip of patriarchy. Andrés is aware that Catalina will never be possessed entirely by him and confesses to her that: ‘Nunca he podido saber qué quieres tú. Tampoco dediqué mucho tiempo a pensar en eso, pero no me creas tan pendejo, sé que te caben muchas mujeres en el cuerpo y que yo sólo conocí a unas cuantas’ (p. 225). He admires her almost ‘manly’ strength and intelligence and has come to terms with her promiscuity: ‘no me equivoqué contigo, eres lista como tú sola, pareces hombre, por eso te perdono que andes de libertinaje. Contigo sí me chingué. Eres mi mejor vieja, y mi mejor viejo, cabrona’ (p. 223).

Testimonial Narrative Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida is, like Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) by Elena Poniatowska (born 1933), central to a living tradition: Testimonial narrative and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel.25 Testimonio is seen as an authentic Latin-American 24 According to Jean Franco, malinchismo today still haunts the work of many Mexican and Mexican-American women including Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Cherríe Moraga. But the Malinche they depict no longer embodies a symbol of passive victimization nor represents the ravished indigenous land. Rather than being associated with social and sexual oppression, women are now depicted as freely accepting the sexual contract which, ultimately, also excludes women from true citizenship and identity. See ‘La Malinche: From Gift to Sexual Contract’, in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, eds Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 66–82 (p. 77). Mastretta’s discursive revolt against the Malinche myth is perhaps best highlighted in her parodic short story (Mujeres de ojos grandes, pp. 175–9) whose protagonist is the tía Amanda Rodoreda (see Chapter Six, pp. 185–86). 25 The Boom generation was inspired by foreign influences. Testimonial narrative, however, has come to be perceived as an authentic, popular, and native form of expression, ‘the gaze from within, from the Latin American I, from the Latin American we’. See Santiago Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 25, and Miguel Barnet, ‘La novela testimonio. Socio-literatura’, in Testimonio y literatura, eds René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986), p. 285. Like some novels of the Mexican Revolution,


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form of fiction (unlike magical realism) and can be traced back to the novel of the Mexican Revolution and far beyond that – to the sixteenth-century chronicles of the conquest. Testimonial narrative uses, for example, recorded interviews as raw material for accounts in which the dividing line between fiction and history is blurred. Testimonio, on the other hand, is seen as the unmediated record of testimonies of living history.26 From the 1960s onwards, female testimonial novels may have emerged in Latin America partly in response to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s sardonic views of the possible ideas and causes behind the Revolution expressed in his Los relámpagos de agosto (1964).27 Marta Portal’s explanation of Ibargüengoitia’s interest in historical satire may also clarify the resurgence of the testimonial narrative: ‘La sátira histórica surge como rebelión y burla. Si la novela nace como oposición realidad subjectiva–mundo objetivo, aquí hay una intención (subjetiva)–caricaturesca que se opone al testimonio que de la Revolución ha significado la novela de la Revolución’.28 Some testimonial works, such as those written by Guatemalan Indian Rigoberta Menchú are known internationally because of their feminist interest. According to Amy K. Kaminsky (1991): Etymologically ‘women’s testimony’ is an oxymoron; the root of ‘testimony’ is ‘testes’, an anatomical requirement of all those whose witness might be accepted in a Roman court of law. Feminist psychology emphasizes that the invisibility and inaudibility of women in public life make women themselves believe that their words, lives, and experiences are less valuable and certainly less universal, than men’s.29

testimonio aims to modify Western notions of reality for the protagonist does not perceive himself/herself as an individual subject but as representative of the pueblo which contrasts with the Western notion of writing as individual creation. 26 Testimonial writing aims ‘to challenge “official”, bourgeois history, to fill voids in the record, to seek the other side of the coin, and generally to empower the voice of the underprivileged and repressed’. See Emil Volek, ‘Testimonial Writing’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy-Dearbourn, 1997), p. 784. For a perceptive discussion of Testimonio see Miguel Barnet, ‘La novela-testimonio. Socioliteratura’, in Testimonio y literatura, eds René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986), pp. 280–302. This article became a kind of attestation for testimonio. 27 See Emil Volek, ‘Mexico: 20th-century Prose and Poetry’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy-Dearbourn, 1997), pp. 548–55 (p. 550). Also see Chapter Two, p. 37. 28 See Marta Portal, Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1977), p. 233. 29 Amy K. Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 48. Women’s voices have undoubtedly been repressed in the male public sphere but here Kaminsky’s etymological association of Latin testimonium with testis in the sense of ‘testicle’ is incorrect. In fact the etymology runs in the opposite direction (testis ⫽ ‘testicle’) and appears to be a special colloquial extension of the word’s basic sense of ‘witness’ (it is etymologically connected


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Although it is not exclusively a woman’s genre, it is undoubtedly an important literary medium for the empowerment of the subaltern woman and because it crosses class and racial boundaries.30 Testimonial narratives include texts written by Mexican female writers such as Elena Poniatowska, Ángeles Mastretta and Silvia Molina whose works offer a radical revisionist history of the Revolution from a feminist/feminine perspective. Like the feminist perspective, the sociopolitical dimension is of prime importance in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores. Mastretta always emphasizes the political purpose of her work. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores are characterized to a point by the polar opposites that Aníbal González sees as central to the construction of documentary narratives: truth versus falsehood, justice versus injustice, society versus the individual.31 These polar opposites are inextricably intertwined with the feminine. Mastretta’s socio-historical preoccupations in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores seem to go against the illusion-breaking thrust of postmodernism, particularly Arráncame la vida, which is a testimonial narrative (to be further explored on pp. 75–78 and 81–83), marked by its journalistic and documentary style.32 According to Mastretta her testimonial writing is an attempt to challenge the official version of history and to speak of lo no dicho, that is, the other side of history where the marginalized and silenced Other moves to centre stage. Although Ángeles Mastretta, like her female counterparts, embraces the satirical and frivolizes history in favour of the more banal and personal, she is not as mockingly irreverent towards the Revolution as is Ibargüengoitia. It must be added that it has not only been the female writers who have revived interest in the Mexican Revolution by resorting to the testimonial genre. In 1999, Carlos Fuentes published Los años con Laura Díaz which offers a feminist testimonial with Indo-European words for ‘three’). See Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 1932; and J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982) p. 67. Furthermore Kaminsky’s suggestion that only men could testify in Roman courts is also incorrect: testis is a noun of common gender, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary gives a specific example of a female ‘testis’ in a judicial context (from Suetonius’s Life of Claudius). 30 See Jean Franco, ‘Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private’, in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, eds George Yúdice and others, Cultural Politics, 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 65–85 (p. 70–1). Jean Franco notes that it is vital, however, to emphazise that ‘the term testimonial embraces a corpus of texts that range from fragments embedded in other texts to full-length life stories’ (p. 71). For a general discussion of women’s testimonial narratives see L. Marín, ‘Speaking Out Together: Testimonials of Latin American Women’, Latin American Perspectives, 70:1 (1991), 51–69, and M. Fernández Olmo, ‘El género testimonial: aproximaciones femenistas’, Revista Interamericana, 11:1 (1981), 69–75. 31 See Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 124. 32 See Jean Franco, ‘Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private’, in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (ed.) George Yúdice, Jean Franco and Juan Flores, Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 65–85 (p. 71) and Lloyd Davies, La casa de los espíritus (ed.) by Alan Deyermond and Stephen Hart, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000), p. 58.


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perspective of the Revolution and its aftermath. Fuentes highlights the continuing importance of the Revolution in the Mexican national psyche.33 The important historical connections between Mexican Testimonial narrative and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel have not been investigated adequately – partly because of critics’ reluctance to draw parallels (rather than contrasts) between works belonging to different literary eras.34 The thematic links between the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and the recent Testimonial Novel already discussed are clear: their focus on a version of history deriving from marginalized oral testimonies, their subordination of form to content, and their emphasis on the communal voice. Testimonial writing and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel traditions often share the same version of the Revolution which is occasionally positive, though not, of course, uncritical. They do not so much talk about the event of revolution but of the mythification of the institutional revolution through state propaganda and icon manipulation. They both contribute to that perennial debate about the state of the revolution – does the real revolution survive in its so-called ‘institutional’ guise? Or is it just a state myth that describes nothing in reality and exists only in rhetoric? Such questions are posed by Mastretta in Arráncame la vida and by Poniatowska in Hasta no verte Jesús mío. Another link is seen in the way both the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Testimonial narrative emerge as hybrid genres – which shift between the fictional and the documentary and encompass autobiographical literature, oral history and the literature of protest and resistance – raising questions concerning their status as borderline discourses between fact and fiction. John Beverley and Elzbieta Sklodowska represent opposing strands of Testimonial criticism: Beverley emphasizes the value of testimonial novels as historical documents; Sklodowska on the other hand, focuses on their literary merits.35 The question that arises from

33 Carlos Fuentes, Los años con Laura Díaz (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999). Ángeles Mastretta praises this novel for its powerful fusion between fact and fiction, a feature which characterizes her own novel Arráncame la vida: ‘Los personajes son seres reales o imaginarios que se graban en la esperanza y fecundan los recuerdos [. . .] Fuentes es un hombre que no puede separar su trabajo literario de su intensa aventura personal. Leer, imaginar y revivir Los años con Laura Díaz arraigó en mi ánimo la certeza de la ineludible alianza entre el Fuentes creador y el Fuentes ser humano’. See Ángeles Mastretta, ‘Laura Díaz y Carlos Fuentes: La edad de sus tiempos’, http://www.nexos.com.mx, Nexos Virtual, July 1999: 259 (Last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). 34 See Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Primitives and Creators’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1968, pp. 1287– 88. 35 John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio’, and ‘Second Thoughts on Testimonio’, in Against Literature, ed. John Beverley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) pp. 69–86, pp. 87–99 and Elzbieta Sklodowska Testimonio hispano-americano: historia, teoría, poética (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). See also ‘La forma testimonial y la novelística de Miguel Barnet,’ Revista/Review Interamericana (1982), 12:3, 375–84 by Elzbieta Sklodowska in which she criticizes Barnet’s theories on the ‘truth’ claims of Testimonio as a means of developing her point about the textual nature of this genre. For a general discussion on testimonial narratives see also G. Gugelberger and M. Kearney, ‘Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America’, Latin American Perspectives, 70 (1991), 3–15.


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such criticism is whether testimonial novels should be judged primarily as historical documents which make specific truth claims, or whether they are to be considered as works of art, and not therefore to be assessed by the same criteria: the truth of art may not be literally verifiable but may offer nonetheless a profound truth which goes beyond the ‘facts’. In combining aspects of journalism and of literature, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, like the testimonial novel, produces ‘a murky rhetorical frontier [. . .] of mutual borrowings where nothing is quite what it seems’.36

Oral Discourse as Discourse of Social Commitment Many contemporary critics regard the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Testimonial writing as a departure from the mainstream novel. Carlos Fuentes points to the Mexican Revolution writers’ lack of aesthetic distance: ‘Los temas inmediatos quemaban las manos de los autores y los forzaban a una técnica testimonial que, en gran medida, les impidió penetrar en sus propios hallazgos.’37 Testimonial narrative also subordinates form to content. In both, the literary is subordinated to the journalistic and narrative becomes a medium for communicating a socio-political message. Although Mastretta has been criticized for being a ‘light’ writer concerned with frivolous matters, the testimonial mode of writing is notable for its concern with such issues as truth, precision, and meaning. Amy Katz Kaminsky remarks that Latin American testimonial writing is distinguished for its non-literariness, ‘a no-nonsense approach to getting the facts straight’ which gives it a ‘kind of discursive manliness’ (Reading the Body Politic, p. 52). As will be seen, such qualities predominate in Arráncame la vida (and to an extent in Mal de amores) where writing is marked by its often matter-of-fact, even unliterary style and its insistence on direct communication. Mastretta’s background in journalism is important in this respect, for the journalist’s mission is usually to transmit

36 See Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 10. For an interesting discussion of journalistic techniques employed by Mexican writers Elena Poniatowska and Maria Luisa Mendoza, see Dolly J. Young and William. D Young. ‘The New Journalism in Mexico: Two Women Writers’, Chasqui, 12:2–3 (1983), 72–80. Young refers to the fact that both Poniatowska and Mendoza combine journalism and literature in such a way that it makes classification within traditional genres difficult. Young shows that both these female authors employ New Journalism techniques, which are often used to ‘create accurate and moving nonfiction’ (Young, p. 78). Mendoza’s collection of satirical short essays, Las cosas (1976), is the most characteristic of New Journalism with its account of the consumer concerns of women reminiscent of both Guadalupe Loaeza’s Compro, luego existo and Ángeles Mastretta’s Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado. Mendoza’s talent for talking about one single object or daily experience and elaborating extensively on it – ‘one idea leads to another, and so on ad infinitum’ (Young, p. 78) – reminds us of Mastretta’s own style. 37 See Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico: Mortiz, 1969), p. 15.


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information, employing language as a natural medium rather than exploring the limits of its communicative powers. In Arráncame la vida, Mastretta does not question the metalanguages of justice, freedom, and truth but deals with these conventional topics with complete seriousness. Both Mexican Revolution narratives and testimonial writing seek to document reality in plain, unproblematic language and to record directly the voices of those who have been marginalized by society. Azuela, Guzmán, and Poniatowska, for instance, worked as journalists which explains their highly developed social awareness. In his collection of essays Otras Inquisiciones (1952) Jorge Luis Borges discusses journalism as ‘a clumsy way of circulating interpretations, usually erroneous ones, about a reality that is fundamentally unknowable’ (Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative, p. 107). Despite such philosophical problems, journalistic writing as exemplified in the work of Mastretta and Poniatowska continues to be associated with political commitment and the desire for social change. According to Aníbal González, journalistic and Testimonial writing, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and documentary fiction in general all attempt to ‘create an impression of immediacy by turning language into a straightforward, transparent medium of communication’ (p. 122). So, in order to maintain this sense of transparency, both Mastretta and Poniatowska use ‘lenguaje popular’, oral testimonies as a means of evaluating and recording history. Mastretta’s employment of an oral tradition derives from her childhood in Puebla where storytelling or recounting the day’s events was a common event (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 321). For both Mastretta and Poniatowska, oral discourse and slang is the antilanguage of official discourse. The orality of Mastretta’s style emerges in her conversational tone and in her frequent use of slang terminology which abounds in Arráncame la vida, adding to the ‘reality effect’: ‘chingar’, ‘coger’, ‘chichis’, ‘cabrón’, ‘pito’, ‘pendejos’, ‘cogemos como dioses’. The employment of slang has radical implications. McHale defines slang as an antilanguage which ‘is a specialized discourse of a deviant social group’.38 McHale further remarks that ‘just as the group’s behaviour deviates from social norms, so analogously its language deviates from the standard’ (p. 168), a point exemplified by Catalina’s use of language in Arráncame la vida. As has been mentioned previously, Catalina is both deviant in action and in speech. She speaks in a vulgar fashion and defies social conventions. But such behaviour seems to be the norm rather than the exception in the Mexican ruling class. Indeed, Pepa admits that ‘cogemos como dioses’ (p. 86) refers to many of the well-to-do wives who have affairs. As the wife of a governor, one would expect Catalina to use ‘correct’ language but shocking vulgarisms punctuate her speech and that of her friends. She uses ‘coger’ repeatedly in evoking her relationship with Carlos Vives. Even in the seduction scene following their retreat into the garden after a state dinner given in Vives’s honour, they both use sexually explicit language: ‘pero por lo pronto quieres que demos una

38

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 168.


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cogidita, ¿no?’ (p. 159 and p. 142). As mentioned earlier (pp. 66–67), Anderson (Displacement: Strategies of Transformation, p. 23) claims that Catalina ‘defends and reproduces her class values while she simultaneously resists the constraints of the gender script assigned to her within that class’. One way she plays the game, is by using a displaced linguistic register which is not indiscriminate, but reflects the idea of bilingualism already discussed (p. 62; pp. 67–68).39 Mastretta’s use of vulgar language transgresses the stylistic conventions of both the typical ‘folletín’ and the sentimental songs that women often sing. Catalina’s vulgar language serves to challenge the clichés associated with femininity as well as to expose by means of parody the macho Mexican’s attitude towards women and regional and national politics.40 Texts replicating everyday language are often seen as an antidiscourse to official language and serve to break high/low barriers. For Bakhtin, antilanguage is essentially dialogic ‘conducting an implicit polemic against the standard language and its world-view’. It creates in effect an ‘anti-world view, a counterreality of its own that is dialectically related to “straight” or “official” reality’ (quoted in McHale, p. 168). Despite its subversive implications there is an implicit irony in Catalina’s use of slang. Critics imply that Catalina has deliberately adopted this language as a strategy. Although Mastretta told me that Catalina knows no other way of talking, because it is part of her world, Catalina’s voice is in fact based on a man’s voice, mimicking that of Renato Leduc, Mastretta’s poet friend (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 322–23). Catalina’s voice subverts male language from within by its ironic inflections. Here language is a kind of performance in which Catalina appropriates vulgar male language and both exploits its communicative power and exposes its underlying vapidity – its failure to communicate except on a superficial stereotypical level.41 As a woman, Catalina’s use of masculine

39 See Danny J. Anderson, ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida,’ in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CON: Greenwood Press, 1997) pp. 13–27 (p. 20). 40 See Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p.103. 41 See Jean Franco ‘La Malinche: From Gift to Sexual Contract’, in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, eds Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 66–82. In her discussion of La Malinche’s role as interpreter for Cortés during the Conquest, Jean Franco applies Luce Irigaray’s view that mimicry is the only tactic women had available within patriarchal discourse. According to Irigaray: ‘to play with mimesis is [. . .] for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself to [. . .] “ideas”, in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make visible by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible; the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine language.’ See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 76. Several critics have pointed out that Catalina acquires her own voice through the use of vulgar expressions which subvert propriety and make a mockery of female constraint.


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language could be seen as potentially subversive, but her collusion with masculine values compensates for the linguistic liberties she takes.

Fact or Fiction? In his study of the relation between journalism and Latin American narrative, Aníbal González proposes that journalism has worked to demystify literary writing and the concept of literature itself. Furthermore the dual roles of many writers push them to inhabit the margins between journalistic and literary writing, seeking their artistic freedom in that ‘gray-no-man’s land between discourses’ (p. 14). It is in this vague area that we can situate Mastretta’s idiosyncratic brand of postmodernism. Despite the insistence on direct communication prevalent in the Mexican Revolutionary novel and testimonial narratives, these texts are marked by their unmistakably novelistic features: the artistry of Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (NRM, I, p. 53–113) and Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente (NRM, I, p. 209–423) has been widely recognized. These narratives are carefully and masterfully planned. Like Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío and Silvia Molina’s La familia vino del norte, Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida also contains distinctly literary techniques. Aníbal González argues that journalism has served to demystify writing and the notion of literature itself; the dual affiliation of many writers encourages them to inhabit the margins, finding maximum creative freedom in the ‘gray no-man’s land between discourses’ (p. 14). It is in this indeterminate area that we can locate Mastretta’s peculiar brand of Postmodernism. This connection between journalism and literature is powerfully evoked by Mastretta, the bricoleuse, who believes that both these media are constructed with the same basic materials: ‘¿En dónde está la barrera? ¿Dónde está la diferencia entre el periodismo y la literatura, si se hacen con lo mismo? Lo haces con los mismos ladrillos que la literatura’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 324). One of the leading testimonial narrative critics, John Beverley, insists that testimonial discourse, in contrast to the bourgeois novel, is ‘primarily concerned with sincerity, rather than literariness’,42 placing it in direct line with Carlos Fuentes’s critique of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel as a tradition which sacrifices literary creativity to faithful representation. Other critics, however, view the Mexican Revolution novelistic tradition as an ethically inadequate form of representation written primarily by elite authors writing from positions of class superiority. A similarly to the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, testimonial narratives privilege the spoken word over the written word recalling Saussure’s view of voice as metaphor of truth and authenticity and writing as a secondary form of

42 John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)’, Modern Fiction Studies, 35 (1989), 11–28 (p. 15).


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communication.43 Testimonial narrative uses the popular and journalistic as a way of achieving what Yúdice describes as an: authentic narrative [. . .] told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation [e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.]. Emphasising popular, oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as an agent [rather than a representative] of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.44

For the more orthodox ‘testimonialistas’ like George Yúdice this truth–believing paradigm is achieved primarily through the interviewer/interviewee technique or through ‘pluriautoridad’ which makes testimonial narrative so unique and authentic.45 For Beverley, testimonial writing privileges the unofficial voice by upgrading the characters to ‘authors’ and the authors are reclassified as mere ‘editors’, ‘collaborators’ or ‘co-authors’. This notion of a text (re) created by more than one author goes counter to the individualistic Western concept of a single author.46 Arráncame la vida does not conform strictly to this definition and therefore would probably be seen as literary testimonio or pseudo-testimony. The interview technique is not directly exploited by Mastretta as it is in Hasta no verte Jesús mío. However, the style of Arráncame la vida is at times very matter of fact and its journalistic quality is reinforced by frequent references to political parties, historical characters, specific geographical locations (districts, streets, shops) and precise time frames. Literary testimonial narratives nevertheless incorporate other testimonial procedures. Testimonial writing gives the appearance of undermining the centrality of the author and therefore the traditional assumptions concerning the authority of texts as in the case of Poniatowska’s

43 ‘Voice becomes a metaphor of truth and authenticity, a source of self-present “living” speech as opposed to the lifeless secondary emanations of writing’ where ‘writing [. . .] is a threat to the deeply traditional view that associates truth with self-presence and the ‘natural’ language wherein it finds expression.’ Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 28. 44 G. Yúdice, ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’, Latin American Perspectives, 70 (1991), 15–32 (p. 17). 45 For Vilches Norat ‘este carácter pluriautorial provoca desconfianza si consideramos el testimonio desde una óptica tradicional, si concebimos el proceso creativo como un proceso individual, generado solamente por una persona. Sin embargo, el testimonio recalca la importancia de la participación del informante en la construcción textual y así suspende el concepto tradicional del autor para dar énfasis al caracter procesal que contiene el texto’. Vanessa Vilches Norat, ‘Elena Poniatowska y el testimonio: la recuperación de todo México’, Inter-American Review of Bibliography, 44 (1994), 283–89 (pp. 284–5). 46 Yúdice explains that testimonio is a personal story which ‘is a shared one with the community to which the testimonialista belongs. The speaker does not speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of identity-formation which is simultaneously personal and collective’. See ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’, p. 15.


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Hasta no verte Jesús mío. Here the interviewer/interviewee technique is important because it permits the once colonized Other to become the speaking subject, with the author relegated to the status of editor. Hasta no verte Jesús mío is based on an interview between Poniatowska and a washer woman, who narrates her recollections of the Revolution and its aftermath. The omission of Poniatowska’s questions allows a simulated monologue and elevates Jesusa to the authorial position.47 Several critics have dismissed testimonial writing’s claims to self-referentiality, non-literariness and authenticity based on the age-old literary idea that the narrative voice is always a persona which cannot be identified unproblematically with the individual narrator unproblematically. Despite the apparent self-effacement of the editor in Testimonial writing there are obvious contradictions. We realize that in Jesusa Palancares’s testimony there are substantial editorial manipulations that problematize the authorial position (Kerr, pp. 371–2). The reliability of Jesusa’s narrative is also questionable. How can an elderly woman reconstruct in such minute detail specific moments in the drama of her personal life and of national history? Moreover editorial manipulation is apparent, for example, in the chronological division of the text.48 As in the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, the literary component in testimonial narrative is problematic. Poniatowska has explicitly admitted that she is selective in her use of interview material: ‘Utilicé las anécdotas, las ideas y muchos de los modismos de Jesusa Palancares [. . .] Maté a los personajes que me sobraban, eliminé cuanta sesión espiritualista, podé, elaboré donde me pareció necesario, podé, cosí, remendé, inventé.’49 When the historical Jesusa Palancares learned about these amendments, she was outraged and accused Poniatowska of being a

47 See Lucille Kerr, ‘Gestures of Authorship: Lying to Tell the Truth in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío’, Modern Language Notes, 106 (1991), 370–94. Kerr questions the truth claims of Poniatwoska’s testimony and examines those editorial manipulations that problematize the authority and author of the text. See also Beth E. Jörgensen, ‘Framing Questions: The Role of Editor in Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatleclo’, Latin American Perspectives, 70:1 (1991), 80–9. 48 Doris Meyer remarks (pp. 53–4) that the epic vision and autobiographical format of Cartucho signal the author’s consciousness of technique and her authoritative manipulation of the text very much in the style of Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío and to a lesser extent Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida. In both Cartucho and Hasta no verte Jesús mío, the reader is aware of the intricate literary relationship between the author and the narrator– witness and the problematical reliability of these testimonial narratives. Meyer points out that through her use of multiple narrative voices Campobello ‘dialogizes the discourse of testimony and shares the authorizing gesture’ (p. 56), ultimately rejecting the ‘monologic appropriation of Mexican history by the post-revolutionary power structure’ (p. 58). See Doris Meyer, ‘The Dialogics of Testimony: Autobiography as Shared Experience in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho’, in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, Oxford Hispanic Studies (Oxford: Calderon Press, 1996), pp. 46–65. 49 See María Inés Lagos-Pope, ‘El testimonio creativo de Hasta no verte Jesús mío’, Revista Iberoamericana, 56 (1990), 243–53 (p. 248).


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liar and inventing everything.50 Because of these inconsistencies Sklodowksa, Echevarría and other critics have been quick to challenge claims that testimonial narrative is a democratic and uniquely Latin American form.51 Mastretta’s own fiction is informed by such ambiguity. When asked in an interview if her work is a historical novel or purely fictitious, Mastretta answered ambiguously: ‘I think that it is a combination of the two [. . .] I don’t know at what point reality becomes fiction.’52 As in Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío, Mastretta achieves the reality effect in Arráncame la vida by giving the appearance of undermining the centrality of the author through the use of biographical and autobiographical techniques. This vraisemblance is further achieved by the socio-political focus and journalistic style. But her novel does not resemble a mere chronicle of Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Mexico since it offers little explicit historical narration. She reconstructs the testimony of a woman and her surrounding context by recording – with creative sensitivity – habits, gestures, clothing and ways of speaking. In this sense Arráncame la vida falls, as Mastretta hints, somewhere between a piece of objective journalism and an artistic creation. Mastretta gathered the historical material from what she read about the history of Puebla and from what she heard as a child about a General who is Andrés Ascensio in her text: When I tried to learn about the history of the man who would be identified with General Ascensio, those who knew most about his life and peculiarities spoke

50 Another self-conscious literary element in Hasta no verte Jesús mío relates to irony. The author Poniatowska seems to be trying to elicit a very different response in her reader from that which Jesusa is trying to elicit in Poniatowska, the editor. The reader observes what Jesusa does not seem to notice and becomes aware of her inconsistencies and unscrupulous conduct. Jesusa’s morals are exposed but precise authorial intention eludes us owing to the ambiguities of the autobiographical form. Such uncertainty emerges following Jesusa’s enlistment as a soldadera with the carrancistas: ‘Nosotros no éramos comevacas, éramos del gobierno constitucional carrancista y estaba prohibido robarle a la gente [. . .] Los zapatistas esos sí robaban las reses, las mataban y hacian avería y media y los campesinos los tenían miedo [. . .] En una de tantas veces [. . .] llegamos como a las cinco de la tarde a un punto que se llama Agua del Perro. No había nada de gente [. . .] encontramos cazuelas con manteca, las ollas de los frijoles cociéndose [. . .] nos subimos a agarrar las gallinas’ (p. 67). We know that this is blatant theft though Jesusa seems to think otherwise or simply does not want to admit it to us. These contradictions may or may not be psychologically plausible but, because of the way the text is constructed, Poniatowska’s editing, perhaps unwittingly, heightens the irony, making it impossible to overlook. 51 A. F. Emery states that, in testimonial narrative, ‘having the voice of the other depend on the paternalistic presence of an interlocutor empowered to represent it signals the weakness of oral tradition, its dependence on a writing that denatures it in order to preserve it. There is a potential for exploitation of the marginal Other as raw anthropological material to be processed for consumption, a reflection of economic exploitation of the Third World’. See A. F. Emery, The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 18. 52 See Gabriella De Beer, ‘Interview with Ángeles Mastretta’, Latin American Literature and Arts, 48 (1994), 15.


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least about him. So I resorted to my recollections. As a little girl, hiding behind an armchair or under a table, I heard the horror stories they told about him. By that time he had been dead for more than 10 years, but he was still a vivid and frightening topic of conversation. My relatives, trembling, spoke about things that I’ll never be sure were true. I reconstructed what I remembered, but I made up much more than I knew. (Gabriella De Beer, p. 15)

There are certainly inconsistencies in Arráncame la vida which point to the relative nature of testimonial discourse. Mastretta interviewed people from Puebla who claimed that General Ascensio was a murderer. But the newspaper accounts read by Mastretta glorified him. These opposing views point to the sharp disjunction between the subaltern consciousness and the official record. Mastretta’s emphasis on the imaginative aspect of her novel points to the literary foundation of testimonial writing which may give an impression of historical veracity but ultimately boasts no greater claim to representing historical ‘truth’ than fiction itself. Although Mastretta claims to have invented Catalina (Gabriella De Beer, p. 16), Catalina’s voice becomes intimately interwoven with that of Mastretta’s, making, in a sense, Arráncame la vida the author’s personal testimony of Postrevolutionary Mexico. Mastretta explained that Arráncame la vida is a constructed testimony: Es un testimonio trastocado y supongo que por eso convertido en literatura pero sí tiene que ver – y no sé cuánto de historia es cierta –. Lo que hay de cierto en este texto es que el mundo en el que ese hombre imperaba tenía miedo. A lo mejor los hechos específicos no pero que la gente tenía miedo, que la gente vivía sojuzgada, que este hombre era arbitrario, eso es lo que es verdad. Los modos en que yo digo que era arbitrario, no sé si son verdad porque me los contaron. Es cierto que algunos los recogí de las voces de otros pero no sé si eso sea verdad o no. Lo que sí sé, es que así lo vivieron. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 324)

Mastretta claims that although there was a political boss who served as the model for Andrés Ascensio, his wife had nothing to do with Catalina who is merely representative of certain women of the thirties.53 In fact, Arráncame la vida is very much about exposing official lies through a narrator who is not herself always reliable. But, perhaps more importantly, this anecdote points to the undecidable core of testimonial literature – is it fact or fiction, journalism or literature, truth or lies, objective narration or imaginative reconstruction? Is it important to assume that history and fiction are effectively inseparable? 53 However, a university lecturer told me that on a visit to Puebla – not, he claims, quite under the portales – he came across a woman who said to him: ‘Sabes, aquí existió la mujer de un gobernador como la que aparece en Arráncame la vida.’ When I mentioned this episode in our interview, Mastretta reaffirmed the fictional status of Catalina (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 331).


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Testimonial narrative, like the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, is now generally recognized as a genre in its own right but it remains largely undefined perhaps due to the fact that, as Hutcheon indicates, ‘the most radical boundaries crossed [. . .] have been those between fiction and non-fiction and – by extension – between art and life’.54 Seeing the testimonial/Mexican Revolutionary Novel as a genuinely democratic and authentically Latin American literary practice may well be a naive assumption, but to place exclusive emphasis on its literary aspects undermines its potential for political engagement. Testimonial writing shares both the documentary impulse of an earlier generation of writers (the novelists of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel) and partakes of the ‘postmodern’ spirit of the present age, hovering undecidably between categories, refusing to be pinned down by any single genre or style or purpose. The gap between testimony in the purist sense as Beverley defines it, and testimonial narrative as Sklodowska defines it, is much less important than the ethical, moral and political implications. Testimonial writing, like the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, and also recent fictions such as Hasta no verte Jesús mío, La familia vino del norte and Arráncame la vida, keep the reader in touch with the basic values of justice, ethics and freedom – or lack of them. For all his theoretical speculations, Eagleton ultimately returns to these perennial values: ‘The discourses of reason, truth, freedom and subjectivity, as we have inherited them, indeed require profound transformation; but it is unlikely that a politics which does not take these traditional topics with full seriousness will prove resourceful and resilient enough to oppose the arrogance of power.’55 In the next chapter, Mal de amores will be examined with particular focus on the character of Emilia Sauri. As in Arráncame la vida, Mastretta’s peculiar feminist stance continues to be multiple and fluid, ambiguous and unstable. On the one hand, Mastretta openly attacks patriarchal beliefs in both novels, while on the other she appears to acquiesce to them. Like Catalina, Emilia is a strategist and both women employ a series of often treacherous tactics to get what they want. Catalina’s life is, in many ways, harder than Emilia’s in that she is locked in the house of a tyrant who monitors her movements. In this sense Catalina’s treacherous side is more tenacious. However, there are significant differences

54 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 10. 55 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 415. For Beverley (‘The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio’) the importance of testimonial writing is that it could be seen as representing a transitional phase in writing, standing midway between the writing of the past and the writing of the future. Testimonial writing can be appreciated for its effect on the institution of literature in that it points towards a ‘new’ form of writing which sheds the utopian absolutism of the novel as a bourgeois form (Beverley, p. 85). Sklodowska’s approach, on the other hand, detracts from this potentially radical aspect of testimonial writing, emphasizing instead its contribution to that ‘open-ended and endless task of rewriting human experience’. See Elzbieta Sklodowska, ‘Spanish American Testimonial Novel – Some Afterthoughts’, New Novel Review, 1:2 (1994), 31–47 (p. 43).


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between the two female protagonists. As will be demonstrated, both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores highlight a progression in Mastretta’s attitude to feminism: Catalina’s egotism is substituted by Emilia’s commitment to the revolutionary cause and to the marginalized Other. Catalina proves incapable of the independent and altruistic role played by Emilia in Mal de amores who as a doctor learns to use her hands to positive purpose, as shall be seen in Chapter Four. As seen earlier in this chapter, Arráncame la vida is dominated by the themes of greed and corruption. Its first-person perspective reinforces the tone of crude individualism. Mal de amores, on the other hand, written in the third person, succeeds from time to time in conveying a sense of human solidarity and community. Emilia’s obsession with Daniel gives way in the second half of the novel to social commitment, as will be seen. The following chapter will also draw the reader’s attention to Mastretta’s self-conscious predilection for linguistic play and to her versatile style and technique as exemplified in Mal de amores.


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4

Mal de amores: History from a Feminist Perspective In 1997 Ángeles Mastretta was awarded the Premio Rómulo Gallegos for Mal de amores (1996), the contribution of this text to Hispanic letters paralleling that of Arráncame la vida (1985). Mal de amores is perhaps one of Mastretta’s most accomplished pieces of writing in terms of thematic treatment and stylistic technique. In contrast with the limited first person perspective of Arráncame la vida, the third person narrative of Mal de amores offers the reader a broader perspective and facilitates greater authorial manipulation of the plot. Catalina’s vulgar language and abrasive tone is replaced by a more measured and less insistent style. According to Trinidad Barrera, Mal de amores reproduces two literary genres: la que prolonga el ciclo de la novela de la Revolución, en cuanto a la malla tupida de ilusiones y desencantos que van progresivamante surgiendo y muriendo a lo largo de un proceso tan confuso como doloroso [. . .] la otra tendencia es heredada del boom narrativo, reproductora de los códigos actualizados de la novela romántica, del folletín rosa, del mundo mágico y maravilloso del continente. Historia y ficción se dan la mano.1

In Mal de amores, the writer takes her reader through the most horrific and fascinating period of twentieth-century Mexican history, from the last years of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency and the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911 to post-revolutionary Mexican society, ending in 1965. Like Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos and Elena Poniatowska, whose works were considered earlier, Mastretta chooses the Revolutionary period as a means of rewriting history from a feminist perspective. In this way, both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida conform broadly to the parameters of the New Historical Novel as defined by Seymour Menton, both being set in a period previous to the author’s.2

1 See Trinidad Barrera, ‘Tácticas, estrategias y utopías de Ángeles Mastretta’, Insula, 618–19 (June–July 1998), 33–5 (p. 35). 2 See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 16. See also Chapter Two, pp. 33, 37 n. 31, 39, 43 and 46, and Chapter Eight, p. 229.


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In many ways Mal de amores is more optimistic than Arráncame la vida since much of the novel deals with the hopes for change that the Revolution will bring. Though not uncritical of the revolutionary tradition, it is reminiscent of Mariano Azuela’s revolutionary fervour and partial optimism in Los de abajo (1915). In Mal de amores, the protagonist’s identification with the underdog reminds us of those narratives of the Mexican Revolution where the collective voice plays a particularly important role as in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931). Mal de amores is not merely historical. It tells us a story of passion intertwined with the history of Mexico and of a family who have rather unconventional occupations and aspirations. As in Arráncame la vida, Mastretta continues to explore the other side of history from the perspective of a woman and her experiences. The historical provides the backdrop for the story of Emilia Sauri and of her rather unconventional upbringing, her gradual awareness of gender, class and politics, her desire to develop her medical career and her passion for two men. Emilia is born into a liberal family during the end of the porfiriato. Her family, particularly her Yucatecan father, Diego Sauri, her mother, Josefa, and her aunt, Milagros, all play an important role in her emotional and educational development. Another important aspect of Emilia’s development includes her emotional life with the revolutionary leader Daniel Cuenca who initially does not accept her socio-political role. Daniel Cuenca is Emilia’s childhood and adolescent sweetheart. After he completes his law degree he commits himself to the cause of the revolution by joining the maderista movement. Daniel leads a nomadic lifestyle, constantly travelling in disguise throughout the country. At first, Emilia passively awaits her hero’s return from the war but she grows to resent his freedom and is hurt by his cavalier comings and goings. For his part Daniel wants to ensure that Emilia remains within the confines of the home and he resents her desire for independence. He cannot, however, impose his will on a girl whose strong character has been molded by a liberal upbringing. Emilia gradually moves away from Daniel and develops a relationship with a doctor, Antonio Zavalza. Her personal development is forged through often painful experiences in both the private and public spheres. Emilia Sauri is very different from the protagonist of Arráncame la vida since her personal and political aspirations set her apart from her female contemporaries who appear content to fulfil the traditional roles of wife and mother. While Catalina resents her situation, she has scant opportunity to exert her feminist desire for freedom and self-fulfilment. The greater freedom enjoyed by Emilia may reflect Mastretta’s own evolving feminism within the context of a society still in the grip of machismo. Although both Emilia and Catalina can be seen as both passive and active, compliant and subversive, Catalina’s radical instincts are ultimately suppressed in the interests of safeguarding her privileged status. Emilia’s social commitment and direct involvement with the Other is what really takes feminism forward in Mal de amores. Emilia is important because she refutes the notion of female indifference to socio-political issues and demonstrates that women’s impact in this sphere can equal, if not surpass, that of men.


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HISTORY FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE

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Mal de amores is a prime example of Mastretta’s feminist view that the personal is the political and the public the personal. The social awakening of a nation and its desire for revolutionary change coincide with Emilia Sauri’s own social awakening and development. The feminist perspective in Mal de amores, as in Arráncame la vida, is extremely important. Unlike Arráncame la vida, Mal de amores has, as yet, attracted few critical studies. Among the works published is María Teresa Lichem’s thesis which explores the development of Latin American women writers, including Mastretta, within the framework of feminist criticism and Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to language.3 Lichem defines the voice as an expression of socio-cultural and political circumstances and interprets the feminine voice as the consequence of a dialogical interaction between the forces of patriarchy and the silenced voices of the Other, particularly of women. Lichem analyses the linguistic strategies employed by female Latin American writers and employs a model of analysis drawing on the theoretical writings and public opinions of female writers. Ultimately Lichem seeks to demonstrate that the writing of many Latin American writers is an exploration of multiple layers of feminine experiences which evolve through the defiance of patriarchy in both the private and public spheres. Mal de amores is also analysed by Sheryl Lee-Ann Laffey in ‘Power and rebellion in the narratives of Ángeles Mastretta’, where the critic researches all of Mastretta’s books showing how the female characters reject and defy patriarchal structures and experience a series of challenges which will help them to attain power.4 This thesis examines specifically the importance of political, religious, verbal and social perspectives which Mastretta expresses in her own essays and newspaper articles. Laffey seeks to express the other version of history as a means of highlighting ‘her story’. Other articles published on Mal de amores include Carmen Villegas’s ‘Las mujeres de la Revolución Mexicana’5 and Trinidad Barrera’s ‘Tácticas, estrategias y utopías de Ángeles Mastretta’. These critical works are invaluable for our understanding of Mastretta’s feminist discourse. Several critical studies on Mal de amores undoubtedly exaggerate Mastretta’s radical feminism. Her message is, in fact, problematic – as emerges clearly in Arráncame la vida – both subverting and complying with the binary system on which patriarchal logic is built. Mal de amores, a more mature feminist work, takes the reader beyond the suppression represented in Arráncame la vida and the constant struggle against men. Critical here are the (often discordant) relationship between men and women in times of oppression and the mutual fight for justice spurred by a sense of communal solidarity with the voiceless Other.

3 See Maria Teresa Lichem, ‘Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women’s Fiction: From Teresa De La Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela’. Diss. Carleton U, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI 2000. NQ42799. 4 Lee Ann S. Laffey, ‘Power and Rebellion in the Narratives of Angeles Mastretta’. Diss. Indiana U, 1998. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1998. 9834606. 5 See Carmen M. Rivera Villegas, ‘Las mujeres y la Revolución Mexicana en Mal de amores de Ángeles Mastretta’, Letras Femeninas, 24:1–2 (Spring–Fall 1998), 37–48.


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My analysis of Mal de amores will reflect postmodernism’s often shifting and ambiguous feminist message. The analysis of this text will enable the reader to compare and contrast this work with Arráncame la vida as a means of tracing the development of Mastretta’s feminist perspective. It will be demonstrated how Emilia plays a much more positive female role than Catalina, and how Emilia shows greater commitment to the social cause and to the plight of women. In Arráncame la vida, a perceptible divide separates the writer from her protagonist, Catalina: Mastretta is certainly a feminist but Catalina is not. Catalina may be admired by the reader because, as we saw in the last chapter, she has expressed her sexual development and (to an extent) political conscience in an environment which would normally suppress them, but her behaviour is often contradictory and as hypocritical as that of her tyrannical husband. When Catalina is given the opportunity to exercise her freedom, she rejects it because she cannot do without the wealth and security her husband provides. Feminism is simply not an issue for her. The development in Mastretta’s depiction of her female characters is partially explained by Trinidad Barrera: El personaje de Emilia representa un paso gigante frente a la Catalina de Arráncame la vida. Ésta, una vez aceptado el lugar asignado como madre y esposa, utiliza sus tácticas para cambiar el sentido del lugar, las famosas ‘tretas del débil’ de las que hablara Josefina Ludmer. Emilia no necesita adoptar o asumir ningún papel tradicional femenino, ni táctica ni estrategia porque de entrada se instala en otra orbe: el que hasta el momento sólo pertenecía al hombre. Ser esposa y amante feliz es un altísimo logro que ella ha alcanzado con su carácter, su donaire, su inteligencia y demás dones, pero sobre todo es que se lo han permitido social y familiarmente, sin traumas. La utopía parece residir en combinar la seguridad de un marido que la admira, quiere y respeta por encima de todo y la de un amante que, desde su particular posición, la quiere desde la infancia, la busca ocasionalmente y le da el sabor agridulce de la pasión clandestina. No le da paz, como se dice en la novela, pero tiene la dicha. (p. 35)

The harsh tone of Arráncame la vida gives way to an atmosphere of equanimity in Mal de amores where loving relationships take the place of raw sexuality. The treatment of the sexual theme in Arráncame la vida is reminiscent of several modern Spanish American novels where it is used to expose double standards and hypocrisy.6 Arráncame la vida does not criticize the organization of society directly but rather attacks those moral values which underpin it. The importance of sexuality in Arráncame la vida and in many Modern Spanish American novels is summed up in the words of Gustavo Sainz: ‘Si no podemos hacer la revolución social, hagamos la revolución moral.’7 As we saw in the previous chapter, in

6 See Donald Shaw, ‘Notes on the Presentation of Sexuality in the Modern Spanish American Novel’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 59 (1982), 275–82 (p. 281). 7 See Gustavo Sainz’s Obsesivos días circulares (Mexico City: 1969), p. 140, and Shaw, p. 281.


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Arráncame la vida sexuality is also linked to self-development and self-knowledge. It is seen as a positive answer to ‘lack of communication, to the radical “otherness” of one’s fellow men and women. Sexuality is posited as vital, a living force opposed to people’s solitude in a dehumanized world’ (Shaw, p. 281). Catalina’s solitude is healed by having sex with other men but in her obsessive indulgence in sex she finds only momentary fulfilment. Although she develops an acute awareness of herself and her political environment, she remains selfish, conscious of her own immoral behaviour but content to immerse herself in a selfobsessed and indulgent society. In Mal de amores, love becomes the central focus. And although women show greater independence, their emancipation can be partially attributed to the fact that they have caring and supportive male figures who encourage them to become self-sufficient. The development of the female protagonist no longer centres almost exclusively on sexual freedom but also on political awareness and participation in the revolutionary cause. Catalina is far from being a positive role model since she rejects those opportunities for change repeatedly presented to her. She has a masculinized vision of the world having been conditioned by Andrés to accept and help perpetuate the established rules relating to gender. Catalina lives from moment to moment, driven by her voracious sexuality. She symbolizes, as Vital notes, ‘un momento de gozo absoluto, de liberación plena y con lo mejor de la vida por delante’.8 But she remains bereft of feminist consciousness. In Mal de amores, Emilia’s role is more positive. She is devoted to the cause of the Revolution and aids the women involved in the upheaval as we see in the second part of the novel. Perhaps it is her sense of guilt which most clearly differentiates Catalina from Emilia. Catalina takes her personal wellbeing for granted, often showing indifference to the suffering of others. Emilia, on the other hand, is so deeply moved by human destruction, illness and injustice, that, despite the barriers she encounters, she feels compelled to act. Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, draw from the Bildungsroman narrative tradition written from a feminist perspective. This genre has been the focus of attention in recent years, particularly where women’s writing is concerned. In Latin America, the contemporary woman’s novel of education reflects a typical trend in women’s fiction and traces women’s physical and metaphysical journeys in history. The Bildungsroman is about developing the self in a world which is often at odds with the individual’s sense of self. However this new trend rejects the hyper-individualized writing typical of the male tradition of the Bildungsroman.9 It is true that Latin America’s women’s writing from the sixties through to the nineties functions like the male Bildungsroman in that it offers a national allegory, as defined by Fredric Jameson: the female protagonists 8 See Alberto Vital, ‘Erotismo, femenismo y postfeminismo’, Texto Crítico, 7 (July–December 1998), 25–34 (p. 31). 9 See abstract of Alice Anne Edwards. ‘Coming of Age in Latin America: Women’s writing and the Bildungsroman’. Unpublished dissertation abstracts, University of Pittsburgh, 1998. Dissertation Abstracts, 1999, 9919274.


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embody not only their own development but project the life of a nation from their marginalized condition (Edwards). In Mal de amores, the protagonist’s understanding of her position as a marginalized member of society is much more powerfully expressed than in Arráncame la vida, where Catalina remains almost entirely within her own social class. While Catalina has only a partial understanding of her marginalization, Emilia develops a penetrating feminist consciousness and pushes back the traditional boundaries of male– female interaction. While Catalina has only a passive awareness of social injustices, Emilia takes decisive action to combat them, joining the Revolution as a doctor and playing a more positive role in the struggle than does the dogmatic, vociferous and largely ineffectual Daniel. Arráncame la vida and particularly Mal de amores can both be seen as narratives which seek to unravel as well as celebrate the complexities of the Mexican experience through the life of two women, which is achieved by the fusion of various levels of realities and discourses. The intermingling of discourses and knowledges not only aligns Mastretta’s work with postmodern narratives but also suggests her feminist questioning of patriarchal structures of knowledge in her desire to represent an alternative vision to historical truth. This indeterminate vision undoubtedly gives rise to a constant ambiguity and destabalizes our reading experience, pointing to the close affinity of both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores with the postmodern urge to express a world of plural and problematic meanings. No single discourse, style or truth predominates; hence the traditional barriers between low and high cultures are effectively eradicated. Heterogeneity, flux, and movement provide an important counterweight to patriarchy’s desire for stability and rationalization. Mastretta’s shuffling of various levels of reality to counter these imposed divisions represent what Christine Buci-Glucksmann terms a postmodern ‘feminization’ of culture and history: ‘In the labor of writing, the metaphor of the feminine then rises up as an element in the break with a certain discredited rationality based upon the idea of a historical and symbolic continuum. It does this by designing heterogeneity, a new otherness.’10 Following Buci-Glucksmann’s view, the feminization of history, like myth, can be associated with the now stereotyped associations of the female with emotion. Unlike scientific thought, which is rational, the female mind eschews commitment to the quest for objectivity and truth preferring instead to indulge in frivolity and play.11 Myth, and by extension history, written from a female perspective, often seek to voice the ‘unsaid’ of rationalism whose objective has been traditionally to impose a kind of mental dictatorship and eliminate the ‘unreasonable other’

10 See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 1994), p. 49. 11 See William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991), p. 29, and Lloyd Davies, La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000), p. 63.


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(Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, p. 63). In this sense the postmodern represents a feminization of culture as Buci-Glucksmann indicates. Patriarchal discourse frequently represses anything to do with the feminine (body, myth, carnival) which it deems to be dangerous and potentially uncontrollable. Mastretta shows that repressed female discourses have their own particular validity and that they provide an important balance in a world of plural meanings. However we must be cautious when applying Buci-Glucksmann’s general alignment of the male with the rational and the female with the irrational to Mal de amores because, as Davies (p. 63) argues: ‘Though apparently clearcut, this difference requires some qualification in the light of the postmodernist realization that even scientific rationality, often seen as a largely male preserve, is ultimately a myth: the blurring of these gendered boundaries echoes the postmodernist disturbance of human gender divisions.’ Indeed in Mastretta’s texts, her female characters do not necessarily embody the irrational and her male characters the rational, as we shall see. In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, women are often aligned with heterogeneity and otherness as well as with order and fixity. In the first section of this chapter I will provide an analysis of the main characters of Mal de amores as a means of demonstrating that Emilia’s liberal family and other characters are important agents in her development towards emancipation and emotional freedom. The main characters who influence her weltanschauung are her father, Diego Sauri, and Daniel Cuenca’s father, Octavio Cuenca. Antithetical female–male role models – Josefa/Milagros and Daniel/Zavalza – exert considerable influence on Emilia who incorporates their opposing characteristics in her own hybrid and complex personality.

Moving beyond traditional gender stereotypes: the characters Before exploring Emilia’s character in both the public and private spheres, we must analyse the importance of those characters in Mal de amores who exert significant influence on her. Arráncame la vida is a man’s world and women are made to feel inferior beings who must get what they want by surreptitious means. They are oppressed and often treated like sexual objects. The uneducated Catalina does not have the familial and cultural background necessary for her independence. She develops quite a warped and masculinized vision of the world and cannot therefore be considered as a positive female role model. In Mal de amores, however, women are able to become independent, participate actively in politics and express their opinions openly. Their different circumstances facilitate personal development and feminist consciousness. Emilia has a liberal education which will help her develop a strong identity. Sexuality is important but becomes increasingly secondary to the exercise of a professional career and participation in the political life of the nation. As will be seen in Chapter Six on sexuality, the traditional association of reason and intelligence with masculinity and physical pleasure, and emotion


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with femininity, is subjected to ironic restatement or plain subversion in many of Mastretta’s texts. The women in Mal de amores come across as positive role models and break with the generally negative female figures we encounter in Arráncame la vida, although Catalina can be admired for her strength of character. The difference in Mal de amores is that the female and male characters do not always conform to traditional gender stereotypes. The male characters are often endowed with ‘female attributes’ such as emotion, sensitivity and spontaneity while the females possess ‘manly’ virtues, such as intelligence, stoicism and courage. In Mastretta’s Mal de amores, ‘the general alignment of the masculine with fixity, reaction, and predictability and the feminine with change, vitality, and excess’ (Davies, p. 85) is both radically confirmed and radically subverted. Indeed this blurring is clearly seen in the fact that Emilia has an almost rationalist and male mind. She is the one who is determined to acquire a degree in medicine at university and has well-honed critical faculties. She even brings to bear her rational proclivities upon her emotions, cataloguing and classifying them with an almost scientific precision: ‘Emilia hablaba de sus sentimientos encontrados y de sus clarísimas furias, ordenándolos y describiéndolos con una precisión casi científica’ (p. 226). Men, on the other hand, are unreasonable talking about politics ‘sin orden y sin tregua’ (p. 223). Emilia’s desire for cohesion is seen when she organizes medicinal pots in alphabetical order for her father who lacks organizational skills. Emilia is a hybrid combination of womanly traits – passivity, passion, warmth – and manly qualities such as intelligence and determination. Mastretta often inverts the traditional roles allocated to men and women, men appearing to be weak and passive and women assuming dominant male roles as in the case of the poet Rivadeneira and Milagros. The women surrounding Emilia, Milagros particularly, embody a mixture of the manly and womanly. The typical association of women with silence is both reinstated and subverted. In Mal de amores, Octavio Cuenca’s wife is an expert in the art of silence and is described as ‘una de las más hábiles descifradoras del silencio que ha dado la larga historia de esa profesión entre las mujeres’ (p. 31). On the other hand, women are often associated with empty chatter. On one occasion Emilia conveys with passion her sudden awareness of the importance of the Revolutionary cause: Emilia entró con la lengua desatada y el corazón en vilo. Habló y habló durante más de una hora, mezclando, en el desorden de su euforia, al carcelero con el trapecista y a su tía con la necesidad de una revolución, a Rivadeneira con el domador de leones y Sor Juana con la muchachita que brincaba de un caballo al otro. (p. 156)

‘Lengua desatada’, ‘habló y habló’, ‘desorden’ allude to the stereotypical association of women with uncontrolled loquacity. But, in fact, Emilia’s verbal effusion is designed to conceal from her parents the full truth of what really occurred during her brave ordeal when she went to save Daniel from prison: ‘Sin embargo, se cuidó de no contar lo que había sucedido tras la reja que cruzó para


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seguir al carcelero en busca de Daniel. Pasó por esa parte como si todo hubiera sido costura y canto’ (p. 156). Finally, unlike in Arráncame la vida, there is in Mal de amores a positive bonding between females from the same and different social classes. Mujeres de ojos grandes, as we shall see, also places great emphasis on the idea of women’s solidarity and their ability to communicate with their eyes, which is also depicted in Mal de amores. Thus, there is a clear development in terms of Mastretta’s feminist discourse in Mal de amores even if the novel is set almost two decades before Arráncame la vida.

Emilia’s ‘Fathers’: Diego Sauri and Octavio Cuenca The father figure has an important presence in both Mal de amores and, as we saw in the previous chapter, Arráncame la vida. In both texts, Emilia and Catalina have strong bonds with their fathers. The familiar figure of the remote authoritarian father is absent in these novels. Both Emilia and Catalina seem more attached to their fathers than they are to their mothers. Here the loving father figures reflect Mastretta’s own close relationship with her father. As we highlighted in the previous chapter, Mastretta explains that the memory of her father has become in many respects mythified and this idealization has been transferred to the fictional plane.12 In Mal de amores, Emilia’s development is influenced by two father figures: her own father Diego Sauri and Daniel’s father, Octavio Cuenca. Both these male figures are extremely valuable in Emilia’s development. Although Octavio is not a central character he exerts a significant influence on Emilia, particularly on her professional life. Whereas Diego enlightens her about the intricacies of alternative medicine, such as indigenous herbal medicine, Cuenca, like Antonio Zavalza, provides practical instruction in orthodox medicine. Their earthy integrity is suggested by their closeness to natural phenomena: Cuenca is described as ‘impávido y noble como el buen vino’ (p. 195) while Diego is described as smelling of ‘madera y tabaco’ (p. 189). Catalina’s relationship with her father compares in some respects with that of Emilia and Diego. The traditional intimate mother–daughter relationship is subordinated here to the closer bond with the father: Diego y su hija no habían conocido un desacuerdo en toda su vida. A ella le gustaba tanto su padre que no necesitó desafiarlo jamás. Siempre le parecía que la razón y las mejores ideas estaban de su parte y si en algo lo creía equivocado fue tan insignificante que nunca consideró contradecirlo. Lo mismo le sucedía a Diego: encontraba a Emilia tan perfecta y adorable como el futuro que tanto le gustaba predecir. (Mal de amores, p. 94) 12 The memory of Mastretta’s father continues to feature prominently in her latest work, El cielo de los leones (2003). In ‘Una voz hasta siempre’, Mastretta recalls nostalgically the happy times she spent as a child with her father and how deeply his death affects her to this day.


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Emilia’s relationship with Octavio Cuenca is so close that it arouses Daniel’s jealousy. Daniel is angered to find that he no longer enjoys the undivided attention of Emilia. Her profession as doctor sets up barriers. He can no longer possess her and does not understand the language she uses in this new role, particularly when she is working alongside his father: Vio después a su padre y a Emilia entregarse a la pasión que ambos compartían. Pasó entonces de sentirse el centro de la vida de Emilia con que dio en la noche a ser tan sólo un testigo intruso en ese universo de signos y términos que no sólo desconocía sino que provocaron las primeras convulsiones de un sentimiento seco y necio: los celos lo fueron enfureciendo mientras su padre y Emilia tejían en sus narices la red de complicidades más perfecta que él podía haber imaginado. (p. 200)

In addition he feels betrayed by what he perceives as Emilia’s usurpation of his own place in his father’s affections: Emilia descifraba el aliento de ese hombre seco que había sido su padre y su padre hablaba con ella usando una suavidad con la que no había privilegiado nunca a sus hijos [. . .] Emilia quería a otro Cuenca además de a él y su padre quería a Emilia como nunca demostró querelo a él. (p. 201)

Emilia poses a double threat: she has a more important professional role than Daniel does and in addition she has usurped his place in his father’s heart.

Four Antithetical Models In Mal de amores, we encounter a pair of male and a pair of female characters who influence Emilia’s development. Emilia’s family circle and close friends also contribute significantly to her development. Even Emilia’s name testifies to her liberal ideals since it derives from Émile Rousseau (p. 20). The first pair of characters are two antithetical females, Milagros and Josefa; the male side comprises two equally opposing characters, Zavalza and Daniel. This symmetrical pattern is reinforced by links between the pairs. Zavalza is the male counterpart of Josefa, and Daniel that of Milagros. Villegas points out that Zavalza represents Emilia’s ‘deseo de regresar al hogar desde donde enfrenta al mundo con seguridad’, and that Daniel embodies ‘su angustia al interactuar en el espacio público y donde no es completamente bienvenida’ (p. 43). Emilia’s mother has conservative instincts and is the one who keeps order in the family in times of turmoil. She teaches Emilia to behave in the socially correct manner while showing her how to be tender and caring. Milagros, Emilia’s aunt, is perhaps Emilia’s most powerful female role model: she facilitates Emilia’s development into a strong woman who does not depend upon men for personal survival and understands the importance of social commitment in times of upheaval.


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Milagros and Josefa Veytia Emilia represents both the passive and the active, the emotional and the rational, the manly and the feminine. Both Milagros and Josefa embody to a great extent these opposing characteristics and in many ways provide balance in Emilia’s character. Milagros like all the people close to her is an exceptional woman as emerges from the opening description of her (pp. 24–5). She is ultimately a contradictory character, a militant feminist who also embodies the image of the male ideal. She is intelligent and opposed in principle to marriage because she does not find men sufficiently stimulating. She is beautiful and knows how to fulfil the traditional female duties to perfection. Milagros is also maternal and loving like Josefa. This maternal streak contrasts with Catalina’s stunning renunciation of motherhood and maternal love in Arráncame la vida (which is analysed in depth in Chapter Five), suggesting Mastretta’s own re-evaluation of motherhood following the birth of her own children. Milagros plays the role of loving aunt to Emilia and surrogate mother to Daniel during the first years of his life. His father, Octavio Cuenca, reclaims his son because he fears that Daniel’s manliness is at risk from the ‘exceso de mimos que le había procurado la generosa pero inmoderada amiga de su mujer’ (p. 59). Her sense of devastation on losing Daniel testifies to her strong maternal instincts. Milagros also loves Rivadeneira, an affluent poet, but for many years rejects his offers of marriage while accepting his attentions and political help. In this somewhat unconventional relationship, Milagros is the one who wears the trousers and Rivadeneira plays the passive role. Milagros’s historical awareness and social commitment will be passed on to Emilia. Josefa Veytia is a much less intricate figure, providing a counterweight of common sense and practicality, but generally playing a lesser role in shaping Emilia’s character. Josefa’s initial conservatism provides a sharp contrast with Diego’s liberal attitude in the context of Emilia’s relationship with Daniel. She is overprotective towards her daughter and is averse to change. She overreacts on various occasions – as when Diego announces that Emilia has spilt ink over her new white dress: Tan bienaventurado discurso terminó cuando Josefa, practicando el deber femenino de la atención diversificada, descubrió a Emilia teñida de lila [. . . .] Josefa calificó a Diego de inconsciente y Diego se defendió llamando a su mujer quisquillosa. Cuando para las nueve de la noche Emilia tuvo a bien dormirse, aún medio pintada de manchas lilas, Josefa se sentó a llorar. (Mal de amores, p. 45)

In many ways Josefa upholds the masculine–feminine divide, preferring, for instance, to keep away from the Sunday tertulia which she sees as a male activity: ‘La misma Josefa Sauri, que tanto y tan bien hablaba a solas con su marido, se consideraba fuera del reino masculino que presidía esas tertulias’ (p. 36). This attitude contrasts sharply with Milagros’s attitude who prefers to reject matrimony rather than to give up her personal freedom: ‘prefirió negarse al matrimonio


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antes que abandonar lo que juzgaba el privilegio de vivir como los hombres’ (p. 36). Here Milagros’s blinkered vision emerges in her idealization of masculine freedom. Mastretta’s stance is reminiscent of Catalina’s in Arráncame la vida. Catalina is bored to death by the empty women’s chatter and prefers to join the men’s circle at her home despite her awareness that such behaviour is socially incorrect: ‘volví al grupo de las mujeres. Prefería oír la plática de los hombres, pero no era correcto. Siempre las cenas se dividían así, de un lado los hombres y en otro nosotras hablando de partos, sirvientas y peinados. El maravilloso mundo de la mujer, Andrés llamaba eso’ (p. 64).

Daniel Cuenca and Antonio Zavalza Perhaps even more than the women, the men in Mal de amores are really the most influential in Emilia’s psychosexual development, particularly Daniel Cuenca and Antonio Zavalza. The importance of masculine influence on Emilia offers another parallel with Arráncame la vida. Daniel and Zavalza are two antithetical masculine models. While Daniel awakens Emilia’s social conscience, Zavalza represents her desire to stay within the safe realms of the private sphere of the home where she can confront the world without risk (Rivera Villegas, p. 43). Daniel on the one hand is the ‘revolucionario y comprometido cabalmente con los designios del estado’ (p. 43), while Zavalza, on the other, is ‘liberal e indulgente respecto a los deseos autónomos de su colega y compañera sentimental’ (p. 43). With Daniel ‘Emilia aprende lo difícil y lo mezquino que es el espacio social prohibido para la mujer, mientras con el segundo, reafirma sus posibilidades de hacer revolución desde el espacio doméstico’ (Villegas, p. 43). Daniel, the revolutionary, depicts the typical characteristics of the macho figure and, as we shall see, makes Emilia feel inadequate about her ‘manly’ roles as doctor and would-be revolutionary. Daniel’s views on gender roles, inherited from his father, are uncompromisingly conservative. His father realizes when Daniel is not yet a teenager that being surrounded by women could be counterproductive to a normal male upbringing and decides to send his son to a boarding school in Chalcicomula. Daniel is sent to a school run by a revolutionary who teaches boys the virtues of maintaining physical fitness, controlling their passions and using their reason: Daniel Cuenca aprendía el mundo bajo la tutela de don Camilo Aberamen, un hombre de formación anarquista que ponía toda la fuerza de sus creencias en educar a un grupo de muchachos elegidos por él [. . .] justo por el temple que los recomendaba [. . .] Tenía la certeza de que la inteligencia crecía mejor en los niños de espíritu indómito. Y era su placer y su orgullo enseñarlos a tramar razones y a gobernar su emoción, sin perder la bravura. Con él aprendían lo mismo música que latín y estudiaban tantas horas de matemáticas como horas subían cerros y saltaban obstáculos entrenando sus cuerpos para batallar con la vida. (p. 64)


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Daniel’s view of women reveals close parallels with that of Andrés Ascencio (Arráncame la vida). Although there is a huge moral gap between the two – Daniel is the fighter for justice, while Andrés is a cold-blooded murderer – they both prevent their partners from becoming independent (Villegas, p. 45). In this sense, they both play the role of catalysts in their women’s quest for freedom and emancipation. In Mal de amores, Zavalza represents Daniel’s antithetical model (Villegas, p. 43). Zavalza fulfils Emilia’s desire for emotional stability and security and altruistically helps her to develop her professional career as a doctor. But he does not offer the same possibilities of emancipation as Daniel does. Despite Daniel’s often unsupportive attitude towards Emilia, he unwittingly provides the tools for her self-development. Emilia learns how to live a nomadic life of dispossession and hardship. Through him she comes into contact with the marginalized Other, sectors of the population who have no official voice. They have been silenced and cannot express their fear and pain, particularly the women, the soldaderas and the children whom Emilia nurses. Had Emilia stayed with Zavalza, she would not have developed as she does. She alternates between these two men but it is Zavalza who usually loses out in the battle for her attention.

Emilia Sauri: From Innocence to Social Commitment As in Arráncame la vida, Mal de amores follows the trajectory of Emilia Sauri from early childhood to adulthood. In Chapter Three, we saw how Catalina’s world of innocence abruptly comes to an end when she is forced into marriage, giving way to a life of greed and deceit. Emilia’s private space both during her childhood and adulthood is mainly characterized by its innocence and tranquility but her problematic relationship with Daniel will draw her into active participation in the frequently tempestuous public domain. Innocence and loss of innocence constitutes a recurrent theme in Mal de amores. The tensions experienced by Emilia as she grows up are complemented on a national level by her country’s struggle to achieve social justice. Emilia both longs for sameness and stability (innocence) and also desires change and innovation (loss of innocence). The tranquility of her innocent childhood inevitably gives way to the anxieties attendant upon her psychosexual awakening and growing political awareness. In Arráncame la vida, Catalina displays less innocence but her development, like Emilia’s, coincides with the socio-political awakening of a nation and its gradual disillusionment with a corrupt government. In Mal de amores, Emilia’s conception, birth and childhood are described in utopian terms by copious references to mythical anecdote and to indigenous (Mayan and Aztec) culture and religion. Chapter Two, for example, is replete with astrological references: in their procreative efforts Josefa and Diego are guided by the movement of the moon. Here there is a powerful environment of magic and ritual which suggests the infancy of mankind, when primal instincts were given free reign. The yearning for innocence is captured in the first scenes of the novel during Emilia’s early years of infancy and adolescence, protected by


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her mother’s fervent desire to keep her isolated from all the political turmoil of the world (p. 27). Josefa reprimands Diego for his inconsiderate attitude by telling their daughter about political affairs which she just cannot understand. Josefa aseguraba que la niña era demasiado pequeña para interesarse en el surgimiento del partido laborista en Inglaterra, la anexión de Hawaii a los Estados Unidos [. . .] Regañaba a su marido por entristecerla hablándole de la prohibición de las corridas de toros del desastre de que se reeligieran los gobernadores o se gastara cien mil pesos mensuales en obras para el imposible desague del Valle de México. Diego respondía diciendo que ella hacía peor hablándole de la Inglaterra de Charlotte Brontë y leyéndole Shirley en voz alta. (p. 27)

As Emilia gradually becomes older, so the references to past innocence increase. It is inextricably linked with the idea of mutual love and harmony between men and women. The powerful bonding between Emilia and Daniel is evoked in their early days of play in the peaceful and beautiful garden in the Cuenca’s home. Daniel’s gift of a talisman to Emilia represents the idea of eternal love and friendship. Indeed, a prelapsarian contentment is suggested by the blissful relationships which unite all of the main characters. Diego and Josefa have an extremely passionate and idealized relationship. While Milagros flaunts her unorthodox views of love and marriage, she finally accepts Rivadeneira’s proposal. Mastretta celebrates all the possibilities of heterosexual love – from love in adultery to love in old age. Love is on the whole harmonious in Mal de amores as represented by Emilia/Zavalza (less so Emilia/Daniel) and the more mature couples Josefa/Diego and Milagros/Rivadeneira: ‘el amor de esta novela es una fuerza cósmica irresistible, es el centro del universo, poco “mal de amores” se puede apreciar’ (Barrena, p. 34). Innocence is also connected with primal lovemaking, where the body is left to express itself freely uninhibited by social strictures, seen in the relationship between Josefa and Diego whose intensity is reflected in their daughter’s with Daniel. There are also instances, as we shall see, of harmonious relationships between different social classes represented by Emilia’s intimacy with the lower class soldaderas and the witch, Teodora. However, private utopia becomes increasingly overshadowed by social conflict and political upheaval. Innocence in Mal de amores is also connected with the concept of peace. Throughout Emilia’s gradual development from innocent childhood to maturity, there are constant allusions to the word ‘paz’. As with Emilia, women such as Josefa, Milagros and the soldadera Dolores Cienfuegos are on occasions seen as the peacemakers in this novel. Even Milagros, the fervent revolutionary who seeks change in all social spheres, hates emotional upheaval. Her house is described as harmonious and ‘tibia’ (p. 126). A recurrent symbol in Mal de amores is a house key, signifying access to personal freedom as well as access to a safe haven from the unruly world. When Josefa enters Milagros’s house, ‘era como saberse a salvo de cualquier catástrofe’ (p. 126) The house is calm and full of harmony, providing a sharp contrast with the world outside. In the house


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‘el piano estaba abierto como siempre, porque Milagros decía que cerrarlo podría traerle infortunios’ (p. 126). Elsewhere, Josefa’s liking for order helps her to overcome the contradictions and disharmony of the world: her ‘espirítu conciliador la ayudaba a pasar sin apuro entre los preceptos y perjuicios que regían el mundo en que vivían’ (p. 25). Josefa is described as being ‘una especie de diosa regida por las leyes de una intensa armonía’ (p. 11) which recalls a similar description of Emilia as incarnating a godess of peace. On receiving one of Daniel’s sporadic letters, Emilia sits next to Milagros who tells her that she looks like a Mayan goddesses: ‘¿Algún don obtendrían con esta postura?’. Emilia simply replies: ‘la paz’ (p. 122). In Mal de amores, peace and tranquility are associated with the private female space, and it is Mastretta’s women who are most closely associated with order and rationality. The typical association of men with rationality and women with change and unpredictability is thus subverted. Emilia possesses an almost male logical mind. She seeks order and peace and strives to rationalize a world turned upside down by unreasonable men. Her desire for cohesion is seen in her ordering of medicinal pots in alphabetical order for her father who cannot keep them in order because he is too emotional and ‘fantasioso’ (p. 172), as Emilia herself puts it. Diego tells her off for mixing all his medicine jars: ‘lo confundiste todo – dijo llevándose las manos a la cabeza [. . .] por eso nunca permití que tu madre trajinara en este rumbo. ¿Cómo voy a saber dónde encontrar las cosas?’ (p. 128). But Emilia retorts: están por orden alfabético– dijo Emilia– Me he pasado toda la vida viendo cómo revoloteas para encontrar algo. Yo me tardaría años en entender lo que tú manejas con intuiciones y recuerdos. ¿No te has oído? Por lo menos veinte veces al día te preguntas. ¿Dónde lo puse? Ahora será muy fácil. (p. 128)

Josefa also emerges as a woman with a strong rational sense. When she argues with Diego, he often comes across as emotional and thoughtless while she hates ambiguity and strives for clarity and certainty (p. 61). Similarly, Milagros, despite her unorthodoxy, maintains her house as a haven of peace with an almost male geometrical order where ‘todo lo demás tenía una razón de ser y un destino en aquel lugar’ (p.126). Milgros’s impeccable room contrasts sharply with that of the general editor of the American newspaper for whom Daniel works (p. 299). Rivadeneira’s home has a similar air of neglect: ‘olía a papeles guardados y a hombre solo’ (p. 210). This female inclination towards peace and order is undermined by Catalina (Arráncame la vida) who associates order (e.g. looking after a family, being a wife, cleaning the house) with an oppressive compliance with male domination: ‘establecí un orden enfermo, era como si siempre estuviera a punto de abrirse el telón [. . .] en la casa no había ni una pizca de polvo, ni un cuadro medio chueco [. . . .] esperando a que él llegara de repente y le diera a todo su razón de ser’ (p. 111). Mastretta’s male characters are generally presented as violators of innocence and order. Even the normally placid figure of Rivadeneira appears in this light,


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disrupting the tranquillity of the Sauri household with the disturbing news of Milagros’s arrest (p. 173): ‘empezó a hablar en desorden, como se habla en los sueños [. . .] Los Sauri no entendían su soliloquio, lo escuchaban como a un loco peinando sus locuras’ (p. 175). Diego echoes the belief that men only bring disorder to the world (p. 123). The major disruptive influence on Emilia is Daniel since he introduces uncertainty and anxiety into her peaceful life: ‘a veces Daniel la interrumpía para elogiarla’ (p. 156) and on another occasion: ‘Daniel irrumpió en el vagón haciendo más escándalo que una feria’ (p. 65).

Awakenings Emilia is representative of Mexican hybridity – according to Bartra ‘los mexicanos llevan dentro, como un homúnculo, al indio, al bárbaro, al salvaje, al niño’.13 Emilia’s hybrid background is also symbolic of Latin America’s cultural fusion. She is proud of her ‘mestizo’ blood and is admired for her multiracial beauty (p. 348). Emilia is beautiful, she has mixed blood, is often passive (like the conquered Indian), childlike and nostalgic for her idyllic childhood. Emilia’s physical traits suggest the Freudian myth of woman as dark continent: ‘Los ojos que su padre le llevó de la costa eran oscuros y grandes como un enigma’ (p. 84). But her big eyes, like those used to describe the liberal aunts in Mujeres de ojos grandes, also suggest her intelligence, inaccessibility to men and ability to see beyond the common horizons which limit many women. Indeed, she also represents the complete opposite of the image of passivity she sometimes embodies. Like Catalina, Emilia is a Malinche figure who combines the qualities of the Virgin Mary (p. 86) and those of the temptress, Eve (pp. 198–9; pp. 227, 216). She possesses multiple identities which elude the grasp of the men who love her. In this respect she may be compared with Catalina who is not only capable of deviating from her role as compliant wife but also possesses an elusive quality which resists masculine efforts to domesticate and possess it, as Andrés realizes (Arráncame la vida, p. 225). Emilia’s destiny is foreseen by Milagros who predicts that Emilia will become a free and independent woman: ‘niña [. . .] yo te deseo la locura, el valor, los anhelos, la impaciencia’ (p. 27). She also knows that Emilia ‘no conocería jamás la delicia de ser inocente’ (p. 51). Emilia’s liberal attitudes and political conscience, derive from her family background. While her mother offers her a literary education based on the works of such writers as Brönte, her father teaches her manly subjects: politics, travelling and medicine. She cannot accept that sewing and emotions are for little girls, and fighting and reason for little boys, precisely because her parents never made such a distinction. Emilia’s rich, though frequently confused, understanding of the world lies beyond the boundaries of

13 See Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (México: Grijalbo, 1996), p. 93.


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orthodox education. As a child Emilia learns about various religions – Mayan, Christian and even Greek. When she is seven years old, her parents argue over which school she should attend. Diego is opposed to her going to a Catholic school where her education would be limited – ‘Ahí lo único que le enseñarán son rezos y de lo que se trata es de formar a una criatura que se entienda con las antinomias del mundo moderno’ (p. 61). He wants Emilia to appreciate the fact that Latin America is built on contradictions and antinomies and is a source of many cultures, both Hispanic and indigenous: se enfrascaron en un litigio que terminó con Emilia inscrita en el colegio de una solterona severa y puntillosa que guardaba consigo una historia de amores prohibidos [. . .] Enseñaban catecismo en su colegio. Pero los Sauri contrarrestaban esa información diciéndole a Emilia que era una teoría como cualquier otra, tan importante aunque tal vez menos certera que la teoría sobre los dioses múltiples que predicaba la cabeza de Milagros. Por eso Emilia creció escuchando que la madre de Jesús era una virgen que se multiplicaba en muchas vírgenes con muchos nombres, y que Eva fue la primera mujer, salida del costado de un hombre, culpable de cuantos males aquejan a la humanidad, al mismo tiempo en que sabía de la paciente diosa Ixchel, la feroz Coatlicue, la hermosa Venus, la bravía Diana y Lilith, la otra primera mujer, rebelde y sin castigos. En las tardes Josefa enseñaba piano y pasión por las novelas, mientras Diego le hablaba sin juicio ni tregua de política, viajes y medicina. (p. 62)

Milagros also inculcates Emilia and her family with a clear awareness of their mixed indigenous and Spanish heritage: Les enseñó el valle que según sus conocimientos habían gobernado en otro tiempo los designios del dios Xólotl [. . .] También los llevó a [. . .] la pirámide erguida en honor de Quetzalcóatl, el dios del aire [. . .] Al llegar corrieron por la cuesta que sube a la punta de la pirámide hasta la iglesia que los españoles del siglo XVI plantaron encima del gran templo, sin ningún respeto por el dios con que los habían confundido los primeros habitantes de México. (p. 66)

In Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s upbringing is more orthodox than Emilia’s, but she resists traditional expectations: ‘Cuando tuve que permanecer encerrada todo el día, mi madre puso su empeño en que fuera una excelente ama de casa, pero siempre me negué a remendar calcetines y a sacarles basurita a los frijoles’ (p. 11). Although Catalina is not as well educated as Emilia, she is driven to learn about the ‘manly’ world of politics from her husband. Both Emilia and Daniel will be catalysts for change: significantly Josefa remarks that ‘hacen más ruido que una revolución’ (p. 136). Emilia seems to be ahead of her times – ‘Ella vivirá toda su vida en otro siglo’ (p. 63) – and her alarmed mother blames Diego for filling Emilia’s head with ideas that will disturb her peaceful existence: ‘vas a convertir a Emilia en una insatisfecha permanente. Si la sigues llenando de imposibles – crecerá como una planta de seda en mitad de un patio’ (p. 63). Emilia, like Catalina, as mentioned in Chapter Three, comes into contact with the male


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world of politics from a young age in her life. Emilia’s political conscience is revealed when as a small child she appears to enjoy the company of visitors in the Casa de la Estrella. The infant is intrigued by the world of politics even if she does not fully understand it: La niña se dejó envolver en las cobijas como si buscara dormirse para descifrar un enigma. Pero ni ése ni otros dormitares consiguieron alejarla del embrujo que las reuniones de aquella casa provocarían en su espíritu. Esa tarde conoció el desasosiego de sus habitantes, y desde entonces la perturbó la efervescencia que regía la vida de sus domingos. (p. 38)

The Sauris’ liberal political views ensure Emilia’s exposure to non-conventional attitudes in the Mexico of the early twentieth century. Just as the couple’s love matures from initial passion towards mutual respect, so do their political affiliations develop a certain refinement and stability: ‘políticamente van afinando sus ideas para respirar el mismo aire liberal y opositor a cualquier gobernante que no se guíe por justicia a su pueblo’ (Barrera, p. 34). Their life together begins under the porfiriato. Josefa, unlike Emilia and Milagros, has no strong political views at first. She supports the Porfirian status quo, though in an unreflecting and instinctive way. In contrast, Milagros and Daniel are committed to the opposition. Josefa is very conservative not only politically but also in her personal life. She initially opposes Daniel’s interest in Emilia, but just as she becomes more open-minded towards political change in the nation so too she comes to accept Emilia’s complicated love-life and becomes very supportive of her. On one occasion when Milagros tells her sister Josefa to show off baby Emilia during one of their Sunday reunions in Cuenca’s home, Josefa’s respectful reference to the old president irritates Milagros who objects to her sister’s use of the deferential ‘don’, which is quite misplaced: –No lo llames ‘don Porfirio’. Es un viejo arbitrario, ruin, seco, malvado. –¿Será para tanto? –Pregúntale a tu marido. –No necesito preguntárselo. Todo el día repite cosas así. –Y ¿tú te haces la sorda? –Por supuesto. No quiero que lo maten por andar de hablador. –Aquí se van a morir hasta los mudos, Josefa. No vale la pena callarse. –No digas esas cosas– pidió Josefa. –Como si no las supieras– le contestó Milagros. (p. 52)

As the nation approaches the outbreak of the Revolution, the political opposition to the Díaz regime intensifies following the death of the miners in Cananea (p. 79). At first Josefa reads avidly – as though they were novels – the newspapers supporting Díaz: ‘todos los días el recuento de lo que iba sucediéndole al país la mantenía en vilo igual que una novela por entregas de aquellas que la


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hacían despertar a media noche tratando de imaginarse lo que seguiría’ (p. 113). The image of her reading the newspapers in front of Diego and expressing her political opinions provides a sharp contrast with Catalina in Arráncame la vida who reads newspapers in secret: ‘Yo leía su periódico a escondidas. Cuando Andrés lo aventaba y salía mentando madres, yo lo recogía y lo devoraba. A veces no entendía ni por qué se enojaba’ (p. 55). Josefa spends hours reading newspapers and tries to understand why there are people who are interested in opposing a man like Díaz who: ‘en sus recuerdos era el héroe de muchas batallas importantes, y en su juicio había estado siempre como el único hombre que logró conseguir un largo periodo de tranquilidad desde que no sólo ella sino sus padres nacieron en el aguerrido país del siglo XIX’ (p. 113). Eventually Diego convinces her of Díaz’s negative, tyrannical side (pp. 28, 71) and Josefa becomes ‘otra militante de la causa antirreelecionista’ (p. 114).14 From Diego’s point of view this change in Josefa is not entirely positive. Now that his wife has become interested in politics, he laments the broken peace in the family: ‘Ya no sé qué cosa es peor [. . .] si el mutismo de antes o esta logorrea dominante’ (p. 114). His reflections on Josefa’s evolution from silence and passivity to conviction and volubility are expressed in terms of traditional female stereotypes: ironically he seems to be more comfortable with the old Josefa who conformed to the traditional function of the female than with the present Josefa who has discovered her own voice. Despite his reservations, Diego frequently encourages the women in the Sauri household to express themselves openly. Emilia’s political conscience and gradual emancipation can be attributed partially to her mother’s stubbornness on the one hand and her father’s encouragement for Emilia to become self-sufficient on the other. Emilia’s unquestioning acceptance of unorthodox ideas is seen when she turns 15. Her birthday serves as the catalyst for political renewal. Su fiesta de quince años se aprovechó para hacer en casa de los Sauri la primera reunión de un club antirreelecionista. Tales agrupaciones no sólo no estaban prohibidas, sino que abundaban como una muestra poco peligrosa de

14

In Chapter Two (p. 28, n. 13) it was highlighted that in recent historiographical studies there has been a reinterpretation of the Díaz era coinciding with current social and political trends in Mexico which reflect Porfirian policy before 1910. In his analysis of neo-Porfirismo, Garner refers to the main exponents of this trend such as Mexico’s leading contemporary historian (and Ángeles Mastretta’s partner), Héctor Aguilar Camín. In their preface to a survey of post-Revolutionary Mexico in In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, both Camín and Lorenzo Meyer emphasize the need to ‘dispel some of the most cherished traditions and the most intolerable vices’ of the historical legacy of the Revolution referring to the vilification of Díaz and the consequent mythification of the Revolution itself (Garner, pp. 4–5). It is interesting to compare Camín’s perspective of Porfirismo with Mastretta’s as expressed in Mal de amores. Although there is a clear anti-Porfirista sentiment in the novel, Mastretta is always circumspect, and even expresses pro-Porfirio sentiments through Josefa, though her opinion changes subsequently as we have seen. See Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz, Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 2001).


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la voluntad democratizadora del gobierno. El cumpleaños de Emilia terminó entre vivas a la patria y mueras al autoritarismo. (p. 83)

This occasion is vital in terms of the socio-political mood of Mexico and Emilia Sauri’s developing character. There is a clear link between Emilia’s personal development on the one hand and the political renewal represented by the Sunday meetings on the other. The change in the socio-political mood of the Sunday tertulias is evident in the transition from harmless musical and literary meetings to fully-fledged political discussions: ‘las tertulias en la casa del doctor Cuenca cedieron los espacios que tuvieron alguna vez, a la discusión sin tregua de los desperfectos acarreados por la bonanza modernizadora y el autoritarismo del régimen que la prohijaba’ (pp. 78–9). Emilia’s loss of innocence coincides with the nation’s socio-political awakening and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Later in the novel, while she is manipulated by a selfish lover who frequently deserts her, so Mexico is betrayed by a Revolution which seems to be driven by greed rather than by commitment to social justice. At the early stages of her development Emilia is more interested in personal relationships than in national affairs. This attitude is reminiscent of Catalina’s own indifference towards politics whose time she prefers to devote to her affair with Carlos Vives. Emilia feels threatened by Daniel’s immersion in the male sphere of political activism: Daniel ‘hablaba con la pasión de un soldado que invoca la batalla. Oyéndolo, Emilia se sintió fuera de aquel territorio y de verdad sintió el miedo que había dicho tener’ (p. 91). She does not understand fully his flamboyant rhetoric and craves for their lost innocent childhood together (p. 91). Emilia resents Daniel’s absences, an attitude reminiscent of Catalina’s (Arráncame la vida), both suggesting female dependence on the male for personal fulfilment. But this Sunday reunion also informs the reader of a significant change in Emilia – she has developed into a beautiful woman with angelic features (p. 86). Both Daniel and her father also notice in Emilia a disquieting independence of mind. Her father sees her as ‘distinta y distante como una desconocida’ (p. 94). Mastretta’s writing with its emphasis on the female body and psyche has been compared with that of Laura Esquivel but Mastretta’s settings are more clearly defined. In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, the political and historical constantly impinge upon individual lives –‘Yo creo que soy una feminista en tanto que sí acepto y promuevo [. . .] que lo privado es público y lo personal es político’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 333). In Mal de amores, Mastretta reinforces this view that politics and history are part of everyday life: ‘la política fue siempre una de las yerbas importantes en los guisos servidos en casa de los Sauri’ (Mal de amores, p. 249). In Mal de amores, Emilia’s socio-political awakening is influenced by two central figures, Milagros and Daniel, who play a pivotal role in her development. Milagros’s influence over Emilia is considerable: unlike Josefa and Diego who offer stability, Milagros seeks to disturb the tranquility of her uneventful home life because, according to her: ‘la paz es para los viejos y los aburridos– dijo


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Milagros–. Ella quiere la dicha, que es más difícil y más breve, pero mejor’ (p. 189). One evening when the family is discussing the latest developments – the transfer of prisoners to Quintana Roo and Madero’s visit to Puebla – Milagros leaves to pursue her revolutionary activities. Josefa prevents Emilia from joining her: ‘ni se te ocurra pensarlo [. . .] dijo peinándola hacia su recámara, hipnotizándola con su voz como una droga, como un último perfume de infancia al que Emilia no pudo resistirse’ (p. 126). This ‘last perfume of childhood’ suggests the imminent loss of the last remnants of Emilia’s innocence. Indeed, almost immediately after this scene, Emilia has her first experience with the marginalized social Other. Milagros encourages her and Daniel to go to Santiago, a poor and violent district in Puebla to distribute clothes and food to the poor. Both Emilia and Daniel are surprised to hear the children address her as tía. Emilia’s initial disgust contrasts with Milagros’s complete dedication to the children whom she treats as her equals, seemingly oblivious to their smell. Emilia observes Milagros ‘con una mezcla de admiración y horror. Ella no se creía capaz de acercarse a gente tan pobre con la naturalidad con que lo hacía su tía. Quiso pegar de gritos’ (p. 138). Emilia is so shocked by the smell (‘quería librarse de [. . .] los ruegos y el olor hiriente de aquellos niños’ (p. 138)) and the terrifying images of those children that she just wants to return to the warmth and safety of her home (p. 138). This passage has a striking parallel with Catalina’s reaction to the poor (Arráncame la vida), when she decides to hop on to the bus to Oaxaca and is confronted with the campesinos: ‘El camión se llenó de campesinos [. . .] Un olor ácido [. . .] y cuerpos apretujados lo llenaba todo. No me gustó mi nueva vida. En cuanto pude me bajé [. . .] Regresé pronto y me dio gusto entrar a mi casa’ (p. 57). There is however an important difference between Catalina and Emilia. Although they are both tied to their comfortable lifestyles, the poverty and misery of the less privileged affects them in significantly different ways. Whereas Catalina is shockingly cold and insensitive – remarking on one occasion that the poor orphans in her charge are really better off dead – Emilia overcomes her initial disgust, and her sense of guilt leads to her wholehearted commitment to their cause. No era que [. . .] Emilia no hubiera aprendido, como todos en su mundo, a convivir con la idea de su existencia sin resentirla, sino que por primera vez al verlos en su refugio, sin los edificios y las calles en los que se les trataba como intrusos, Emilia sintió vergüenza y culpa. Dos sentimientos que nunca había tenido la desdicha de padecer. (p. 137)15

Fleeing from the police following Daniel’s distribution of revolutionary pamphlets, the pair take shelter in the bathroom of a house. Daniel urges Emilia to 15 The encounter with the Other – experienced by both Catalina and Emilia – has conspicuous parallels with Mastretta’s reaction to the paupers in ‘La mujer es un misterio’ (Puerto libre, pp. 133–42) and analysed in Chapter Eight. In the latter texts Mastretta explores her own privileged circumstances and her sense of guilt (also expressed in our interview, p. 326).


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take her clothes off and to pretend that she is having a bath. This ruse works. Emilia and Daniel are left alone and for the first time Emilia becomes aware of his physical presence, his body, his skin, his smell: Emilia se arrastró de nuevo hacia el cobijo redondo en que Daniel la esperaba deslumbrado. Cien palabras como agua dejó caer sobre su oído mientras se acostaba sobre su espalda. Emilia sintió su cuerpo contra el de ella, húmedo y firme. Lo recorrió urgida de aprendérselo, temblando, pero libre de temores, segura de que la más omnipotente de las diosas no merecía su envidia. (p. 140)

Following two hours of frantic lovemaking Emilia and Daniel leave the house in a state of ecstasy: ‘corrieron entre la milpa dando gritos a un aire que sentían el más libre de sus vidas’ (p. 141). That night, Daniel returns to her bedside. When he enters her room where Emilia is sleeping, she draws him on, her openness and curiosity reminiscent of Catalina’s first sexual experience (p. 9), although in the case of Emilia it is the woman who takes the initiative undeterred by her lack of experience. Whereas Catalina seeks to discourage Andrés (pp. 10, 79), Emilia makes passionate love to Daniel. Throughout Mal de amores there are clear links between the sexual and the political, as the above example illustrates.

Emilia Sauri and Daniel Cuenca The previous chapter discussed the way in which Rivera Villegas has identified some broad similarities between Daniel and Andrés in terms of their views of woman whom they believe must remain within the safe confines of the domestic sphere while a man, to reinforce Rosario Castellanos’s view of the patriarch’s role in society, is the ‘rey de la creación [. . .] Él es quien lleva a cabo las empresas comerciales, las conquistas, las exploraciones y las guerras’.16 In Mal de amores, Daniel’s revolutionary rhetoric embodying social change and equality appears to be at odds with his rather conservative personal behaviour and expectations. He likes the idea of Emilia waiting for him while he goes to war. The image of a compass is often used to describe Man’s need of a stable and enduring relationship with Woman: Daniel is the traveller and the nomad sustained by the knowledge of a faithful and doting companion (p. 134), the fixed foot of the compass, constant, safe, unmoving. Men, like Daniel, can draw a perfect circle, and follow their revolutionary urges only if the woman remains loyal and unquestioning. During the first half of the novel Emilia is always prepared to wait for him, her existence punctuated by his haphazard appearances and by his sporadic letters. While she accepts that he must be away for long periods of time to fight for his cause, he cannot accept that Emilia must also be free to lead her life independently of him. 16 See O’Connell (1995, p. 37) and Rosario Castellanos’s Sobre Cultura Femenina (Mexico City: Ediciones de América, Revista Antológica, 1950), p. 79. Also see Chapter Two, pp. 44–5.


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During Daniel’s comings and goings, Emilia undergoes medical training – both orthodox and unorthodox – under the guidance respectively, of Daniel’s father Octavio Cuenca and Diego Sauri, her own father. Emilia proves to be a competent if unqualified practitioner. She is able to make a direct and positive contribution to the revolutionary struggle, a role which arouses some resentment in Daniel: ‘Viéndola transitar entre los enfermos, Daniel supo que Emilia era más fuerte que él, menos ostenstosa que él, más necesaria en el mundo que él con todas sus teorías y todas sus batallas’ (p. 307). For Daniel the medical profession is a male preserve, like the Revolution (p. 343). Emilia accomplishes more than Daniel: ‘Ella habla menos y hace más que otros’ (p. 308). The first time her medical skills are put to the test is when an injured young soldier appears at the Casa de la estrella. She cares for him but he eventually dies from his atrocious wounds. Emilia bravely contains her emotions by resorting to her thespian skills, demonstrating her innate strength of character: ‘Ni una lágrima, ni un gesto de horror pudo atisbar Diego Sauri en su hija [. . .] parecía una vieja acostumbrada a la pena y sus infamias’ (p. 194). Emilia will subsequently help many other wounded soldiers and soldaderas. What is admirable in Emilia is that she will cure wounded soldiers whether they are porfiristas, villistas or zapatistas. Emilia’s passion for medicine and saving the lives of others takes precedence over her political affiliations. She strives to save others from death and helps women give birth, even if her medical expertise often fails her. On one occasion, she goes to a poor district in Puebla and is shocked to learn that many poor women often become pregnant and have to give birth to children without the support of either the father of the child or a midwife. Despite her best efforts she fails to save the life of such a woman. Emilia is devastated and feels guilty for not being able to do anything for the woman (p. 236) but her harrowing experience contributes to the development of her strong character. As Daniel’s departures become more frequent and his letters more irregular, Emilia becomes aware of his unreliable character: Zavalza on the other hand is ever faithful to her. While she is in the US Zavalza sends her more letters than Daniel (p. 293). Just as her faith in Daniel falters, so does her belief in the revolutionary cause. Despite its negative aspects, Daniel sees the Revolution as an opportunity for heroism –‘Todas las guerras son mierda –dijo la gran gorda [. . .] pero en todas hay héroes –contestó Daniel’ (p. 309). Emilia accuses him of having a fanciful relationship with the Revolution: ‘no ha hecho sino acariciar quimeras desde que lo conozco’ (p. 353). When Emilia joins Daniel on his revolutionary trips, she tires of his inconsistent behaviour. He wants her to wait for him passively but does not want to commit himself to her. Emilia’s exposure to the political turmoil of the war and her medical career satisfy her need for fulfilment and emancipation, but she cannot suppress her longing for personal stability. Despite his inconstancy, she persists in looking to Daniel to fulfil this need: ‘Desde abajo, morosa, encontró alegre la parte que veía de sus testículos y le acarició las piernas, le besó una rodilla huesuda, se incorporó para jugar a meter su cabeza bajo el arco que hacían sus muslos –Eres el techo de mi casa’ (p. 330). But Daniel is a nomad who cannot live


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without the excitement of war and whose often misguided passion for the Revolution exceeds his love for Emilia (p. 431). Daniel is also subject to the typically male fear that overfamiliarity will diminish their love: A ratos temía perder su condición de nómada, su certidumbre de que ninguna libertad era más verdadera que la de aquel que un día amanece en una cama y otro en otra [. . .] entonces la deseaba más que nunca [. . .] No quería acostumbrarse a saciar ese deseo, no quería que llegara la tarde en que de tanto verla dejara de estremecerlo su estampa. (p. 312)

But Emilia becomes disillusioned with him and his empty promises just as ordinary Mexicans became disenchanted with the false promise of the Revolution as we see in Arráncame la vida. She challenges Daniel on various occasions: –¿Ésta es tu redentora guerra que persigues? Le preguntó Emilia esa noche. [. . .] –Así son todas las guerras – alegó Daniel. –Te lo dije – murmuró Emilia. –Te crees perfecta – contestó él para iniciar el pleito que le urgía. (p. 308)

She even tries to make Daniel aware of the contradictions that undermine his revolutionary rhetoric, pointing to the neglect of hospitals and to the rising incidence of typhus: ‘si él y su guerra no sabían cómo arreglar tantos entuertos para qué se habían metido a intentarlo. ¿De qué demonios había servido la revolución?’(p. 343). Towards the end of the novel Emilia returns yet again to Puebla to settle down with Zavalza. Although she is grateful to him for what he teaches her in her life, she is ironically more grateful to Daniel for teaching her how to rely on herself rather than on other people, to survive on limited supplies of food and not to expect anything in return for her help to others. And this is precisely what makes Daniel love her and respect her: ‘Daniel la veía cada tarde más flaca y más desharrapada, pero más intrépida que la anterior, cruzando frente a las desgracias que los primeros días la horrorizaban [. . .] y entendió que la iba queriendo para siempre, como no querría nunca a nadie más’ (p. 323).

Multiple identities: Emilia as Matrioska Villegas seeks to explain Daniel’s complicated attitude towards Emilia as: una castración psico-emotiva que lo conduce a privar a su compañera de las decisiones fundamentales de su vida en común y, peor aún, a burlarse sarcásticamente de la labor de ella entre los pobres. Ante estas burlas, Emilia trata de defenderse – no con palabras sino con la acción de continuar su práctica – pero, en muchas ocasiones, Daniel la hace sucumbir y perder valor ante el encanto de su llamada sexual. (p. 42)


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From this perspective, Emilia is a somewhat contradictory character, like Catalina in Arráncame la vida. The previous chapter showed how through Catalina, Mastretta is able to move beyond the boundaries of the Malinche/Guadalupe paradigm in order to unveil alternative ways in which Catalina/women perceive(s) her/their self-image and the world around her/them on the one hand, while ambiguously portraying Catalina/women precisely in terms of this duality on the other. In many respects, Mastretta’s portrayal of Emilia follows a similar pattern to that of Catalina. Both female characters seem willingly subservient. Both are complicitous and duplicitous with their partners and with patriarchal structures. Both Catalina and Emilia combine the qualities of the Virgin Mary and those of the temptress, Eve. Emilia breaks with the traditional expectation of women confined to the private domestic space through her direct involvement in the political sphere, yet, she is content to fulfil the role of subservient role of lover, wife and child-bearer. Similarly to Andrés, Daniel is sensitive to what he perceives as the treacherous nature of women: when Emilia refuses to do his bidding he brands her ‘traidora’ (p. 360). Emilia too is far from innocent particularly in her fickle sexual behaviour. Emilia and Zavalza set up home together while Daniel is fighting in the Revolution. But when Daniel reappears she has no compunctions about leaving Zavalza. It is ironic that Daniel should accuse her of betraying him through her relations with Zavalza (p. 395). Emilia’s fickleness is more overt than that of Catalina’s. Catalina has various opportunities to leave Andrés but decides against this out of fear, submissiveness and financial dependence since she has no career (García, p. 105). Emilia’s situation is less circumscribed. When Emilia meets Zavalza for the first time he represents that yearning that she has for stability. The opposing sides of Emilia’s character are reflected in her relationships with Zavalza and Daniel, two antithetical models who both contribute something towards the duality of her being: ‘A cambio del Daniel que centellaba de vez en cuando, y que estaba perdido desde el año anterior, Emilia encontró en esa presencia, menos drástica pero más generosa, a un hombre inteligente y bueno de esos que, como decía Josefa, no abundan en el mundo’ (Mal de amores, p. 216). Zavalza exercises a calming influence on Emilia: ‘añoró la paz de sus frascos y sus libros, la taciturna asiduidad de Antonio Zavalza, su boca como un bálsamo que le curaba el afán de tener a Daniel cerca’ (p. 227). But he also represents danger – the domestication of Emilia and her ‘descent’ into comfortable married life. Daniel on the other hand constantly disrupts her routines with his theatrical comings and goings. Diego calls him an ‘estúpido’ for his unreliability, and Josefa criticizes him for disturbing Emilia’s tranquility (p. 189). Daniel has come to accept the fact that he will never be able to possess her entirely nor she him. When Emilia moves in with Zavalza she confesses to her family that she is ‘bígama’ – which is accepted without question by her family. Such tolerance might strike the reader as somewhat unusual or even out of place in early twentieth-century Mexico (Rivera Villegas, p. 43). It can be argued that Daniel’s inconstancy has positive effects on Emilia, forcing her to develop a strong sense of independence


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free of the burden of attachment to a single man. It is Daniel who makes Emilia a feminist capable of making independent choices. In fact Emilia has achieved precisely what Catalina longed for: the uncertain status of amante or mistress rather than fixed subordination as wife. Catalina confesses that she would have liked Andrés to be her lover. Me hubiera gustado ser amante de Andrés. Esperándolo metida en batas de seda y zapatillas brillantes, usar el dinero justo para lo que se me antojara, dormir hasta tardísimo en las mañanas, librarme de la Beneficiencia Pública y el gesto de primera dama. Además, a las amantes todo el mundo les tiene lástima o cariño, nadie las considera cómplices. En cambio, yo era la cómplice official. (p. 57)

Her status as ‘cómplice oficial’ does not however, inhibit Catalina’s behaviour, as was seen in Chapter Three. The fickleness displayed by both Catalina and Emila is reflected in the political realm where individuals constantly shift their alliances to personal advantage, often betraying their former friends in the process. Emilia’s potential for such behaviour matches that of Catalina – as Mastretta has herself made clear: Si yo contara la vida de Emilia Sauri después de casada, a lo mejor hubiera sido incluso más promiscua. A lo mejor hubiera tenido más amores que Zavalza y Daniel Cuenca. Es probable que yo me deba esa historia porque se nos hacen tan normales que los hombres se enamoren muchas veces y de muchas mujeres y se nos hace tan anormales las mujeres que hacen eso pero a las mismas mujeres y ya no se diga a los hombres. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338)

Just as Emilia is less egotistical than Catalina, so Daniel’s moral weaknesses pale in comparison with those of Andrés. Emilia sees Daniel as possessing a split personality. His passion for the revolution outstrips his passion as a lover: ‘Daniel [. . .] podía dividirse en dos: uno era el que se montaba con ella en el cuerno de la luna [. . .] El otro era un traidor que se subía al caballo de la revolución para irse a hacer la patria’ (p. 293). (Catalina also alludes on the first page of Arráncame la vida to Andrés’s split personality, referring to both his treachery and charm.) Daniel’s fickleness towards Emilia is reflected in his political manoeuverings. During the Revolution political allegiances were constantly shifting: Daniel himself takes on the unlikely role of Mexican political affairs correspondent for Howard Gardner, the editor of an American journal. In the battle against Madero, there is no political cohesion: ‘por todo el país [. . .] se levantaron en contra del usurpador, unidos por el odio que le tenían, aunque no por un acuerdo común sobre qué había de hacerse al retomar el gobierno, los grupos y los intereses más distintos’ (pp. 291–2). Emilia is not a traitor, as Daniel alleges. She does, however, repudiate the submissive role which Daniel expects her to play. Mastretta clearly endorses her conduct: she may be promiscuous in maintaining relationships with two men. But promiscuous belongs to the


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lexicon of male patriarchal discourse, often used to condemn those women who do not conform to the rules drawn up by men. By repudiating their rules Emilia calls into question such female virtues as constancy and long-suffering endurance of errant male behaviour. She is a feminist because she refuses to subordinate her future to the whims of any one man. Emilia in many respects is a fighter and her elusive quality is admired by the various men in her life. In Mal de amores, Zavalza knows that Emilia will never be entirely his, even when she falls pregnant with his children. He accepts that Emilia is a bigamist: ‘Era un hombre extraño entre los hombres, querible como ningún otro, porque como ningún otro fue capaz de comprender la riqueza de alguien que sin remedio y sin pausa tiene fuerzas para dos amores al mismo tiempo’ (p. 393). Even Daniel must resign himself to this fact. He compares Emilia to a Russian doll, which opens to reveal a smaller replica of itself: ‘Pareces una matrioska [. . .] ¿será que si uno te abre, adentro encuentra otra y otra y otra? [. . .] ¿Cuántas Emilias iban por la vida viviéndola como si les urgiera devorarla? Daniel estaba seguro de que nunca las conocería a todas. Algunas, incluso, prefería no imaginarlas’ (p. 394). Daniel’s statement is clearly reminiscent of Andrés’s view of Catalina. Daniel, however, does not view Emilia’s diverse identities with the same degree of equanimity as Andrés does Catalina: Todas eran Emilias que la robaban a la suya. A la Emilia encendida sólo para él, a la que nunca se cansó de aventurarse en el universo inasible de su corazón [. . .] ¿Cuántas Emilias? La de Zavalza, la de sus hijos, la de la piedra bajo la almohada, la del árbol, la del tren, la médica, la boticaria, la viajera, la suya. ¿Cuántas Emilias? Mil y ninguna, mil y la suya. (Mal de amores, p. 395)

As I will indicate in Chapter Six, the final sentences of both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores are open-ended, reinforcing the independence of both Catalina and Emilia and perhaps hinting at more amorous adventures to come.

Emilia’s Social Commitment Whereas the prevailaing theme in Arráncame la vida was that of human insatiability, in Mal de amores, Mastretta is now concerned in exploring questions of love, human solidarity and community, so vital in times of adversity, war and famine. Gradually Emilia’s obsession with Daniel gives way in the second half of the novel to social commitment. The communal voice, as we recall, is a vital aspect in the testimonial novels of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and an important Post-Boom trend. Emilia’s contact with the silenced Other – women, children, the elderly – focuses attention on those elements of the population which do not feature in official history. Emilia’s solidarity with other women emerges during her stay at Izúcar. Here she comes to understand the importance of women to the Revolution, whose role


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is often ignored in history. In Mal de amores, the women are portrayed as extremely hard working (pp. 262–3). Emilia also discovers that she is not the only woman who must suffer the prolonged absences of her lover: ‘aprendió que el ir y venir de los hombres no era una pena que la privilegiara sólo a ella’ (p. 261). She also learns that women are the preservers of the collective and historical memory. They draw strength from their memories when their men are absent (p. 261). Emilia, unlike Catalina, rises above the limitations of social and class ideology and achieves genuine solidarity with the soldaderas. While Emilia learns survival techniques from them she also provides them with her medical expertise. But the experience is humbling for Emilia who comes to realize her limitations as a doctor (p. 262).17 When Daniel urges Emilia to leave Izúcar believing that she is hindering the revolutionary cause (p. 264), Emilia establishes a close rapport with the canteen owner and local revolutionary leader, Chui Morales, and with the soldadera Dolores Cienfuegos (p. 260). Emilia enjoys talking the vulgar language of the revolutionaries (p. 266) – reminding us of Catalina’s ability to adopt the vulgar language employed by Andrés. The canteen is reserved for men and Daniel tries to get her out but she proves to Daniel that she can drink like a man and wrestle like a man (pp. 257–60). But it is significant that Emilia finally decides to return to Puebla in response to Dolores’s advice (not Daniel’s). She convinces Emilia that her education and knowledge would be a much more powerful tool in the city than in the countryside: Emilia en el pueblo acabaría por estorbar [. . .]. En cambio si se iba para Puebla y desde ahí los ayudaba, podría serles más útil que en un campamento de hombres armadas. Ella sabía curar, hablar en inglés, descrifrar el idioma que hablaban los hombres del gobierno, preparar medicinas. [. . .] Ella era necesaria y querida, pero su trabajo estaba en otra parte. (p. 266)

Emilia understands and accepts Dolores’s arguments, which are marked by reason and intelligence rather than by that prejudice and misogyny displayed by Daniel. In contrast to Mal de amores, in Arráncame la vida, the lack of solidarity between women is shocking. Undoubtedly Mastretta debunks the masculine concept of women as sexually passive and politically ignorant – in itself an extremely important step in feminist discourse. But the major difference between Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores is the emphatically feminist message of the later work. At the end of Arráncame la vida we feel that Mastretta really has pushed forward the feminist cause by exposing the corruption of the Mexican macho order which oppresses the marginalized female other. Mastretta has forged a space from the female perspective which challenges the official story. At the end of Arráncame la vida, Catalina, recently widowed, is in 17 As will be analysed in Chapter Five this experience recalls Teodora, the witch, with whom Emilia strikes a close rapport. Her magical powers help to save a woman’s life and expose the limits of Emilia’s own knowledge.


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a position to enjoy wealth and freedom, but she inspires little admiration since she has not shaped her own destiny. She transgresses many moral and social boundaries but her personal development is limited. She may provide entertainment through her humour and mocking disregard for lo correcto, but our final impression of her is rather negative given her duplicitous and unprincipled behaviour. At the end we have a woman who is finally free of the physical presence of Andrés but not of his malign influence. Andrés may be dead but his unfortunate legacy will, in all likelihood, survive in his widow: Me da gusto por ti. La viudez es el estado ideal de la mujer. Se pone al difunto en un altar, se honra su memoria cada vez que sea necesario y se dedica uno a hacer todo lo que no pudo hacer con él en vida. Te lo digo por experiencia, no hay mejor condición que la de viuda. Y a tu edad. Con que no cometas el error de prenderte a otro luego luego, te va a cambiar para bien. (p. 232)

Catalina can now choose between multiple possibilities: ‘sentada en el suelo, jugando con la tierra húmeda que rodeaba la tumba de Andrés. Divertida con mi futuro, casi feliz’ (p. 238). But she is tied to her past and will forever fall short of true contentment (‘casi feliz’). Emilia on the other hand is a positive female heroine. Initially dominated by Daniel, she finally proves her fighting qualities and her feminism. In her analysis of Arráncame la vida, García refers to Carolyn Heilbrun’s remarks about the general failure of women to make common cause: As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narrative of their own. Like Penelope awaiting Ulysses, weaving and unweaving, women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it. They will live their lives individually, among the suitors, without a story to be told, wondering whether or when to marry [. . .] There will be narratives of female lives only when women no longer live their lives in isolation in the houses and the stories of men.18

Catalina, as a narrator tells a very powerful story: in spite of playing a subordinate role to Andrés, she effectively communicates her own often contradictory feelings. Catalina in this respect, like the women in Mal de amores and Mujeres de ojos grandes (an elderly woman, p. 95; tía Elvira, p.151; tía Josefa, p. 187), is privileged with powerful tools such as memory and creative imagination. But Catalina is alone in other senses. Women need to hear and to talk to one another in order to create new and alternative narratives. For García, Mastretta has produced a successful narrative by communicating the life of a rebellious woman, crucial to the feminist literary cause. I would argue, however, that there is an essential flaw in García’s appropriation of Heilbrun’s vision. A key feature in 18

See Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), pp. 46–7.


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Arráncame la vida is precisely the lack of communication between individuals, and more particularly the lack of solidarity between women. Catalina often sees other women as rivals rather than as companions and is often dismissive of women from both her own and from the lower classes. In Arráncame la vida, women seem isolated from one another and although they often entertain each other with stories of their sex lives, they fail to communicate at a deeper level. In Mal de amores, however, women are not isolated one from another. We detect a strong sense of unity between women where female solidarity acts as a pillar of strength in times of war and upheaval. Mastretta communicates a story not of one group of women (the bourgeoisie) as in Arráncame la vida, but of women from a variety of backgrounds and social classes. They are seen as communal preservers of memory and transmit to each other the stories and myths of the repressed other. Emilia also shares her life stories with women from other groups who in turn share theirs. Emilia has a perfect memory, ‘guardaba un recuerdo minucioso’ (Mal de amores, p. 372). When Zavalza hears her speak of the past, he is amazed at her ability to document the week’s events with total precision (p. 372). Women weave their lives with memories (p. 261). The metaphor of sewing and weaving recurs in Mal de amores and is connected with the theme of memory and nostalgia for the past – seen for example when Zavalza offers to be the perfect listener to all Emilia’s stories of her past life ‘con el que recuperar el tejido de memoria que hilaba empeñosa y febril, como quien teje una obra de arte [. . .]’ (pp. 372–3). Although she never speaks of Daniel, Zavalza senses her uneasy yearning for him: ‘sabiendo de su inclinación a recordar como quien borda, era lógico que Zavalza tuviera como una piedra la certidumbre de que ninguno de sus encantos y aventuras había ella olvidado en dos años’ (p. 373). Shortly after her marriage, Sol expresses her fear of leaving her home for her new life. Emilia retorts that she needs to use her imagination and let herself go: ‘¿Me estás oyendo lo de la imaginación? [. . .] el pájaro que la pone a volar está aquí abajo de tu sombrero’ (p. 185). Unfortunately Sol does not understand, perhaps because she is conditioned by the rules of society. Imagination complements memory as an important tool for sustaining individual consciousness (e.g. through Catalina’s narration) and collective consciousness (Mal de amores) and for keeping alive the mythical past. Emilia is aware of the importance of memory and its volatility. After leaving Daniel and settling down with Zavalza, she is overcome by nostalgia. Swaying on a rocking chair one night Zavalza watches her and understands her ‘abismos de nostalgia (p. 377). Emilia has the sense that: todo lo que quisiera recordar cuando fuera vieja debía archivarlo ahí como en un sobre del que podría extraer enigmas y sueños cuando la vida empezara a volverse sólo un manojo de impulsos y formas inconstantes. De ese paraíso, tejido con recuerdos, no habría nunca nadie que pudiera expulsarla. (p. 377)

The metaphor of weaving is also associated in Mujeres de ojos grandes with the weaving of collective oral stories of the past as various women and men gather to recount the atrocities suffered by women during the Mexican


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Revolution: ‘El suegro, las tías, la cuñada, el cuñado y la mamá [. . .] se pusieron a hilvanar historias de mujeres raptadas, violadas, muertas y descuartizadas, durante los últimos treinta años’ (p. 160). According to Freud, weaving has been the only female contribution to the history of inventions.19 While men are the destroyers of life with their wars and their quest for power, the female practice of weaving, on the other hand, symbolizes an important human need to transmit oral history. This female activity has metaphorical importance for it indicates textual practice: in Mal de amores, Emilia tries to make sense of the upheaval of the events of the Revolution by documenting them (p. 231). In so doing she is preventing the disappearance of collective memories which will be transmitted to her children. In Mal de amores and Mujeres de ojos grandes (p. 187) women also transmit oral stories to each other and pass down their knowledge of hitherto repressed knowledge (such as herbal remedies in Mal de amores). Female weaving relates to that tissue of words produced by women engaged in that ceaseless interlacing of alternative versions of a history fabricated by men. Ultimately Mastretta herself and her writing are part of this ongoing process which will finally prevail over patriarchal discourse. In the next section of this chapter I shall analyse Mal de amores in the context of diverse literary trends. The novel Mal de amores is notable for its diversity of technique and style. An important aspect of the text’s uniqueness and complexity lies in Mastretta’s ability to incorporate apparently incongruous narrative modes – the social realist and the historical are combined with the magical realist and folletinesque – thus providing the reader aesthetic pleasure through the novel’s self-conscious artistry and linguistic play.

‘Mal de amores’ in the context of literary modes Although Mastretta’s writing exemplifies Ernesto Sábato’s conception of a good writer,20 her accessible, non-experimental prose has attracted the label of popular writer. But language is a central feature of Mastretta’s works. It was the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges with his theories on the importance of language and its problematic relationship with representation who played a significant role in shaping the international literary corpus of Postmodernism. Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Luisa Valenzuela and Elena Poniatowska have all in their various ways enriched the concept of postmodern experimentation in literature. According to Ermarth: ‘Postmodern narrative emphasizes the power of invention and fabrication to the point, as Robbe-Grillet says, of making it the foundation

19 See Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 5. Also see Chapter Eight, p. 187. 20 According to Ernesto Sábato: ‘un buen escritor expresa grandes cosas con pequeñas palabras; a la inversa del mal escritor, que dice cosas insignificantes con grandes palabras’. See El escritor y sus fantasmas, 3rd edn (Buenos Aires, 1997), p. 209.


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of discourse, the subject of the book.’21 If set alongside the experimental works of Elena Poniatowska or Carlos Fuentes, Mastretta’s works may well appear dull and unoriginal, but she herself has said that she was never attracted by stylistic complexities and dislocations in the manner of Cortázar: ‘yo nunca me he propuesto ni sueño con proponerme una novela así. Ayer estaba releyendo a Rayuela [. . .] la abres donde quieres y es totalmente arbitraria y sigue siendo genial [. . .] digamos que les doy las cosas a los lectores un poco más desmenuzadas’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 321). But Mastretta experiments in other ways: La gente está experimentando todo el tiempo con lo que dice. Lo que pasa es que a lo mejor son maneras menos crípticas. Pero siempre que pruebas con un adjetivo, experimentas. Siempre que lo pones donde aparentemente no debería de ir, siempre que alteras las formas [. . .] pasa de repente y no es deliberado pero me pasa. Lo que haces es jugar y lo que haces es experimentar. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 323)

As already discussed, Mal de amores is a novel notable for its powerful evocation of socio-political events; but it also a novel which diverts the reader’s attention from story to language through the deployment of an array of apparently incongruous narrative modes – the social realist and the historical are combined with the magical-realist and the folletinesque – noticeable for their carnivalesque excess.

Neorealism David Lodge remarks that Realism continues to play an important role in twentieth-century fiction (alongside the self-conscious Joycean strand) and this may be seen in Mastretta’s works.22 Thus, a salient feature of her novel, Mal de amores, is its neorealist and costumbrista style which indicates the influence of earlier Mexican writers. Mal de amores is notable for its detached costumbrista description of characters including their dress, habits and conversation. Mastretta often falls into an almost stylized story-telling mode designed to create atmosphere or suspense. The historical context is enriched by frequent references to mythified beliefs and practice and she uses the characteristic style of anecdote and storytelling: ‘Diego Sauri nació en una pequeña isla que aún flota en el Caribe Mexicano’ (p. 9), ‘Varios años después y muchos aprendizajes después’ (p. 12), ‘Esa misma noche’ (p. 11). In our interview, Mastretta revelled in her reputation as a natural storyteller which derives in large part from the 21 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History:Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 8. 22 See David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19.


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influence of her grandmother. Both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida are influenced by the nineteenth-century Historical Novel which subordinates historical fact to romantic intrigue.23

Linguistic Excess and Magical Realism In contrast to this somewhat staid, matter-of-fact costumbrista style, is the lively intensity of language used in Mal de amores. Stylistic excess emerges in Mal de amores when Emilia, still only a small child, spills ink over her clean white clothes (p. 45) which can be seen as a metaphor of Mastretta’s own narrative excess – which often appears ‘intemperate’ on the white pages of the book. Mastretta’s style in Mal de amores emphasizes its orality through the breathless accretion and reiteration of verbs and nouns as in the passionate love-making of Daniel and Emilia, enhanced by sensous details relating to smell, sight, taste and touch. Saltó del vagón al andén invadido por un olor a galletas con mantequilla [. . .] y apenas hecho el recorrido por estaciones que cuando no olían a pólvora apestaban a muerto, Emilia se dejó consentir por aquel aroma y extendió el ansia de sus ojos en busca de Daniel [. . .] Quiso grabarse su figura buscándola entre la gente. Quiso sentir que aún podía volver. Quiso darse un último respiro antes de aceptar que otra vez abandonaba el territorio de la cordura [. . .] En cuanto lo tuvo cerca, se aferró al cuerpo de animal sitiado que le extendía los brazos. (Mal de amores, p. 279)

The intensity of the Emilia–Daniel relationship recalls that of Blanca and Pedro Tercero in La casa de los espíritus. The frenzy of activity evoked in the following passage is complemented by linguistic excess giving rise to a breathless enumerative style: Aprendió el valor de un frijol, de un jarro de agua, de un trompo, de una tuerca, de un clavo, de un zapato, de un pedazo de rata, de un conejo, de un huevo, de 23 Many nineteenth-century historical novels lacked originality and were written in a conventional style. Romanticism, inherited by way of Spanish and French influence, formed another important current of nineteenth-century writing and revealed a strong preference for feminine protagonists as we see in Clemencia (1869) by the Mexican Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834–93). Many of these novels developed a similar thematic pattern focusing on love hampered by class or racial divisions. Despite the apparent originality of the themes treated in the Romantic novel, they remained in essence conservative, for many of the writers of the movement were mainly Catholic. See Jean Franco, ‘The Inheritance of Romanticism’, in A Literary History of Spain: Spanish American Literature Since Independence (London: Ernest Benn, 1973), pp. 55–72. For a survey of Mexican literature from the nineteenth century onwards, see Carlos Peña González, History of Mexican Literature, trans. Gusta Barfield Nance and Florence Johnson Dunstan, 3rd. edn (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1968), p. 56.


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un botón, de la sombra de un árbol, de la luz de una vela. Y enseñó a curar fiebres, a hervir el agua, a enmendar dolores de cabeza, a coser una herida, a hilvanar una falda, a pintar mariposas, a doblar un papel para hacer barquito, a limpiarse los dientes con carbón de tortilla, a matar con una infusión de pirú y flores de tabachín los lombrices. (p. 261)

Here the lists of nouns and verbs produce an impression of spontaneous flow – typical of unedited informal speech. But they also give a sense of substance and compression – as if Mastretta were attempting to say everything yet cannot quite express all that she would like to. Elsewhere the relentless rhythm of sentences contributes to the urgency of the themes: the repetition of questions and the use of free indirect speech in the following passage suggest the idea of the whirlwind pace of the Revolution and Emilia’s confused and pained state of mind because Daniel might be dead: ¿Y quiénes irían a perder el litigio que se había desatado por el país? [. . .] ¿Por qué no habría salido ella como su madre? ¿Por qué Daniel no sería un hombre estable y generoso como su padre? ¿Por qué había tenido ella la peregrina fortuna de enamorarse así? [. . .] ¿Por qué no podía ella librarse de la fuerza que le empujaba hacia un hombre que hasta muerto podía estar? Daniel: con sus ojos como preguntas, su pelo sobre la frente, su cabeza poblada de ocurrencias. Daniel poniéndole las manos donde nadie, metiéndose a su entraña como su propiedad, llamándola cuando él quería y largándose cuando se hartaba de mirarla. (p. 300–01)

Mastretta’s style is characterized by certain distinctive features such as her employment of three lexical units, contributing to the rhythmic quality of her prose. Thus Emilia: ‘lloró por la amistad que no tuvieron, por la distancia de sus mundos, por el ángel devastador en el borde de sus mundos’ (Mal de amores, p. 23). Elsewhere Mastretta’s writing is rich in unexpected metaphors such as ‘la máquina de vapor y sus vagones haciendo tras ella un escándalo de gitanos’ (p. 324), and ‘el zócalo sería una feria de emociones’ (p. 325). Individual characters display unusual combinations of physical features and character traits: Teodora ‘mostró dos manos fuertes y jóvenes que no parecían tener relación con la pequeñez y la aparente debilidad de su cuerpo envejecido’ (p. 320). As for Milagros, ‘podía sonreír como un ángel y enceguecer de furia como todos los diablos’ (p. 24). Verbal excess is also employed to produce an erotic effect (p. 342). In the following passage enumeration and repetition give the sense of two bodies moving to and fro in the gentle act of lovemaking. The use of alliteration contributes to the impression of sensual carnality taking on almost carnivalesque dimensions: Conocía todos los escondites de ese cuerpo, viajaba con su recuerdo y su cabeza como una parte de él, como consigo mismo [. . . .] Daniel [. . .] prefirió tocarla de nuevo, indagar si le tenía secretos, mientras allanaba hasta el último doblez que ella quiso guardarse en el cuerpo, reconocerla y sembrar en el centro mismo todos sus deseos el gozo extenuado que otra vez supo nada más suyo [. . .]


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Emilia Sauri cerró los ojos y vio el mar, vio la luna inmensa y excéntrica columpiándose contra el cielo [. . .] Se imaginó por dentro: húmeda, belicosa, triunfante. Y por primera vez bendijo su fortuna llamándola, por primera vez no quiso guardarse el ruido de montañas brotándole del cuerpo. (p. 253)

Elsewhere Mastretta resorts to stylistic excess in her employment of the Magical realist mode. Following the sober Neorealist tone of the first chapter, the second narrates the passionate relationship between Diego and Josefa Veytia and their conception of Emilia (p. 16). The intense lovemaking of Diego and Josefa is larger than life and the enchanted way in which they use the astral signs to conceive the baby are connected with the menstrual cycles of Josefa (p. 16) which assume the heroic grandiosity of wartime resistance to a superior enemy: El mundo de entonces tenía el hábito de la guerra, y celebraba los grandes peligros como un vértigo de la costumbre. Como parte de ese mundo, Josefa sintió correr la sangre por sus muslos y en lugar de aterrarse giró en redondo gritando: ‘Estoy herida, pero no me pienso rendir!’ (p. 19)

Mastretta, like García Márquez, and to a lesser extent Isabel Allende, flaunts her omniscience by anticipating future events through the repeated use of phrases such as: ‘para fines del siglo’ and ‘el siglo fue cambiando muchas cosas’ (p. 78), ‘a fines de ese año’ (p. 80), ‘tres días después’ (p. 81), ‘la tarde del martes siguiente’ (p. 164). Such phrases ‘suggest the suspense-creating procedures of oral story-telling, but also have the effect of increasing our interest in the plot and [. . .] authorial manipulation of events’ (Davies, p. 89). While clichéd generalizations are used to convey broad sweeps of time (Mal de amores, p. 15), elsewhere, intimate detail regarding bodily functions – often glamorized by reference to extraterrestrial influences – familiarize the reader with individual and private routines. Pinpoint accuracy and precision – also reminiscent of García Márquez – lend an air of concrete reality to terrible events such as the earthquake which ‘estremeció a la ciudad a las cuatro de la mañana con veintiséis minutos del siete de junio’ (p. 222). On the other hand long periods of time are frequently compressed: ‘durante los meses de turbulencia y abismos que siguieron’ (p. 269), ‘los días se hicieron meses y la vida un intenso litigio con sus estragos y aventuras’ (p. 269). Some characters have the power to anticipate future events: Milagros foresees Emilia’s character and life style. On the national plane, Josefa predicts that Obregón will bring peace because she recognizes in him ‘la buena estrella militar que Josefa reconoció siempre en su agricultor predilecto’ (p. 381). The sense of suspended cyclical time also recalls García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967): ‘durante los días que siguieron, la vida giró sin reparo hasta casi parecer la misma’ (Mal de amores, p. 170).24 And when the Revolution breaks 24 Various critics have noted that Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir is marked by its mythical and cyclical patterns where the characters are caught up in the static and changeless town of Ixtepec whose only life resides in its own memory. In a perceptive analysis


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out, the notion that war can often take on a rather supernatural aura emerges in the idea that time has stopped: ‘todo estaba como suspendido, esperando a que algo que dependía de otros se resolviera en algún momento’ (p. 349).

Melodrama and Farce Another feature, which complements Mastretta’s stylistic and thematic excess, is the use of melodrama. Her use of melodramatic techniques approximates Mastretta to nineteenth-century popular novelists, deeply influenced – according to Christopher Prendergast – by the melodramatic genre: ‘Melodrama, as a distinctive stage form, exercised a certain influence on the development of popular fiction (and) given the spectacular commercial success of the form, it is in no way surprising that the nineteenth-century popular novelist turned to it as a source of inspiration for both matter and technique.’25 Prendergast also traces the development of the melodramatic form and how it is used in fiction today (p. 5). In early century use, a romantic play was typically interspersed with songs and the actors were accompanied by the music appropriate to the situations. In later use the ‘musical element gradually ceased to be an essential feature of the “melodrama”, and the name now denotes a dramatic piece characterized by sensationalist incident and violent appeals to the emotions, but with a happy ending’ (Prendergast, p. 5). Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida show clear signs of having been influenced by such forms and techniques. For instance, both these novels are interspersed with musical elements reminiscent of boleros which have special significance where melodrama is concerned. According to Schaefer, popular music or commercial music is ‘intended to please a mass audience and simultaneously to promote and reflect a set of standardized norms of taste’ but is ‘generally considered banal, childish, innocent and at best only remotely concerned with social and economic realities’.26 The bolero is particularly apt for popular romance – as Mastretta’s two novels have been classified – since they always focus on love and passion. Arráncame la vida itself is the title of Agustín Lara’s bolero and there are references to Temblor, La noche de anoche and Cenizas.

of cyclical time in Garro’s novel, Adriana Méndez Rodenas points out that Garro subverts temporal chronology by the ‘orden simultáneo de la repetición’ (p. 850). Méndez Rodenas analyses the texts open-endedness in relation to écriture féminine, reminding us of Mastretta’s own fluid and open-ended texts. See ‘Tiempo femenino, tiempo ficticio: Los recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro’, Revista Iberoamericana, 51 (1985), 843–51. 25 Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 5. For another useful analysis of the role of melodrama see John Fletcher, ‘Melodrama: An Introduction’, Screen 26:3 (Summer 1988), 2–12. 26 Claudia Schaefer, ‘Popular Music as the Nexus of History, Memory, and Desire in Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida’, in Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), pp. 88–110 (p. 93).


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Thus the song fragments in Arráncame la vida, which speak of love and betrayal, disillusionment and bitterness, reflect Catalina’s tempestuous love-life. Mastretta’s mild sensationalism and her appeal to violent emotions recall the techniques of the folletín and can be seen as a deliberate ploy to attract a mass audience. In this respect again we can compare Mastretta with such writers as the Argentine Manuel Puig (1932–1990) whose Boquitas pintadas (1969) consists of entregas or instalments rather than chapters. Mise-en-scène openings promise eventful plot development: ‘La tarde del martes siguiente, llegó Madero. Una multitud lo esperó en la estación del tren gritando vivas y contagiándose de fervor’ (Mal de amores, p. 164). Mastretta’s chapter endings, however, are what really hold the reader’s suspense from one chapter to the next. For example, Emilia’s separation from Daniel is followed by her encounter with Zavalza – significantly at the end of chapter XII (p. 181). Here the sexually-charged ‘olor estorboso de los nardos’ creates an appropriate backdrop to the introduction of Zavalza and his ‘cuerpo de animal fino’. The next chapter will focus on the development of his relationship with Emilia. Often Mastretta takes a potentially dramatic and grim event and converts it into a farce as when Milagros, Rivadeneira and Emilia decide to go to Mexico City to witness Madero’s arrival. Early next morning they are awakened by the tremors of an earthquake. The potential danger of the situation is downplayed since Milagros, long accustomed to such events, openly laughs at Rivadeneira’s distress. What would normally be a disconcerting situation is converted into a farcical and frivolous episode owing to Milagros’s flippant obliviousness to the potential dangers: durante los tres minutos que duró el temblor, anduvo por la casa dejándose sentirlo y riéndose de la furia con que Rivadeneira la regañaba por no bajar cuanto antes a la calle. –¿No entiendes que esta ciudad está sobre el agua? Se puede caer de golpe y matarnos –le pidió diez veces Rivadeneira cuando la tierra y él dejaron de temblar. No volvieron a dormirse. La llegada de Madero estaba anunciada para las diez, pero salieron de la casa desde las siete. Compraron los periódicos y se instalaron a leerlos en un café de chinos. (p. 222)

A piece of individualistic flamboyancy can overshadow historical events of national importance, as when Milagros, Rivadeneira and Emilia await Madero’s arrival at the crowded ‘Reforma’. Just as Rivadeneira decides that they should leave because of the sweltering heat, Emilia decides to climb a statue to have a better view, inevitably exposing her legs to the appreciative men in the crowd. When Emilia spots Daniel, she climbs down the statue, rushes towards him and embraces him (p. 224). The importance of Madero’s visit is momentarily diminished as the expectant crowds turn their attention to the couple’s passionate embrace. Emilia is oblivious to the onlookers, being totally immersed in her


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public passion: ‘sintiendo que se ahogaba un momento y volaba el otro’ (p. 224). Their separation is postponed by a final caress: ‘Con una mano, Emilia acarició la espalda de Daniel, como si fuera dueña del tiempo. Luego buscó su pecho y del pecho bajó al camino hacia adentro que abría un pantalón [. . .] Sintió su grupa fuerte y su piel’ (p. 225). This blatant expression of female desire is alien to traditional melodrama and may be seen as a feminist violation of the ‘rules’. Daniel’s hasty departure reinstates the rules, however, since male abandonment of the female – albeit owing to the call of duty – relegates the woman from her active role as sexual initiator to her traditional status as subservient being dependent on the active male: ‘Siempre era lo mismo, siempre el atisbo y la huida, siempre la sorpresa y la desaparición siempre la espera como única vuelta de su destino’ (p. 225); ‘Emilia se quedó con la noche entera para esperar que Daniel llegara [. . .] No tenía sueño. El arrebato es enemigo del sueño y Daniel no llegaba y no llegó’ (pp. 226–7). Chance facilitates the passionate though fleeting encounters between Emilia and Daniel. The manipulation of chance is part of the melodramatic stock-intrade of the popular writer. Prendergast notes that chance has always figured among ‘more disreputable or irresponsible elements of the writer’s repertoire’ (p. 60). Chance or coincidence are usually associated with low melodrama and is exploited, as T. S. Eliot puts it, ‘simply for the sake of seeing the thrilling situation which arises in consequence’ (Prendergast, p. 41). According to Rodolfo Usigli, chance plays a crucial role in Mexican history and it may indeed inform Mastretta’s vision of the world.27 On the other hand, Mastretta’s deliberate use of a technique associated with melodrama is suggested by the plot’s dependence on chance encounters such as the melodramatic and unexpected encounter between Emilia and Daniel in Mexico City (p. 224); the sudden return of Daniel to Puebla just after Emilia had agreed to marry Zavalza (p. 250); her chance meeting with Daniel in a bar in a Mexican town (p. 303); and another in New York (p. 385), together with many other chance encounters (p. 394). It is as if the melodramatic intensity of their feelings serves as a magnet drawing the one to another in circumstances above and beyond the banal laws of probability governing ‘real life’. This is easy entertainment and indicates how melodrama sometimes challenges the predominance of serious fiction in Mal de amores. To conclude, the reader is struck by Mastretta’s diverse styles particularly in Mal de amores which ranges from the frivolous (e.g. Emilia’s conversation with Sol just before the latter’s wedding, pp. 167–8) to the ominous (‘al fondo, dibujados con la oscuridad, estaban los volcanes, vigilando el desastre que corría por esa tierra’, p. 324); from the poetic (‘un gajo de luz entró sin miedo por el cuarto

27

It is difficult, according to Rodolfo Usigli, to ‘concebir a México sin la casualidad – la mitad por lo menos del mexicano es azar puro, golpe de dados, como dicen los franceses – [. . .]’. See ‘Doce Notas’, in Teatro Completo de Rodolfo Usigli (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979), III, pp. 478–94 (p. 493).


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y se destuvo en el cuerpo de Milgros que dormía inmutable como la Iztaccíhuatl’, p. 127) to the prosaic and dour, matter-of-fact description of the Revolutionary events placed in explicit time frames (‘Un gobierno de transición preparaba nuevas elecciones para octubre de 1911. Cada mañana los periódicos recién despertados a su arbitrio insultaban a quien mejor les parecía’, p. 228). Mastretta’s style is enriched by the use of various discourse types – for example, foreign words (Mal de amores, Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado), journalistic clichés (Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado) and medical terminology (Mal de amores). Spanish, Indian and Latin medical terms are employed by Diego indiscriminately: ‘A ver, a que no encuentras la Cañafístula en conserva [. . .] pídeme otra [. . .] Palo de Sasafrás [. . .] Yerba de Juan Infante [. . .] Cannabis Indica’ (pp. 129–31); ‘el bulbo de unas flores parecidas a los lirios, que la yerbera de mercado llamaba Oceoloxóchtil y su marido Tigridia Pavonia’ (p. 16). Ancient Spanish is used to describe herbs: ‘El había encontrado su nombre científico y la descripción de sus efectos curativos en el libro de un español que en el siglo XVI recorrió la Nueva España [. . .] su corazón había latido más rápido mientras leía: Algunos dizen que si las beuen las mugeres les ayuda a concebir’ (Mal de amores, p. 16). Mastretta often uses pairs of adjectives or verbs. Diego Sauri is described as ‘desolado y enfebrecido’ (Mal de amores, p. 229) and ‘renovado y excéntrico’ (Mal de amores, p. 239). There are certain juxtapositions of adjectives which are notable for their marked contrast: ‘había por todas partes miseria y estancamiento y entretejiendo esa desgracía, había riqueza y cambios’ (Mal de amores, p. 197). Similes are equally striking, since they disturb reader expectations: in ‘luego pasó el silencio entre ellos, como una legión de ángeles ociosos’ (Mal de amores, p. 175) the military connotations of ‘legión’ clash with ‘ángeles ociosos’, which itself offers a rather jarring conjunction of spirituality (‘ángeles’) and materialism (‘ociosos’). In Mal de amores, transitions between discourses can be brusque, distracting the reader’s attention from the narrative to the structure and style. It is this feature of Mal de amores which most clearly distinguishes it from realist writers such as the Mexican Revolutionary novelists whose prose, like testimonial writing, is usually ‘metodológicamente callado’.28 Although Mastretta does not actually refer to the authoritative process of writing as does Isabel Allende, for example, there are various references within the text to literature: writers such as Charlotte Brönte and Rousseau, and literary characters – Julian Sorel and Ana Ozores – are mentioned (pp. 27–8). There are a few examples of life assuming artistic and literary form in Mal de amores: Milagros’s clothes suggest the latest styles found in the fashion magazines: ‘a veces se vestía como un dibujo de Le Moniteur de la Mode’ (p. 26). Josefa reads the newspapers as if they were serialized novels: ‘todos los días el recuento de lo que iba sucediéndole al país la mantenía en vilo igual que una novela por entregas que la hacían despertar a media noche tratando de imaginarse lo que 28 See Elzbieta Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoamericano: historia, teoría, poética (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 120. Sklodowska’s perceptive analysis of a supposedly native genre examines its problematical truth claims as well as its relationship with postmodernism.


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seguiría’ (p. 113). Milagros and the poet Rivadeneira often express in a playful manner their love for each other by citing verses. Rivadeneira asks – ‘¿Qué te parece, Lucero/ la fuerza de mi desdicha?’ (p. 37) to which Milagros answers: ‘A no tener mi valor,/ pienso que el vuestro envidiara’ (p. 37). On another occasion the idea that literature reflects life and viceversa is expressed in a conversation between Milagros and Josefa: –Te pongo en la realidad, Josefa, pero tú no vas a salir nunca de las novelas. Hago esfuerzos inútiles, todo lo quieres ver color rosa. –Las novelas están llenas de catástrofes –defendió Josefa. –Entonces no te quejes de la realidad –contestó Milagros. (p. 112)

Such references also serve to draw the reader’s attention to the way in which the text has been constructed, to its self-consciousness. Significant here are Daniel’s letter-writing and journalism and Emilia’s painstaking endeavour to document the chaos of the Revolution – her efforts to confer (textual) order on the disorder of the world (p. 231). Literary technique and manipulation underlie Daniel’s reconstruction of testimonies of people in the Revolution: ‘estaba eufórico, haciendo planes y recontando amigos, dispuesto una vez más a entregarse sin recato al teje y maneje de líos y disputas’ (p. 391). Daniel’s ‘teje y maneje’ emphasizes the material process of Mastretta’s own writing, particularly in Arráncame la vida, which is a testimonial narrative based upon real events but which Mastretta has manipulated in order to reconstruct a fictional testimony. However, while Mastretta’s self-conscious techniques are important, they are not allowed to divert the reader’s attention from the socio-political message. The next chapter focuses almost exclusively on Mal de amores which has not yet received the extensive critical analysis accorded to Arráncame la vida despite its greater length and complexity. By examining the hitherto unexplored themes of Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival, I hope to shed new light on Mastretta’s rich and complex narrative techniques in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida. This chapter demonstrates that a serious social commitment underlies the shimmering surface of her prose.


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Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival Our exploration of the themes of Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival (with particular reference to Mal de amores) will serve to highlight the multiplicity of Mastretta’s writing. The inconsistent treatment of the carnivalesque, the mythical and the magical – which appear both positively and negatively – contribute to the reader’s sense of a shifting and unstable world.

Mythical Origins and Utopia From the point of view of setting and action both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida follow the norms of conventional realism though Mal de amores incorporates fantastical and mythical elements which have a dislocating effect on the reader. Here the tension between the mythic and utopian on the one hand and the harsh realities of revolutionary struggle on the other reflect Bartra’s theories of melancholy and metamorphosis. At the level of character analysis, Emilia is torn between the desire for sameness and the need for change reflecting the contradictory national yearning for stability and nostalgic return to a mythic past on the one hand, and an equally powerful desire for social change and modernity on the other.1 Myth regresses to the childhood and innocence of humanity. Mal de amores begins with an atmosphere of innocence, myth and magic. During the early years of Emilia’s life, the Sauri family is blissfully happy. Emilia displays the innocence and wholeness of young humanity. The element of innocence, complemented by a sense of order and harmony, is evoked in the way Emilia’s parents seek to protect her from the negative aspects of the world, and in her games in the garden with Daniel where they sing nursery rhymes and seal their pledges of eternal friendship and love. During her childhood, Emilia spends long hours at the Cuenca home whose doors are closed in order to keep the outside world at

1 Bartra’s concept of melancholy may be related to Roland Barthes’s structuralist analysis of myth which he associates with ideology and the falsification of consciousness by bourgeois capitalist society. The Mexican revolution challenges the ruling elite’s mythical conception of existing social structures as natural, timeless and eternal, God-given and fixed rather than man-made and fluid. See Chapter Seven, pp. 218–23, p. 219 n. 20, and Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 5–34.


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bay: ‘era una casa que tenía la puerta cerrada porque en Puebla las puertas siempre se han cerrado, como si un continuo temor al mundo de la calle cercara las moradas’ (p. 33). Though Emilia’s childhood world gives the impression of wholeness and tranquility, it remains a closed and isolated place where privilege appears to be ordained by nature rather than contrived by society. Here again we note the ambivalence of Mastretta’s fiction: myth suggests the cyclical, the eternal, resistance to change and progress. But on the other hand, the portrayal of myth as the return to origins and purity is a positive aspect tempered by the gentlest of ironies. Mastretta emphasizes the principle of historical change rather than stasis and repetition: Diego tells Josefa on one occasion that ‘éstos son otros tiempos’ and since Emilia has found love then ‘qué importa si no le tocan el orden y las ceremonias [. . .] porque sabes que la historia no se repite’ (p. 157). Here Mastretta departs from the mythic and cyclical time of Mariano Azuela, Elena Garro, García Márquez and Isabel Allende whose narrative worlds ‘are structured by cyclic patterns which affect both characters and events, and the future, constantly anticipated, is shown to be conditioned by the past’ (Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, p. 74). For Mastretta, history is fluid and in a constant process of metamorphosis. Throughout Mal de amores, there are allusions to the return to mythic origins. The text begins by telling us the story of Emilia’s father, Diego Sauri, who was born on a small Caribbean island called Isla Mujeres of which he is very proud, often reminding his family of his Indian past. Mastretta recounts the history of the island by reconstructing the last battle of the Mayas against the Spanish conquerors, the ‘guerra de castas’ (p. 9). Various creole and mestizo families had fled to the island for protection and it was there that Diego grew up surrounded by the wild beauty of the island but never finding the spiritual tranquility enjoyed by his parents. He wanted to discover what lay beyond the peaceful waters of the Caribbean. He may have inherited his urge to travel which was shared by the islanders (‘viajeros encallados y de cruces azarosas’, p. 9) many of whom were pirates (p. 10). The travel motifs in Mal de amores are important since travelling will be an intrinsic aspect of Emilia’s life and can also be seen as a metaphor of her journey of self-discovery. The first chapter recounts Diego’s growing passion for medicine which he learnt from his father and his development of an almost magical gift to bring half-dead fish back to life: ‘se le había vuelto ya una pasión la habilidad curandera que su padre le descubrió cuando aún era niño, viéndolo revivir los peces que habían traído medio vivos para la cena’ (p. 10). His passion for alternative herbal medicine is another important aspect of Mal de amores. While Diego is a pharmacist, Emilia, becomes a doctor under the guidance of Daniel’s father, Dr. Cuenca, and will later have an affair with another doctor, Antonio Zavalza. As will be seen, the intersection of orthodox, alternative and magical practices will have an important impact on Emilia. The first chapter also recounts an event during Diego’s youth which would change his life. One night, the locals of the island find an Indian woman who was battered and bruised and take her to Diego’s home to be healed. Diego’s


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remedies are successful and once she recovers he ships her off in the first boat to leave the island. Before she embarks on the ship, she scribbles in the sand the words ‘Ah Hoc’ meaning ‘shark’ (p. 11). Mastretta explains that that was the name given to Fermín Mundaca, a rapacious and violent pirate who lived temporarily on the island and was known to sell arms to the Mayans and ships to the invaders who fought the natives. Even today in Isla Mujeres the myth of this terrible pirate lives on. In Mal de amores, myth is part of normal everyday reality. That same night, five men abducted Diego and shipped him off in a boat to an unknown destination. Days later he landed in Northern Europe where he acquired medical knowledge. He subsequently returned to his beloved Mexico where he met Josefa Veytia, Emilia’s mother. The marriage of Josefa and Diego is announced alongside a major historical event, the proclamation of Alfonso XII as the King of Spain (p. 14). This episode anticipates another which similarly conjoins personal happiness and historical event: the melodramatic reunion of Emilia and Daniel which coincides with Madero’s speech in Mexico City (pp. 223–6). Private and relatively unimportant episodes take their place alongside major historical events, sometimes surpassing them in their emotional intensity and narrative impact. The return to origins is evoked elsewhere in the novel particularly when Emilia, having left home to participate in the revolutionary struggle, experiences a great sense of nostalgia for her lost paradise, her stable home and childhood. The mythical is often associated with the feminine and ‘seeks to reaffirm the unity of the human with the natural world’ (Davies, p. 71). Mastretta’s female characters possess earthy archetypal qualities, reminiscent of some of the tías in Mujeres de ojos grandes and Isabel Allende’s female characters in La casa de los espíritus (Davies, p. 71). In Mujeres de ojos grandes, Concha Esparza is obsessed with violets and their aromas are associated with her: ‘llegó a crecer las más extravagantes y le gustaba regalarlas para que todo el mundo tuviera en su casa el inquebrantable aroma de Concha Esparza’ (p. 181). The mythical is closely associated with natural female bodily processes such as childbirth. Diego praises Josefa for her valour when she gives birth to Emilia and compares his wife to Ixchel – goddess of the moon, water and birth: ‘era la diosa maya de la luna, las aguas y los curanderos, encargada por eso de proteger el parto y los embarazos’ (p. 23). On another occasion, the heart-to-heart conversation between Emilia and Dolores Cienfuegos takes place against the background of the natural world: ‘las dos se fueron caminando hasta el río y se sentaron en la orilla, bajo un sauce llorón, con el rumor del agua corriendo sobre las piedras como la otra única presencia entre ellas’ (p. 265). Emilia has a natural affinity with herbal medicines which she uses to cure female maladies: ‘enseñó a curar fiebres [. . .] a matar con una infusión de pirú y flores de tabachín los lombrices que se comían la panza de las niñas [. . .] a revolver epazote y yerba dulce con crema de cacao para untarla en la vagina y evitar un embarazo’ (p. 261). Myth is also linked to magic and sexuality. Chapter II in Mal de amores explores in more detail the relationship between Josefa and Diego and their


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obsessive lovemaking designed to lead to conception. In this chapter the interplay of primal energies and magical events is crucial: Sólo descansaban de su intensa labor creadora para que Josefa diera unos tragos enormes del agua en que hervía por dos horas el bulbo de unas flores parecidas a los lirios, que la yerbera del mercado llamaba Oceoloxóchitl y su marido Tigridia Pavonia. Él había encontrado su nombre científico y la descripción de sus efectos curativos en el libro de un español que en el siglo XVI recorrió la Nueva España haciendo el recuento de las plantas usadas por los antiguos mexicanos. Su corazón había latido más rápido mientras leía: ‘Algunos dizen que si as beuen la mugeres les ayuda a concebir.’ (p. 16)

This intense desire for physical contact will also be passed down the generational line to Emilia, who will conduct an equally intense, if intermittent, relationship with Daniel. Elsewhere in the midst of social upheaval, the idea that the mythic is connected with the Indian past as a kind of innocent paradise where men and women lived in harmony and enjoyed idyllic sexual relations is seen in Diego’s description of Yucatán (p. 21) which suggests a mythical earthly paradise. The sexual can also represent a utopian return to wholeness (associated with the natural world and innocence), the search for a lost paradise, partially fulfiled by Emilia and her lover, Daniel Cuenca, when they make love. They often make love with a primitive passion and sensuality which contrasts with the plain lust characterizing the relationships of Catalina in Arráncame la vida. Emilia compares Daniel’s body to an animal – ‘qué animal magnífico eres’ (p. 329) – suggesting the primordial quality of their physical relationship. After long separations, they might at first feel distanced from each other since their childhood has been lost in the past. But their paradise is recuperated through lovemaking – even when the setting, such as Izúcar, ‘un pueblo caliente y arisco’, is not the most propitious. Here the perfect idyll of their renewed romance is heightened by the survival of some natural life in the aridness of Izúcar: Nadie lo hubiera considerado un buen lugar para su luna de miel, pero la luna era de miel sobre las cabezas de Emilia Sauri y Daniel Cuenca la noche que se tendieron en la yerba, al lado de los cañaverales, en la soledad oscura y tibia que los bordeaba. No había duda ni pena que cupiera bajo el cielo que los cubrió. Durmieron como muy pocos han logrado dormir sobre la tierra. (p. 255)

In Mujeres de ojos grandes, female sexuality is also linked to the natural world and magic. Fátima Lapuente’s body is described rather fantastically as being ‘lleno de luciérnagas’ (p. 83) while the ‘luna intrigosa y ardiente’ (p. 137) deranges the ordered mind of tía Aguirre.

Magical Realism At the heart of myth lies the magical. The term magical realism continues to divide critical opinion: some critics, such as Ángel Flores, claim that ‘realismo


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mágico’ is an exclusively Latin American preserve while others, notably, Amaryll Chanady, have emphasized its international status within the broader framework of avant-garde literature, although she insists that it has a uniquely Latin American core originating from ‘creative “cannibalization” ’.2 Finding its origins in Europe, magical realism was appropriated in Latin America where the term became modified and enriched by Latin Americans in their art and literature.3 The Boom’s international success in the 1960s and 1970s meant that magical realism became something ‘that Latin America gave back to the world (to Europe) transformed in its own image’ (Beardsell, p. 203). Taking into consideration the diverse meanings attributed to magical (or magic) realism, a brief definition of the term may be useful in our analysis of Mastretta’s texts. The term magical realism is associated with twentieth-century art applied by German art critic, Franz Roh in the 1920s to German Post-Expressionism in his Nachexpressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der Neusten Europäishcen Malerei. Roh argued that the world of concrete real objects should be depicted in such a way as to reveal their hidden mystery, that is, the magic lying just beneath the surface of everyday things. In this respect, magical realism, which became most closely associated with Latin American literature, has a peculiar significance very different from its status in Europe. Within Latin American literature, as in Mastretta’s Mal de amores, the magical stages a kind of creative conflict between such opposites as the magical, the indigenous and the mythical on the one hand, and the real, the Western and the rational on the other. But magical realism also reconciles concepts which are normally considered as opposed to each other: the real and the magical, for example, are presented on an equal footing.4 Amaryll Chanady observes that ‘magical realism belongs neither entirely to the domain of fantasy (the creation of a world totally different from ours), nor to that of reality, our conventional everyday world’.5

2 See Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, ‘The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigm in Magical Realism’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Farris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) pp. 125–44. In her essay, Chanady undermines Ángel Flores’s view of magical realism as an authentically Latin American phenomenon. Also see Ángel Flores, ‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction’, Hispania, 38 (1955), 187–92. 3 See Peter Beardsell, Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), pp. 196–203. 4 Beardsell explains that in Latin American literature magical realism is distinguished by a combination of various features, some of which are to be found in Mal de amores. These include: ‘the presence of the real and the magical together in the same texts; [. . .] the transcendence of conventional concepts of reality in order to explore it and reveal it from new angles; the expression of the individual’s subconscious mind as manifested in dreams, visions, hallucinations; the expression of a mythical infrastructure as found in popular, and especially pre-Columbian, culture’. See Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze, p. 197. 5 See Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomies (New York: Garland, 1985). Chanady draws useful distinctions between the magical and the fantastic modes.


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A key feature of magical realism is authorial reticence: magical realism has overtones of the fantastic but is not unbelievable, the quotidian is not differentiated from the marvellous and the supernatural is not seen as problematic. Latin American magical realism differs from European fantastic literature, since the latter ‘lacks the ultimate reference to an objectively-existing reality’ (Beardsell, p. 197). Leal makes an important distinction between these two modes: the magical realist writer ‘does not need to justify the mysterious nature of events, as the writer of fantastic stories has to. In fantastic literature the supernatural invades a world ruled by reason.’6 An important aspect of magical realism is seen in the way in which occurences seen as supernatural in fantastic literature are presented as natural from an indigenous American perspective, while familiar aspects of every day life are seen as supernatural from the native perspective – as occurs in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. A kind of dynamic fusion occurs of the laws of the supernatural and the laws of the natural world. In the West, rational mentality makes us think of the world as an objective phenomenon which can be tested and understood according to empirical criteria. Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and to an extent Ángeles Mastretta, subvert this faith in rational objectivity. As will be explored later, in Mal de amores magical realism does not force the reader to take up a specific political position. Rather it challenges the readers to reassess the assumptions – religious, cultural or political – which condition their view of the world. It highlights culture as a sphere of creative friction and conflict. It does not offer a clear political moral message but rather challenges ingrained opinions and attitudes which have long been accepted. Throughout Mastretta’s fictional works there are various magical-realist overtones such as in Mujeres de ojos grandes. Tía Elvira, for instance, has the unusual capacity of seeing in the dark: ‘De lo oscuro salían arañas y vampiros gigantes [. . .] su mamá [. . .] abrazada a un crucifijo, [. . .] su papá en cuatro pies [. . .], mientras el abuelo y los tíos pasaban [. . .] abriendo sus bocas moradas para aullar’ (p. 151). The magical is also manifest in the first few chapters of Mal de amores – the astrological determines when Josefa and Diego must make love to conceive a baby and they take herbal drinks to help them conceive Emilia (p. 16). Mastretta has acknowledged the influence of Gabriel García Márquez (García, Broken Bars, p. 81) and his use of magical realism which is less blatant and direct in her work than in that of Isabel Allende. Mastretta does not rely on the supernatural as does Allende, but focuses on the essential otherness of indigenous custom and medicine, as she does in Mal de amores.7 However the supernatural is

6 See Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, ‘The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigm in Magical Realism’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, p. 132. Also see Luis Leal, ‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1983), pp. 119–24 (p. 123). 7 In Los pasos perdidos (1953), Alejo Carpentier’s version of magical realism draws upon the marvellous aspects of the Latin American landscape and culture without crossing over into


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suggested in the angelic and divine metaphors associated with some of the women in Mal de amores. Women are often described as being angelic in Mal de amores, which suggests their supernatural aura. The paralysis of one revolutionary, Carmela Milpa, is not incompatible with angelic qualities: ‘una mujer paralítica que a falta de fuerza en sus piernas tenía una sedosa voz de ángel’ (Mal de amores, p. 260). Both Emilia and Milagros are described as angelic. Josefa is amazed at the beauty of the newly-born Emilia, and Milagros observes that she is so beautiful that it is almost as if she has been woven together by angels: ‘Como bordada por los ángeles’ (p. 23). Emilia is physically angelic because of her outstanding beauty and Milagros is both beautiful and has supernatural powers. Although Emilia is not perfect, she has a divine aura: los gestos de Emilia estaban tocados por una gracia misteriosa. Tal vez su secreto principal fuera no ser perfecta, tener un huequito entre los dientes de en medio, una pequeña marca de varicela que matizaba la presunción de su nariz de diosa, un modo raro de fruncir el ceño cuando una pregunta le parecía inútil. (p. 332)

We are told that Milagros: ‘podía sonreír como un ángel y enceguecer de furia como todos los diablos’ (p. 24). Her name suggests the ability to perform miracles/milagros. Milagros is witch-like: ‘solía desbaratar un argumento con la luz ominosa de su mirada’ and although she hates to sew ‘era una bruja para diseñar sus vestidos o cambiar el ambiente de un cuarto con sólo mover algunos cuadros’ (p. 24). Her prophetic and ritualistic predictions of Emilia’s future turn out to be true (p. 25). Even Josefa who is the most conservative of the three main characters is said to have a ‘clarividente cabeza’ (p. 243). Diego, who adores his wife, sees her as a divine, supernatural authority: ‘era uno de esos extraños hombres que respetan sin preguntas los designios de la autoridad divina encarnada en su mujer’ (p. 17). The angelic and divine metaphors associated with some of the female characters ultimately symbolize the otherness of woman and her parthuman, part-divine condition. Mastretta’s female characters, like Allende’s, pertain to this ambiguous category which both revives a forgotten reality and offers an alternative form to traditional political and gender divisions. Luce Irigaray remarks that angels: link what has been split by patriarchy – the flesh and the spirit, nature and gods, the carnal and the divine, and are a way of conceptualizing a possible overcoming of the deadly and immobilizing division of the sexes in which women have been allocated body, flesh, nature, earth, carnality while men have been allocated spirit and transcendence.8 the realm of the supernatural as do Elena Garro, Juan Rulfo and most notably, Gabriel García Márquez. 8 See The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 157.


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Some of the female characters in Mal de amores possess these attributes. Milagros, like Teodora, seems not to belong to the real world. She predicts the future of Emilia by employing other-worldly metaphors: ‘te deseo el sentido del tiempo que tienen las estrellas [. . .] te deseo la fe en los augurios, en la voz de los muertos [. . .] en el futuro como la promesa donde cabe todo lo que aún no te sucede’ (p. 27). In addition Milagros has much sexual appeal and a refined social conscience.9 Throughout Mal de amores there is an important interplay between magic, the indigenous, the popular and the mythic on the one hand, and science and officialdom on the other. In Latin America pre-modern features are still manifest, creating a complex structure of collective definitions and a specific social practice, defying the superiority of official culture.10 The importance of the interplay between science and magic is particularly meaningful in the context of Mal de amores. Emilia’s exposure to alternative medical practices highlights the tension between popular medicine (associated with the feminine and irrational) and the official (linked to the manly and rational). Emilia learns about medicine from many different sources. From her father she learns about herbal remedies, from Cuenca and Zavalza she learns about more conventional practices and in the US she receives formal education and learns about the latest technologies. The Revolution gives her the opportunity to put her medical knowledge into practice and to learn about new unconventional remedies from the soldaderas. These incompatible medical practices come to a head when Emilia experiences a moment of magical healing during the Revolution. Having failed to save a dying woman, Emilia curses her medical training in Chicago seeing it as a waste of time: ‘maldijo su estancia en Chicago diciéndose que no había sido la mejor manera de aprender una medicina para vivir entre los pobres, y con todas sus fuerzas invocó con el que sacarse cura de la nada’ (p. 320). And in effect as if by magic, from ‘la nada’, the answer comes in the figure of Teodora, a diminutive old lady: ‘se les acercó una vieja pequeña y medio encorvada, diciendo que ella podría hacer algo’ (p. 320). At first Emilia is sceptical (p. 320), but the old lady cures the sick woman with her bare hands: ‘Con esas manos [. . .] empezó a sobar la cabeza de la enferma [. . .] como si buscara lugares precisos en los que detener la suavidad de sus dedos [. . .] luego bajó [. . . .] a un punto exacto en las plantas de los pies en el que se detuvo’ (pp. 320–1). Emilia is astounded and at first cannot seem to accept this instance of miraculous curing and asks the old lady naively: ‘¿sabe usted acupuntura

9 See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000) p. 100. 10 William Rowe and Vivian Shelling remark that the ‘magic that continued to be practised by the lower orders of society became an alternative knowledge, from below [. . .] It was a syncretism of native Indian, African and popular belief, shared by different social classes, located in the interstices rather than the official structures of society, and was primarily the province of woman’. See William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991), p. 214.


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[. . .]?’ (p. 321). The old lady is not familiar with such terminology and simply replies: ‘Yo me llamo Teodora, esto no sé cómo se llame’ (p. 321). Here the supernatural has become part of the quotidian, accepted without question by Teodora. Emilia wants to learn from Teodora and seeks to impress the old lady by discussing the latest medical advances. Teodora seems to have acquired her skills from sources of knowledge long suppressed by the rational mind. As the old lady puts it, ‘se mira y se aprende, no hay más’ (p. 322). Here the view that popular medicine is based on intuition rather than knowledge is important. The now stereotyped associations of the female with intuition and feeling can also be applied to popular practices, beliefs and myth which, unlike ‘male’ scientific thought, are emotional and fantastic rather than demonstrative and analytical. The figure of Teodora is very important and bears a strong resemblance to Teresa Urrea in La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora (1990) by the Mexican writer Brianda Domecq.11 Her knowledge based on intuition inspires Emilia who takes on board Teodora’s view that medical success often derives from experimentation with various curative paths, as will be seen further on. In so doing, Emilia refuses to play the orthodox game, rejecting stale practices which are narrow–minded and devoid of fresh perspective. Teodora inspires Emilia to become inventive in her medical practice and to accept both orthodox medicine and medicine based upon magical practices. Teodora is a kind of wild woman who breaks the social and class barriers to which Emilia has been accustomed. Emilia becomes her close friend: their relationship represents the power of female solidarity and the communal voice. Emilia feels indebted to Teodora and pays tribute to this old magician by setting up a medical practice when she settles down with Zavalza. Here both orthodox and unorthodox forms of medicine are practised. Emilia has learnt that if one type of medicine does not work for an illness then another should be tried – which goes counter to Zavalza’s conservative medical training. Emilia we are told: no usaba la palabra incurable, no creía en Dios, pero de qué manera en algo así como la Divina Providencia. Cuando no le funcionaba un tratamiento intentaba otro. Le había enseñado a Zavalza que nadie se enfermaba igual de la misma cosa y que por lo mismo nadie tenía por qué curarse de lo mismo con lo mismo. Diagnosticaba los males de la gente con sólo verle el color de la piel o la luz de los ojos. (pp. 377–8)

11 This novel tells the story of an unnamed female investigator who researches the life of a healer in the nineteenth century and finds that her life begins to merge with hers. Many feminist messages emerge in this text where ‘woman-to-woman bonds based on friendship and the sharing of knowledge illustrate the power of female solidarity’ (García, Broken Bars, p. 191). Urrea is a rebellious woman and she incarnates the archetypal ‘wild woman’, that is, ‘intuition, imagination and creativity’ (García, p. 196). As the patroness of writers and thinkers the Wild Woman ‘is the inspiration for invention. She is also a healer, for she carries the medicine of all things’ (p. 191). Urrea inspires the investigator to write and ultimately provides the key to understanding Domecq’s narrative powers (p. 191). Urrea’s magic, like Todora’s, challenges the political power of the Díaz regime (García, p. 196). See Brianda Domecq, La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora (Mexico City: Planeta, 1990).


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Zavalza, representing male reason and orthodoxy, is mildly taken aback by Emilia’s surgery where the convergence of medical practices – orthodox as well as alternative remedies, Indian and medieval Spanish medicine – has a humorously carnivalesque effect. Under Emilia’s leadership, the hospital becomes a kind of laboratory of diverse practices where the highest standards are achieved because of the inclusive approach adopted: ‘convivían ahí, enriqueciéndose con el intercambio indiscriminado de sus conocimientos, dos autoridades indígenas que se llamaban a sí mismos médicos tradicionales y una partera de oficio más apta para el trance de sacar hijos que el más famoso ginecólogo neoyorkino’ (p. 378). To add to this comic range of people and practices – Teodora, the magician, and Refugio, the seller of encyclopedias ‘con su colección de enigmas’ (p. 379), come to help in the hospital which now resembles a circus ‘parecido a un circo de tres pistas’ (p. 379). At times Zavalza thinks that ‘el hospital a veces parecía más a un consejo de locos que un centro científico, pero en el fondo estaba de acuerdo con su eclecticismo y sus búsquedas’ (p. 378). At first Emilia is sceptical of Refugio but subsequently accepts him ‘al principio sólo confiaba en los poderes curatives de su lengua, pero la experiencia hizo que casi todos ahí lo consideraran de una utilidad práctica’ (p. 380). Even Teodora and Emilia work together successfully despite their disparate beliefs and practices (p. 381). Although Mastretta’s treatment of popular custom and alternative medical practices is generally positive, she does not shrink from exposing their limitations. While Teodora’s magical healing works, Emilia knows that more orthodox medicine could have saved many people from dying: ‘no había tenido medicinas [. . .] y tuvo que mandar a morirse en su casa por lo menos a seis personas que con diez días en un hospital como el de Chicago hubieran quedado libres de mal’ (p. 309). Emilia is also sceptical of the herbal remedies her father recommends for lovesickness: ‘eres fantasioso, papá, te pareces a Monardes’, and jokingly reminds him of the traditional curative powers of tobacco: ‘¿Ya ves para cuántas cosas dice que usaban el tabaco? Para cerrar heridas, para dolores de cabeza, reumas, males de pecho [. . . .] Con razón no hay cosa que mi tía Milagros no resuelva liando un cigarrillo’ (pp. 172–73). Refusing to accept a magical cure, Emilia seeks a scientific explanation. Supernatural practices are treated with suspicion by Diego who reprimands Josefa for allowing their child to become involved with people who believe in the devil (p. 47). Both Diego and Josefa believe in the healing powers of herbal remedies (pp. 172, 125). Superstition is another element of magical realism, but is subject to ironic treatment. Josefa in Mal de amores is deeply superstitious and places a salt shaker with stones in it to keep familial disputes and upheaval at bay. The terminology of the supernatural crops up as seen for example in the reference to the corrupt governor (‘este demonio’, p. 177) who has taken Milagros prisoner, and in Emilia’s horrific dream as a child where she mistakes Daniel for the devil (p. 47). Elsewhere Mastretta alludes to the ignorance of those Mexicans who believe in the mystical powers of religion. Milagros criticizes Sol’s family for having given the girl a ridiculously long


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name (‘María de la Soledad Casilda de la Virgen de Guadalupe de los Sagrados Corazones de Jesús y de María’, p. 101) partly because of their suspicions and fears: Con esa letanía se le dio gusto [. . .] a su abuela maternal empeñada en ponerle a la niña el mismo nombre duro con el que ella vivía, a su madre que como toda mexicana con riesgos en el presente y temblor ante el futuro acudía para todo asunto a la dulce y muda presencia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, y a su abuela paterna que no era muy dada a tratar con los santos porque consideraba torpe meterse a pedirle algo a gente que por muchos méritos que tuviera no tenía ni de chiste el poder de los iluminados corazones de María y Jesús que, como cualquiera debía saber, eran importantes miembros del poderío central. Porque no en balde Jesús formaba parte de la Santísima Trinidad y María era su madre. (p. 101)

The oscillation which characterizes the reading experience of Mal de amores, which dismisses as well as vindicates magical practice, contribute to the reader’s sense of uncertainty. Mastretta’s intention is to present a world which is both familiar and unfamiliar. While supernatural powers and carnivalesque excess takes the readers beyond the familiar limits of their everyday world, the sociopolitical dimension which characterizes the text highlights both recognition and meaning. The oscillation between the realist discourse and those of popular custom, carnivalesque excess and magical practice – which both clash and come together – prevent the reader from conforming to any specific mode of interpretation. However the positive aspects of magical practice tend on the whole to outstrip the negative treatment. The inconsistent treatment of magical practice is perhaps best exemplified in the figure of Milagros. Milagros is deeply suspicious of Josefa’s obsessive tea-making and scorns Josefa’s dependence on magic and ritual (p. 125). The negative attitude of both Milagros and Diego towards alternative beliefs and practices is ironic because, as liberals, they both defend Latin America’s indigenous past and Diego himself uses many unorthodox remedies. Furthermore the lower-classes and marginalized groups in Latin America have relied historically on ‘magical’ remedies. Indeed, at the outset, Milagros was portrayed as a kind of prophetic witch with a penchant for pagan ritual. By speaking of the positive elements of magic as exemplified in both Milagros and Teodora, Mastretta successfully recaptures the importance of an alternative practice which would otherwise have fallen into oblivion. One important reason for Mastretta’s use of magical realism is that it recalls Mexico’s long-forgotten mythic and indigenous past. Milagros’s belief in alternative practice, for example, show her to be an important agent in the transmission of the mythical and historical past of the native Other. But magical realism is also one, among many other modes of expression and truths, which Mastretta resorts to in order to celebrate the multiplicity of the world and hybridity which characterizes Latin America’s cultural fusion. The diverse discourses Mastretta resorts to are given equal legitimacy in a text which repudiates hierarchical divisions. This may be


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seen in Mastretta’s indiscriminate use of Christian and indigenous imagery which is often reflected in the flippant attitudes of her characters: –Bendito sea Dios –contestó Josefa tranquilizada con la noticia. –¿Cuál de todos? –preguntó el señor Sauri. –Cualquiera que te haya inspirado esta vez –contestó su mujer. (p. 29)

Carnival An important aspect of magical realism is the carnivalesque. In both Mal de amores and to an extent Arráncame la vida, the carnivalesque must be seen within the context of the subversive. Carnival traditionally is an occasion of feasting and entertainment. Bakhtin’s concept of Carnivalisation refers to the incorporation of carnival into everyday life and its influence on literature and language. Traditionally carnival was anathema to authority and order. Bakhtin also argues that during carnival latent anarchic energies led to the transgression of social and moral standards. Carnival is associated with primitive, pre-oedipal energies – associated with the mythic past and the magical – which have been repressed by civilization.12 According to Rodríguez Monegal the importance of the carnivalesque in Latin America is related to the continent’s often barbaric assimilation of foreign cultures, and the impact of imposed social systems such as Christianity and feudalism.13 As a discourse of the low, carnival defies rational and legal norms. Like myth, carnival challenges bourgeois society which typically repudiates ‘base’ languages of carnival such as laughter and parody. Yet carnival, as Stalleybrass and White state, carried on with its ritual inversions: ‘it links the inversion of hierarchy [. . .] with a comic privileging of the bottom part of the body [. . .] over the rational and spiritual control of the head’.14 While there are no references to fully-fledged popular carnivals there are many residual indicators of carnival in Mal de amores such as the festive dinner, plays and circuses and their function must be seen in a broader framework. During carnival, fancy dress is a pivotal element in these times of anarchic celebrations. Dress plays an important role in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida. Dress in Mal de amores has a double function in that it is used to express both conformity and rebellion whereas in Arráncame la vida it is used almost invariably to express a form of subservience to patriarchal ideals and values. The 12 The carnivalesque works as a mode of subversion in literature in spite of carnival’s reliance on social authorization which, as Eagleton points out, makes it a subdued and limited concern rather than a powerful tool of insubordination and mockery. See Terry Eagleton’s Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 148. 13 See Emir Rodriguez Monegal, ‘Carnaval/Antropofagia/Parodia’, Revista Iberoamericana, 45 (1979), 401–12. This is a useful study of the reception of Bakhtinian theories in Latin America. 14 See Stalleybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 183.


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fact that dress can be examined from two very different and contrasting perspectives is once again a clear example of Mastretta’s ability to fuse discourses in an ambiguous postmodern fashion. Francine Masiello points out that towards the end of the nineteenth century, gender, dress and commerce were intrinsically interlinked, marked by the fact that the ‘marketing of gender images and dress served the liberal state as a vehicle to modernize culture’.15 Fashion served in many ways to reinforce the projects of the modern state (Masiello, p. 220). Modernity in Latin America was typically bound to an agenda of regulated tastes and desires whereby people had to act according to prescribed ways of behaving, speaking and dressing (Masiello, p. 220). These links between gender, dress and modern commerce persist to the present time. Masiello examines the way in which many contemporary Latin American writers such as Damiela Eltit and Carmen Boullosa link corporeality to the experience of modernity and seeks to show that the ‘gendered body is the originating point of discourse, community, and action’ (p. 231). In both Mal de amores and particularly Arráncame la vida, fashion and commodification also dominate social life. In Mujeres de ojos grandes, there are references to female fashion: ‘nada le faltó a la tía Leonor: sombreros, gasas, zapatos franceses, vajillas alemanas, anillo de brillantes, collar de perlas disparejas’ (p. 8). In Arráncame la vida, Catalina frequently remarks on the clothes people are wearing, particularly women whom she often criticizes for their bourgeois taste or lack of taste in fashion (pp. 88–9). Catalina mocks women who wear fur coats during the warm Mexican winters to follow international fashion trends (pp. 62, 66, 99, 136). She also remarks on the appearance of lower class women: ‘se veían pobretonas, a lo mejor esposas de algún empleado [. . .] de burócratas inconformes o hasta de obreros’ (p. 116). Dress is so important to Catalina that she uses related imagery to express her feelings: she likens Andrés’s bothersome presence to ‘un ropero antiguo a media casa’ (p. 127). Although Catalina is often seen transgressing social codes, she also conforms to them. She often talks about what is lo correcto. Catalina, like the rest of the women in the novel, is willing to impress others by preparing exquisite meals for guests (p. 82). She tries to please men by wearing ‘sexy’ and expensive clothes. She possesses 90 pairs of shoes (p. 235) and she, like all the rest of the women in her social circle, is equipped to look like a Hollywood starlet. Ironically, she too wears a fur coat: ‘las pieles a veces son cursis, pero ese de zorro, me lo ponía con botas y me sentí artista de Hollywood’ (p. 120). Women, including Catalina, conform to male expectations willingly commodifying themselves in order to make the ‘correct’ impression. Sol in Mal de amores has had her wedding dress made especially in Paris – a flagrant display of her wealth. She enthuses about all the chic and imported items she will have when she marries: ‘los muebles

15 See Francine Masiello, ‘Gender, Dress and Market: The Commerce of Citizenship in Latin America’, in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, eds Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 219–33 (p. 220).


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ingleses’, ‘la vajilla de Baviera y las copas de cristal sueco’ (p. 119). Dress is associated with the restriction of a person’s identity and is interlinked with the idea of ‘sexual bodies as vehicles of commodified goods’ (Masiello, p. 228). In Mal de amores, when Sol García gets married both her wedding dress and the presents she is given acquire special importance. Sol’s family have effectively married her off or rather sold their daughter off to a rich family so that they can raise their social standing. Commodity implies power and security and both Sol and her mother are attracted by this prospect. When Sol meets her future husband, her mother, impressed by his affluence, is keen for the wedding to take place: Dueño junto con su familia de haciendas varias, ingenios azucareros, tierras de tabaco [. . .] el muchacho conquistó a Sol más rápido de lo que Emilia hubiera imaginado. Y cuando hizo falta [. . .] su madre gestó el torpe pero eficaz métafora de que su hija era una joya y de que las joyas necesitan guardarse en cofres de lujo. (p. 118)

Sol’s identity has been erased, she has been propelled into the market arena and is now not a person but a thing, a jewel to be bought and sold. Her family’s social relations have in effect improved Sol’s ‘value’ as a trade and sale token. The idea of commodification also emerges in Arráncame la vida, where the women are also prepared to sell their bodies to men – in exchange for security, wealth and social prestige. Bibi tells Catalina that ‘es horrible ser viuda pobre’ (p. 100). She marries Gómez Soto who provides her with expensive cars and clothes but not with happiness (pp. 98–103, 203). Gómez Soto, like Andrés, is corrupt and when Catalina suggests to Bibi that her lover has killed the director of El Avante, Bibi opts for silence perhaps for fear of losing her comfortable lifestyle. Catalina herself had, of course, preferred to ignore the truth about Andrés in order to safeguard her wealth. Dress in Mal de amores serves a subversive function. In an important episode, Sol, who epitomizes the greed and wealth of the hacendados, has her dress made for her marriage. The dress, imported from Paris, is too large for her and Josefa has to tailor it to make it fit. Emilia helps her out of the constricting dress: Sol bajó de la silla y Emilia le ayudó a desabrochar la hilera de pequeños botones forrados de organza que le corría por la espalda como un escalofrío. –Vas a estar preciosa –dijo y la besó para disculpar su ausencia de tantos días. Sol se había quedado a medio vestir con su corpiño de varillas y fondos de olanes. –¿Qué te pasó? –le preguntó a Emilia en voz baja y casi sobre el oído. –Me caí a un río –dijo Emilia jugueteando con sus recuerdos. (p. 168)


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The symbol of Sol’s corset is an important metaphor and is reminiscent of Pérez Galdós whose female characters curse the ‘maldito corsé’ that restrict their movements and personal freedom. According to Lisa Pauline Condé (1992), Galdós makes a comparison in his texts between the unnatural constraints put on women by society – clothes, cosmetics – and those imposed on the female body.16 The corset is important not only to bolster women’s image but it is also linked with respectability (Condé, p. 13). According to Susan Brownmiller, women’s erect posture ‘was identified with moral rectitude and social propriety (the term ‘straitlaced’ owes its origin to the corset) and loosening the stays or leaving the house without them was interpreted as a sign of loose, licentious behaviour’.17 Condé sees ‘the confines of the corset’ (p. 13) as signifying the ‘submissive, self-conscious values of the feminine sphere’ (p. 13). Female constraint within a corset is connected with the control of excess. Clothes, styles and social behaviour that conform to the trends of fashion or ‘good taste’ are in many ways a social regulator and ultimately a form of state control (p. 224) – like the corset. They also serve to control manipulation and immoderation (Masiello, p. 224). Woman, often associated with excess and subversion, can represent a metaphorical danger to the harmony of the state. Sol in Mal de amores is constricted both physically and metaphorically by her corset. She has become her husband’s property and he, as the symbol of patriarchal and state dominance, can ultimately regulate her behaviour. The idea of female excess and loss of control is a constant threat in Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida. Excess in Arráncame la vida is associated with corporeal intemperance, with the parodic treatment of ‘correct’ social and moral behaviour. In Mal de amores, female excess is associated to an extent with the body, and with the transgression of socially imposed gender roles. In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores the association of the feminine with emotion and anarchy runs counter to women’s desire for harmony and stability in their lives. Emilia’s anarchic behaviour is often contrasted with her almost patriarchal sense of order elsewhere. The image of Emilia helping Sol out of her restrictive wedding clothes is clearly symbolic of Emilia’s liberal character and more generally of women’s desire for freedom. By helping Sol get out of those clothes, she is symbolically attempting to liberate her friend from society’s overpowering physical and metaphorical pressure to make women conform. Subconsciously Emilia is rejecting the dictates of a society to which people like Sol and her superficial mother have chosen to adhere.18 Her action can be seen as

16 See Lisa P. Condé. ‘El Maldito Corsé in the Works of Pérez Galdós’, Romance Studies, 20 (1992), 7–20 (p. 7). 17 See Condé, p. 13, and Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Ballentine Books, 1985), pp. 36–7. Brownmiller also explores the issues of dress and femininity in a sociocultural context (pp. 77–102). 18 Although Emilia, like Milagros, finally marries, she views marriage both as a concession to bourgeois commodification (p. 180) and an abandonment of female freedom. On one occasion Emilia claims ‘no quiero un anillo como el de Sol’ (p. 120) and when Sol


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a metaphorical attempt to liberate her best friend’s spirit, very much in the style of Galdós’s Rosalía in La de Bringas (1884) (Condé, p. 13). But unlike Emilia, Sol remains a prisoner of her own corset. She soon puts it back on again in order to get married. Throughout Mal de amores, women are associated with the language of excess. They must be silenced by men because they usually speak their minds and therefore become a liability. Diego wishes that Josefa would not talk about politics with her ‘logorrea dominante’ (p. 114) and recollects rather ruefully the tranquil woman she used to be. The same view that women should be silenced is echoed in Mujeres de ojos grandes where: cualquiera de estos hombres esperaba, como todos los otros, fincar con una mujer que no anduviera opinando, ni metiéndose en las pláticas de los señores, ni aconsejando cómo solucionar [. . .] la epidemia de los gobernadores. Las mujeres no estaban para hablar de temas que no fueran domésticos, y entre menos hablaran mejor. (p. 152)

Octavio Cuenca (Mal de amores) echoes the view that women tend towards emotional excess. He suddenly makes the decision to take Daniel out of the care of Milagros so that Daniel ‘se repondría [. . .] del exceso de mimos que le había procurado la generosa pero inmoderada amiga de su mujer’ (p. 59). ‘Exceso de mimos’ and ‘inmoderada’ allude to the idea of feminine intemperance. Even Milagros echoes the view that women are given to excess. When Emilia is born she wishes on her ‘la locura [. . .] los anhelos, la impaciencia’ (p. 27). Women’s loss of control is often associated with madness in Mujeres de ojos grandes (pp. 137, 129–30). Thus, the husband of tía Fernanda sees her madness as confirmation of ‘la teoría que su padre y su abuelo, ardientes lectores de Schopenhauer, habían encontrado con él con toda la claridad, las causas y certidumbres filosóficas de la falta de cerebro en las mujeres’ (p. 37). Emilia (Mal de amores) breaks the metaphoric and physical silence imposed on women when she returns from her first exposure to the revolutionary activities of Daniel and Milagros and is described as having a ‘lengua desatada y el corazón en vilo. Habló y habló durante una hora, mezclando, en el desorden de su euforia, al carcelero con la trapecista y a su necesidad de una revolución’ (p. 156). Elsewhere, the emotional openness of women contrasts with male repression: Daniel’s teacher, Camilo Aberman, believes that true masculinity implies stoicism and emotional control: ‘era su placer y su orgullo enseñarlos a tramar razones y a gobernar su emoción, sin perder la bravura’ (p. 64). In Mal de amores, Emilia’s refusal to adhere to socially-imposed forms of behaviour and dress is embodied literally in the shedding of Sol’s clothes, but also her own clothes as is seen in the childhood episode in which Daniel and Emilia are playing in Cuenca’s garden. On this occasion, she is dressed up like marries, Emilia asks Milagros ironically: ‘¿Qué podemos hacer? ¿Rescatarla de la dicha? [. . .] ¿Cómo se convence al cielo de que no es azul sino transparente?’ (p. 180).


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a doll, constricted by ludicrous frills and petticoats and feels vulnerable under the mocking gaze of Daniel. Attempting to climb a tree, Emilia is hindered by her petticoats and decides to take them off. This immodest shedding of clothes represents Emilia’s rebellion against traditional female conformity. Emilia and Daniel sing and play happily and in many ways the garden is emblematic of the last remnants of their childhood innocence. But even here, their relationship is a kind of tug-of-war. Just as Emilia settles herself on the branches, Daniel jumps off, picks up her dress and says ‘ahí te quedas’ (p. 54). Emilia runs off behind him only to find that her petticoats are floating on the pond at the end of Cuenca’s garden. Nothing could be more amusing for Daniel’s older brother, Salvador, and his friend, who are having a smoke next to the pond than the sight of a screaming young child running up to Daniel in her underwear, pushing him into the water only to realize that she is the laughing stock of these young men (p. 55). Here she is made to feel embarrassed but the more mature Emilia will learn to defy the male gaze as she commits herself to the feminist cause. In Arráncame la vida, there are only few instances where dress acts as the standard-bearer of freedom against constricting social and moral values. Thus when Catalina or her married friends are having affairs, Catalina always remarks that she or they are dressed extravagantly in beautiful clothes. When Bibi is having an affair with a bullfighter Catalina remarks that her friend ‘entró corriendo, con zapatos bajos, pantalones y una blusa de cuadros, casi de hombre. Se veía linda, pero extrañísima’ (p. 203). When Andrés dies, Catalina dresses in black but remarks that she usually dresses in this way only to go to parties which implies that she is celebrating rather than mourning his death: ‘Andrés hubiera dicho que era yo una viuda de buen ver’ (p. 235). Another example of subtle subversion emerges following Carlos Vives’s death when Catalina becomes physically and emotionally distanced from Andrés. Andrés, more than ever, seeks to impose his power on both the private and public spheres. Lilia, one of Andrés’s daughters starts to rebel against her father by building a close relationship with Catalina and having an affair with a young man of whom Andrés does not approve. His death – in mysterious circumstances – is arranged by Andrés. Andrés forces the begrudging Lilia to marry another man, the son of an affluent client. Catalina recounts how she helped Lilia to get out of her restrictive wedding clothes following the wedding: ‘le desprendí el velo y el tocado. Cuando se sintió libre de los pasadores agitó la cabeza [. . .] respiró como si hubiera estado conteniendo el aire durante horas [. . .] Quise ayudarla a desabrocharse’ (p. 195). Catalina is aware of the limitations marriage puts on women’s freedom and feels for Lilia. She helps Lilia out of her wedding clothes – as Emilia had with Sol – suggesting an attempt by Catalina to ‘infect’ Lilia with her own transgressive behaviour, inculcating in her resistance to social norms and expectations. Here, unusually, Catalina forges a bond with another woman. But Catalina does not try to interfere in this arranged marriage because she knows that women must conform in order to be secure in society. Catalina sees Lilia as possessing a very similar character to herself: ‘me gustaba, era curiosa y metiche como yo’ (p. 189). This gives Catalina hope that her step-daughter will overcome the constraints of


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married life by exploiting the wealth of her husband and by having extramarital affairs – thus replicating Catalina’s own behaviour. For Catalina there is no reason why a comfortable marriage should interfere with the pursuit of sexual fulfilment outside its boundaries. Official ritual in Mexican society is criticized in Arráncame la vida. Women like Catalina appear to be charitable by giving away their jewellery for the nation’s fundraising efforts at the time of petrol nationalization. But all they are interested in is looking attractive in their finest clothes and posing in front of the cameras. Catalina, in spite of herself, ironizes the whole event: ‘para completar el espectáculo, yo a la mera hora me conmoví de verdad y dejé también las perlas que llevaba puestas’ (p. 56). Dress is also used as an instrument of criticism in the episode recounting Andrés’s campaign to become governor of Puebla. Catalina and her children wear indigenous clothes and attract a large crowd (pp. 47–8). Their extravagant attire points to a blatant political ploy by Andrés who gives a speech replete with the empty rhetoric of family unity and democracy. Carnivalesque excess is also associated with simulation, deception and staging often represented by the metaphor of the mask. Traditionally the mask is associated with the most ancient of rituals and spectacles and serves to conceal identity. There are no actual references to masks in any of Mastretta’s novels apart from one obvious one in Mujeres de ojos grandes: ‘la muy dichosa se quitaba y se ponía una máscara de esas que hacen en Venecia, una de muchos colores con la luna en la punta de la cabeza y la boca delirante’ (p. 51). Here the carnivalesque is immediately evoked by the extravagance of this particular mask. It stimulates the erotic fantasies of the male spectators and suggests the idea of the unleashing of primal forces free of cultural constraints. But in Mal de amores, there are other types of masks, which emerge in the context of the circus and theatrical spectacle. Masiello states that any nation seeking to impose strict social control must face the constant threat of subversion: ‘the free play of artifice and shifting identities proliferates without relief. In this respect, when alternative gendered identities emerge, erupting below the tightly woven fabric of patriotic discourse, they often supply an emancipatory potential, a proposal for democratic action’ (p. 221). Concern for institutional upheaval is paralleled by the fear of cross-dressing, disguise and sartorial extravagance (Masiello, p. 223). Disguise and crossdressing play an important role in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores. Non-standard forms of dress are an active means of political subversion against the state and gender-imposed identities. At the beginning of Mal de amores, Josefa – who still sympathizes with the porfiriato – ‘había crecido sabiendo que la ropa de los domingos debía ser elegante y que desde los niños hasta los viejos estaban obligados a pasear sus mejores disfraces en ese día’ (p. 50). Diego, Dr. Cuenca and the visitors who come to the Sunday tertulias all wish to wear their most tattered clothes in a conscientious anti-authoritarian gesture directed against Porfirio Díaz. Josefa chastizes Diego and tells him that he and the nation will get nowhere ‘en tus fachas’ (p. 50) and ‘por lo pronto que la niña se vista como es correcto’ (p. 50). This echoes many passages in Arráncame la vida


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where Catalina is also aware of what is socially correct, how she must behave and dress. But there is an underlying irony in both Catalina’s and Josefa’s interpretation of what is lo correcto. Masiello points out that in a society governed by social regulation and gender rules, the lawmakers also understand that fashion can create a fiction of its own, ‘catering to imposters and fakes’ (p. 224). The awareness that the seemingly normal is in fact a façade is evoked in Mastretta’s ironic reference to her characters’ mejores disfraces (p. 50). Simulation and disguise cause apprehensions about the profanation of the standardized identity of citizens and are used to explain the crisis of a nation (Masiello, p. 225). Masiello affirms that: ‘Patriotic rhetoric is built from the naming and localization of difference and from denouncing those imposters who menace the modern state’ (p. 225). Mal de amores is full of imposters embodied in the form of cross-dressers, anarchists and feminists. Diego and his Sunday anti-reelectionist friends opt to wear tattered clothes as an expression of their anarchist views and liberal ideas. Cross-dressing is found on numerous occasions. To prevent his true identity (as Madero’s right-hand man) from being discovered by the antimaderistas, Daniel must on various occasions assume new names and identities as a way of duping the Porfirian supporters or other opponents. He fights for political freedom but must transgress political and gender boundaries to do so, by means of disguise and deceit. When he is taken prisoner for distributing propaganda, he passes for an American and pretends not to understand a word of Spanish (p. 147). As a revolutionary, Daniel often has to dress as a priest (p. 358), peasant or wealthy playboy – ‘a veces de señorito encumbrado y a veces de campesino’ (p. 132) – as well as in a host of other disguises (p. 295) in order to hide his identity from his enemies and to be able to cross the borders into Puebla without risk. On one occasion he dresses up as a woman and Josefa is scandalized by the spectacle of her daughter kissing someone whom she takes to be another woman: –Están besándose –dijo la voz descompuesta de Josefa. –Lógico –dijo Diego. –¿Eso también será normal en el siglo XX? –preguntó Josefa. – Me voy a tener que morir, yo no tengo sitio en este siglo [. . .] Diego había devuelto el tarro de mariguana a su lugar y más muerto de celos que de preocupación por la moral sexual del siglo XX, se distrajo con la zozobra de Josefa. La llamó puritana, la abrazó, le secó las lágrimas y se la fue llevando al segundo piso en busca de un desayuno. (Mal de amores, pp. 132–3).

Here, the carnivalesque lies in cross-gender dressing and the comic aspect derives from Josefa’s mistaken interpretation – she does not realize that the person wearing the wig is in fact Daniel. Humour serves as a strategy to demystify sexual taboos, and to deflate puritanical outrage. The idea of deceit and simulation is evoked in other scenes in Mal de amores and is metaphorically linked to the spectacle of the circus. When Emilia turns


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fifteen, her family and friends gather at the home of the Sauris and join in an esperpentic performance: el poeta Rivadeneira, en su carácter de maestro de ceremonias, un compositor con su guitarra y tres mujeres vestidas de tehuanas que bailarían acompañando su nueva canción, una cantante de opera que andaba de trabajo en la ciudad y se dejó invitar a comer mole con ajonjolí a cambio de tres arias italianas, una pareja disfrazada para bailar el Dúo de los paraguas y una niña de ocho años que cantaba en náhuatal. (p. 86)

Their fancy dress signals both their mocking disregard of authority and their confident expectation of Revolutionary success. These anarchists who gather every Sunday are aware of the dangers of their meetings and on one occasion, when they are close to being apprehended by the authorities, they have to resort to their theatrical expertise. It is the governor’s birthday and his supporters decide to give him an album signed by everybody in recognition of his power. Dr Cuenca refuses to sign it but writes a message: ‘Una sola herencia quiero dejarles a mis hijos: parálisis en la espalda ante el tirano’ (p. 81). He is arrested for drunkenness and though freed a few days later he is regarded thereafter as a subversive by the authorities. People going to the Sunday tertulias are suspected of spying on the liberals who decide that pretence is their best mode of defence: ‘la primera y fundamental: el disimulo’ (p. 82). The Sunday visitors take this as a warning and literature replaces politics as the main topic of conversation (p. 82). But revolutionary fervour stirs beneath the façade of peaceful conformism: ‘entre semana, los tambores escondidos el Domingo llamaban a guerra de boca en boca y de carta en carta’ (p. 82). The metaphorical link between circus, spectacle and anarchism becomes a literal link as well. Milagros takes Emilia to see a circus – whose owner is to donate half of his earnings to Madero’s campaign (p. 121). Milagros tells Emilia that the function will help to free revolutionaries from prison (p. 144). Here the circus or the ‘low primitive’ serves to deceive the authorities. The fact that Emilia feels at ease among the general cavorting of the grotesque figures, the confetti and masks is significant: El bullicio de la carpa le pareció a Emilia el mejor sitio para estar y no estar que pudiera encontrarse. Había allí dentro tanta gente que al mirarla con ojos entrecerrados su ropa de colores parecía un puño de confetti contra la cara. Tenían un buen lugar, llegaron a tiempo para ver el desfile de los monos y los elefantes, los equilibristas. Emilia estaba tan feliz que pudo reírse hasta con los payasos a los que temía cuando era niña. (p. 144)

Emilia is living at a time when many people – including Daniel and Milagros – had to resort to deception in order to survive. Deception becomes almost second nature to Emilia. In fact both Catalina (Arráncame la vida) and Emilia are both exemplary actresses. Their experience teaches them that feigning emotion, deceit and simulation is often the key to freedom. In Arráncame la vida, Catalina


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learns to act according to the demands of her socially-imposed role, as do the rest of the female characters. Thus her acting skills are employed when a highranking general, with whom Andrés does business (p. 130), comes to dinner: ‘Lucina tráele un servicio al señor – dije adoptando actitud de ama de casa’ (p. 131). But her dissembling has its sting for she prepares the dish which her guest hates: ‘a propósito dispuse mole poblano porque lo odiaba’ (p. 130). Catalina also describes other women as being excellent actresses: ‘la señora Bryan estaba pálida pero fingía un “no pasa nada” digno de la mejor actriz’ (p. 108). Emilia’s skills as an actress may derive from her aunt and mentor Milagros who ‘con los años [. . .] se había especializado en montar escenarios y dirigir espéctaculos’ (p. 83). They were certainly honed by the Sunday tertulias in which she had to act in front of groups of people gathered in Cuenca’s home (pp. 85–7). She dislikes being at the centre of attention but is well able to conceal her uneasiness: Emilia no miró a quienes aplaudieron para recibirla como si estuviera en el centro de un teatro de ópera [. . . .] estaba acostumbrada a la calidez de aquel grupo, pero nunca supo escuchar sus aplausos sin algo de vergüenza. Apenas terminó hizo una caravana y corrió a ocultarse tras la tela negra que Milagros Veytia había considerado una perfecta bambalina [. . .] Emilia volvió al escenario y dio las gracias con unas caravanas largas y una sonrisa quieta. (p. 85)

In this episode, Emilia plays a central role. Dolled up for the first time – ‘llevaba una falda larga. Su madre le había hecho un traje de seda clara, idéntico al que ilustraba la penúltima portada de La Moda Elegante’ (p. 85) – Emilia is being primed for a male audience. This scene recalls an earlier one when Emilia, still a child, becomes the object of Daniel’s censorious gaze (p. 53). The boy is amused by Emilia who appears to be disguised as a doll (p. 51). Emilia becomes selfconscious as he gazes at her: ‘Emilia sintió sobre ella los ojos burlones de Daniel’ (p. 52). According to Masiello, gaze ‘exercises a particular violence on human beings and feelings, reducing persons to object status’ (p. 230). Mastretta concentrates on gender-specific features of Emilia as a woman, and on the materiality of the gendered spectacle (Masiello, p. 230). Emilia’s sensuous beauty is enhanced by her clothes and her aunt, Milagros, is quite happy to show her off: ‘Es tan perfecta que sugiere un equívoco – le dijo a Josefa cuando ella se la enseñó preocupada’ (p. 84). This reminds us of Josefa’s view of the child Emilia, clad in her pink frills, as ‘una obra maestra’ (p. 51). Emilia is a stunning spectacle for everyone but particularly for Daniel. In this sense, gaze plays a particularly powerful role in ‘determining identity and manipulates appearance and meaning’ (Masiello, p. 230), ultimately fragmenting its object’s sense of identity. According to Masiello the dominance of gaze can be seen as an allegory of the ‘vigilant eye of the state’ and thus the subjects/objects of the spectacle are ‘at the mercy of an apparatus of representation’ (p. 230). However, Mastretta finds a liberating response for her subjects/objects. Again the idea of simulation and deception emerges as an important element to


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defy authority in the form of staging or miming. Following the Argentine writer José Ingenieros, Masiello explains that the struggle of life in modern times is represented by an ‘activity producing behavioural mutations and leading to mimetic compulsions. The man of character, who was committed to action and strongly anchored in his beliefs, was now replaced in the fin de siglo, by the “hombre amorfo”, chameleon-like in appearance’.19 The liberals at the Cuencas’s Sunday ‘tertulia’ mask their opposition behind a façade of conformity. They are indeed chameleon-like in their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing circumstances and to make seamless transitions (like Catalina and Emilia) in a world dominated by appearances. Emilia balances compliance with social and, in particular, male expectations with the independence of spirit required to express her identity and selfhood – a strategy which Catalina (Arráncame la vida) also learns to deploy. Catalina dresses beautifully and acts subserviently and correctly but manages to be transgressive at the same time. Andrés himself senses the actress in his wife when he refers to her ‘labios de actriz’ (p. 128). This is quite an accurate description of Catalina who often mimics the language and behaviour that is seen as socially correct for women in the presence of men. Catalina is often ironic both about her own behaviour and that of others as, for instance, in her description of the way the wife of one politician subserviently accepts the traditional social role she must enact (p. 169), or in her ridiculing of Chofi and ‘las esposas de los ministros, que la rodeaban como pollitos a su gallina’ (p. 136). Elsewhere Catalina repudiates ‘correct’ behaviour by using vulgar language in the private sphere with her lover Carlos (p. 159) – a symbol of carnivalesque excess. Catalina and her friends speak with unreserved brashness about their married lives, and their affairs and mock their husbands whom they know to be corrupt assassins: ‘Nos reímos. Como buenas poblanas, mis amigas eran la purísima oposición verbal. Decían todo lo que yo quería oír y no tenía dónde’ (p. 109). As narrator, she also uses language which may be considered particularly unbecoming in a woman. The idea of linguistic mimicking is seen for instance when Catalina finds out that Andrés has involved her father in some shady business with Heiss. Anderson (‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation’, 1988: p. 20) comments how Catalina overcomes her ‘natural’ inferiority as a woman by manipulating her husband by means of subtle modulations in the tone of her voice (Arráncame la vida, p. 64) which feigns recognition of Andrés’s superiority. Here we see underlying contradictions in Catalina. She both conforms to, and undermines, lo correcto and is not afraid to deviate from conventional behaviour: ‘yo no me acuerdo qué hice aparte de llorar en público como nunca debió hacerlo la esposa del gobernador’ (p. 110). Even as a child Emilia defied convention. When Daniel gazes mockingly at her dress she returns his gaze and orders him not to stare at her – ‘No me mires así’ (p. 53). But Emilia realizes that direct confrontation is not the solution and 19 See Masiello (p. 223) and José Ingenieros, La lucha por la simulación en la vida, introduction by Aníbal Ponce (Buenos Aires: Ramón J Roggero, 1949).


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other rather more subtle strategies must be deployed in order to obtain her freedom, as Catalina also appreciates. As Emilia plays her cello for the people visiting the Cuencas, she might well appear to be at the centre of the spectacle embodying the traditional female figure – beautiful, passive and naive. But she knows how to use her beauty for her own purposes. Daniel embodies an ideology of change but at the same time he has very traditional views about women – particularly Emilia. He really does embody the conventional Mexican macho figure. He wants her to remain at home and to organize her life around his activities. At first he tries to stop her participating in revolutionary activities. Like Catalina, Emilia understands Daniel and knows that she can only get what she wants indirectly – in his presence her behaviour is often ‘staged’. While he is away, however, she wages her own ‘feminist war’ by practising as a doctor and conducting an affair with Zavalza. Daniel’s absence allows Emilia to develop into an independent woman. Emilia’s emotions, in relation to her lover, are often polarized – great rage or great happiness – emotions typically found in popular romance. Emilia’s relationship with Daniel is one of constant frustration owing to his prolonged absences on Revolutionary business. She is a hopeless romantic, and every time he returns from the Revolution he raises her hopes that he will remain by her side forever only to dash them again by his sudden departures. Emilia’s emotional changes may be normal in a young girl especially when it involves the first feelings of love and frustration toward an unreliable lover. Her melodramatic skills are kept perfectly honed by frequent practice. However, Emilia also learns quickly the rules of the game. As in Arráncame la vida, Mal de amores is a novel about the power relations between the sexes. Catalina and Emilia struggle in their different ways against patriarchal domination but both know that they are in a man-made world and that to survive they must conform to that world and behave accordingly (Mal de amores, p. 36). Emilia has learnt to hide her sentiments when it is to her advantage to do so. For instance, when Daniel returns from his revolutionary activities, he looks at her as he would a beautiful object: ‘Daniel veía a Emilia con la sorpresa de quien descubre que un juguete ha mutado en diosa’ (p. 88). Emilia satisfies his ego by responding to him in the way he wants her to. She is moved by his lithe physicality and ‘de puro sentirlo cerca, Emilia se dejó llorar dos lágrimas típicas de su condición Sauri que odió con toda su condición Veytia’ (p. 88). She is mimicking the image that he wants her to adopt, that of passive goddess. But this is only a strategy. Indeed, elsewhere when she finds out from Milagros that Daniel has been imprisoned, she keeps her tears back because she knows that her feminist aunt would never approve of such emotional exhibitionism: ‘Sabía que a Milagros no le gustaban los desmayos ni transigía con las mujeres que palidecen y se atontan’ (p. 145). Her thespian skills are of course of prime importance in the prison scene (pp. 144–53). She uses her feminine charm to bluff her way in and get Daniel out. When he leaves again, she determines to break free and decides to seduce Zavalza, employing for this purpose her native beauty and her theatrical skills: ‘Tres semanas después, sin haberle visto un pelo a Daniel,


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tomaron el tren de regreso a Puebla. Emilia iba vestida de nuevo hasta los calzones y llevaba puesta una sonrisa de lujo y altanería que sólo proporcionaba el desencanto, mezclado al trato con la Ciudad de los Palacios’ (p. 227). Elsewhere Emilia, like Catalina, is strong and often acts exactly like her male counterparts and at times she seems to overcome them by showing greater strength of character than either Daniel or Zavalza. Both Daniel and Andrés Ascencio, who represent in their different ways entrenched patriarchal attitudes, have paradoxically produced subversive women in spite of themselves provoking Catalina and Emilia into breaking the gender norms which their men wished to impose on them. These women are chameleon-like, they have not one but many identities and play different strategic roles. Zavalza knows one Emilia, the passive and stable wife and mother – though he is aware of another Emilia, the passionate and anarchic woman who relates only to Daniel. Emilia eventually becomes a matrioska, forever beyond the reach of both Daniel and Zavalza. Andrés is also aware of Catalina’s unknowable character, which is why he finally respects her as though she were a man (p. 223). Unrestrained sexuality is a further aspect of carnivalesque excess. I will only briefly allude to the theme of sexuality for it will be analysed extensively in Chapter Six. For Mastretta the removal of clothes signifies both liberation from sexual inhibitions and a gesture of political freedom. When Emilia and Daniel first go to distribute food and anti-Porfirista propaganda in a poor district of Puebla, they are followed by police and have to hide in a house. Daniel urges Emilia to take off her clothes. At first she reacts with embarrassment but she soon undresses down to her underwear. Taking off her clothes can be seen as a form of revolutionary activity and sexual liberation for Emilia: Quítate la ropa –le dijo Daniel, desabotonándose la camisa mientras murmuraba que si abrían y los encontraban vestidos, lo diera por muerto [. . .] Emilia perdió la duda bajo el pánico que le produjeron esas explicaciones. Se quitó todas las faldas y los fondos que podía usar una mujer en ese tiempo. Cuando aún le quedaban sobre el cuerpo el corpiño y los calzones de encaje, Daniel le pidió que se apurara [. . .] Emilia se desató la trenza que llevaba enredada en la cabeza y su melena de rizos oscuros le cubrió la espalda [. . .] Emilia sintió su cuerpo contra el de ella, húmedo y firme. Lo recorrió urgida de aprendérselo, temblando, pero libre de temores. (pp. 139–40)

In Mastretta’s fiction, the body often enjoys superior status to the mind or the spirit. Catalina says at one point ‘yo no era un buen ejemplo de amor extremo’ (p. 32). At the level of affection for others this is certainly true but the sexual desires of Catalina and (up to a point) of Emilia become all-consuming. In Mal de amores, the prodigious and procreative efforts of Diego and Josefa recall Catalina’s equally spirited though less wholesome instincts, satisfied in her case through adulterous relationships. In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, adultery is the norm rather than the exception which has the effect of diminishing its moral implications.


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Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores all break the normal narrative conventions associated with the novel of adultery. The family serves as a basic unit holding society together. Familiarity and habit can often result in boredom and boredom can lead to subversive behaviour.20 Catalina, like many married female characters in the novel, becomes bored with her life-style and falls into adultery. In Arráncame la vida, though not in Mal de amores, adultery destabilizes family unity. Both Catalina and Andrés are adulterous and undermine family unity in their pursuit of sexual gratification. According to Tanner, one ‘cannot transform transgression and profanation into a regular way of life, for then you return into the vicious downward spiral of devaluation through repetition, and the loss of difference engendered by habit’ (p. 376). Catalina is perturbed to rediscover in adultery all the familiar banalities of marriage. Catalina finds that her affair with Quijano soon becomes passionless as it falls into routine and assumes the dullness of a stale marriage: Los dos llegábamos exactamente en el mismo tiempo al mismo cuarto lleno de sol y plantas. Quijano era un solemne. Intentaba describir lo que dio en llamar ‘lo nuestro’ y hacía unos discursos con los que parecía ensayar el guión de su próxima película. Hablaba de mi frescura, de mi espontaneidad, de mi gracia. Oyéndolo me iba quedando dormida. (p. 212)

In both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, sexual desires extend beyond normal boundaries. Emilia’s excessive love is seen in the way she can love two men at the same time. When Emilia claims that she is a bigamist, Milagros congratulates her but Josefa disapproves of such extravagant real-life romance whch seems to outdo fiction: ‘No he visto tanta fortuna ni en las novelas. Un hombre como Rivadeneira no aparece jamás. Pero dos, destinados a una misma familia, si lo ponemos por escrito no lo cree nadie’ (p. 370). On the whole the Sauri family are tolerant of Emilia’s adulterous behaviour, which may be interpreted as Mastretta’s defiance of the novel of adultery tradition in which women are normally punished for their adultery. In Mujeres de ojos grandes, Mastretta defies this tradition by failing to punish the sexual indiscretions of women such as tía Leonor (pp. 7–12). The unexpected dénoument of the story of la tía Marina (pp. 131–5) also mocks the tradition of the novel of adultery. Burdened by guilt, Marina decides to tell her husband about her infidelity but then discovers him with another woman: ‘por primera vez en mucho tiempo (Marina) sintió alivio, cambió la pena por sorpresa y después la sorpresa por la paz’ (p. 135). According to Overton (1996), the novel of female adultery normally deals with a single case of adultery by the female character,21 but Mastretta seems to be mocking this tradition in Arráncame la vida by allowing Catalina to have, not 20

See Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 369. 21 See Bill Overton, The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900 (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), p. 4.


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one, but three lovers (and an aborted fourth affair with the homosexual Fernando). In the society in which Catalina lives, both women and men are adulterous, behaviour which may be reviled in public but which is condoned if conducted with discretion. Adultery can undermine the fabric of society but its negative effect can be contained as long as it is kept secret. Women must be more cautious than men when having affairs and Catalina and some of the other adulterous wives hire hotel rooms to have sex with their lovers away from the prying eyes of society. But everybody knows that Andrés is a womanizer and has left many women pregnant: ‘Andrés Ascensio tenía muchas mujeres, una en Zacatlán y otra en Cholula, una en el barrio de La Luz y otras en México’ (p. 8). While such behaviour is tolerated in men it is usually punished in women. Interestingly Catalina escapes punishment while her partner in adultery, Carlos, is killed by Andrés for his indiscretions. The blatant character of Catalina’s adulterous behaviour emerges when she starts having an affair with Quijano who moves into a house with two entrances and two gardens so that Catalina can come in and out to make love with him as she pleases. Furthermore the traditional closure achieved in the novel of adultery through the heroine’s death is replaced here by an open-ended conclusion. Abandonment of sexual self-control encroaches upon the integrity of gender distinctions. Some of the men in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores have female characteristics, while conversely the women resemble men. Josefa’s suspicion of lesbianism when she mistakes the heavily disguised Daniel for a woman as he kisses Emilia can be linked with Catalina’s desire to make love with a man who turns out to be a homosexual. In both cases the carnivalesque blurring of gender is strongly suggested. For Bakhtin, ‘eccentricity is a special category of the carnival sense of the world [. . .] it permits – in concretely sensuous form – the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves’.22 The outbursts in which both Emilia and Daniel indulge are also eccentrically outrageous. Ignoring Milagros’s objections (p. 163), Emilia continues kissing Daniel passionately in front of the historical figure of Aquiles Serdán. Here the reader cannot help noticing how carnivalesque humour is used to subvert authority. Serdán’s heroic aura is somewhat diminished by the counter-attraction of the ‘pasión sin recatos’ (p. 162) shared by Daniel and Emilia. Unrestrained sexuality is evoked in metaphors of upheaval seen for instance when Daniel moves into the Sauri’s home where he will make love to Emilia. The couple’s uninhibited and unruly behaviour is mirrored in the ‘unruliness’ of the style, marked by breathless enumeration: Sin más trámite, Daniel quedó instalado en la casa de los Sauri y durante los siguientes días lo puso todo de cabeza [. . .] Josefa dejó de leer y se puso a probar recetas de cocina con un fervor de recién casada, Floberto el perico enloqueció tratando de habituarse al silencio de las mañanas y el ruidero de las noches, 22 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 123.


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Casiopea, la gata con que Josefa acompañaba sus lecturas, fue corrida de la estancia en que Daniel y Emilia retozaban hasta mucho después del desayuno, y Futuro, el perro negro con el que Emilia salía a caminar todas las tardes, tuvo que soportar el abandono y el encierro en que lo dejó su dueña. (pp. 161–2)

Their passion is often described in terms of carnivals and fairs. As Daniel observes Emilia’s beautiful eyes he describes them as ‘ojos de feria’ (p. 87). Near the end of the novel, when the war is over, they meet for the last time in New York and they make love passionately (p. 386). They discover the city as if it were a fun fair: Las semanas siguientes recorrieron la ciudad como una feria, como si fuera un tiovivo [. . .] y una rueda de la fortuna [. . .]. Entraban a los teatros como a cajas de sorpresa, miraban como una oferta las embarcaciones que llegaban de otros mundos, comían extravagancias hasta que les salía por las orejas. (p. 387)

Carnivalesque excess in matters of love is evoked at the time when Emilia makes love to Daniel for days on end and drinks an afrodisiac herbal tea which seemingly soothes the soul: ‘el brebaje de amores que su hija había bebido esos días le puso en los ojos un matiz de aplomo que no tenían la semana anterior’ (Mal de amores, p. 161). Josefa, representing domestic authority and order, is so outraged by the intensity of the relationship between Daniel and Emilia, that she seeks to restrain their excesses. Worried that Emilia will get pregnant Josefa decides to take measures to prevent it: ‘voy a preparar un agua de canela y sea por Dios’ (p. 161). Ironically, Diego and Josefa had also drunk herbal teas precisely to enhance their procreative powers. In Arráncame la vida, eccentric if not abnormal sexuality is suggested by relationships between couples of differing ages. Andrés is married to Catalina, fifteen years his junior. He also has affairs with younger girls: ‘engañaba a las jovencitas’ (p. 8). Bibi has an affair with a Colombian bullfighter who is seven years younger than herself: ‘tiene un cuerpo divino. Parece adolescente’ (p. 203). Their all-consuming desire to have sex turn the women of Arráncame la vida into sexual predators. When Catalina is pregnant she has sex with a young milkman and derives a kind of masculine pleasure in relieving him of his virginity: ‘yo me encargué de quitarle la virginidad que todavía no dejaba en ningún burdel’ (p. 32). Bored with their unattractive husbands and their high-ranking jobs (generals, governors, politicians, lawyers) women seek men with more colourful careers and interests – bullfighters, musicians, homosexuals, film directors and ‘el partero más famoso de Puebla’ (p. 86), which could perhaps be seen as a perverse form of sexual fantasy. They seek to have romantic affairs and experience the adventures which the routines of married life deny them. Some relationships suggest incest. Catalina once refers to her son Checo as taking her hand as if he were her novio (p. 237). Her father also refers to her as being his novia. Andrés is initially, at least, as much of a father figure to her as he is a husband. This incestuous dependence suggests Catalina’s inability to break free


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from the grip of patriarchy. Marcela and Octavio have an incestuous affair, which Catalina encourages by allowing them to sleep in the same room together, and persuades Andrés not to marry them off. Andrés also seems to condone their relationship: ‘¿Tú también crees que hacen buena pareja? – y soltó la carcajada’ (p. 94). Incest can be seen as a consequence of inward-looking, primitive Mexican society. A fundamental aspect of carnival is laughter – aimed at officialdom or authority – as exemplified in Mal de amores, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Arráncame la vida. Parody, in Bakhtin’s terms, is intrinsically linked to a carnival sense of the world. (Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics, p. 127). In Arráncame la vida, there is open disregard for official ritual: a hostile public jeers the politicians – including Andrés accompanied by Catalina – who are standing on a balcony during the processions of the Día del Trabajador (p. 94). Catalina herself mocks the solemnity of these corrupt officials as they are jeered: ‘Creí que Rodolfo iba a empezar a hacer pucheros, pero en vez de eso agudizó la solemnidad de sus aburridas facciones y permaneció firme, sin perder la media risa’ (p. 95). Ironically, her own unimpeachable though ‘staged’ correctness draws gushing praise from Fito: ‘Dada la ecuanimidad de Rodolfo pensé que lo correcto sería también sonreír y no moverme [. . .] Fito le preguntó a Cordera si no creía que mi actitud era comparable a la de una reina sabia’ (p. 95). Another example of anti-authoritarian humour emerges when a friend of Catalina, Bibi, has an affair with a Colombian bullfighter. Bibi is married to the corrupt and physically grotesque general Gómez Soto who conducts business while seated on the toilet – ‘imagínate que trata sus negocios en el excusado, mete a la gente al bañito del tren y ahí le hace contar sus asuntos’ (p. 203). Bibi tries to find an excuse to divorce her husband who is nicknamed Odilón. One day a friend of hers, Raquel, tells her that he would be going to a brothel with some other highly respectable men for a stag night – but not to have sex with the prostitutes. Rather they would measure their penises and compete with one another as a way of satisfying their male ego (p. 204). With the help of the owner of the brothel Bibi dresses up as a ‘puta enferma [. . .] porque [. . .] les gusta que haya atractivos caros’ (p. 206). Bibi explains how the brothel owner: ‘inventó que tenía yo todo el cuerpo quemado y me vendó hasta la cara y desde las piernas, me sentó a media casa hecha una momia’ (p. 206). Catalina is extremely amused: Eran demasiados pitos. Da emoción uno, pero no una bola de encuerados. Estaban ridículos. Se tentoneaban. Se paraban cadera con cadera y a ver a quién le llegaba más lejos la cosa [. . .] ponen ahí a las mujeres para que no se vaya a pensar que son mariconadas lo que están haciendo. (p. 207)

Bibi plans to use her knowledge of her husband’s secret activities to extort money from him and to divorce him. She asks Catalina to write a letter to him revealing her knowledge of his infidelity but when her romance with the bullfighter comes to an abrupt end she realizes that she must remain with Soto – ‘además, si ella quería divorciarse, él no quería, y el apoderado era su esposo’ (p. 208). Bibi will never know if her husband received the letter, but he becomes more solicitous and


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romantic towards Bibi who reverts to her role of subservient wife with ‘la sonrisa de esposa mezclada con ángel que tanto le había servido en la vida’ (p. 210). Many of the characters in Mal de amores have rather bizarre occupations and are often parodically depicted as larger than life, given to extreme emotions and passions, experiencing both pleasure and pain, hope and disillusion, often personifying extreme virtues, or extreme vices. Daniel’s powers of survival relate to the fact that, like a cat, he has seven lives (p. 299). In this sense, Mal de amores revels in self-parody through ruthless exaggeration. The humorous description of Ignacio Cardenal, the absurd Spanish encyclopedia seller who can also repair refrigerators, recalls the comic style of García Márquez: El hombre abrió un maletín pequeño en comparación con sus baúles, pero grande en comparación con su figura que parecía hecha para no cargar nada jamás, y sacó un desarmador, unas pinzas, una llave inglesa, unos cables eléctricos. Después abrió dos de los baúles que llevaba parados sobre las ruedas y exhibió dentro cuatro libreros perfectos. El tiempo empezó a correr sobre la curiosidad general y la parsimonia con que el hombre se hundía en los libros y hurgaba como un médico en las tripas del refrigerador, que no servía desde mil novecientos trece, año en que hasta el último experto en aparatos eléctricos salió del país rumbo a Cuba. Una hora y varias consultas después, el refrigerador empezó a zumbar como un avispero y todos los que lo conocieron en salud coincidieron en que había recuperado su voz de siempre. (p. 347)

Elsewhere, Mastretta parodies the institution of the Church and the folletín, often associated with the marriage-plot, and mocked by Milagros’s ironic remarks about marriage (pp. 332–3). The institution of marriage is undermined on the occasion when Daniel and Emilia participate in a mock marriage ceremony. This ‘wedding’ takes place in a derelict graveyard full of drunken tramps with an eccentric fortune-teller, Don Refugio – ‘un hombre viejo como la vejez misma’ (p. 332) – officiating. Refugio’s peculiar way of marrying Daniel and Emilia constitutes a sacrilegious inversion of holy matrimony: Señaló un fresno a medio metro de la banca. Luego, sin más autoridad que su gesto de viejo erudito en asuntos de sobrevivencia y sin más trámite que el de preguntarles sus nombres, don Refugio, como dijo llamarse, los declaró marido y mujer. Cortó luego tres hojas del fresno que cubría sus cabezas. Mordió la punta de las tres y se las pasó a ellos para que cada quien buscara un sitio donde morderlas [. . .] –este árbol se alimenta con la luz de los muertos. Así que no necesitamos más testigos –dijo el viejo. Luego les preguntó si a cambio de la ceremonia estaban dispuestos a llevarlo a comer. (pp. 333–4)

The Grotesque In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, the grotesque intrudes into both the private and public spheres – often with rejuvenating effect. But the downside of carnival – the fantastically hideous and threatening – penetrates the fabric of politics especially when it is associated with the barbarism of Revolutionary and


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post-Revolutionary Mexico and the pointlessness of upheaval and death. The carnival sense of the world signifies the diminution of reason and the frivolization of politics and history. Mastretta’s negative portrayal of motherhood, often focusing on the grotesque physicality of childbirth, is found in several other Mexican female writers including Rosario Castellanos and Nellie Campobello. This treatment of motherhood can be seen as an attack on the patriarchal myth which perpetuates the notion that childbirth is a beautiful and painless experience. Mal de amores celebrates motherhood but it also provides a realistic portrayal of childbirth which is painful and often leads to death. In Arráncame la vida, motherhood and pregnancy are portrayed as monstrous.23 Catalina’s absent mother is a negative role model and Catalina reproduces her behaviour since she abandons her own children in her search for personal freedom. Catalina is also cruel, manipulative and uncaring. For Catalina, pregnancy is a nightmarish experience: ‘La había cargado nueve meses como una pesadilla. Le había visto crecer a mi cuerpo una joroba por delante y no lograba ser una madre enternecida. La primera desgracia fue dejar los caballos y los vestidos entallados, la segunda soportar unas agruras que me llegaban hasta la nariz’ (p. 31). Catalina hates being pregnant for it is uncomfortable and she is worried about the pain it will cause (p. 32). Catalina and her friends know that pregnancy is not as wonderful as some may wish to think – ‘yo no sé quién inventó que las mujeres somos felices y bellas embarazadas’ (p. 102) – while the experience of childbirth is reduced to animal level by Andrés – ‘creciste viendo animales cargarse y parir sin tanta faramalla [. . .] No pienses en eso y verás que se te olvidan las molestias’ (p. 31). Catalina’s own perception of pregnant women such as Chofi is equally demeaning: ‘se le puso una panza del tamaño de las nalgas, y unas chichis como de elefanta. Pobrecita, pero daba pena. Se iba a convertir en presidenta y ni así dejaba de comérselo todo’ (p. 103). Catalina does not like being pregnant and longs for the lithe gracefulness of her old body. Pregnancy brings only stretch marks and diminished sex appeal: ‘Todo el embarazo fue un fraude. Andrés no volvió

23 Nuala Finnegan explores the issue of monstrous motherhood and pregnancy in Castellanos’s Oficio de tinieblas, Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida and Brianda Domecq’s La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora. Lisa Davies also shows how Rosario Castellanos deconstructs the selflessness of motherhood in Oficio de tinieblas. Davies identifies in the two main characters, Marcela and Catalina, two monstrous and cruel mothers and thus deconstructs the virgin-mother figure (p. 6). Finnegan also portrays these two women in a similar light. See Lisa Davies, ‘Monstrous Mothers and the Cult of the Virgin in Rosario Castellanos’s Oficio de tinieblas’, New Readings, vol. 6:1–12 (2000). See www.cf.ac.uk/ euros/newreadings/volume6, (Last accessed: 5 Nov. 2001). Also See Nuala Finnegan, ‘Reproducing the Monstrous Nation: A Note on Pregnancy and Motherhood in the Fiction of Rosario Castellanos, Brianda Domecq, and Ángeles Mastretta’, MLR, 96:4 (2001), 1006–15 and Monstrous Projections of Femininity in the Fiction of Mexican Writer Rosario Castellanos, Hispanic Literature, 54 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2000).


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a tocarme dizque para no lastimar al niño y eso me puso más nerviosa, no podía pensar con orden, me distraía’ (p. 32). In Arráncame la vida, pregnancy goes beyond Catalina’s superficial concerns for her loss of sexual appeal. Monstrous motherhood carnivalizes love. Catalina’s allconsuming sexual drive is disconnected entirely from childbirth and motherhood, as it is linked to her negative role as unfaithful wife and bad mother (Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (1979), p. 12). Mastretta’s monstrous representation of motherhood through Catalina reinforces to an extent the patriarchal image of the bad mother, as does Castellanos in Oficio de tinieblas. In this respect, Catalina may be seen as a Malinche figure whose sexual drive suppresses her maternal instincts. She abandons the children and plays with them only to fill her time: ‘durante años no había jugado con mis hijos [. . .] estuve segura que no podía tener mejor compañía que sus juegos [. . .] mientras Carlos visitaba otra vez a Medina [. . .] me dieron las dos de la tarde carcajeándome y peleando como chiquita’ (p. 166). Her extreme selfishness and irresponsibility towards her children is seen when we are told that she gives premature birth to one of her children because she had chosen to go horse-riding (p. 103). Catalina is fully aware of her maternal deficiencies: mi amor por los hijos de Andrés era un invento, que cómo podría decirse que los quería si ni siquiera me daba orgullo ser madre de los que parí. No me disculpé, ni alegué a mi favour ni me importó parecerles una bruja. Había detestado alguna vez ser madre de mis hijos y de los ajenos, y estaba en mi derecho a decirlo. (p. 214)

This outlandish disregard for her children could be seen as having a deeper meaning interrelated with social criticism. When Catalina becomes pregnant with Verania she describes her pregnancy as if her child is an alien fish-like monster wriggling in her stomach: ‘Odiaba quejarme, pero odiaba la sensación de estar continuamente poseída por algo extraño. Cuando empezó a moverse como un pescado nadando en el fondo de mi vientre creí que se saldría hasta matarme. Andrés era culpable de que pasaran todas esas cosas y ni siquiera soportaba hablar de ellas’ (p. 31). Catalina’s second pregnancy is equally unpleasant and she is relieved when her second child, Checo, is finally born: ‘sentí que me deshacía de la piedra que cargaba en la barriga, juré que ésa sería la última vez’ (p. 44). Bibi and Catalina are both horrified at the prospect of giving birth to monstrous children who may reproduce the physical and character traits of their husbands: –[. . .] estoy muy espantada, donde a la pobre criatura le salga la nariz de este hombre. –Deja la nariz, las mañas. No sé cómo nos hemos atrevido a reproducirlos. –No tienen por qué salir iguales –dijo la Bibi, acariciando su barriga. –Ya ves que Beethoven era hijo de un alcohólico y una loca. –[. . .] da esperanzas ¿no?. (p. 101)


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Elsewhere when Catalina meets Bibi she talks of her children as being barbarians: ‘nos preguntábamos por nuestros hijos, ella lamentaba la fragilidad del suyo, yo la barbarie de los míos’ (p. 97). Finnegan explores the way in which Castellanos, Domecq and Mastretta revise maternal myths prevalent in Mexico through their portrayal of the ‘deformed’ body of the pregnant woman. The representation of pregnancy as something vile, where women’s bodies and identities are invaded by the monster foetus, permits Finnegan to relate these narratives of disgust to Kristeva’s notion of the ‘abject’ (Finnegan, ‘Reproducing the Monstrous Nation’, p. 1008). These monstrous depictions work on two different levels. On the one hand, Finnegan sees this depiction of women’s pregnant bodies as an indictment of the patriarchal structures that restrict their lives, and their estranged offspring as patriarchal impositions (Finnegan, p. 1006). The reproductive capabilities of women are harnessed to perpetuate the existing power – of the landowning elite of Mexican rural society in the case of Mastretta and Castellanos: The monster that is Mexico is signified figuratively by the monsters about to emerge from these grotesquely deformed female bodies [. . .] The metaphor works to illustrate the perpetuation of politically corrupt systems of power and the contribution of women to this process. This raises the crucial question of the complicity of women in the maintenance of the systems of power that oppress them. (Finnegan, 2001: p. 1006)

Catalina feels that she has produced monstrous offspring representative of the monstrous nation plagued by corruption, death and nepotism. Catalina herself thinks that her own child may one day kill her (p. 31) and blames Andrés, the representative of this corrupt society. This may explain her rejection of her children. She cannot feel love for them for they are the progeny of a murderer. In fact she herself struggles to contain her almost murderous resentment towards her children, perhaps symptomatic of her subconscious desire to break out of her patriarchal chains. When she is in charge of the orphanage, she feels that the squalor of the orphans’ lives is such that they would be better off dead than alive. On one occasion Verania almost chokes to death with a sweet stuck in her throat and Catalina takes her to the doctor not so much for the child’s sake as out of fear of being blamed by Andrés, ‘Creí que se iba a morir y me horrorizó la idea de oír al general gritándome asesina descuidada’ (p. 97). Finally when Virginia, one of Andrés’s daughters disappears, Catalina is very matter-of-fact about her death: ‘dimos parte a la policía, la buscamos muchos días, nunca supimos qué fue de ella. Al volver su padre aceptó la desaparición como una muerte inevitable’ (p. 45).24

24 Josefina Ludmer examines the relationship between violence, death and women in twentieth-century Argentine literature and in passing to Catalina’s poisoning of her husband, Andrés, himself responsible for many deaths including that of his wife’s lover. Catalina ‘usa [. . .] el veneno de la exaltación y la muerte, y le da un té euforizante que mata a la larga. Pero no actúa sola; ese té se lo dio una campesina cuyo marido había asesinado por el marido de


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It is significant that Catalina not only feels distaste at reproducing male children but feels the same way about her female children too. Underlying this disdain is the fear that social corruption and hypocrisy will be perpetuated through both males and females. Her subconscious desire to stop this process colours her attitude towards her children and points to her own moral failings and maternal deficiencies. We may condemn Catalina for her grotesque behaviour but she is reflecting, to a large extent, the views of Mastretta who, like Castellanos, attacks the patriarchal institution of motherhood and its associated myths that force motherhood on women, leaving them without the freedom to choose an alternative (Lisa Davies, p. 10). As with Castellanos (Davies, p. 11), Mastretta undermines the selfless image of the Mexican mother and challenges the patriarchal view of women as ‘natural carers’. Furthermore, Catalina embodies the Virgin/Malinche figure through her own peculiar progress from innocence to experience. In some ways, the Catalina of Arráncame la vida perpetuates her own oppression. Catalina knows that in order to have wealth she must comply to patriarchy’s demands, that is, to fulfil subservient roles expected of her as wife, cook, childbearer and mother. But Catalina fulfils these roles only half-heartedly and to the detriment of her children, for she associates the role of mother with the suppression of her freedom. Like Castellanos, Mastretta indicates in Arráncame la vida, that motherhood should be ‘one among many other options rather than the only option’ (Davies, p. 11). Some regard Rosario Castellanos’s feminism as negative since it offers no real alternatives for women and often leads to madness (Davies, p. 11).25 Mastretta’s treatment of her female characters is very different. Her open-ended texts suggest the positive possibilities for women. I have argued throughout this work that Catalina colludes with the system that she struggles against. But I would argue that Finnegan’s bleak final words on Castellanos’s writing – which sees as a failed attempt to create new spaces for women and Catalina: éxtasis y muerte al doble asesino de campesinos y artistas. Por supuesto, el veneno es una droga desconocida: nadie sospecha y no hay justicia estatal.’ Ludmer identifies an emerging pattern in Latin American literature whereby female characters commit a crime yet escape State punishment. Such a violation of the rules is alien to many traditional plots where deviant women normally end paying for their sins. See Josefina Ludmer, ‘Mujeres que matan’, Revista Iberoamericana, 62:176–7 (Jul. Dec. 1996), 781–97. 25 Finnegan examines the way Rosario Castellanos’s texts describe the experience of femininity through metaphors of disease, dirt, disfigurement and pain and depict the female body as ‘a place of entrapment, sickness, refuge and death, the central axiom of all female experience. It is for most of her characters an insurmountable barrier that actively and painfully frustrates all their attempts at self-liberation’ (Finnegan, ‘Monstrous Projections’, p. 2). According to Finnegan the female monsters that inhabit Castellanos’s fictive worlds – as well as those of Domecq and Mastretta – reveal the problems of women writers seeking to find new spaces for the female characters in their work (Finnegan, p. 143). While Castellanos, Domecq and Mastretta seek to revise maternal myths they also endorse Paz’s version of Mexican identity and women’s role in its construction. The effect of their work is the ‘consolidation of state power on the one hand and problematic personal fulfilment of the female characters on the other’ (Finnegan, ‘Reproducing the Monstrous Nation’, p. 1015).


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their experiences within the official discourses – cannot be applied unreservedly to Mastretta’s writing. Unlike Castellanos, Mastretta celebrates the female body and sexuality. Her female characters are not diseased or deformed and are rarely associated with the abject. Her texts usually conclude on an open and upbeat note – unlike those of Castellanos. Catalina of Arráncame la vida may be a negative role model, but her future is open and potentially positive. In Mal de amores, Mastretta looks beyond the traditional limits of women’s activity to explore alternative spaces such as women’s direct contribution to the Revolution and communal solidarity. The grotesque also permeates Mal de amores. The Revolution originates in hope and idealism but degenerates into a parody of its founding values. Amid the barbarism of the revolutionary years, the spirit of carnival endures. In Arráncame la vida, the comic spirit of carnival emerges at the end of the novel with the explicit reference to Andrés’s physical shrinking: se había ido poniendo viejo. Durante las últimas semanas lo vi adelgazar y encogerse de a poco, pero esa tarde envejecía en minutos. De pronto el saco resultó enorme para él. Tenía los hombros enjutos y la cara inclinada, la barba se le perdía entre el cuello duro de la casaca militar y los galones parecían más tiesos que nunca. (p. 225)

Andrés’s carnivalesque metamorphosis into a shrivelled image of his former self suggests the triumph of the low other over the high figure of authority he once was. His military uniform, now too big for him, is a poignant metaphor of his loss of political power.26 The more comic, positive and subversive (revolutionary) spirit of carnival in Mal de amores has now given way to the grotesque world of war, famine and death induced primarily by men and their greed. There is a kind of carnivalesque dethronement of the original and positive sense of Carnival associated with the subversion of state patriarchal authority (Porfiriato) and logic in search of a new order. For Emilia the Revolution has become a spectacle (p. 372) – which has disastrous human consequences: Antes de las ocho ya estaba Emilia enfrentada a una clientela heterogénea y explosiva cuyas enfermedades iban del simple dolor de estómago a las heridas más horrendas que sus ojos hubieran visto: brazos a medio arrancar, manos sin dedos, troncos con las piernas pudriéndose, cabezas desorejadas, tripas de fuera. En cualquier otra circunstancia el espectáculo que fue llamada a resolver la hubiera hecho llorar de impotencia. (p. 306)

The Revolution has become part of everyday life. The horrifying experience of violence is expressed in the physical landscape. The landscape of Emilia’s

26

Andrés’s shrinking recalls that of Esteban Trueba in La casa de los espíritus. Both are violent and reactionary characters. See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, p. 85.


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childhood games with Daniel was innocent, fresh, exuberant and full of promise: ‘Todo era verde o agua a su alrededor [. . .] justo en la playa del muelle, frente al primer mar de sus ojos, Emilia conoció el calor trópico y el café en que sus padres se enamoraron de golpe y sin regreso’ (p. 65). The poetic and yet tranquil air of this landscape contrasts with the landscape of Revolution which is heavy and arid. Izúcar is described as ‘un pueblo caliente y arisco’ (p. 255). The landscape of war is ominous and threatening as Emilia observes: ‘Al fondo, dibujados en la oscuridad, estaban los volcanes, vigilando el desastre que corría por esa tierra’ (p. 324). Everybody has come to accept the tragic aspect of the Revolution as part of everyday reality. Both Emilia and Daniel are horrified by the dantesque scenery caused by the ravages of war: ‘la experiencia del horror vuelto costumbre no se olvida jamás’ (p. 317). For Emilia reality has assumed a nightmarish character: ‘Y tanto horror vieron sus ojos esos días que mucho tiempo después temía cerrarlos y encontrarse de nuevo con la guerra y sus designios’ (p. 317). She wants to avert her gaze from the disfigured faces around her: ‘se abrazaba a Daniel para exorcizar el desfiguro de esas caras’ (p. 317). Despite their awareness of this horror, it seems that everybody has become immune and indifferent to it. Death and famine have become so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that it forms part of the natural landscape where the lifeless forms of the hanged men replace the living fruit growing in the trees: ‘los árboles inmutables uno tras otro, cada cual con su muerto como la única fruta en el paisaje’ (p. 317). Elsewhere the tragic sense of death has been lost in the war. The sense of numbness that the horrors of war have provoked, brings out the most primitive behaviour in humans. War arouses perverse instincts – such as those of the childminder looking for a dead body with which to entertain her master’s child: ‘una niñera atravesó cerca de ellos en busca de algún muerto con el que entretener al hijo de sus patrones’ (p. 326). Individualism has been lost amidst horrific mob behaviour (p. 317). Elsewhere, the lowering of moral standards is seen when Emilia finds three young teenagers being sexually abused surrounded by a circle of men in Izúcar (p. 256). The Revolutionaries drown their sorrows in alcohol and promiscuity: ‘a esas horas los revolucionarios andaban más sueltos que en el día y más borrachos que en la mañana’ (p. 326). The sweet fragrances of Emilia’s childhood have now given way to the stench of infirm and rotting flesh: ‘los niños viejos y las mujeres sorprendidas tras casas incendiadas de las que salía un olor que entraba hasta los huesos y poblaba la imaginación de infamias’ (pp. 317–18). Scatology, another carnivalesque feature associated with low bodily functions, indicates the loss of social decorum in times of war, as we see in the cramped train in which Emilia and Daniel are travelling (p. 318). The Revolution has been perverted. Indifference appears to be a façade behind which people hide their real feelings, a survival mechanism in the face of death and horror. In this sense the idea of their carnivalized feelings becomes a direct metaphor of the circus, a spectacle of masks. During the Revolution, Emilia and Daniel go to watch theatres and circuses: ‘a la zarzuela cuyas penas menores


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ayudaban a la gente a llorar sin vergüenza sus penas mayores, y también al circo, que Emilia no lograba separar del opresivo atardecer adolescente en que supo que Daniel estaba en la cárcel’ (p. 352). The circus becomes a mirror image of the Revolution – ‘todo lo celebraron ellos como si no lo hubieran visto nunca, como si la faramalla del circo fuera la perfecta gemela del desvarío en que vivían’ (p. 352) – and envelops both Emilia and Daniel and the whole town in its timeless aura: No sólo ellos vivían en vilo, la ciudad toda parecía suspendida entre un columpio y otro. Los combates en las afueras se oían como si estuvieran dentro. En las noches sus habitantes buscaban farra como si fueran soldados con licencia. Cada día era el último, cada día algo se iba perdiendo y algo llegaba a marcar las costumbres y el sol de otra manera. (p. 352)

The idea that people hide from reality emerges too in the arid timelessness of futile expectation: ‘todo estaba como suspendido, esperando a que algo que dependía de otros se resolviera en algún momento’ (p. 349). Revolutionary ideals have been forgotten: ‘Las leyes eran algo que de momento estaba guardado en un cajón, esperando a ser necesario en un futuro más bien remoto’ (p. 305). Abrupt changes of identity complement shifting alliances: no one knows from one moment to the next which political party they are supporting (p. 229). Sexual promiscuity reflects the fickleness of these changing alliances. The failing Revolution inevitably generates disillusionment. Daniel has become so sickened by the upheaval that he seeks to drown his sorrows in alcohol. His beloved revolution has metamorphosed into a grotesque monster which has infected its supporters with corruption and death: Todos estamos borrachos. De poder. De sangre. De altruismo trasnochado. De alcohol en el mejor de los casos. Pero todos andamos borrachos todo el tiempo. Tú por ejemplo: ¿qué tienes que andar buscando la muerte entre los moribundos? ¿Qué buscas metiéndoles la mano en la boca a los enfermos de peste? (p. 351)

Mastretta’s portrayal of myth and carnival and her use of magical realist techniques – which have attracted little interest to date – reflect the richness and versatility of her writing. Mastretta’s narrative may sometimes give the reader the impression that her main concern is with frivolous stylistic play, but it is arguably her treatment of the themes of love and death which constitutes the most memorable and enduring aspect of her work. In Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, these themes are treated with equal seriousness but with different outcomes. In Arráncame la vida, the writer ironizes a corrupt and repressive society where human beings are driven by their sexual instincts to escape their oppressive lifestyles and where violent death is an intrinsic part of their lives. In Mal de amores, Mastretta has restored value to the experience of love and death. Raw sexuality has given way to real love and harmony between human beings and death, although often carnivalized, is seen as a tragic event – as when Daniel


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and Emilia are told the news of Doctor Cuenca’s death. Daniel and Emilia mourn the loss of this formidable man and lament the plight of humanity in the midst of pointless horror and death. Their subsequent love-making serves as a redeeming and renewing force in their lives: Lloraron juntos toda una tarde y parte de la noche. Por ellos y por todos, por el sueño que acuñó el viejo Cuenca, por su mundo perdido y su mundo sin límites, por los asesinados y los asesinos, por la guerra que los separaba y la paz que no sabían buscarse. Depués, la índole de sus cuerpos los hizo revivir. Amanecieron dormidos uno sobre el otro y estuvieron repitiendo esa ecuación hasta entrado el mediodía. (Mal de amores, p. 279)

The following chapter analyses Mastretta’s treatment of the body, both physical and textual. Considering its importance in her novels and in postmodern feminism generally, it seems surprising that so little critical attention has been devoted to this subject. Chapter Six analyses the importance of female empowerment through bodily erotics. I will occasionally compare Mastretta’s work with that of her compatriot, Elena Poniatowska, by focusing particularly on the topic of sexuality. From this comparison Mastretta emerges as a writer of considerable literary merit whose work combines feminism, eroticism and serious commitment to social change. Our consideration of the body of the text will lead us into Mastretta’s exploration of the erotics of the text, highlighting the writer’s selfconscious indulgence in linguistic play and her poetic use of sound, which has received scant critical attention to date.


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6

Literary Intimacies1 This chapter continues the task of demonstrating the largely unacknowledged literary force and range of Ángeles Mastretta’s works by focusing on the hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in the author’s texts. Such an exploration will serve to place Mastretta more precisely within the context of contemporary Mexican writing. Although Mastretta has received less critical attention than some of her fellow Mexican women writers (Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska), Mastretta shares many of the artistic and ideological preoccupations of these writers. Elena Poniatowska, for example, enjoys considerable prestige in elite literary circles – unlike Mastretta – and yet she touches upon issues which Mastretta also writes about.2 Like the works of Ángeles Mastretta, the novels of Poniatowska are committed left-wing testimonies of the lives of various unrepresented people, predominantly women. This distinctive orientation sets their work apart from the Mexican Revolution novelists, especially the male writers. Typical of the New Historical aspect of Poniatowska’s novel is not only her desire to talk of the marginalized Other but also her employment of intertextuality which serves as a literary weapon against dominant discourses (García, Broken Bars, p. 6) and can be seen as a direct influence on Mastretta’s Mal de

1 Sections of this chapter have been published in two journals: ‘The Physical Body and Identity in the works of Ángeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 54:1 (2001), 203–19, and ‘The Physical and Textual Body in the Works of Ángeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska’, Romance Studies, 19:2 (2001), 173–86. 2 Poniatowska’s œuvre embraces testimonial narrative, fictional autobiography, short fiction and journalistic articles. Her broad appeal may be attributable to her penetrating social vision complemented by her deft use of popular cultural elements and her self-conscious focus on language and writing – reminiscent in this respect of earlier Boom writing. Elena Poniatowska is perhaps the most-well known woman author in Mexico owing to her prolific writing which ranges from testimonial narrative, fictional autobiography, epistolary narrative, short fiction to journalistic articles. Her documentary and testimonial narratives have received the greatest critical acclaim. Ponitowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) shares the same thematic interest as Mastretta of recording Mexican Revolutionary history from a feminine/feminist perspective. The protagonist Jesusa, a washerwoman, is a strong female character through whom Poniatowska challenges the view that women are not interested in politics and history. The narrative is based upon a set of interviews between Poniatowska and Josefina Bórquez who is Jesusa Palancares in the novel. Drawing on a series of Bildungsroman and picaresque techniques, it retells chronologically key moments in the life experience of Jesusa which include her experiences of the Revolution, the cristero upheaval and the bleakness of post-Revolutionary Mexico.


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amores. Mastretta’s work, like that of her better-known and more politicallyengaged compatriot Poniatowska, contributes to a literature of protest and resistance and seeks to recover the other side of a specifically Mexican history and culture from a feminine/feminist perspective. Poniatowska is a writer who has undoubtedly exerted great literary influence upon Mastretta, yet there are some significant differences between the two writers, notably in their narrative style, Poniatowska’s being more innovative and experimental. Both belong to the PostBoom generation and both make use of a wide variety of discourses (literary, journalistic, historical, colloquial) and narrative techniques such as humour and irony. While their works are highly entertaining, drawing on a variety of popular sources and rhetorical devices, they are underpinned by serious purpose, fulfiling social and documentary functions, and showing particular sensitivity to the position of women.3 The plot-centredness and chronological structure of the works of both Mastretta and Poniatowska (Hasta no verte Jesús mío) provide for greater reader accessibility than did the typical Boom novel, though their trenchant social criticism precludes ‘passive’ consumption or complacency on the part of the reader.4 Both are socially committed writers whose works centre on Mexican history. By writing from a broadly feminist perspective, they both offer a revisionist history of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, challenging patriarchal ideologies and seeking to redress gender imbalance. They question the Mexican feminine stereotypes as outlined by Octavio Paz in El Laberinto de la soledad (1950) and offer a critique of the mystification of the institutional revolution through state propaganda and icon manipulation.5 As with Poniatowska and Laura Esquivel, Mastretta challenges dominant ideologies and seeks to redress the gender imbalance based on those binary systems rooted in Western thought. In the works of both Mastretta and Poniatowska the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine are often clear-cut but both use irony and humour to subvert rigid binarism. The following extract from Mal de amores encapsulates the feminist orientation of Mastretta’s work: Todo en esa sala olía al mundo de hombres. Las pocas mujeres que discurrían entre ellos era porque se habían hecho al ánimo de razonar y equivocarse. No porque ése les resultara el mejor de los modos, sino porque tenían claro que el mundo de los hombres sólo se puede penetrar portándose como ellos. Lo demás genera desconfianza. [. . . .] La misma Josefa Sauri que tanto y tan bien hablaba a solas con su marido, se consideraba fuera del reino masculino que presidía esas tertulias. Eso no le importaba gran cosa, porque se sabía representada por los bríos de aquella hermana suya, inasible como una exha3 See Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 4 See Gabriella De Beer, ‘Interview with Ángeles Mastretta’, Latin American Literature and Arts, 48 (Spring 1994), 14–17. 5 Octavio Paz, ‘Los hijos de la malinche’, El laberinto de la soledad, 2nd edn, Colección Popular (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959), pp. 59–80.


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lación, que prefirió negarse al matrimonio antes de abandonar lo que juzgaba el privilegio de vivir como los hombres. (p. 36)

The women in Mastretta’s, Poniatowska’s and Esquivel’s texts know that they must comply with socially-imposed roles but many hate their prescribed role: thus Milagros ‘detestaba los trabajos que la costumbre les había dado a las mujeres, le parecían suertes menores en las que miles de talentos mayores dejaban el ímpetu que debía ponerse en cosas más útiles’ (Mal de amores, p. 75). Male-dominated binary divisions (woman/man, passive/active) are broken by women seeking to achieve autonomy and to break with the traditional bonds of marriage and childbearing associated with their culture. In Puerto libre, for example, one of Mastretta’s female characters says that Mexican women are divided into two categories, ‘hijas de María’ or ‘hijas de la Chingada’, but claims to reject both (Puerto libre, p. 129). The narrator points to a third category: ‘[. . .] que es precisamente la que ella misma señala cuando afirma “yo no quiero pertenecer a ninguna de las dos” [. . .] así que la tercera opción es ella, la tercera opción son mujeres como ella, mujeres de las que empieza a haber un montón.’6 The characters of Mastretta and Poniatowska embody this third option. They do not always conform to the prostitute/virgin stereotypes found in the novels of the Mexican Revolution. Elena Poniatowska, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta and other female Latin-American writers need to share with their readers women’s ‘unacceptable fantasies’ of ‘sexuality, freedom, power: alternate worlds in which women are autonomous, self-defining people’.7 As already seen in the previous chapters, Mastretta’s female characters employ a series of survival strategies such as dissimulation as a means of breaking out of their prescribed roles; the author uses different narrative techniques to tell their unacceptable stories. While Mastretta, Poniatowska and Esquivel are feminists in the sense that they want their literature to be a demonstration of female sexual power and to express self-defined images of womanhood within the private and public spheres, their novels do not espouse militant feminism nor do they undermine traditional structures. As will be shown, the feminism of Mastretta is often ambiguous and her narratives typically oscillate between the representation of female power and loss of power. This is what gives Mastretta’s novels their postmodern flavour as well as their elusiveness: they refuse to be pinned down by one unifying point of view. But what remains a clear hallmark of her feminism is her determination to express lo no dicho, that is, the unspoken spaces of the marginal, especially the unrecorded history of women. In Mastretta’s restoration of the lost voices of the past (especially those of women), and their reconstruction 6 See Mauricio Carrera, ‘La tierra de la gran promesa’, La Jornada, 20 July 1997 http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1997/jul97 (last accessed: 14 Dec. 2004). 7 See Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. 4. Here Walker acknowledges the work of Carolyn G. Heilbrun.


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of events from alternative perspectives, the texts of Mastretta, like those of Poniatowska, show a clear affinity with New Historical Writing in which the repressed Other moves to centre stage and where the historical focus shifts towards the non-canonical, the episodic, the anecdotal, the contingent and the exotic. These aspects of the historical record can be seen as poetic or even creative: they escape or contest the rules, laws and principles of the dominant codes of their time. Many New Historical writers feel it their duty to redress past political iniquities by giving representation to previously excluded groups. In this respect historical writing assumes a kind of deviancy and overlaps with feminist practice.8 Women’s socio-historical, racial and class marginalization is analysed alongside such broad themes as the female body and sexuality. Chapter Two showed how themes of this kind have been treated by writers such as Rosario Castellanos, but are analysed with fresh enthusiasm by contemporary novelists such as Laura Esquivel, Mastretta and Poniatowska who offer a closer focus on marginalized and largely uncharted female experience through their exploration of orgasm and masturbation. It is on these private spheres that I shall focus my attention in this chapter. Here I will argue that in the works of Ángeles Mastretta the female self and body are perceived as unstable and embrace multiple possibilities. The postmodern Mastretta portrays the female body as fragmented and objectified by the male gaze, though that same body often proves elusive, and ungovernable, arrogating to itself the active role traditionally associated with the male. The themes of female empowerment and loss of power through both the destabilization of traditional rules governing women and female acquiescence to them can also be found in the works of Elena Poniatowska, such as Tinísima (1992).

Bodily Erotics Mastretta’s focus on the corporeal derives from her determination to challenge the concept of woman as a site of lack, and to examine the dark continent of female sexuality from a feminist perspective. Her portrayal of female sexuality indicates her determination to break with sexual taboos and to repudiate the view that sex is a dirty activity whose legitimacy is confined to reproductive purposes. Yo no crecí en un mundo que elogiara el placer sexual [. . .] De eso no se hablaba y cuando se hablaba, se decía que la gente hacía el amor para tener 8 According to Alice Jardine, the omissions from the historical record are being revalorized as its ‘feminine foils’ (p. 82). She identifies a link between those periods in the West when women were most vocally polemic and the so-called epistemological breaks in the history of Western thought. See Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 4th edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). For a detailed account of the New Historical writing in Latin America, see Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).


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hijos. Por supuesto no se llamaba eso ‘hacer el amor’. [. . .] Creo que si vivo dentro del cuerpo de una mujer, tengo que hablar con naturalidad de esa sexualidad. ¿Cuántos libros hay en los que hay hombres masturbándose? Existen bastantes. En cambio, ¿hay libros de mujeres que se masturban? No. Yo tengo amigas cuya vida sexual está mal porque su vida emotiva está mal. Yo les digo con una gran naturalidad, ‘¡mastúrbate! dedo, no te quedes. . . .!’, y me ven con verdadero horror. La gente dice cuando una solterona está malhumorada, lo que hace falta es casarse. A lo mejor si hubiera descubierto que podía tener una relación autosuficiente con su cuerpo, seguramente sería triste pero no colérica. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 334–35)9

Foucault argues ‘that sexuality has never been “repressed” as such but rather has been the object of various discourses’ (Coward (1986), p. 233).10 Moreover, he sees within sexuality the workings of power where the ‘identity of the subject is found through discourses which multiply areas of pleasure and attention only to control, classify, subject’ (Coward, p. 233). These discourses belong to the male sphere and have been used to control, classify and subject women, denying their subjectivity and ability to experience pleasure. Such discourses on sexuality have been subjected to a radical feminist critique. Indeed, the works of Mastretta, Poniatowska and Esquivel can be understood as an attempt to break with the concept of woman as a site of lack and with the denial and oppression of female sexuality where the determining male gaze which projects its fantasy onto the female figure is representative of what Laura Mulvey describes as a ‘world ordered by sexual imbalance [in which] pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’.11 The association of female sexuality with the illicit is repudiated in their work which explores the non-reproductive possibilities of sexuality. For these writers sexuality is associated with self-fulfilment and is portrayed from the female perspective. For Mastretta, Poniatowska, Castellanos, Garro and Esquivel sexuality and identity go hand in hand. In Mastretta’s novels, the body and female sexuality are rediscovered, mapped and remapped. In order to understand the concept of mapping it might be useful to look at the way in which the mapping of territory took place in Colonial history. The marking of boundaries and the naming of features in the physical landscape were all considered to be the prerogative of male conquerors. They named the world around them, imposed their own names on the rivers, chains of

9

Feminism has fought against the ‘equation of female sexuality with the illicit and disgusting’ and the limitations of sexual activity to reproductive ends. See Rosalind Coward, ‘Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?’, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 225–39 (p. 234). 10 Coward summarizes the main arguments of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 233. 11 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), 6–18 (p. 18).


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mountains and valleys, and by doing so appropriated and dominated them. There was a perfect ordering of the world, which was logical and masculine in conception, and wild zones were simply blank spaces outside this known territory. Women’s bodies were in a sense also mapped and claimed by men in this way. Women had no part in the naming of this newly-mapped world. The link between men mapping the continent and mapping women’s bodies is powerfully depicted in Stradanus’s engraving ‘America’ where Amerigo Vespucci, dressed and bearing his ‘European emblems of European meaning’, observes ‘the Indian America, a naked woman, unnamed presence of difference, a body which will awake among exotic plants and animals [. . .] the conqueror will write the body of the other and inscribe upon it his own history’.12 In this example, the male gaze on the female nude body is clearly that of the discoverer’s gaze (Europe) on a new land (America) waiting to be explored (and mapped) (Beardsell, p. 14). The idea of conquering the female body/new territory is powerfully depicted in the poetry of Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda who have theorized about the connections between desire and alterity. In his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, poem 13, the poet Neruda uses the nude female body as a metaphor for his world – while expressing desire for it: – ‘he ido marcando con cruces de fuego/el atlas blanco de tu cuerpo’.13 Here the mapping of the female body can be connected to Lacan’s concept that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ and, by implication, sexual desire for the Other.14 Thus the female Other becomes the object of the poet’s/the conqueror’s/men’s desire. In this respect, and as Luce Irigaray has stated, ‘la sexualité féminine a toujours été pensée à partir de paramètres masculins’ [female sexuality has always been conceived of within masculine parameters].15 This assertion expresses the recognition that fundamentally ‘everything has always been determined and defined according to masculine parameters’ (Beardsell, p. 15). Although metaphors relating to the female body/continent are not explicitly used by Mastretta, the powerful mapping and re-mapping of the body in the works of the author serves to compensate for the prior exclusion of female sexuality and desire. Such an exploration also allows the writer to undermine the view that woman like everything else, has

12

Quoted from Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, in Peter Hulme, ‘Polytropic man: tropes of sexuality and mobility in early colonial discourse’, in Europe and its others, eds F. Barker and others (Colchester: University of Essex, 1984), vol. 1, p. 19. The link female/continent can also be seen when in 1507 the geographer Martin Waldseemuller made the case in his Cosmographie introductio that since the three continents then known as Asia, Europe and Africa possessed the names of women, it seemed only the natural step forward to give the name of America to the New World, having taken it and transformed it into it its feminine form from the name of the discoverer of the new continent, Amerigo Vespucci. 13 See Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción, 4th edn (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2004). 14 See J. Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analyis, 1977), p. 235. 15 See Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe que n’en est pas un (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), p. 23.


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‘always been determined and defined according to masculine parameters’. Like Mastretta, many Latin American women writers are now demonstrating that mapped women too, were, and are, possessors of wild zones which men had and have no access to (and even had/have no desire to have access to). Latin American women writers have now begun to re-map those areas misrepresented by men by naming and renaming their own bodies and identities. Sexual repression and sexual liberation are opposing yet recurrent themes in Mastretta’s texts, as will be seen. The sexual repression that Mastretta herself experienced is reflected in the lives of her female characters who live in earlier historical periods. For Diane Braun, focusing on the different circumstances of women in a previous era is a positive advantage because: The author can say what could not be said by the women from the past. What has been silenced is not lost to oblivion but becomes part of our actual memory. We can validate experiences which were not considered valid before. In providing an atmosphere of criticism of the past by looking for or listening to or speaking the other side of the story, the text provides the reader with an opportunity to transfer that critical thinking to his or her own situation.16

Persistent references to parts of the body such as ‘muslos’, ‘rostros’, ‘chichis’ immediately alert the reader to the central impulse of these texts – the re-mapping and rediscovery of women’s bodies and sexual identity. Even the titles of some of Mastretta’s short biographical stories and essays refer to the body: ‘Don de lengua’ in Puerto libre, ‘La fiesta entre los labios’, ‘Los ojos de Pedro Infante’ in El mundo iluminado and ‘Una voz hasta siempre’ in El cielo de los leones. References to bodily sensations – smell, touch, taste, hearing and particularly sight – recur throughout the text contributing to its aura of tangible physicality: ‘al poco rato de estar juntos el cuarto de sus amores sonaba como la Sinfonía Pastoral y olía a perfume como si lo hubiera inventado Coco Chanel’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 173). The accumulation of references relating to the female body become strongly suggestive of sexual desire. The commonplace association of reason and intellect with masculinity, and physical pleasure and emotion with femininity is subjected either to ironic restatement (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 33, p. 37) or plain subversion (Mal de amores, p. 36). The female characters in Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores communicate with their eyes: ‘había entre ellas un pacto remoto que les hacía comprenderse con los ojos’ (Mal de amores, p. 24). The women have ‘ojos profundos’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 63) which suggests that they are farsighted and that their vision is acute and penetrating. Their large eyes can be seen as representative of their ability to see beyond common horizons and thus

16 See Diane Braun, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Maria Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of Florida,1994. Dissertation Abstracts, 1995. 9502800, p. 128.


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to overcome obstacles such as cultural boundaries imposed on gender/sexual behaviour.17 However, the body is also described in terms of the scatological and the natural female bodily cycles and fluids – menstruation (Arráncame la vida, p. 27) or breast feeding (Mal de amores, pp. 37–8). When Emilia travels with Daniel on a crowded train to fight in the Revolution there is explicit description of bodily functions: No había en los vagones de ese tren ninguna rudeza destinada a ordenar la convivencia, cada quien hacía con el espacio que le tocaba, con su cuerpo y sus necesidades lo que le venía. Había quienes [. . .] orinaban en las esquinas o desde las ventanas, quienes dormían medio encuerados, maldecían a sus parejas o se les iban encima sin interesarse en lo más mínimo por la opinión de los otros viajeros. Al principio, Emilia se había empeñado en mantener en alto las dotes civilizatorias que tanto cuidado habían puesto en ella sus padres, pero con el tiempo aprendió a guiarse como los otros pasajeros, según sus necesidades se lo pedían. (Mal de amores, p. 318)

War and violence undermine civilized values. However, even among such scenes of deprivation, Mastretta enhances the importance of the body and physical contact. Emilia waits for the darkness to ‘levantar su falda y cobijar a Daniel bajo ella, en un juego que sobre la certeza de muerte, revaluaba la vida en la trabazón de sus cuerpos’ (pp. 318–9). Among the train passangers are soldaderas who have contracted venereal diseases. Emilia, a trained doctor, is pained by the women’s awful suffering: ‘pasaba horas preguntándose [. . .] con qué antiséptico podrían remediarse las enfermedades venéreas que iban entre las piernas de los hombres hasta las soldaderas y el fondo de sus tibias vaginas’ (p. 319). Mastretta’s celebration of the female cycles and fluids can at times be problematic. Pregnancy and menstruation often suggest female independence as well as the sense of loss of control. In both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores there are two passages which relate to the protagonists’ experience of 17 When asked about the significance of the constant allusions to eyes in Mujeres de ojos grandes, Mastretta replied ‘[. . .] they see further than others. They are in a place where everybody has the same horizon, but they see beyond the common horizon. [. . .] Since they are capable of seeing further, then they are also more capable of acting as a consequence of what they see’. See Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 82. For an interesting analysis of Mujeres de ojos grandes, see Lee A. Daniel, ‘Un acercamiento a la mujer en Mujeres de ojos grandes de Ángeles Mastretta’, in Estudios en honor de Janet Pérez: el sujeto femenino en escritoras hispánicas, eds Susana Cavallo, Luis A. Jiménea and Oralia PrebleNiemi, Scripta Humanística, 129 (Portamac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1998). Daniel focuses on the idea of ‘la mujer mastrettiana’, represented in each of the tías: while they may be perceived as complying with the world of men, the lasting image we have of these women is their strength and wit and frequently they appear to be more intelligent than their male counterparts.


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menstruation. In Mal de amores, Emilia’s first experience of menstruation is described explicitly: –¿Te caíste? –No, contestó la niña. –Tienes sangre en la falda [. . .]¿Dónde tengo la sangre? –¿Dónde la ha de tener? –preguntó Milagros. –También para eso pasan los años. –No lo digas, no lo digas –pidió Josefa mirando el tiempo en la falda de su hija, en la palidez de su cara infantil, en el asombro de sus ojos, en la prisa con que puso la mano entre sus piernas [. . .] –¿Qué tengo? –preguntó Emilia que veía una respuesta en el gesto de los demás. –La sangre de las mujeres –le dijo su amiga Sol que era un año mayor y hacía tiempo se había conformado con esa frase oscura y unos trapitos blancos para solucionar su pregunta de cada mes. [. . .] Diego Sauri se supo fuera de la conversación. Echó a andar hacia ese otro misterio que era el automóvil [. . .]. (pp. 76–7)

This passage is reminiscent of Catalina’s musings in Arráncame la vida: Muchas veces la tristeza se me juntaba con la sangre del mes. Y ni para contárselo al general. Porque esas cosas no les importan a los hombres. No me daba vergüenza la sangre, no como a mi mamá, que nunca hablaba de eso y que me enseñó a lavar los trapos rojos cuando nadie pudiera verme. [. . .] A la sangre los poblanos le decían Pepe Flores [. . .] ¡qué ganas de tener Pepe Flores o lo que sea –decía yo –con tal de que les llene el aburrimiento! [. . .] Cuando me entraba tristeza pensaba en Pepe Flores, en cómo hubiera querido que fuera el mío, en cuánto me gustaría irme con él al mar los cinco días que cada mes dedicaba a visitarme. (p. 27)

Menstrual blood, like birth, has been identified as a taboo subject and associated with the abject, an important concept in Western feminist thinking. Abjection is primarily identified with the bodily cycles, and fluids of the female reproductive body specific to the female adult. It relates to ‘the indeterminate, fluid, borderline area between certainties; an area associated with change’ – (‘también para eso pasan los años [. . .] la sangre de las mujeres’).18 According to Barbara Brook (p. 51), ‘the marker of female adulthood with its accompanying dangerous entry into the abject, is taken to be the onset of menstruation’. The idea of threat or danger, which is associated with menstruation, is powerfully expressed in Mal de amores at the end of Chapter VII. Josefa spends the whole night weeping after discovering that Emilia has ‘become a woman’, a development which is equally unwelcome to her father Diego (p. 77). The following

18 See Barbara Brook, Feminist Perspectives on the Body, Feminist Perspectives (London: Longman, 1999), p. 158.


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chapter (VII) begins – significantly – with a discussion of the social impact, mostly negative, of foreign investments in Mexico (p. 78). The implicit comparison between Emilia’s physiological changes and national upheaval is important: both the Revolution and menstruation pose a threat to the established (patriarchal) order of things and both must be contained or suppressed. Menstrual blood, like childbirth, is considered an abject condition where ‘the female body is perceived (by men) as changing shape and transgressing from the ‘natural’ human state whereby blood, and other bodily fluids, are contained’ (Brook, p. 50). Menstruation ‘offers an area of the body in a sense out of control: and the language and imagery of the ‘sanitary product’ industry is one organized around that idea of containing danger and embarrassment’ (Brook, p. 51). The idea of menstruation being contained is portrayed in Mal de amores where Sol ‘hacía tiempo se había conformado con esa frase oscura y unos trapitos blancos para solucionar su pregunta’ (p. 77). The most interesting aspect of Mastretta’s portrayal of this theme in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida is the attitude of the protagonists’ mothers who perpetuate the myth of menstruation as a shameful bodily function which must be covered up: as we have already noted, Catalina’s mother ‘nunca hablaba de eso y [. . .] me enseñó a lavar los trapos rojos cuando nadie pudiera verme’. Josefa’s pleading – ‘no lo digas, no lo digas’ – makes Emilia feel inadequate and out of control (p. 77). Menstruation is associated with ‘an entry into the reproductive reality that is presumed to be women’s primary domain’.19 This presumption has made many feminists such as Simon de Beauvoir regard the ability of women’s bodies to reproduce as a negative capability. For some feminists the pregnant body ‘embodies the cultural identification of women with childbearing and nature’ (Brook, p. 41). As has been indicated in Chapter Five, the idea that pregnancy is an uncanny experience and is something which has been imposed on the female body certainly comes across powerfully in Arráncame la vida. Mastretta undermines the myth of happy motherhood as when Catalina responds with horror to the discovery that she is pregnant and blames Andrés for what he has done to her. Once again we have a problematic relation with the female body. Unlike Arráncame la vida, where motherhood and pregnancy are vehemently rejected, Mal de amores celebrates motherhood. Mal de amores offers a striking portrait of mother/daughter bonding when Josefa breast-feeds her daughter Emilia: ‘Josefa desabrochó hasta la cintura los botones de su blusa [. . .] Había un goce recién conocido en aquella ceremonia’ (pp. 37–8). The young Daniel Cuenca, later to be Emilia’s lover, suddenly disturbs this intimate scene: Josefa estaba hundida en él (goce), cuando sintió una mano apoyarse sobre su pecho desnudo. Abrió sus ojos y encontró a Daniel Cuenca con la cara encima

19 See Barbara Brook (p. 53), and Elizabeth Grosz Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 205.


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de la niña que se prendía a su pezón. Apenas se sintió visto, Daniel se alejó caminando hacia la puerta sin darles la espalda. (p. 38)

In my interview with Mastretta, the author explained to me that the celebration of motherhood in Mal de amores came from her own experience of being a mother (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 316). When she wrote Arráncame la vida, the author had not yet had children. The different points of view which Mastretta takes of pregnancy and motherhood in these texts is another clear example of Mastretta’s postmodern ambivalences. References in her texts to ‘cuerpo’ and ‘ojos profundos’ are repeated incessantly, and become strongly suggestive of sexual desire: ‘volteó su cuerpo de animal fino’ (Mal de amores, p. 181). References to taste, sound, smell and food are also charged with desire and associated with images of the female body and sexuality: ‘el novio de Clemencia Ortega no supo el frasco de locura y pasiones que estaba destapando aquella noche. Lo tomó como la mermelada y lo abrió [. . .] se llenó de aquel perfume, de aquel brebaje atroz’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 77). In El mundo iluminado, the food/sexuality link is explicitly made by a character who believes that the smell of melons indicates their ripeness: ‘lo mismo sucede con los amores [. . .] Hay que olerlos bien antes de probarlos’ (p. 185). Mastretta makes explicit connections between food and sexuality when discussing the importance of female sexuality: Yo hablo de mi cuerpo mucho y de lo que siento y de lo que huelo y de lo que toco. Todo el tiempo hablo de eso [. . .] Cuando algo me gusta digo “¡esto se siente riquísimo!” y “¡qué delicia!” y quién sabe qué y no puedo comer sin estar diciendo “¡qué maravilla!” y “¡esto está buenísimo!”. Entonces me pasa igual y me resulta igual de lícito y eso sí lo aprendí. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 334)

Mastretta’s body/food references, particularly in Mujeres de ojos grandes, can be seen as countering nineteenth-century writers such as Alas and Galdós who employed food and sexuality as a means of dissecting the moral and sexual depravity of their characters.20 Sexuality is enhanced in Mastretta’s texts through its association with the pleasures of smell, touch and taste. Mastretta’s depiction of food is reminiscent of Laura Esquivel’s magical realist treatment in Como agua para chocolate in which Tita’s repressed emotions manifest themselves magically in the dishes she prepares.21

20 See Catherine Jagoe’s ‘Decadence in Galdós’s “Ángel Guerra” ’ in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth Century Spain, eds Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 161–81. The association of female body parts with voracious feeding (as a response to social repression and decadence) is a typical feature in Galdós’s novel. 21 See Yael Halevi Wise, ‘Storytelling in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) pp. 123–31. Also


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In the texts of Mastretta and for example, Elena Poniatowska the private sphere of the body is one area among several others over which the female characters achieve a degree of autonomy.22 In Arráncame la vida, Catalina, the main protagonist, maps her own body. Two distinct story lines emerge here: one relates to the official and androcentric embodied in Ascencio and his wife, their upward social mobilization and Ascencio’s corrupt political manipulations. The other story relates to the female protagonist’s transgression of class, gender and sexual boundaries. This story offers the underside of the official history. Like Mal de amores, this novel is an example of current feminist concern with rewriting the past from new critical perspectives, highlighting the machinations of elite power politics in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. Before their marriage, Ascencio takes Catalina on a trip to the seaside to Tecolutla where ‘fui a pegarme la espantada de mi vida’ (p. 9). Her first sexual experience begins in a familiarly conventional manner: the virgin’s reliance on the male’s sexual expertise reflects the traditional gender and hierarchical power roles based on binary divisions. Catalina’s puzzlement is humorously depicted: ‘yo había visto caballos y toros irse sobre yeguas y vacas, pero el pito parado de un señor era otra cosa’ (p. 9). Catalina is understandably frightened and explains: ‘es que no estoy segura de que eso me quepa’ (p. 9). At first Catalina fails to control her sexual experience and thus turns for guidance to Andrés. Perhaps this is a normal reaction. Coming from a family which imposed strict gender-related behaviour patterns, her need for guidance from Ascencio is an important symptom of her continued dependence on such norms which have instilled passivity and self-repression in her. Feminist re-readings of Freudian and Lacanian sexual theory undermine the notion of sexuality as an innate quality and emphasize its construction in the context of family and society.23 As a child, Catalina was closer to her father than to her mother; her need for sexual guidance from Ascencio may be seen in terms of displaced desire for continued paternal affection. But as her future indiscretions and wilfulness demonstrate, she has sufficient independence of mind to break free from this reliance on a stronger male figure. At first, Andrés appears to take control of Catalina’s body. He fucks her like an object for his personal pleasure, appreciation and masculine ego. Ascencio maps Catalina’s body – to the point of dehumanizing her – ‘fíjese ya está mojada – comentó con el mismo tono de voz que mi madre usaba para hablar complacida de sus guisos’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 9). Ascencio’s comment points to

see Stephen M. Hart, Companion to Spanish-American Literature (London: Támesis, 1999), pp. 150–51. 22 Diane Braun indicates the importance of women’s physical autonomy in Arráncame la vida, p. 154. 23 See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing The Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine’ in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 357–70 (p. 362).


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the male gaze reducing the female body to an object, providing the same kind of satisfaction and pleasure as food. Although she is treated almost casually, as a sexual object, Catalina becomes indispensable to Ascencio. She resists his attempted sexual appropriation of her and her body denies his, even as she welcomes it: he fucks her and tries to appropriate her body but finds that she has not reached orgasm. Ascencio says unfeelingly: –No sientes, ¿por qué no sientes? –preguntó después. –Sí siento, pero el final no lo entendí. –Pues el final es lo que importa –dijo hablando con el cielo. –¡Ay, estas viejas! ¿Cuándo aprenderán? [. . .] Y se quedó dormido. (Arráncame la vida, p. 10)

A potentially romantic encounter is trivialized by the comments made by Andrés. Here the comic and the ironic are used both to undermine the myth of male sexual power and to break with trite clichés attached to woman’s lack of sexual initiative and inability to experience sexual pleasure (reach orgasm).24 Catalina has been virtually raped but her senses have been awakened. She is fascinated by the semen, the wetness, the male fluid that she feels between her legs. Although she does not comprehend this wetness, she instinctively understands that it is not part of her body, it is rather something which has been injected into her: ‘Por las piernas me corría un líquido, lo toqué. No era mío, él me lo había echado’ (p. 10). Again this reinforces the idea that despite the fact that Andrés has penetrated her body, she has rejected his in the act of lovemaking. Although Ascencio physically overflows into her, her psychological rejection does not permit him to appropriate her. Catalina wants to ‘sentir’: –¿Por qué no me enseñas? –le dije. –¿A qué ? –Pues a sentir. –Eso no se enseña, se aprende –contestó. (p. 10)

Although here Catalina relies on Ascencio’s sexual guidance, the process of re-mapping her body and self-discovery begins: ‘Entonces me propuse aprender’ (p. 10). At first her rather vague notion of ‘sentir’ relies on what Ascencio has told her to do, that is, ‘ponerse flojita’ which she tries to achieve and in a hilariously funny passage we are told: ‘por lo pronto me dediqué a estar flojita, tanto que a veces parecía lela. Andrés hablaba y hablaba mientras caminábamos por la 24

Recent studies have pointed to female humour as a ‘frequently-used strategy for protesting the traditional codes of behaviour and for demythifying taboos’. See Dianna Niebylski, ‘Transgression in the Comic Mode: Ángeles Mastretta and Her Cast of Liberated Aunts’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 29–40 (p. 32).


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playa: yo columpiaba los brazos, abría la boca como si me cayera la mandíbula; metía y sacaba la barriga, apretaba y aflojaba las nalgas’ (p. 10). Catalina’s sexuality remains incomprehensible to her. A few days later, in an act of frustration, she resolves in secret to go and visit the gypsy, an ‘experta en amores’ (p. 11) to learn how to ‘sentir’. This scene anticipates the autonomy and self-control which Catalina will exert over her own body – illustrated in the sexual affairs she has later in her life. Indeed, when she discovers that her husband has killed a certain lawyer (p. 77), she begins to employ her body as a weapon. Catalina ceases to comply with his sexual demands, turning him away ‘con las piernas cerradas, bien cerradas por primera vez’ (p. 79).25 On another occasion, when Catalina becomes pregnant, Andrés stops having sex with her because she looks fat and ugly. Fearing abandonment, Catalina has her first affair with a sexually inexperienced teenager: ‘Pablo se encargó de quitarme las ansias esos tres últimos meses de embarazo, y yo me encargué de quitarle la virginidad que todavía no dejaba en ningún burdel. Eso fue lo único bueno que tuvo mi embarazo de Verania’ (p. 32). Catalina reverses her previous situation in which her virginal lack was remedied by Ascensio’s sexual experience. Catalina is in control and in her predatory hunger for instant sexual gratification she objectifies Pablo’s body: ‘aprecié la tela corriente de sus pantalones, sus pelos desordenados y sus manos’ (p. 32). Sexual liberation goes hand in hand with Catalina’s desire to construct a self-defined image of womanhood – as is the case with Emilia in Mal de amores, some of the tías in Mujeres de ojos grandes and Tina Modotti in Poniatowska’s Tinísima (1992).26 The gypsy makes up for Ascensio’s own lack – his inability to enlighten Catalina about the location of her ‘timbre’ (p. 12), the locus of her sexuality. With maternal gentleness and understanding the gypsy helps Catalina discover her sexuality. Anderson remarks with reference to this episode that the ‘lack of information, the secrecy, and even the difficulty in naming the female anatomy point toward the controlled nature of the theme and its social impropriety’.27 But this passage is also important because it illustrates how a marginalized old hag is able to teach a young, middle-class woman to feel, whereas Ascencio, the macho eterno, proves himself incapable of it. Catalina transgresses both class boundaries and patriarchal norms. This episode points towards the survival and endurance of female bonding in the face of the apparent dominance of male patriarchal dogmas and reveals a feminine sub-world as yet unpenetrated by the male mind, still uncolonized by domesticating male discourse.

25

The female body as weapon is an important theme in the work of both Mastretta and Poniatowska. Diane Braun applies this idea of the body as a sexual weapon to Arráncame la vida, p. 154. 26 Elena Poniatowska, Tinísima (Mexico City: Era, 1992). 27 Danny J. Anderson, ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida,’ in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp.13–27 (p. 24, n. 10).


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Catalina masturbates the night after her encounter with the gypsy and the discovery of her ‘secreto que era imposible compartir’ (p. 12). This scene – which is examined later in this chapter – is evoked with passion and offers a sharp contrast to Catalina’s sexual initiation by Andrés, ironized in order to undermine natural sexual activity and its purposefulness as a means to an end (reproduction). The sexual scene between Andrés and Catalina turns out to be rather uneventful and in any case is trivialized by the frivolous tone of the narrative style. The excitement and passion of Catalina’s autoeroticism, on the other hand, are reflected in the liveliness of the narrative style. Catalina’s sighing and gasping awakens her sisters and her mother takes her to the doctor thinking that she might be ill because ‘así le había empezado la tuberculosis a la dama de las camelias’ (p. 12). As Braun points out (p. 137), the female sex drive was traditionally associated with abnormality and illness, a notion which is clearly undermined by Mastretta. Catalina’s power emerges in the masturbation scene but the masturbatory scene is only one of several examples of Catalina’s independence from Andrés, an independence which also transcends the merely sexual sphere. She becomes increasingly detached from her husband in other areas of their relationship, as, for instance, in her decision to vote against Rodolfo, Andrés’s friend, during the presidential elections (p. 107). Her defiance constitutes a daring challenge to her husband’s authority and confirms to some extent her evolving political awareness and growing self-sufficiency. Mastretta, like Elena Poniatowska (La “flor de lís”, 1988), celebrates female masturbation and sexuality which represent essential experiences of women long obscured and silenced by the official text. Why should women not talk about these topics and enjoy their own bodies? As noted earlier (pp. 165–66) the literature on male masturbation is plentiful but there is comparatively little on the corresponding female experience. Like Héléne Cixous and Luce Irigarary, Mastretta speaks of female sexuality from women’s perspective as a means of challenging Western binary divisions (mind/body, man/woman; passive/active) and attempts to re-inscribe women in multiple ways that counter these oppositions. Autoeroticism is shunned since it is perceived as embarrassing and indecent. Freud claimed that female clitoral activity constitutes a regression to a ‘childish masculinity’ making woman abnormal, deviant in relation to the masculine norm.28 Masturbation is the ‘dangerous supplement’, whereby, according to Derrida, the ‘supplement’ (writing, culture, society, education, evil) supplements, is adjoined to, substitutes, is added to Nature (woman, maternal presence, innocence, virginity).29 But it is when the ‘dangerous supplement’, ‘a sort of [. . .] state inconceivable to reason’ (p. 152), erupts in Nature, that it leads desire ‘away from the good path, makes it err far from natural ways, guides it toward its loss or fall and therefore it is a sort 28

Jo Labanyi, ‘Voyeurism and Narrative Pleasure in Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair’, Romance Studies, 19 (1991), 105–16 (p. 113). 29 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 141–64.


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of lapse or scandal (scandalon)’ (p. 151). Like writing, which is the unnatural supplement of speech (p. 144), masturbation as portrayed in the texts of Mastretta and Poniatowska is the unnatural supplement to normal feminine sexuality which in its natural form depends on masculine intervention: the male completes the female, making up her lack. Thus masturbation permits women to express their sexual selves for themselves independently of any oppressive male conception of female sexuality. In Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes, masturbation is associated with the biblical notions of sin and evil, bearing comparison with Elena Poniatowska’s La “Flor de lis”.30 Mujeres de ojos grandes narrates the stories of various liberated tías who transgress the normal boundaries of gender. Although they are not models or heroines and live ordinary lives, their ability to overcome difficulties resulting from their sexual indiscretions and their unexpected manner of reacting to awkward situations, make them extraordinary in many ways. This effect is enriched by Mastretta’s occasional recourse to magical, larger-than-life elements (Braun, p. 164). As an adolescent, la tía Verónica discovers the pleasures of masturbation in Mujeres de ojos grandes as does Mariana in La “Flor de lis”. Both these girls are shackled by the strict dogmas of Catholicism and its rituals and both have internalized those biblical notions of good and evil expounded by the Church and society. As Mariana begins to caress herself she immediately reproaches herself for her pecado and stops. But the excitement that her caresses produce impels her to continue. She is torn in an almost schizophrenic internal monologue between what is right and what is wrong – between the dictates of her reason and the desires of her body – but nevertheless she succumbs to the beauty of her experience. In Mujeres de ojos grandes, masturbation is linked with the sexto mandamiento. Here there is an obvious play on words in ‘sexo’/‘sexto’. When she goes to confession for the first time, she tells the new young vicar in town: –Pequé contra el sexto mandamiento. –¿Sóla o acompañada? –le preguntó el nuevo vicario. Hasta entonces no supo la tía Verónica que tal asunto se podía practicar acompañada. ‘¿Cómo sería eso?’ se preguntó mientras contestaba: ‘Sola’. (p. 65)

Verónica, like Mariana, cannot desist from masturbation despite her fear of being excommunicated: ‘[. . .] con un chicle, tres cacahuates cualquier cosa que significara un castigo menos grave que la excomunión derivada de comulgar con el sexto mandamiento metido en todo el cuerpo’ (p. 64). The celebration of female orgasm, masturbation and indiscretion in Mastretta’s work can be seen as the expression of an essential aspect of female 30

La “Flor de lis”, 4th edn (Madrid: Alianza Tres/Era, 1989).


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sexuality which the official text has obscured. As Niebylski remarks, it also represents the writer’s desire to highlight the fact that our aunts, mothers, grandmothers and women were able to assert their sexual needs, just like their modern counterparts, without having to pay with their lives (p. 30). Mastretta wants to show that love affairs are often the only means of compensating for tedium. As Braun remarks about the women in Arráncame la vida, ‘affairs allow them to fulfil their desires; sexual gratification is more often achieved in their affairs than in their marriages’ (p. 154). But even then this does not apply to all the female characters since some of these women are happy to fulfil a feminine gender role construct and not all the men are oppressive (Braun, p. 173). The comic approach to sex, together with the frequently unconventional conclusions to sexual experiences, found in the texts of Mastretta and Poniatowska show that their female characters really do experience great pleasure as far as the affirmation of their female sexuality and identity is concerned. In Mal de amores, Mastretta questions the exclusivity of monogamous love through Emilia’s discovery that it is possible to love two different men at the same time. Biblical precepts are also undermined when tía Verónica, in Mujeres de ojos grandes, decides to confess for the second time that she has sinned against the ‘sexto mandamiento’, fully expecting to be excommunicated. But the vicar’s response is reassuring: –¿tú creatura? [. . .] No sabes lo que estás diciendo. [. . .] Luego la tomó de la mano [. . .] le pellizcó los cachetes [. . .] sonrió desde el fondo de su casto pasado y le dijo: –Echale una miradita al Santísimo, y vete a dormir. Mañana comulgas que mañana es Viernes Primero. Desde entonces la tía Verónica durmió y pecó como la bendita que fue. (p. 66)

Perhaps the vicar realizes that the dogmas of the Church are a little outdated for everyday realities or he is simply incredulous, failing to conceive that Verónica is capable of such a transgression. There is also an obvious play on words in ‘pecó como la bendita que fue’ (p. 66) where the substitution of the expected ‘pecadora’ by ‘bendita’ undermines the idea of sin as expounded by the Church.31

31 Mastretta’s reference to the Sixth Commandment causes some problems. In Latin America and Spain most children have to take their First Communion at the age of twelve for which they are expected to learn the catechism. According to the Catholic Church, the sixth commandment in the catechism is ‘no cometerás actos impuros’. In this case, Verónica has clearly learnt her catechism. In Cipriano de Valera’s version of the Holy Bible, the Sixth Commandment states ‘No matarás’ (Exodus 20.19) while in the New King James version, the sixth Commandment refers solely to adultery, ‘You shall not commit adultery’ (Exodus 20.24, p. 101). In this case, Mastretta could be parodying the biblical reference to women ‘taken in adultery, in the very act’ (John 8.4) which is followed by Jesus’ challenge: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’ (John 8.7). Verónica thinks – perhaps naively – that she is sinning against the sixth commandment, unaware that it refers solely to adultery – which


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In Mastretta’s conventional playful manner the male gaze objectifying the female body is subverted by an unexpected inversion of gender roles and behaviour. For instance, the view that women are sexually passive and men sexually active is inverted in Arráncame la vida, where women see adultery as normal rather than as exceptional behaviour. On one occasion, Pepa discusses with Catalina her affair with the local partero (p. 86). She uses vulgar masculine language to describe their energetic lovemaking ‘cogemos como dioses’ (p. 86). Mastretta, like Laura Esquivel and Elena Poniatowska, undermines the traditional view that the body, as the locus of self and identity, provides a natural and stable anchor. In their novels, the concept of body/identity is multiple and diverse.32 References to the female body are numerous yet Mastretta’s usual focus is not on the whole body but rather on its isolated parts: ‘muslos’, ‘rostros’, ‘manos’, ‘piernas’. At the start of many of the stories/vignettes in Mujeres de ojos grandes, Mastretta gives us a vivid image of her cast of female protagonists but the female body is generally seen from a masculine perspective. The erotic parts of the body are isolated, taking the form of perfect plastizised legs, cunts and breasts: ‘redondas chichis’; ‘caderas redondas y firmes’; ‘nuca de porcelana’. They are products of the fantazising male subject, thus reinforcing the otherness of woman. While tía Martínez is certainly not attractive ‘algo tenía en sus piernas y su voz atropellada que le hacía interesante. Por desgracia no andaban los hombres buscando mujeres interesantes para casarse con ellas’ (p. 23). In Mal de amores, Milagros, Emilia’s aunt, is described as a woman who ‘tenía [. . .] los pómulos prominentes y la melena oscura, podía sonreir como un ángel y enceguecer de furia como todos los diablos [. . .]’ (pp. 23–4). The description of ‘tía’ Leonor’s body is also narrated from a masculine perspective: tenía el ombligo más perfecto que se haya visto. Un pequeño punto hundido justo en la mitad de su vientre planísma. [. . .] quienes las vieron cuentan que is suggested by the Vicar’s response: ‘¿Tú creatura? [. . .] No sabes lo que estás diciendo’ (p. 66). Again the biblical saying ‘Go and sin no more’ is parodied when the Vicar tells her patronisingly: ‘Échale una miradita al Santísimo, y vete a dormir [. . .]. Desde entonces la tía Verónica durmió y pecó como la bendita que fue’ (p. 66). 32 The notion of an integrated self-identity is also challenged radically by French feminists. For deconstructionists, the self is plural and essentially divided between its conscious and unconscious dimensions. Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva identify plurality, multiplicity and difference as the key concepts for women’s liberation. They take de Beauvoire’s understanding of Otherness in The Second Sex (1949) and subvert it. Woman is still the Other, but rather than seeing this position as something which must be overcome, postmodern feminists examine its advantages. This emphasis on the positive side of Otherness – of being marginalized and excluded – is a major aspect of postmodern Feminism and is clearly expressed in Mastretta’s work as we shall see. The condition of Otherness allows women to condemn the norms of the dominant male culture. Moreover, Otherness, in spite of its association with subjugation and weakness allows for openness and difference. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), and Rosemarie Tong, ‘Postmodern Feminism’, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 217–33 (p. 219).


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sus piernas eran largas y doradas, que el vello de su pubis era un mechón rojizo y altanero, que fue imposible mirarle la cintura sin desearla entera. (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 7)33

The presentation of the female body draws heavily on commonplace male erotic fantasies and archetypal sexual images: woman as beautiful or ugly, as virgin or whore, as domesticated or untamed. The socially-constructed female body and identity often lose their subjectivity in the texts of Mastretta and Poniatowska. But even if the female body is often mutilated and fragmented by the aestheticizing and erotisizing male gaze, it ultimately evades all attempts to circumscribe it and hold it in place.34 The imposition of fixed sexual and gender identities imposed by patriarchy on the female characters leads them to break free in order to achieve sexual self-fulfilment. The female characters, however, have strong personalities and are driven by the desire to change their prescriptive, tedious life-styles that often lead them to have affairs. They crave sexual liberation and personal fulfilment and regard a change of identity as their only lifeline: ‘a veces la tía Mónica quería con todas sus ganas no ser ella. Detestaba su pelo y su barriga, su manera de caminar, sus pestañas lacias y su necesidad de otras cosas’ (p. 125). Catalina Guzmán’s fragmented sense of self derives from her alienation from her husband and from the social role she is expected to play. The men that Catalina and Emilia (Mal de amores) have loved or had affairs with have also

33 This passage recalls the photograph of the naked Tina in Poniatowska’s Tinísima, her pubis fetishized by the male gaze (p. 74). As in Mujeres de ojos grandes, Tinísima shows how the sense of self is independent of the body and its image, which become a construction of desire as seen by the Other, at least in the first half of the novel. Here the cutting up of Tina’s self is articulated through the corporeal. The photograph, ‘Tina en la azotea’, showing her posing naked for her lover, Edward Weston (p. 71), is complemented by a sketch (p. 118) of her semi-naked – ‘una rosa en el sexo y pétalos giratorios en los pezones’ (p. 123) – in the style of a femme fatale. At the beginning of the novel, Tina – wrongly accused of murdering one of her many lovers – is exposed to public view, and photographs of her, posing naked for Edward Weston, are made public in a Mexican journal. Poniatowska uses the photo of her posing nude as a way of drawing out the classical male responses to the naked female form. A photo, picture or painting is the artistic creation of one man but provides a multiplicity of contradictory views and impressions depending on the observer who can take and appropriate what he or she wants from it. So, while some reduce Tina to a larger-than life cunt or see her as a ‘puta desnuda’ (p. 110), others see her nudity as an artistic production (p. 74). Thus, Tina is a self in constant process: she is dehumanized either by crass stereotyping or by aestheticization; her body, subjected to constant scruitiny, is embellished or mutilated. This photograph acts as a way of eliminating the other more substantial side of Tina. The aesthetisization of the female has neutralized and rendered immobile her threatening aspects. Tina is transformed into an unfeeling nothingness. The raw flesh, the ‘mata frondosa’ (p. 74), is exposed to the male gaze and becomes a site of lack. 34 Like Mastretta with her female protagonists, throughout Tinísima, Poniatowska seeks to express Tina’s power. Although men try to possess Tina’s body with their gaze, Poniatowska manages to deconstruct male desire, and emphasizes the ultimate unknowability of Tinísima’s identity by writing what is beyond their gaze.


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reconstructed them in accordance with their desired objects: muse, whore, wife, lover, comrade, reminding us of Poniatowska’s Tinísima. Catalina wants to be someone else, to break with her sense of being dehumanized and objectified by her husband: ‘Otra quería ser yo; yo era parte de la decoración’ (p. 58). Andrés tells her that as a hostess ‘la cosa era ser bonita, dulce, implacable’ (p. 59). She understands that women of her condition are objectified by the male gaze and is often annoyed to see that other women are treated as mere possessions: ‘De todos modos me costaba disimular el cansancio frente a aquellos señores que tomaban a sus mujeres del codo como si sus brazos fueran el asa de una tacita de café’ (p. 59). Here the female body is fragmented and dehumanized, treated as though it were an inanimate object. This division of self is again evident when Catalina comes back to Andrés following her encounter with her lover Carlos Vives at the Bellas Artes. As she asks Andrés ‘¿Vámos a cenar?’ (p. 124) she has the sudden sensation of seeing herself from the outside as if her own body were out of control: ‘oí mi voz como algo que no me pertenecía. Como si otra me estuviera supliendo para hablar y moverme’ (p. 124). Evident here is the tension between her official identity as wife/‘gobernadora’ and her unofficial desire to embark on a new and liberated phase of her womanhood. Her extramarital affairs provide the stimulus for such personal renewal. Patriarchy’s imposition of fixed identities on women lead them to seek selffulfilment by contravening the ‘rules’, particularly in the sexual sphere. In Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s multiple sexual experiences ultimately help her fulfil her desire to break free from constricting modes of behaviour. As in the case of Catalina and Tina (Tinísima), Emilia in Mal de amores moves from original passivity to self-assertion. The idea of male domination is subverted in Mal de Amores since Emilia exceeds Daniel’s grasp even as he turns her into an object of desire. When for instance Daniel returns from his revolutionary activities, he observes Emilia as he would an exquisite thing: ‘Daniel veía a Emilia con la sorpresa de quien descubre que un juguete ha mutado en diosa’ (p. 88). In Mal de amores, Emilia’s sense of personal fulfilment is partially achieved by loving two men at the same time. Her lover, the revolutionary Daniel, tries to impose on her a traditional female role, expecting her to remain at home and await his return. But Emilia evades his grasp as she expresses her independence both by practising as a doctor and by entering into a new relationship – with Antonio Zavalza. At first Andrés and Daniel seem to take hold of Catalina and Emilia respectively, but these women resist their attempted appropriation of them. Like Tina in Tinísima, they cannot be fixed or held in place even when they seem to be possessed entirely by their men. For these women their frequently tumultuous affairs with men serve to define and redefine their identities and sexual selves, ever-proliferating and boundless. As with Tina, Catalina and Emilia not only flit from one identity to another but draw men into their vortex of change, flow, play, pleasure, which defies any masculine attempt to frame it. As was seen in Chapters Three and Four, Emilia and Catalina are matrioskas whose promiscuity may be seen as a conscious effort to fight the masculinized


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perception of women as passive and compliant. Similarly to Tina, both these women have achieved their own sexual and personal identity by breaking away from the grip of patriarchy. In Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores (as in Tinísima), the principal male partners, Andrés and Daniel, serve as important agents of self-discovery for their women. At first Emilia seems to embrace the more traditional role of the woman who needs to be possessed and absorbed by the dominant male. Although Emilia craves sexual and professional freedom, she also longs for stability. Yet the male world to which Daniel belongs implies loss and dispossession: Emilia, like Tina, becomes committed to the communist movement and her sexuality becomes secondary in her life. Both Emilia and Tina constantly struggle for self-definition but we feel that even when they embrace social commitment their identity remains intangible. Emilia struggles for self-definition, and her elusive identity is powerfully evoked in the last, ambiguous sentence: ‘¿A qué hora llegaste? –le preguntó Emilia besándolo [. . .] –nunca me voy –dijo Daniel acariciando su cabeza con olor a misterios’ (p. 395), ultimately highlighting Daniel’s inability to hold Emilia in place even when she seems to be possessed entirely by him. In our interview Mastretta asserted that if she wrote a sequel to the novel, Emilia might be promiscuous and free: Si yo contara la vida de Emilia Sauri después de casada, a lo mejor hubiera sido incluso más promiscua. A lo mejor hubiera tenido más amores que Zavalza y Daniel Cuenca. Es probable que yo me deba esa historia porque se nos hacen tan normales que los hombres se enamoren muchas veces y de muchas mujeres y se nos hace tan anormales las mujeres que hacen eso pero a las mismas mujeres y ya no se diga a los hombres. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338)

In Chapter Three it was argued that Andrés in Arráncame la vida has a negative influence on Catalina seen in the way she has adopted his typically male egotistical principles. But Andrés has helped her positively in other ways by making her strive for a measure of independence. As in Mal de amores, the openendedness of Arráncame la vida suggests that Catalina will refuse to mould her future to the capriciousness of men, thus taking the advice of a widow who recommends widowhood as the ideal state for a woman – to be protected from male intrusion. The view that the female self/body is unstable and embraces multiple possibilities is also expressed in Mujeres de ojos grandes, which tells the stories of a series of big-eyed, sexually adventurous or unconventional aunts. In some of the vignettes – at least initially – the self seems to be independent of the body which is constructed by male desire. The vignettes start with traditional descriptions of the aunts’ bodies as a way of establishing their materiality and giving them recognisable characteristics. But the female body in fragments implies a fractured self and an unstable identity. In Mujeres de ojos grandes, the title itself points to a dominant leitmotif in the text: most of the female characters have


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‘ojos profundos’/‘grandes’, acting as mirrors to each other.35 The repetition of such traits can sometimes have the effect of blurring individual differences, creating echoes across the texts, instead of identifying characters. In Mastretta’s books, the metaphor of closed eyes is ambiguous. It suggests both women’s power and loss of power. It could signify both the ability of women to reject men and to thwart full masculine possession but also the suppression of the female self. Mastretta makes various references in her books to women having to recite an Ave María when they make love to men. For instance in Mujeres de ojos grandes, tía Leonor follows her mother’s advice when making love: ‘cerrar los ojos y decir un avemaría. En realidad, varios avemarías’ (p. 8). Similarly in Mal de amores, Sol’s mother advises her that during love-making, ‘lo mejor es cerrar los ojos y rezar un Ave María’ (p. 184). In our interview, Mastretta explained that this prayer was a form of religious suppression of female pleasure: va a haber un momento en el que tengas que cerrar los ojos. El matrimonio es muy bonito, pero va a haber un momento en el que vas a tener que cerrar los ojos y decir un Ave María. A mí me parece fatídico. ¡Es tristísimo y terrible que la gente se concentre en lo que está! En lugar de sentir plenamente, tenga que pensar en otra cosa y tenga que pensar en la religión, tenga que negar que eso le está pasando a su cuerpo, no sentirlo, negarlo, resistirse. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta, 337)

In Mal de amores and Mujeres de ojos grandes, women’s wide-open eyes point to self-assertiveness, to the ability to move beyond the established patriarchal norms of gender and behaviour. For Mastretta, they can represent women’s ability to see beyond the common horizon and to act accordingly (García, Broken Bars, p. 83). Moreover, the fact that women are able to communicate with their eyes, as in Mal de amores, emphasizes the importance of female bonding and challenges the monopoly of power traditionally exercised by the male gaze. As Jo Labanyi points out ‘if Knowledge is looking, only men can look; and what they look at is women’.36 The symbol of closed eyes representing hidden truth/Knowledge emerges in Mastretta’s El mundo iluminado: ‘Cuántas veces

35 In ‘ “Sublime, Forcément Sublime” ’: The Body in Duras’s Texts’, Romance Studies 20 (1992), 45–57, Catherine Rodgers applies the notion of the body pulled apart by desire to Marguerite Duras’s Les Yeux bleus (1980). For Rodgers, Duras reproduces negative and archetypal images of bodies and sexual stereotypes in her texts because she is not able to rid herself of all the negative values that have been attached to female sexuality and female organs (p. 54). Rodgers points out that in Duras’s texts the ‘impossibility of writing the female body from an entirely feminine perspective may explain why these descriptions are so often introduced from the point of view of a male spectator; here, perhaps unconsciously, Duras reflects the influence of phallocentric discourse’ (p. 54). The often stereotyped images of femininity offered by Poniatowska and Mastretta do not exclude alternative visions of woman based on reappraisals of gender and sexuality. 36 See ‘Voyeurism and Narrative Pleasure in Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair’, Romance Studies, 19 (Winter 1991), 105–16 (p. 107).


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cierra uno los ojos para ver y cuántas para ver mejor?’ (p. 11).37 The idea of hidden truth is also connected to the impenetrability of women by men in Mujeres de ojos grandes.38 The penetration of the vagina has traditionally been seen as the key to masculine self-knowledge. In Mujeres de ojos grandes, the pubis can be seen as a metaphor for the ultimate unknowability of women and their conscious desire to exclude men from their inner being.39 Tía Rosa is a Catholic puritan but becomes jealous of her immoral sister who has an affair with a man. One night tía Rosa has a surreal sexual dream in which she imagines her sister dancing in a carnival surrounded by men: su hermana levantaba las piernas para bailar un cancan que los demás tarareaban, pero en lugar de los calzones y los encajes [. . .] ella llevaba una falda diminuta que subía complacida enseñando sus piernas duras y su pubis cambiado de lugar. Porque sobre el sitio en el que está el pubis ella se había pintado una decoración de hojas amarillas, verdes, moradas que palpitaban como si estuviera en el centro del mundo. Y arriba de una pierna, brillante y esponjado, iba el mechón de pelo de su pubis: viajero y libre como todo en ella. (p. 52)

Here, the leaves which cover the sister’s elusive pubis evoke the religious myth of Adam and Eve. Rather than being expelled from paradise, Rosa’s sister is free to indulge her sexual instincts. The description of her pubis as ‘viajero y libre’ is, of course, a direct reference to her personal freedom. Men desire her but cannot possess her. Often the plot’s unexpected developments and endings in Mujeres de ojos grandes offer a multiplicity of possibilities for the female characters. Clemencia

37 The metaphor of closed eyes in Tinísima is also treated ambiguously. Jörgensen remarks that in the first half of the novel, the photographs suggest her passivity – seen in the manner she usually appears with her eyes closed or her face turned away from the camera. (See Beth E. Jörgensen, ‘Light-Writing: Biography and Photography in Tinísima’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen. Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 57–72 (p. 69)). In the second half of the novel, however, it is Tina who takes photographs of her lovers. She develops a strong sense of social commitment and has a much more self-assertive character (Jörgensen, p. 71). Indeed, in the second half of the novel, she reinvents herself, constantly changing from one identity to another, even changing her name on various occasions for the sake of her profession. She is a woman free of emotional and sexual ties. Here Poniatowska seeks to celebrate the social revolutionary, the photographer, whose professional work has lacked recognition historically (Jörgensen, p. 71). As we have already mentioned, both Catalina and Emilia also progress from original submissiveness to self-assertion. 38 In Tinísima, by Elena Poniatowska, Tina is impenetrable just like her ‘mata frondosa’, an unfathomable ‘triángulo que escondía todas las maravillas’ (p. 74), inaccessible to men. 39 We realize that in Tinísima Tina’s ‘pub(l)ic’ nudity serves as a screen to hide her other deeper, more complex side. Men have tried to possess her but to no avail: ‘ellos querían seducirla para siempre, hacían proyectos, ella no, “te quiero para mí”, decían; en ella ningún deseo de exclusividad [. . .] Retener, poseer creer que se es para poseer le era tan ajeno como la economía doméstica, y, hasta la fecha, no se daba cuenta que su forma de irse los enloquecía’ (p. 636).


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Ortega (Mujeres de ojos grandes), for example, does not understand why she cannot have sex with her lover without marrying him. Following a rather casual relationship, her suitor asks her to marry him. When Clemencia refuses him and says ‘en mis planes no estaba casarme’ (p. 79), her lover seeks to insult her by attacking her sense of honour: he asks her if she plans to be a whore all her life (‘¿Quieres ser una puta toda tu vida?’ (p. 79)). According to Niebylski (p. 29), in Spanish Golden Age drama, honour constituted identity and integrity but the honour code to which the lover appeals here is completely subverted by the cunning way in which the aunt turns his accusation into a threat to force him to do business: ‘Vete, antes de que te cobre el dineral que me debes’ (p. 79). The lover, of course, is taken aback and perhaps made aware of the stupidity of his accusation by Clemencia’s witty response. He leaves and marries another woman whom he does not really love but returns to Clemencia a few years later. Once again they have sex and despite being married he asks Clemencia to marry him but again she rejects him. Offended but unrelenting he then asks her to tell him that she loves him more than all the other twelve men she has slept with. Although she claims that she has not stopped loving him, she admits that her love for him is no greater than that for each of the twelve others. This time the man’s ego is so utterly shattered that he seeks to insult her yet again: ‘eres una . . .’, but Clemencia is quick to warn him: ‘Cuidado con lo que dices porque te cobro, y no te alcanza con las treinta panaderías’ (p. 79). The next day, when Clemencia opens her mail, she finds the deeds of the lover’s bread shops in her name with a simple note attached to them saying: ‘eres una terca’ (p. 81). This message shows that the lover perhaps has understood that Clemencia, however promiscuous, is honest and will be bound neither by him nor by convention. Such an unexpectedly happy ending highlights female strength of character which overshadows that of the male and reflects the ‘incurably optimistic attitude that characterizes the comic vision, an attitude that imagines individuals (even Latin males) capable of radical change’ (Niebylski, p. 38). It also shows that traditional views of women and the behaviour and gender roles expected of them are totally anachronistic. Mastretta’s use of the plot’s unexpected developments as a means of challenging traditional codes of behaviour and for demythifying taboos is also seen in the parodic short story whose protagonist is the tía Amanda Rodoreda. Mastretta resorts to humour as a strategy to contest the Malinche myth. Amanda’s mother loved two men, her husband, Daniel Rodoreda, and his best friend, Antonio Sánchez, and made love to both in the ‘cerro La Malinche’ (p. 175). Both men seem quite happy to accept this arrangement until one day Amanda’s mother announces that she has fallen pregnant and without warning Antonio disappears. Before the child is born, Daniel’s mother asks him to confirm that he is the father: ‘tuvo la delicadeza de preguntarle a su hijo si estaba seguro de que por el vientre de su mujer había pasado más que el esperma Rodoreda’ (p. 176). Both the crestfallen Daniel and his wife refuse to speak of her treachery. A beautiful daughter is born but the Rodoreda couple know that Amanda ‘era hija de Antonio Sánchez, el compadre de su papá’ (p. 175), although Amanda’s mother is mystified by ‘aquella niña tan poco parecida a los dos hombres que para su


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desgracia le cruzaron la vida’ (p. 175). The implication seems to be that there was a second lover. The identity of Amanda’s father remains unresolved upon the death of her mother. On Amanda’s twentieth birthday Antonio Sánchez returns to the city ‘hermoso y devastador como siempre’ (p. 177). Amanda gets straight to the point: ‘De usted se supone que soy hija. ¿Y a qué ha vuelto? ¿A casarse conmigo?’ (p. 178). Daniel is furious at her impertinence but Antonio reveals that he had never slept with Amanda’s mother and that Amanda was truly Daniel’s daughter. The three agree that Amanda should marry her ‘otro papá’ (p. 179). This story is punctuated by a series of unexpected developments – as with tía Clemencia Ortega’s sexual indiscretions which go unpunished (Mujeres de ojos grandes, pp. 77–81). Amanda’s mother is undoubtedly promiscuous: she has an affair with two lovers but her infidelity is forgiven by her husband. Mastretta explains that Amanda’s mother’s love for two men ‘no fue su culpa. En realidad no fue culpa de nadie. Así sucede a veces y no vale la pena desvelarse investigando por qué’ (p. 175). The implication may be that conventional views of women and in particular the social propriety long demanded of women have been relaxed and that the role of husband as jealous guardian of his wife’s honour has been superseded by a more liberal outlook. Mastretta also focuses on the taboo subject of incest in this story. Far from seeking to punish female inconstancy, Daniel not only forgives his wife’s possible love affair with his best friend but also permits his daughter Amanda to marry the same friend. This gives rise to a kind of figurative incest. Not only is female subservience called into question but the incest taboo becomes an object of ridicule. We may conclude from the above analysis that the emphasis on the sexual in the works of Mastretta and Poniatowska comes, perhaps, from the need to break with the concept of marianismo, that is, the ‘other face of machismo’.40 The explicitness with which female sexuality has been treated by female writers such as Rosario Castellanos, and more recently by Laura Esquivel, as well as Elena Poniatowska and Ángeles Mastretta, indicates that the grip of patriarchy, traditionally stronger in Mexico than in other parts of Hispanic America, is finally being broken.41

40

See Evelyn P. Stevens, ‘Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo’, in Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), pp. 89–103. According to Stevens, marianismo refers to the Latin American stereotype of the ideal woman as counterpart to the macho. A ‘real woman’ (p. 94) is ‘submissive to the demands of men’ (p. 95) and sexually ‘the ideal dictates not only premarital chastity for all women, but postnuptial frigidity. “Good” women do not enjoy coitus; they endure it when the duties of matrimony require it [. . .] “le hice el servicio”, they may say [. . .]’ (p. 96). Moreover, for Stevens, not only are these prescriptions imposed by male-dominated society on women but women too uphold this arrangement and thus are ‘not ready to relinquish their female chauvinism’ (p. 100). Some of the female characters of Mastretta and Poniatowska may not represent exemplary models of change but they clearly repudiate such outdated norms, as evidenced by tía Clemencia’s behaviour in Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes. 41 See Deborah Castillo’s Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), which explores the importance of the


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Having explored Mastretta’s treatment of female experiences such as sexuality, menstruation and masturbation, we now turn to the distinctive corporeality of her writing.

Textual Bodies and the Erotics of Language In this section the interrelationship between the physical and textual bodies in the works of Ángeles Mastretta will be explored. I also examine Mastretta’s style and technique in order to appreciate the erotics of her language, in particular, its rich sensual quality, which has received scant critical attention to date. The perception of the female body and identity as multiple and diverse emerges on a metaphorical plane, since the focus on the physical body leads to a consideration of the body of the text, highlighting the links and parallels between the physical and metaphorical bodies. When I interviewed Mastretta in 1999, the author clearly expressed the importance of the link between bodily senses, the skin and text: Me parece muy importante que el cuerpo y la piel estén presentes porque en la vida eso me parece importante [. . .] Yo quiero que los lectores sientan con lo que escribo. Yo les quiero provocar sensaciones, provocarles emociones físicas. Quiero eso. Yo quiero poner eso en palabras [. . .]. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 336)

The connection Mastretta makes between the body/sexuality and expressing the body/sexual though the written form is a link made explicit by Barthes when he compares the text with corporeal tissue which ‘se fait, se travaille à travers un entrelacs perpétuel’.42 There are several images of sewing and weaving (Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores, p. 156, and Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 19) as well as sewing and weaving explicitly linked to the body, images which at times are extremely sensual (Mal de amores, p. 168). The link between the text and the female body in Mastretta’s text emerges in the parallels that may be drawn between various examples of textual fragmentation and the images we explored earlier on relating to the female body which is frequently mutilated and fragmented by the aestheticizing and erotisizing male gaze, yet eludes all efforts to demarcate it. There are frequent images of disjointed bodies which may reflect the texts’ own instability – their nervous floating in a sea of diverse styles and discourses. Textual and linguistic fragmentation in Mastretta’s texts has an ambiguous function: while it serves as a structural

sexually liberated woman and the prostitute in Mexican fiction, breaking with traditional notions and opening unspoken spaces within which sexuality and gender can be redefined. 42 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Éditions du Seuil, 1973), p. 101. The physical (text)ure of books is also an important motif in La “Flor de lis” by Poniatowska seen, for example, when Mariana is looking for a ‘volumen empastado de piel roja’ (p. 273).


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analogue of the female fractured sense of identity, so too it highlights the multiple possibilities for the female self, as we have already discussed.43 Textual fragmentation can be seen in Mastretta’s use of Bolero verses which are quoted in Arráncame la vida and the text’s unexpected open-endedness (as we see in some of the vignettes of Mujeres de ojos grandes). The colloquial or conversational language in Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores, contributes to the diversification of the texts, as does the incorporation of Mexican popular cultural forms ranging from boleros and revolutionary corridos to children’s songs.44 In Mastretta’s Mal de amores, the intrusion of foreign discourses interrupts the reader’s pleasure. Here the text emerges plainly as a tissue of citations and a site for linguistic/textual strategies. The inclusion of boleros in Arráncame la vida, not only interferes with the reader’s pleasure but acts as a mise-en-abyme technique within the novel since the boleros partially reflect Catalina Guzmán’s sense of fragmented self, life and desire. Boleros often talk about passion, unfaithful women, the yearning for a lost love or nostalgia for the past. During one of the weekly meetings in Ascensio’s house, Catalina and Carlos Vives, her secret lover, sing duets of romantic ballads, ranging from ‘La noche de anoche’ to ‘Arráncame la vida’.

43 Textual fragmentation is perhaps a more prominent structural feature in Poniatowska’s Tinísima than in Mastretta’s texts. Charlotte Ekland has remarked that Tinísima appears to be what Kristeva describes as a sujet en procès, in continual flux, reflected at the discursive level by discontinuity, where the stylistic diversity contributes to the ambiguity and fluid identity of Tina. See ‘Tinísima: the Construction of the Self through the Structures of Narrative Discourse’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico, 1980–1995, ed. Kristine Ibsen. Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 73–84, 78–82). See also Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudies, trans. Thomas Gora et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). For Kristeva the subject is constituted in language and results from the contradictions between the symbolic and the semiotic. The semiotic refers to the drives of the body, the unconscious, the intuitive and to non-sense. The symbolic order refers to the language, the law and the order of the Father. The semiotic constantly seeks to disrupt the symbolic, resulting in the destabilization of meaning and ultimately of the self. Thus, for Kristeva, the result is that the subject is in the process of becoming. The self, which is divided between these two opposing forces must seek a balance. Tina is torn between her private world of dreams, desires and fears, and the public sphere which is dominated by men and rhetoric, a conflict especially evident when she is put on trial and her identity is called into question. The same can be said of both Emilia and Catalina. Both are subjects in the process of becoming, whose private world of personal hope for a better future and desire for sexual/professional liberation is frequently at odds with the public sphere which is predominantly male dominated where women are frequently excluded. For further discussion of the semiotic see Elizabeth A. Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. 43, and Paul Julian Smith, The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 18. 44 Visual fragmentation occurs in Mastretta’s collections of essays, Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado. As mentioned in Chapter Seven (p. 208), in ‘Máximas y decires de algunas mujeres con los ojos grandes’ (Puerto libre, pp. 125–32) which relates to female sexuality and desire, the reader’s pleasure is disrupted by the separation of the maxims by groups of three asterisks.


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According to Claudia Schaefer, the ballads that Catalina and Carlos sing to each other have symbolic meaning: ‘for Catalina and Carlos, they are confessions, cathartic assertions of freedom, emotional outlets for their mutual discoveries and pleasures’.45 But they also have an ironic function. Catalina can only express her passion for Carlos indirectly, through metaphors pertaining to the system of popular mythology, just as she can only indirectly defy her husband who is representative of the symbolic order and rigid political system. In Arráncame la vida and Mujeres de ojos grandes, the open endings underline the textual fragmentation. The ending of Mujeres de ojos grandes with the story of Verónica and her masturbatory experience may be seen as defying the patriarchal narrative pattern of tension and resolution. Such endings undermine the Rousseauist and Scholesian concept that the masturbatory act as a metaphor of writing is an essentially male act. For Scholes, the male sexual act represents the act of writing itself and the male trajectory of arousal, tumescence and detumescence, refers to the general narrative pattern of tension and resolution.46 In the masturbatory scene with tía Verónica, Mastretta has replaced the male experience with an analogous female alternative. Mastretta shows in Mujeres de ojos grandes that female masturbation and pleasure can include two highly representable instances of tumescence and detumescence, but can break this essentially male logic of tension and resolution since women’s auto-eroticism defies conventional heterosexual sex because it does not depend upon male intervention. It defies this male pattern because it is known that women can come immediately again. And again after that if they please. After she has discovered the pleasures of masturbation and her sin is subtly redeemed, Verónica, ‘desde entonces durmió y pecó como la bendita que fue’ – implying that she will do so again and again. When I interviewed Mastretta, the author expressed the importance of the multiplicity of female orgasm: Si tú ves en el mundo en el que vivimos, la posibilidad de que los hombres exploren la sexualidad femenina, con lo rica, prolongada y distinta que es, es bastante escasa. La mayoría de los hombres occidentales son impacientes. Lo que quieren es, cuando hacen el amor, tener un orgasmo y acabar. Las mujeres 45 Claudia Schaefer, ‘Popular Music as the Nexus of History, Memory, and Desire in Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida’, in Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), pp. 88–110 (pp. 101–02). 46 See Susan Winnet’s ‘Coming Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure’, PMLA, 105 (1990), 505–9 (p. 506), and Robert Scholes, ‘The Orgastic Pattern of Fiction’, in Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 26–8. Scholes, like Peter Brooks, considers male orgasm as symbolic of the structural dynamics of the novel. Susan Winnet argues that women’s textual experience is radically different, analogous to the processes of giving birth (Mujeres de ojos grandes, pp. 67–72; pp. 185–87) and breast feeding (Mal de amores, p. 38) This argument can be applied to Mal de amores which opens with Josefa giving birth as the climax to the couple’s prodigious procreative efforts. In a sense the plot repudiates arousal and climax since it traces a circle, ending, as it began, with a birth – that of Emilia’s first child. Here the procreative process is elided, providing variation within repetition.


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podemos tardar y darle pluralidad además en nuestros recuerdos. Una muchas veces puede conseguir o no grandes orgasmos cuando hace el amor pero puede recordar con más intensidad el espacio de piel del otro que tocó y eso para un hombre es una estupidez, probablemente. Pero para una mujer no. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 335)

I then asked Mastretta to what extent she believed that the multiplicity of female sexuality is reflected at a textual level in her works, for example, in the way she leaves the text’s ending unresolved. She answered: Cuando dejo los textos abiertos, yo sí creo que refleja el modo en que somos físicamente y lo dispuestos que estamos a estar abiertos con otros. ¿Por qué se tiene que elegir si elegir es siempre abandonar? Por eso para mí elegir es una de las cosas más difíciles que hay. Es inevitable pero en la vida muchas veces tienes que elegir pero en los textos no necesariamente, entonces por eso los puedes dejar abiertos. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 336)

This concept of multiplicity may be seen as an instance of what has been called écriture féminine. Hélène Cixous maintains that the female text is characterized by such open-endedness and fluidity: A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop [. . .] (it is) the manner of beginning [. . .] that marks a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides, all at once, starts twenty times, thirty times over.47 47 See Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation’, trans. Amette Kuhn, Signs, 7.1 (1981), 41–55 (p. 53). Écriture féminine is a term coined by Cixous and is associated with other French feminists such as Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who have all used this term as a means of resisting and moving beyond masculinist thinking. This resistance takes place in the form of jouissance, the physical pleasures of infancy and of adulthood repressed but not obliterated by the Law of the Father. See Rosemarie Tong, ‘Postmodern Feminism’, in Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 217–33. French Feminism maintains that there is an écriture féminine, that is, a noticeably female mode of expression which differs from male language and discourse. Irigaray, like Cixous, attempts to re-inscribe woman in plural ways and both link women’s diffuse sexuality to women’s written language. Irigaray and Cixous are among today’s French postmodern feminists who fight against traditional assumptions about truth and reality surrounding Western phallogocentric (as Jacques Derrida puts it) discourse and thought – usually gendered male. French feminists criticize totalizing structures such as language and knowledge. They also are anti-essentialist in their questioning of the traditional (male) assumptions of truth and reality. The notion of a direct relationship between language and reality is contested by French feminists. Like the self, which is unstable and diverse, language is prone to slippage. Irigaray and Cixous oppose women’s bodily experience to phallic/symbolic patterns ingrained in Western thought. If women can break with male repression in the form of jouissance (‘the reexperience of the physical pleasures of infancy and of later sexuality, repressed but not obliterated by the Law of the Father’) and speak about their sexuality with the new languages (écriture féminine) it requires, they will establish ‘a point of view (a site of différence) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart, not only in


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Open endings, and the concept of ‘starting over again’ which characterizes the lives of some of the female characters in Mastretta’s texts, often permit the expression of a diversity of sexual/life experiences. Indeed when, towards the end of Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s husband dies, we are left with a feeling of irresolution tempered by optimism about Catalina’s future, as the last words of the novel suggest: ‘Sentada en el suelo, jugando con la tierra húmeda que rodeaba la tumba de Andrés. Divertida con mi futuro, casi feliz’ (p. 238). We almost feel that another book could be written about Catalina and her new status as solterona. Textual fragmentation in both Arráncame la vida and Mujeres de ojos grandes reinforces the thematic focus on fragmentation (Catalina’s identity/sexuality and Verónica’s sexuality) which suggests positive potential for change. The open endings in Mastretta’s work conform to what Brooks perceives as the writer’s desire to break with conventional dénouements: ‘This tenuous, fictive, arbitrary status of ends clearly speaks to and speaks of a situation of plot, which no longer wishes to be seen as end-determined [. . .] claiming a final plenitude of meanings.’48 It is important to note here that Brooks identifies a series of male writers whose texts resort to open-endedness, and so undermines Cixous’s theory that this sort of writing is exclusively the female writer’s domain. Indeed Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela – which Mastretta makes reference to in various of her journalistic essays – is an example of a novel that illustrates open-endedness. Octavio Paz’s Piedra de sol is another work which illustrates both circularity and open-endedness. Sexuality at the level of the (fragmented) textual body in Mastretta’s texts is richly illustrated by means of Barthes’s (1973) concept of jouissance. In Barthes’s view of ‘the erotics of reading’, the writer must seduce and give pleasure to his reader who in turn will experience two types of sensation: plaisir and jouissance. Plaisir (pleasure of the text) relates to the reading experience typically produced by the conventional novel: ‘celui qui contente, emplit, donne de l’euphorie; celui qui vient de la culture, ne romp pas avec elle, est lié à une practique confortable de la lecture’ (Barthes, p. 25). Jouissance relates to the unexpected: ‘celui qui met en état de perte, celui qui déconforte (peut-être jusqu’à un certain ennui), fait vaciller les assises historiques, culturelles, psychologiques, du lecteur, la consistence de ses goûts, de ses valeurs et de ses souvenirs, met en crise son rapport au langage’ (Barthes, pp. 25–6). Jouissance is exemplified in the unexpected open-endedness of Mastretta’s texts, which frequently point to the female characters’ sexual liberation and to the

theory, but also in practice.’ See See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 357–70 (p. 358). For clarification of the term jouissance see pp. 295–6. 48 See Peter Brooks, ‘In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot’, in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 314.


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diversity of sexual possibilities.49 Jouissance is also achieved though Mastretta’s erotics of language. Style charged with erotic power provides a further example of sexuality at the level of the text. Linguistic playfulness is conspicuous in Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes where the writer often plays with language and turns conventional meanings upside down. Parallel structures are often found though traditional associations are frequently inverted – ‘se casó con un hombre [. . .] que resultó un desastre para los negocios y un genio para la fertilidad’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 97). Similes are equally striking, since they disturb reader expectations: ‘luego se dormía con la tentación entre los ojos, como una santa’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 126). Adjectives are used to produce a kind of linguistic carnival in which stylistic decorum is broken by excessive listing: ‘todavía hay quien recuerda el escándalo que se armó [. . .] la llamó cursi, marisabidilla, ridícula, torpe, ruin, loca, demente, posesiva, arbitraria y suma, pero sumamente tonta’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 68). Again the subversión of conventional meaning is seen when Verónica ‘pecó como la bendita que fue’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 66), tía Clemencia’s nipples ‘estaban puntiagudos como dos pirinolas’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 77) and tía Natalia’s desires are painful: ‘le dolían los deseos’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 75). Here the alliterative ‘body’ of the language is notable for its ‘erotics’ of sound rather than for its communication of any fixed meaning. The self-conscious focus of Mastretta on the ‘body’ of the words rather than on meaning, on form rather than content, is reflected in her obsession with the sound of words. Examples of onomatopoeia such as ‘boca trastabillante’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 103) proliferate in these texts and the rhythm of the prose is often chaotic in its sudden changes of pace: ‘su pecho sube y baja, su corazón late y se les hincha la nariz como a los caballos de carreras, yeguas finas, eso es lo que son, su cuerpo suelto a destreza ya no oprimido’ (La “Flor de lis”, p. 186). Mastretta is concerned with the cadencia, the rhythm of the female body, again reflected in the repetition and rhythm of words: La tía Fernanda dio por fin con la causa exacta de su extravío: era la cadencia [. . .] fue la maldita cadencia lo que la sacó de quicio. La cadencia, esa indescifrable nimiedad que hace que alguien camine de cierto modo, hable con cierto tono, mire con cierta pausa, acaricie con cierta exactitud. (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 33) 49 Tinísima by Poniatowska is a powerful example of jouissance, exemplified in the textual fragmentation, the employment of visual interference and the variety of discourses. In La “Flor de lís’’ too Poniatowska seems to have little desire to compromise with the ‘text of pleasure’. Mariana is driven by desire which is visible not only in her body/self but in the body of the text. La “Flor de lís” deals with the conflict between Mariana’s almost incestuous desire for her mother, Luz, and her desire to overcome that love as a way of achieving selfaffirmation. In this text, writing and desire are closely linked. The effects of desire are visible not only on Mariana’s body but on the text as body. The destruction of the world/self translates into the ‘destruction of the body of the text, leading to a near absence of text altogether’. A similar process occurs in Marguerite Duras’s texts. See ‘ “Sublime, Forcément Sublime”: the Body in Duras’s Texts’, p. 50.


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Mastretta powerfully evokes her obsession with the sound of words: ‘ Me cuesta hablar de mi obsesión por las palabras, por el modo en que suenan y se combinan, por cuántos adjetivos sobran y cuál es el imprescindible. [. . .] Tengo vicio por los sonidos, gusto por oír las palabras redondas, cobijadoras, tibias’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 38). Even as the author explains her obsession for linguistic play, the reader’s pleasure is broken. The narrative flow is disrupted as our attention focuses on the rhythmic words ‘redondas’, ‘cobijadoras’, ‘tibias’ which have explicit erotic significance. Mastretta plays with the sexual sounds that these words produce – so effectively that not only do they evoke erotic images, perhaps of a curvaceous, round and warm female body/word, but also compel the reader to utter these words out loud, enabling their sound to draw out their latent power. Thus Mastretta stirs in us not only mental but also physical sensations. This physical interaction with the text powerfully illustrates the text/body link in Mastretta’s works.50 Mastretta expresses the fragmentation of the feminine body by resorting to metaphors and images of fluidity, fragmentation, ambiguity and excess. The female body, as a site of obscurity, formlessness and indiscipline, finds its textual counterpart in such techniques as synaesthesia where the normal rules do not apply: female communication takes place by means of eyes rather than voice as we saw in Mal de amores (p. 24). Both body and text seem out of control in the masturbation scenes involving Catalina (Arráncame la vida). But this lack of control is experienced positively. In both texts, masturbation replaces the purposefulness of normal sexuality with play and undirected pleasure; it can be related to its textual correlatives – the substitution of linguistic diversion for meaning-creation, self-reflexiveness for referentiality, formlessness and fragmentation for coherence – and, we might add, linguistic incontinence for stylistic tightness and rigour. Her normal physical control and mental awareness dissolve in Catalina’s irrepressible jouissance: Esperé hasta que se apagaron las luces [. . .]. Me puse la mano en el timbre y la moví. Todo lo importante estaba ahí, por ahí se miraba, se oía, por ahí se pensaba. Yo no tenía cabeza, ni brazos, ni pies, ni ombligo. Las piernas se me pusieron tiesas como si quisieran desprenderse. Y sí, ahí estaba todo. (Arráncame la vida, p. 12)51 50 Asked how important the sounds of words were in her work, Mastretta replied: ‘eso me parece esencial en un escritor. Ya no digas como escritora, como lectora me parece esencial. Yo puedo encontrarme una historia que me digan que es maravillosa pero si el libro no me convoca con la música de lo que dice, no puedo ir al libro, me paro. A lo mejor hay músicas que uno obedece y músicas que no, pero yo sí creo que los sonidos son muy importantes. Yo escribo y releo en voz alta. Oigo. Me importa mucho cómo se oyen las cosas y luego cuál es el rítmo que tienen. Eso no sé por qué es, pero tengo una parte de mí que está muy emparentada a la música y tiene pasión por la música. Y yo creo que la literatura está emparentada y tiene que tener pasión por los sonidos. No puedes escribir ni hablar si no cuentas con eso’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 324). 51 Catalina’s experience resembles Mariana’s of La “Flor de lis” by Poniatowska: [. . .] no puedo dormir y de golpe me encuentro a mí misma con las dos manos sobre mi sexo [. . .]


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In the text, the jerking, jolting rhythm of the words suggests a lack of corporeal control. As the body becomes dismembered so does language and meaning. The text becomes the text of pleasure.52 Mastretta seeks desperately to find the right word to describe that female sexual experience and desire. Words cannot express intense experience: they are clumsy, trip over each other and they act as barriers to fluid communication. Their articulation is distorted by the ‘voz atropellada’ (p. 23), ‘voz en trozos’ (p. 103) (Mujeres de ojos grandes); Mastretta focuses on the sound of words rather than their sense ‘aprendió el vocabulario [. . .] que [. . .] no era sólo de palabras aquel lenguaje, también estaba hecho de tonos’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 107). Language becomes unintelligible and understanding disappears. Even the act of writing loses meaning: ‘–¿para qué sirve esto? [. . .] escribía en cualquier cuaderno toda clase de historias que después no podía leer porque con el punto final olvidaba la letra’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 138). The idea of écriture féminine is powerfully evoked through this ‘nonsensical’ play of words. For Mastretta and postmodern French feminists Cixous and Irigaray, feminine writing, like sexuality, is fragmentary and rhythmic, full of pleasures and possibilities. In our interview, Mastretta indicated her preference for writing in fragmentary rather than in uniform and continous prose: ‘Si tuviera que elegir uno de los dos, probablemente acabaría en los fragmentos porque se parece más a mí. Yo soy muy desordenada y atisbo la vida en fragmentos’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320). She often ‘scribbles’ and ‘jots down’ her thoughts on pieces of paper: ‘llevo mucho tiempo de escribir a ratitos, de escribir a saltos, de no escribir con la disciplina que acostumbro escribir’. She also sees writing not only as a conscientious act but also as something which comes from the unconscious: ‘los textos que escribes con fragmentos de la vida y con reflexiones tienen que ver con la parte consciente de ti. Estas cosas que inventas están enparentadas con una zona consciente y deliberada a ratos pero que viene de no sé dónde en otros ratos.’ Fragmentary writing obscures meaning and language becomes the central focus. Mastretta sees herself liberated from the constraints of the language typically used in the (male) discourse of journalism which she had used in Ovaciones. By means of obtrusive lists (Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado) and sexually-charged linguistic play, Mastretta

Hablo sola [. . .] escondo mis manos tras de mi cintura, las castigo, cochinas manos, no las reconozco, no son mías, no me pertenecen, puercas, sáquense [. . . .] ‘debo concentrarme en otra cosa’ [. . .] y no así, así como ahora, animal acorralado, partido en dos, la cabeza en contra de las rodillas, aterrada ante lo que bulle en mi centro (p. 263). 52 This conscious desire to produce disruptive excess is illustrated further by an episode found in La “Flor de lis”. When Mariana has concluded her masturbation she looks out of the window and spots a woman pissing (La “Flor de lis”, p. 264). This pissing becomes a metaphor for disruptive excess and fluidity. Even the ‘mancha humeante’ becomes a metaphorical excess which crops up throughout the novel as a threat to the established order of things. Scatology is an important aspect of Poniatowska’s excessive humour ( La “Flor de lis”, p. 93).


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celebrates the incoherent and irrational (so approximating to Cixous’s as yet unrealized project, écriture féminine, which envisages an alternative female symbolic system). Feminine writing is seen not solely as a new style of writing: it provides the possibility of change and subversion against patriarchy. Moreover, it is believed that by developing a new way of writing which is not bound by the rules that govern patriarchal discourse, women will change the way the man-made world writes and thinks and relocate their place within it. The preoccupation of Mastretta with the female body and female sexual liberation is also reflected in the structural discontinuities and the sensuous bodily language of her texts. Narrative flow and coherence are at times disrupted, so that the textual body parallels the physical body which is inchoate, fragmented, in pieces. The reader views the body of the text as the female protagonists often view their physical bodies – as Other, alien, beyond their grasp. Herein lies their pleasure – a physical body whose desires elude knowledge and control and a textual body whose proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. While Mastretta flirtatiously and ambiguously employs elements of écriture féminine, it remains impossible for her to write from an entirely feminine perspective, isolated from the male sphere of writing, cultural production and authority. This is why, perhaps, Mastretta, like Elena Poniatowska, finally reverts to more traditional forms of writing. Although Mastretta seeks to give an alternative view of history, literature and women, they simultaneously re-instate the old systems. The archetypal images of female bodies and sexual stereotypes Mastretta reproduces may partly be explained by the fact that she, like Poniatowska, cannot rid herself of all the stereotyped values associated with female sexuality and female organs (Rodgers, p. 54). As we have seen in the passage describing la tía Leonor in Mujeres de ojos grandes (p. 7), the physical descriptions of Mastretta’s female characters derive from an implied masculine perspective (Rodgers, p. 5). Both she and Poniatowska, perhaps unconsciously, emulate the influence of phallocentric discourse, and Mastretta’s conventional mode of writing in particular may give the impression of complicity with patriarchal systems.53 53 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 7. Because of Mastretta’s and Poniatowska’s exploration of previously taboo and repressed subjects such as orgasm, sexuality and masturbation and the emergence of certain written forms such as testimonial narrative, critics view such texts as constituting a woman’s genre which seeks to empower subaltern women. Any links which the testimonial writing of Mastretta and Poniatowska – such as Arráncame la vida and Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) – may have with écriture féminine are difficult to identify, though in many ways testimonial writing seems to have little in common with the now stereotyped perception of women’s writing as fluid and amorphous, based on intuition rather than reason. Testimonial writing is noted for its clarity of purpose, its structural unity, its concern with getting the facts straight – qualities which have led some writers to gender the genre male rather than female. See Amy K. Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 52.


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Diane Braun notes that women writers interested in social change do not have to invent a new form of language which is purely feminine. She proposes that feminist writers begin at a standpoint from within the established literary canon (Braun, p. 20). As does Poniatowska, Mastretta portrays strong and active women whose demands for political liberty reflect recent social and economic changes in Mexico. Liberated women are used to highlight woman’s ability to understand and participate in history and politics and to undermine those demeaning cultural constructions of female passivity as expounded by the conservative establishment. But in order to understand women’s desire for female representation in the public domain one must first understand her position within the private sphere. In the penultimate chapter we examine Mastretta’s essayistic and journalistic works Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998) and her most recent publication, El cielo de los leones (2003). Although Mastretta’s recognition can be attributed partially to the publication of some of the essays we find in these three collections in the monthly publication, Nexos – a magazine dedicated to the arts, science and current political affairs with a readership of over 20,000 per month – these texts have in fact received the least critical acclaim of all her works. The next chapter will therefore offer new perspectives in her essayistic and journalistic works, bringing to light the versatility and richness of Ángeles Mastretta’s writing.


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7

Shimmering Surfaces, Immeasurable Depths This chapter contextualizes Mastretta’s work with specific reference to Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998) and El cielo de los leones within current postmodernist and more specifically Post-Boom writing. Here we examine how both Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones, are defined by their postmodern elusiveness where shimmering surfaces are occasionally interrupted by unforeseen depths by exploring the themes of multiplicity, order and disorder and probe the mind of the marginal Other. Few would disagree that Mastretta’s fiction is accessible, noticeable for its uncomplicated style which works against the main thrust of much postmodern writing which favours self-reflexivity and draws attention to its own status as a production. Yet it is nevertheless tempting to use such a term as postmodernism when analysing Mastretta’s works. In very general terms, postmodernism, like modernism, expresses the need to reject boundaries between high and low forms of art and rigid genre distinctions; resorts to a self-conscious expression by emphasizing pastiche, fragmentation, discontinuity and ambiguity. The main thrust of this chapter is to highlight how Mastretta’s Puerto Libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones interweave the biographical and the fictional, often rejecting rigid genre distinctions by playfully mixing pastiche with parody, bricolage with irony. Mastretta offers a distinctive blend of the popular and the radical, erases the traditional boundaries between high culture and popular culture. As will be seen in the next section, these essayistic texts are truly postmodern in their celebration of the trivial and the chaos brought about by the contemporary world.

‘Desorden y Multiplicidad’1 Consider the following two quotations: ¿Qué lugares serán nuestros puertos libres? ¿Cuáles los sitios por los que nuestra imaginación, nuestros deseos, nuestra necesidad de embrujos y abalorios deberán cursar para ganarle a su vida algo mejor que la realidad? Quién sabe. Hemos de buscar el azar que nos regale otros refugios, otros territorios para la 1 I have chosen this title as the words ‘desorden’ and ‘multiplicidad’ persistently appear in my interview with Mastretta and throughout her texts.


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inocencia y el riesgo, la fuerza y los desvaríos. [. . .] Por todo esto he querido llamar Puerto libre a la región impertinente y ávida desde la que escribí los textos que hacen este libro, como homenaje menor a esas zonas de la euforia y el desafuero que languidecen sin remedio a la orilla del mar. (Ángeles Mastretta, Puerto libre, pp. 14–15) [To be Postmodern is] to trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in the light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing.2

These quotations may appear at first glance to be disconnected. The first, comes from Ángeles Mastretta’s Puerto libre (1993) which is a collection of short stories and essays, biographical and non-biographical writing, memoirs and anecdotes. The quotation is taken from the main story ‘Abrir un puerto’ which beautifully describes the former splendour of the Mexican ports which once bustled with life and diversity: ‘imposible encontrar simetría en las casas y las tiendas de los puertos libres, es justamente su desorden, su desigualdad, lo que las hace parecidas’ (p. 12). This variety was reflected in the rich range of goods that arrived at the ports which were then distributed throughout Mexico: Allá, los niños crecían imaginándose a las vacas holandesas de las que salía la mantequilla en lata [. . .] Allá los adultos freían su pescado con aceite de oliva español, se vestían con seda de la China [. . .] México era la patria mágica y remota a la que pertenecían, el mundo todo era su manantial y su despensa, su pasión y su encierro. (p. 11)

Above all, this multiplicity was represented by the people living in the ports, a microcosm of lo mexicano, perhaps: de todos los tamaños, de diversos colores y costumbres, de rasgos, religiones y voluntades varias. Por eso sólo se parecen a sí mismos y los rige una atmósfera de tregua y fantasías propias de los lugares habitados por quienes saben que el destino es un largo juego de azar y paciencia [. . .] Por eso están llenos de historias deslumbrantes y las cuentan como si fueran su pan diario, con el orgullo y la nostalgia de quien sabe que esas cosas sólo pueden suceder en ciertos sitios. (p. 13)

Now, these ports have become almost extinct because of modernisation: ‘llevándose con ellos su mayor calidad: su condición de comarcas privilegiadas, de lugares donde se busca y se encuentra lo insólito’ (p. 14). Mastretta advocates writing ‘como un homenaje menor a esas zonas de la euforia y el desafuero’ 2 Alan West, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, eds R. Ferguson et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), p. 19.


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(p. 15) focusing on nooks and crannies of everyday life which contribute to that rich collage which forms the basis of Mexican identity. She searches for ‘lo inusitado, las sorpresas, la febril quimera de estar en otra parte, en puertos y escondrijos que aún desconocemos’ (p. 14). We can already start to see a connection between West’s theory of cultural politics and Mastretta’s Puerto libre in their profuse, celebratory and insistent vocabulary of disarray and indecisiveness and in the syntax of parataxis: diversity, heterogeneity, the yearning to deal with parts in the absence of wholes. The provisional (‘el azar’); the shifting and changing (‘las sorpresas’), the contingent and the particular (‘costumbres y trajines’) (p. 14) are all concepts which evoke the postmodern. The postmodern or ‘suspensiveness’, to use Wilde’s term, embraces ‘chaos at all conceivable levels – universal and mundane, cosmic and quotidian’ and ‘engenders modes of acceptance that equally run the gamut of possibility from the most expansive to the most shrunken and shrivelled’ – reflecting Mastretta’s celebration of incompatible categories and her interest in their interrelatedness: Extraña correspondencia la que existe entre los deseos y la seducción, entre lo inverosímil y catedral, entre la riqueza y la casualidad, entre el mar y los volcanes, entre la valentía y el desafuero, entre las aventuras y la ventura (‘Umbral para un libro que se soñó distinto’, El cielo de los leones, p. 9).3

This universalist vision of the postmodern reflects Italo Calvino’s Borgesian theories of multiplicity in literature which attempt to project ‘the idea of a system of multiple and infinite relationships between everything and everything else’.4 Literature is an encyclopaedic projection of the world, a medley of visions, experiences and styles ‘capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes”, into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world’ (Calvino, p. 112) where everything can be ‘constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable’ (p. 124).5 Perhaps more importantly postmodern chaos and multiplicity ‘implies the tolerance of a fundamental uncertainty about the meanings and relations of things in the world and in the universe’ (Wilde, p. 132) – providing a sharp contrast with modernism’s ‘ironic vision of disconnection and disjunction [. . .] spurred by an anxiety to recuperate a lost wholeness in self-sustaining orders’ (p. 131). Whereas modernism can be understood as a lamentation of the chaos and fragmentation caused by the modern world and a yearning for unity; postmodernism celebrates the impermanence and incoherence of the contemporary world. 3

Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 135. 4 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1988), p. 112. 5 See Italo Calvino, ‘Multiplicity’, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 101–24.


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Throughout Mastretta’s collections of essays and memories – Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998) and El cielo de los leones – the celebration of the every day and the personal world is expressed in the profuse and often frenzied proliferation of adjectives and nouns which imply multiplicity, disorder and chaos: ‘en trozos, en desorden, sin más ley’ (‘Umbral para un libro que se soñó distinto’, El cielo de los leones, p. 7). The incoherence and eclecticism of the contemporary urban world is expressed through a certain juxtaposition of adjectives which are notable for their striking contrast: ‘esta ciudad horrible y bellísima [. . .] Sólo sucede que la ciudad ha crecido en horrores tanto como le brotan maravillas’ (El cielo de los leones, p. 235). Following this common spirit of disorder and multiplicity, all three texts fall comfortably within the broad boundaries of the postmodern or more specifically the Post-Boom. As we explained in the introductory chapter, the Post-Boom can be understood as a counter-project to the Boom. Unlike Boom writing, with its Byzantine philosophizing and its privileging of form over content, the writers of the Post-Boom advocate a return to simplicity, plot-centeredness and show more concern for the everyday issues than their Boom predecessors did. In his article, ‘Towards a description of the Post-Boom’, Donald Shaw outlines the general characteristics of this Latin American trend which addresses aspects of contemporary urban life and youth-culture in a free-wheeling, desultory style, which also feature in Masttretta’s Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones.6 These works of essays, short stories and autobiographical narrative are representative of modern Mexican society dominated by new technologies and the mass media.7 But Mastretta also celebrates and juxtaposes both the old and the new, the traditional and the modern depicted in her grandfather’s fascination for all 6 See Donald Shaw, ‘Towards a Description of the Post-Boom’, BHS, 66 (1989), 87–94 (p. 90). See also Salvador C. Fernández, Gustavo Sainz: Postmodernism in the Mexican Novel, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory, 7 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Fernández examines Sainz’s works in the context of postmodern Mexican fiction and highlights his use of historiographic metafiction, heteroglossia, carnival and fragmentation – techniques also found in Mastretta’s writing. A member of the ‘Onda’ generation, Sainz’s interests encompass film, music, youth culture and urban life. The frivolous and sometimes flippant tone of his work is reminiscent of Mastretta’s Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado, though in Sainz’s works, as well as Mastretta’s, such qualities are balanced by serious interest in socio-political themes (Fernández, p. 20). 7 Many of the short texts in these three collections could be regarded as journalism. Some of the essays of the three collections have been previously published in the monthly publication, Nexos. Mastretta’s popularity could be attributed – at least in part – to the availability of these texts on-line. See http://www.nexos.com.mx. Technology has contributed to the popularisation of literature and enlivened the debate about the relative merits of high and low art. El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones all straddle the border between journalism and literature, and therefore contribute to the softening of traditional boundaries between high culture and mass culture. As mentioned in Chapter Three, Mastretta, the bricoleuse, insists that both these media are constructed with the same basic materials: ‘¿En dónde está la barrera? ¿Dónde está la diferencia entre el periodismo y la literatura, si se hacen con lo mismo? Lo haces con los mismos ladrillos que la literatura’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 324). Mastretta’s inspiration for El mundo iluminado derives from her


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things modern and his obsession with the age-old tradition of bullfighting (‘El abuelo del siglo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 20). Postmodern frivolity and obsession with ‘lo cotidiano’ permeate Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones which are notable for their apparent lightness of touch and superficiality, their interest in surfaces rather than in depths. I enquired about Mastretta’s view on the popular element in her work and she told me that she is indebted to Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) by Italo Calvino, whom she acknowledges as a significant influence on her work.8 In ‘Una pasión asombrada’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 141–6), Mastretta also touches on the question of popular writing by alluding to the writer Edith Wharton whom various critics have classified ‘de conservadora, para condenarla, por supuesto’ (p. 144) for writing on mundane subjects. Mastretta is clearly using Wharton’s experience to reflect the critical reception of her own works which have been branded as ‘light’. Mastretta praises Wharton for her ability to explore both the mundane and the frivolous – ‘en el sentido que lo propone Italo Calvino’ (‘Una pasión asombrada’, p. 146) – on the one hand, and the more serious issues of the world, on the other, while still keeping a critical distance: ‘capaz de ironizar sobre la frivolidad o la mentira innata que rigió el mundo en que vivía’ (‘Una pasión asombrada’, p. 146). Mastretta’s own texts – particularly her works of fiction – are notable for the way in which they alternate between seriousness and frivolity, while maintaining a critical stance through recourse to humour and irony. Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones can be seen as Ángeles Mastretta’s desire to express the plurality of writing and the world which it reflects as a system of manifold yet stable associations between ‘everything and everything else’ (Calvino, p. 112). It is their postmodern aura of weightlessness and multiplicity which draws us into Mastretta’s fictional world. In the first story, ‘Cerrar los ojos’, in El mundo iluminado, Mastretta beckons us into her world of fantasy. She asks us to close our eyes and let our imagination wander: ‘Cerrar los ojos y convertir periódicos de la mañana en barcos de papel. Ayudar a los niños a ponerlos sobre el canal que bordea la fuente rugosa y gris del Parque México. Y ya no saber nada, nada que no sea juego y conjuro’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 13). An insignificant experience – making paper boats with children and sailing them in a fountain in a city park – is impressed upon our minds by the imagery advice column called ‘Del absurdo cotidiano’ published in Ovaciones: ‘Ese periódico era muy popular, hecho para gente que no estaba acostumbrada a leer, y cuando se encontraba algo que leer lo hacía con mucha avidez. Me llegaban cartas de taxistas, de enfermeras, de veladores [. . .] Escribía sobre lo que me mandaban en las cartas, sobre la noticia del día [. . .] Este libro está muy emparentado con esto’. Renato Ravelo, La Jornada, 7 Dec. 1998, ‘El escritor se mira en un espejo que puede romper y recrear’, http://serpiente.dgsca.unam.mx/jornada (last accessed: 11 Oct. 2004). 8 In Six Memos for the next Millenium, Calvino states: ‘My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language’ ( p. 3).


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of lightness and verbal buoyancy in this passage taken from El mundo iluminado. Here, there is clear opposition between the images and words associated with weight, dirt and routine – ‘periódicos de la mañana’, ‘rugosa y gris’ and those associated with lightness, play and innocence – ‘barcos de papel’, ‘niños’, ‘no saber nada’, ‘juego y conjuro’. But this opposition is resolved in favour of lightness: meaning is dispersed in the butterfly movements of a weightless verbal text. The newspapers – whose heavy political subject matter would require static concentration – are transformed into lightness and motion: paper boats which assume multiple images as they set sail. The imagination is left to roam playfully with weightless possibilities and knowledges. To reflect this world of lightness, Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado, and to a point, El cielo de los leones, have become a web of interweaving yet different voices and perspectives, a postmodern pastiche of discourses (literary, journalistic, documentary and historical) with proliferating references to TV and films, sexuality and pop music. These texts constitute a celebration of lightness and their fragmentary style, their plurivocity, their thematic disparity and their linguistic playfulness are truly postmodern in their endeavour to explore surfaces and to represent as far as possible a shimmering and elusive world. Their celebratory collage of discourses can be seen as an expression of the ultimate interrelatedness of all things. Mastretta says that she enjoys writing about everyday life stories: Considero un privilegio el oficio de escribir [. . .] de contar una historia para consolar o hacer felices a quienes se reconocen en ella. De contar una historia para desentrañar y bendecir la complejidad de lo que parece fácil, la importancia de lo que se supone que no importa, de lo que no registran ni los peródicos ni los libros de economía, de lo que no explican los sociólogos, no curan los médicos, ni aparece como un peldaño en nuestro currículum: de la hazaña diaria que es sobrevivir. (El mundo iluminado, p. 198)

Of all her works, El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones are the most concerned with this postmodern desire to express the non-official and the quotidian as a means of conveying human engagement with the insignificant and the routine human experience conditioned by such factors as ‘la acción piadosa de la aspirina’ (Puerto libre, p. 107), by trivial curiosity (‘¿Por qué se visten de blanco los doctores?’) or by unreflecting faith in technology: ‘creo en el lenguaje de mi computadora’ (Puerto libre, p. 107). These texts focus on all major and minor aspects of life: Mastretta’s own life, Mexico City, women’s emancipation, sexuality, love, religion, politics, fear, death and even the most banal concerns expressing the patchwork quality of the end of the twentieth century. In many ways the trivial is treated as important, and the more serious aspects of life become secondary (‘Los conversadores’, El mundo iluminado, pp. 75–80). Mastretta shares with the reader personal memories which are both frivolous and significant: attending a concert with her daughter; family trips to Acapulco (El cielo de los leones, p. 99), her fond recollections of her lecturer


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Froylan Navárez López at the ‘Facultad de Ciencias y Letras’; her acceptance speech following the award of the Rómulo Gallegos prize for Mal de amores (El mundo iluminado, pp. 197–200). In El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones, Mastretta dwells on what is often taken for granted: Creo, por ejemplo, en la sopa del mediodía [. . .] Creo en la gente que sabe estarse quieta [. . .] creo en el destino creo en los que saben trastornar su destino. (Puerto libre, ‘Fe y quimera’, pp. 107–10)

This dependence on the quotidian is reflected in the listing of these banal activities that preoccupy Mastretta: Hoy en la mañana perdí la factura del coche con que, esperanzados en que un día nos pagara el seguro, repusimos la mitad de la camioneta que nos robaron el mes antepasado. Perdí la credencial de elector que usé para identificarme el mes anterior en el banco, perdí mi bolsa, una lupa tamaño carta que heredé de mi padre y que cada vez necesito más veces, perdí tres plumas, el número de teléfono del carpintero. (‘Las olas: ritual y democracia’, El mundo iluminado, p. 133)

Mastretta’s densely enumerative style seems out of harmony with the lightness of the content. Elsewhere the eloquence of language and its cumulative weight also provides a sharp contrast with the frivolity of the themes (‘Lo que guarda el río’, El mundo iluminado, pp. 115–19). El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones are bright worlds which embrace Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ben Hur, Cindy Crawford, chat shows, CDs, Agustín Lara’s boleros, Shakespeare, cinema, computers, noisy cities, a woman who had 131 orgasms . . . . Mastretta’s celebration of the proliferating postmodern world of consumerism often takes the form of endless lists: ‘los chicles, las aspirinas, los chocolates, los perfumes, las pastillas de vitamina A, los aretes, y las bolsas de mano’ (‘Abrir un puerto’, Puerto libre, p. 12). ‘Abrir un puerto’, as we have seen, describes Mexican ports of the past and their bustling activities. The lists of imported goods are interminable: ‘vajillas chinas y mermeladas suizas, encajes de Bruselas, radios japonesas, televisores alemanes, carpetas bordadas en Asia, blusas de India, pasadores franceses, peinetas italianas, lino español, copas de cristal alemán’ (Puerto libre, ‘Abrir un puerto’, p. 12). Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and to some extent, El cielo de los leones, embody the world of bourgeois – almost carnivalesque – excess reflected for instance in the accumulation of gourmet foods and drinks (El mundo iluminado, ‘Lo que guarda el río’, p. 118). The naked consumerism and uncontrolled buying


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of ‘Mea culpa’ (Puerto libre, pp. 165–75) recalls some of the advice columns Mastretta contributed to Ovaciones in the 1980s. This fragment relates to the way people usually go over their yearly sins as they approach New Year’s Eve: Culpa de compra: Esta culpa la padecen más las mujeres que los hombres y se da al volver a la casa. Cuando salta, la acompañan lamentos y preguntas como éstas: ¿para qué compré esto? ¿cuánto costó? Me volví loca. Zapatos morados, ni que tuviera yo con qué ponérmelos. Salmón, ¿quién se lo va a comer? Tú eres la única en esta casa a la que le gusta. ¿Para qué siete libros si vas a leer uno? Etcétera. (Puerto libre, pp. 167–8).

Mastretta typecasts herself as a compulsive buyer making no bones about her addiction: Dice mi amiga Lola que yo soy la única persona que conoce que va de compras antes de irse de viaje. ¿Será porque tengo la provinciana certeza de que el Tegretol, el Redoxón, el rímel, los zapatos y las medias son mejores aquí que en cualquier otra parte? ¿Será porque creo de veras que mis viajes de trabajo son trabajo? No lo sé. El caso es que es cierto, siempre hago compras compulsivas antes de irme de viaje. (El mundo iluminado, ‘La manía de viajar’, p. 112)

In her anecdotal essay, ‘Nada como las vacaciones’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 97–105), Mastretta recalls with amusement vendors selling useless knick-knacks on a beach in Acapulco: Ellos acuden a nuestro comportamiento de lagartijas y le ofrecen a nuestro asueto toda clase de fantasías: tamarindos, vestidos, cocos, lentes, collares, caracolas, trencitas, tatuajres, quesadillas, caballos, canciones, refrescos, hileras, lanchas, tablas, paseos, motos, sombreros, faldas, pulseras, plata. Y otra vez: tamarindos, vestidos, cocos, lentes. (p. 99)

Once again Mastretta’s compressed enumerative style clashes violently with the weightlessness of the content. Also the use of alliteration (‘collares, caracoles’) is notable for its sound rather than for its communication of any rigid meaning. Just as the pages of El cielo de los leones – and even more so those of Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado – become cluttered with seemingly incongruent lists of adjectives and nouns which clash and collide with one another, so too the lives of people become crammed with useless things and possessions. While Mastretta’s lists venerate a world of infinite consumer goods, she too ironizes her own and even her children’s obsession with buying and spending: Yo les agradezco que insistan, porque si algo me urge es entrenarme en el ‘no’ como posible respuesta, como tabla de salvación, y después de algunas compras, inevitablemente hay que entregarse a practicar el ‘no, gracias’ [. . .] La ecológica Daniela se encargó de hacernos ver la crueldad que se ejerce contra


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los pobres y huesudos anuales que caminan la playa cargando gordos bajo el sol inclemente. En cambio ella y Cati se pusieron tatuajes temporales y ellos comieron quesadillas y desperdiciaron ceviches, mientras yo lamía el celofán de los tamarindos’. (El cielo de los leones, p. 100)

Mastretta’s comic irony is resonant of Guadalupe Loaeza’s Compro, luego existo (1992).9 The famous Cartesian tenet, neatly adapted to serve Loaeza’s own purposes, conveys the spirit of our times. In this text, the author goes beyond the mere enumeration of consumer needs. Buying has become a way of being for we are what we buy and eat. Through subtle uses of irony, humour and exaggeration, Loaeza attacks Mexican post-industrial society dominated as it is by the belief that getting and spending are the main goals of human life. Materialism excludes all semblance of spiritual values. In the style of Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976) she uses footnotes offering theories on consumerism which provide a powerful counterbalance to the ‘low’ and comparatively frivolous writing of the main body of the text. Material acquisitiveness suggests unsatisfied desire.10

High/Low Dialectic As we discussed in the introductory chapter, postmodernism frequently implies, to use Laura García Moreno’s term, a softening of traditional boundaries between high culture and mass culture. Such disruption of the high/low dialectic can be found in Mastretta’s three essayistic works. The incorporation of highbrow culture into daily life is facilitated by technology – cinema and TV – which has become the medium through which canonical texts and discourses 9

Guadalupe Loaeza, Compro, luego existo, 10th edn (México: Alianza Editorial, 1997). Gianni Vattimo argues that today’s postmodern society dominated by consumer values will not produce a less enlightened society, but rather a more self-conscious and transparent society leading to greater tolerance and acceptance of otredad, of a diversity of alternative cultures and subcultures, ultimately rendering society much richer, more complex and more chaotic (p. 1). See Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 10 Manuel Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976). Mastretta both parodies and celebrates with humour and a spirit of frivolity the commodities that postmodern society offers with its fun-culture and mass media. In the essay entitled ‘Guiso feminista’ (Puerto libre, pp. 117–24), Mastretta uses the language of recipe books to parody the perfect bourgeois wife who cooks the perfect meals for her husband: ‘Marichu es un encanto que algunas feministas quemarían en leña verde [. . .] pasan una hora cambiando la habitual sopa de fideos por una sopa de sesos y alcachofas, tragan la repugnancia que les provoca leer: los sesos se limpian muy bien quitando la sangre y la membrana bajo la llave de agua fría’ (p. 120). Mastretta further parodies Marichu by using French culinary terminology considered chic among the bourgeois: ‘la lechuga orejona se cambia por unos espárragos frolité’ (p. 121). Here frolité has a clear ironic effect. Despite Mastretta’s desire to offer a self-ironic portrait of her privileged status and the obsessive consumerist hype that affects her, her sensitivity is reduced by the gay abandon of tone and structure in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones.


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have been popularized and made accessible to the masses, often reaching the most remote places. Though she embraces the spirit of postmodernism, Mastretta cannot help stepping back in surprise at the collapse of traditional divisions in modern society: ‘¿Qué opinaría Shakespeare si supiera que sus obras de teatro se convierten en películas cuyos diálogos repiten los adolescentes del tardío siglo XX por el desconocido país llamado México?’ (‘Comentarios a la guerra diaria’, El mundo iluminado, p. 147). Mastretta’s celebration of surfaces can be seen as an attack on highbrow culture, which traditionally prides itself on its depth.11 In ‘Mea culpa’ (Puerto libre, pp. 165–76), the text’s title is written in Latin and is a typical example of Mastretta’s conscious employment of foreign words. But, more importantly, this text can be seen as a gentle satire of official religious discourse. The text reads like a pseudo-litany because of its Latin title and penitential listing of sins but this religiosity is undermined by the content, which is reminiscent of a newspaper advice column. Elsewhere, religion – associated with the rational and spiritual – and cooking and eating – associated with the material and the privileging of the bottom part of the body – are now treated on equal footing: ‘tras la merienda, que recuerdo como una celebración religiosa porque para ella guisar y comer eran como decir una plegaria [. . .]’ (‘Entre lo inverosímil y catedral’, El cielo de los leones, p. 37). Mastretta sets barriers only to deconstruct them. For instance she typecasts people in ‘Mea Culpa’ (Puerto libre) into categories but then she gently mocks them through humorous adjectivization. In ‘Mea culpa’ Mastretta refers to the obsessive need to produce a ‘colección de culpas anuales’ for the approaching New Year. Mastretta lists different types of ‘culposos’ who suffer either from ‘culpa de carencia’ or from ‘culpa por exceso verbal’ and proceeds to give a light-hearted description of the effects of this type of guilt followed by advice on self-improvement which might help the ‘culposo’ to overcome either his or her over-indulgence in food or excessive talking. Mastretta offers this advice to those who suffer ‘culpa por silencio’: ‘Simpre es menor que la anterior y tiene más fácil remedio. Pero trate usted de no olvidar los cumpleaños, de no faltar a los pésames, de no callarse el cariño cuando puede expresarlo, porque algunos silencios se vuelven abismos’ (Puerto libre, p. 172). In Mastretta’s obsessive list-making, even love can be categorized: ‘Los analistas hacen diferencias, hasta se dan el lujo de creer que es posible clasificar los amores. Con toda tranquilidad los llaman normales o perversos, conyugales o ilícitos, infantiles y adultos, románticos o realistas’ (Puerto libre, ‘El silencio más fino’, p. 160).

11 See Ivelisse Santiago Stommes, ‘Reflexiones de la representación: cultura popular y resistencia en Manuel Puig, Rosario Ferré y Angeles Mastretta’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, 1999, Dissertation Abstracts 9951305. Stommes shows how popular culture can be used as both an instrument for the ideological manipulation of the masses and a vehicle of resistance to that manipulation.


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Why this urge to classify and define? Mastretta herself answers with a rhetorical: ‘¿Vale la pena preguntarse?’ (El mundo iluminado, ‘Contar las bendiciones’, p. 95). All attempts to categorize seem a pointless task:12 Nosotros podríamos hacer una clasificación que dividiera a los amores entre los bizcos, los cuerdos, los epilépticos, los sidosos, los esterelizados, los aburridos, los cursis, los calculadores, los talentosos, los genios, los sosos, los litigantes, los modernos y los desempleados. Lograríamos explicar más o menos lo mismo: nada. (Puerto libre, ‘El silencio mas fino’, p. 160)

Such close application of analytical principles is ultimately futile. Lists of this kind do serve the purpose, however, of diverting the reader’s attention from meaning to style. Indeed in our interview, Mastretta claims that she compiled these lists for their own sake with no particular end in view. Of the reference to women’s 131 orgasms in Puerto libre (‘El peso del alma’, p. 30), she states: Es una lista muy divertida. No sé por qué lo hago. Creo que lo hago porque me divierto así porque la paso bien haciéndolo. Además son listas completamente contradictorias. No se podrían hacer esas listas en matématicas porque sumo naranjas con cuadernos y mujeres con gatos. Es deliberadamente y como para mi diversión y espero que a veces para los demás. Son listas en las que caben las cosas más inusitadas. Revuelvo todo. No podría salir de allí un pastel porque hay los ingredientes más extravagantes. Hago eso con muchísima frecuencia. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 319).

It is as if Mastretta were striving to write un livre sur rien, a typical postmodern feature of writing which occurs not only when tropological worlds collapse but also happens ‘whenever our attention is distracted from the projected world and made to fix on its linguistic medium’.13 Mastretta’s language is not in itself obscure; rather her repetition of words and her lists of whole phrases or single words are often so long that meaning is lost. These lists also serve to disengage language from the straitjacket of syntactical rules. There is a desire to play with words, a pleasure denied to Mastretta the journalist: ‘Allí hay ganas sólo de hacer literatura cuando aparentemente no la tengo permitida en una revista. Hay ganas de inventar’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 319). In ‘Fe y Quimera’ (Puerto libre) the author simply lists what she believes in. Thus: Creo en los sobres de colores Creo que sobreviviremos a la contaminación 12 See Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Bibliothèque des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966). Foucault refers to the typical Borgesian procedure of ‘ébranlant toutes surfaces ordonnées et tous les plans qui assagissent pour nous le foisonnement des êtres’ (p. 7). 13 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 148.


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Creo que México es un país de expertos en la sobrevivencia Creo en los muros de Ricardo Legorreta Creo en los hoteles de cinco estreLlas y en la casa de mi madre junto al río Creo en la prisa de Verónica Creo en el jugo de zanahoria y en los chocolates amargos. (Puerto libre, p. 109)

Here, the carnivalesque anti-discourse is reflected at various levels. The reader’s attention is diverted to the arrangement of the text and its visual fragmentation, a common feature of both Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado. Conventional prose is marked by its ‘spacelessness’ (McHale, p. 181) but against this ‘convention of the page of solid print as “second nature”, the introduction of blank space has the effect of foregrounding the presence and materiality of the book, and of disrupting the reality of the projected world’ (McHale, p. 181). Spatial displacement of words is a typically postmodern feature in its endeavour to produce other displacements ‘of the conventions of prose fiction’, on the one hand, and ‘of the ontological structure of the novel’ on the other (McHale, p. 181). Blank spaces in the text become in many ways a metaphor for emptiness or lightness and fragmentation. Spaces serve to divide different discursive and ontological worlds, which are often disconnected and quite frivolous. In these two texts carnivalesque fragmentation is illustrated by the way Mastretta uses completely objective discourses such as the journalistic. ‘Máximas y decires de algunas mujeres con los ojos grandes’ (Puerto libre, pp. 125–31) is also structurally incoherent, consisting of loosely arranged maxims uttered by different tías on their life philosophies. These maxims are separated by iconographic imagery (***). The only points of contact between these women are the generic term tía, the fact that their maxims relate to the body and temptation and the intertextual link we may make between these tías and those who appear in Mujeres de ojos grandes. These máximas reflect only a surface view of the complexities of love and temptation and of the personalities of the speaking subjects. The text’s layout forces us to reflect on the principles of selection and order (or lack of them) that produced such a heterogeneous assemblage. In many ways ‘Máximas y decires de algunas mujeres con los ojos grandes’ can be seen as a repudiation of reason and logic, of male discourse. Here there is no introduction or conclusion, no framing – these popular sentiments stand as they are, ‘eran distintos ellos, tan distintos de todo que parecían iguales’ (p. 131). Perhaps most importantly, the idea of playful multiplicity and the fusion of incompatible categories as a form of anti-discourse can be seen as Mastretta’s desire to celebrate intellectual ignorance. I alluded in our interview to ‘Don de lengua’ (Puerto libre, pp. 59–64) which describes a conversation between Mastretta and her daughter. Her daughter asks her endless questions such as ‘¿Por qué los médicos se visten de blanco?’, ‘¿Sabes qué quiere decir no sé?’, or ‘¿Mami, de dónde sale la lengua?’. Mastretta simply answers ‘No sé’ and the


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writer, Mastretta, goes on to describe the different uses of human language which often falls short of coherent articulation: ‘No siempre acierta la lengua’ (‘Don de lengua’, p. 63). Mastretta’s style often serves to block signification and her experimentation with linguistic ‘non-sense’ can be seen as a desire to return to a lost innocence. The author affirms that her style is not only a celebration of intellectual ignorance but also an expression of discursive multiplicity and of multiple truths: Sí, claro que es una celebración de la ignorancia, al mismo tiempo que hay una certeza de que hay muchas verdades. De que a una cosa se le pueden contestar con muchas respuestas y que ninguna está mal del mismo modo en que una sola no sería válida. Hay una vez más la urgencia de la multiplicidad. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320)

Throughout Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado, and to a point in El cielo de los leones, Mastretta’s endless questions can be seen as questioning ‘common sense’ notions. As an interrogative writer she is a questioner like her children: ‘¿Por qué si valoramos el sentido del humor encontramos vergonzoso el don de llanto?’ (‘Don de lágrimas’, Puerto libre, p. 54); ‘¿Por qué lloramos? ¿Por qué han llorado, a lo largo de la historia, en todas las culturas, todos los seres humanos?’ (‘Réquiem por unas margaritas’, El cielo de los leones, p. 87). In ‘La mujer es un misterio’ (Puerto libre, p. 105), repeated questions put in doubt received ideas about gender. In ‘El peso del alma’ (Puerto libre, p. 27), Mastretta’s unconventional, sometimes shocking questions stimulate the reader to think about the world in unusual ways. Thus: ‘¿Qúe es primero, la seducción o el deseo?’ (‘El cielo de los leones’, El cielo de los leones, p. 131); ‘¿Quién insulta, el alma o la lengua?’ (Puerto libre, p. 30) and after the woman’s largerthan-life experience of 131 orgasms, Mastretta queries humorously: ¿Qué mezcla de Humphrey Bogart, William Hurt, Al Pacino, Robert Redford y el cubano de El Padrino III colaboró en el logro de los 131 sobresaltos? [. . .] ¿Saben los expertos qué pasaría en el mundo si todas las mujeres pudieran obtener 131 orgasmos por hora? ¿Sería eso alcanzar la libertad o llegar en definitiva a la total esclavitud? (pp. 31–2)

Here Mastretta seems to be mocking precision and statistical accuracy. Her text – which offers no solution to her outrageous questions and ends with no conclusion – seems to repudiate knowledge, precision, accuracy and intellectual pretension. The mixing of high/low divisions also lends itself to another interpretation. Crammed with film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Sarita Montiel, Robert Redford, Al Pacino and literary figures such as Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Rulfo – Mastretta’s essayistic work diminishes glamour and fame by making them ordinary. In ‘Fama o Cronopio’ (El mundo iluminado) Mastretta reduces the distance between high and low forms of culture. She compares Julio Cortázar with Luis Miguel by way of indicating that just as she sees Cortázar as one of the most


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complex practitioners of late twentieth-century Latin American writing so Catalina considers Luis Miguel to be one of the coolest (‘divino’) bolero singers. Catalina explains to a friend that Cortázar ‘es un tipo al que mi mamá admira mucho – . Y como si lo supiera todo agregó: – Es como Luis Miguel para nosotros’ (p. 59). Mastretta has the most frivolous reasons for bringing the two personages together: ‘Yo lo que hice fue emparentarlos para jugar’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 318). This statement is a clear illustration of Mastretta’s writing as frivolous game whose meaning is often superficial. An important link to be made here between Julio Cortázar’s Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962) – which clearly seems to appeal to Mastretta – and Mastretta’s essayistic texts, is that both deal with the experience of the absurd and resort to comic ironization of the quotidian. Cortázar seems more intent than Mastretta in portraying the absurdity and vanity of the everyday activity. But like Mastretta, Cortázar challenges common sense notions by putting into question things that we normally take take for granted such as walking up a flight of stairs (‘Instrucciones para subir una escalera’, Historias de cronopios y de famas). Despite the apparent triviality of their texts, play and humour are key elements used by Mastretta and Cortázar to break with fixed generic boundaries. In ‘Si sobrevives, canta’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 43–9), Mastretta legitimates, justifies and celebrates popular culture. The author tells us about a personal acquaintance of hers, the poet Jaime Sabines, considered one of Mexico’s most outstanding poets whose subject matter ranges from the celebration of the everyday, to universal human values and experiences of love and death. Mastretta diminishes the poet’s legendary status (‘En México sus libros se cargan y se leen como amuletos’, p. 48) by alluding to the simplicity of his character and his penchant to play down his reputation: ‘Sabines hizo la tarde leyendo sus poemas como si estuviéramos en una cantina y él tuviera veinte años y nadie supiera de su nombre y él no supiera de la fama’ (p. 46). The now stereotyped association of poetry as a high form of art is radically challenged by Mastretta who depicts Sabines as a poet who successfully brought poetry to the streets by engaging with his audience, ‘como si fuera un juglar y no el poeta sofisticadísimo que era, nos sabíamos sus palabras y las íbamos diciendo con él’ (p. 47). Most importantly Mastretta’s desire to break with the high/low dialectic recalls the postmodern effort to engage not only with the ordinary (Wilde, p. 149), but also with an innate desire to recover human values, such as love and compassion. This search, often achieved through the destruction of fixed boundaries and the mixing of disparate elements, is extremely important, not only in Mastretta’s three volumes of essays but also in her novels, particularly Mal de amores. Mastretta says that her children are: más influenciados en sus deseos y esperanzas por los pechos de Cindy Crawford y las valentonadas de Arnold Schwarzenegger que por la mítica belleza de Helena o el estoico valor de Cuauhtémoc. Sus héroes están más cerca y son más peligrosos porque parecen asequibles un domingo de cine y


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están lejísimos de cualquier lunes en la mañana. (El mundo iluminado, ‘Comentarios a la guerra diaria’, p. 151)

Just as Julio Cortázar is placed alongside Luis Miguel, and Jaime Sabines alongside ordinary Mexicans, so ancient Greek and Aztec mythologies are put on the same plane as contemporary mass culture. In this way the full range of human emotions – desires and dreams, hopes and fears – transcend temporal, cultural and contextual boundaries. Fictional characters, movie stars, personal acquaintances – alive or dead – are reinvented through Mastretta’s works: ‘nos apuntalan, nos mueven, nos mantienen vivos, nos quitan el terror a la muerte [. . .] influyen en nuestras decisiones, cobijan nuestros secretos, conmueven y fecundan nuestra memoria’ (Puerto libre, ‘Personajes’, p. 115). ‘El perro de Quevedo’ (El mundo iluminado, pp. 81–6) not only exemplifies the conflation of disparate cultural forms but is also representative of the shattering of temporal and contextual barriers between past and present. Mastretta tells us a heart-warming anecdote of the time when her dog, Gioco, fell in love: Lo vi correr tras las vigorosas, juveniles y bien dotadas ancas de una perra Rottweiler y perderse con el hocico [. . .]. No quiso en todo el fin de semana ni escuchar nuestras voces [. . .] ni siquiera comer [. . .] Y nada lo consolaba . . . [. . .] Total pasó el día encerrado, hemos de suponer que repitiendo a Quevedo. (p. 83)

Gioco is distressed because his love is unrequited and nothing, including the advice of doctors, biologists, ‘amigos conocedores y sarcásticos’ (p. 85), Quevedo’s sonnets or Pavarotti’s music, can lift the dog’s forlorn mood (p. 85). Gioco may be a fine pedigree – ‘es el único French que anda sin correa’ (p. 82) – but the conjunction of his high amorous feelings with his low canine habits [‘se roza con los corrientes, les lame la mugre a los abandonados y huele los traseros de los elegantes cazadores que pasan a su lado remilgosos y atilados’ (p. 82)] may amuse the reader. Mastretta is gently mocking Quevedo’s sonnets, renowned for their intense descriptions of the lover’s idealization of the absent beloved and their evocation of boundless love: ‘¿y quién sino un amante que soñaba, juntara tanto infierno a tanto cielo?’ (p. 85). Quevedo depicts the lover’s dejection which often leads to suicidal despair: ‘Si hija del amor mi muerte fuese’ (p. 85). The poet’s romantic resolution of this amorous crisis is Death but Mastretta replaces this dramatic gesture with a less drastic remedy based on popular wisdom: Dénle un baño [. . .] ¿Un baño?. Así de fácil. ¿Acabará teniendo razón la suegra de mi suegra con aquello de que la infidelidad en los hombres es perdonable porque se cura con un baño? ¿Será un baño motivo de cura tan urgente e imposible?. Le dimos un baño [. . .] Había vuelto [. . .] nuestro perro era otra vez él, nuestro perro. (pp. 85–6)

Despite the banal humour this text contains, Mastretta undermines fixed boundaries by allowing a multiplicity of possibilities, with much deeper implications.


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Quevedo’s sonnets, normally reserved for the scholarly, have been popularized by transferring them to the realm of the more than ordinary life of a dog. Gioco’s passion is so deep and heartfelt that it seemingly bears comparison with those lofty sentiments portrayed by Quevedo and Shakespeare: ‘llegó el momento de regresar. Entonces, sin más piedad que la de los Montesco, atrapamos a Gioco y lo separamos de su Julieta [. . .] Todo su romance había sido una sucesión de frustraciones, saltos equívocos y esfuerzos inútiles’ (p. 84). We may laugh at Gioco’s expense but the reader cannot but help feel a sense of empathy perhaps because his behaviour is only too familiar to us. Mastretta indicated that she used Gioco’s feelings of love not only as a playful experiment but as a way of expressing her own feelings and experiences of love: ‘lo que hago allí es totalmente tramposo que es prestarme la pasión del Gioco para hablar de la mía o sus desazones para asumir las mías y las de Quevedo. Es un juego’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 317). The transposition of Golden Age sonnets into a modern context not only makes the ordinary extraordinary and vice-versa but also acts as a forceful reminder that no textual or temporal boundaries can act as a barrier to perennial human values of love and emotion. The private discourses of love, death and desire also relate to the autobiographical aspects of Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and especially El cielo de los leones. Yet while the author personalizes her texts, she universalizes the personal. She quotes Borges to express the importance of writing about the personal as a means of projecting universal human values in El mundo iluminado (‘Vivir con lujo’, p. 124) and El cielo de los leones: Me alegró reencontrar unas frases con las que Borges y su cerebro genial vinieron en mi ayuda. En ellas me amparo esta vez. Dicen así: “Quiero dejar escrita una confesión, que al mismo es íntima y general, ya que las cosas que le ocurren a un hombre les ocurren a todos” (‘No oigo cantar a las ranas’, p. 17)

The breaking down of high and low barriers in Mastretta’s essayistic texts is intrinsically intertwined with the numerous interweaving modes and styles in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones. Throughout Mastretta’s fiction and non-fiction writing, the word ‘jugar’ takes on special significance because of what its persistent employment reveals about the author’s narrative outlook. There are words and nouns which imply play and lightness and fulfil a crucial function in Mastretta’s writing: ‘el juego de su mano’ (Ninguna eternidad como la mía, p. 21), ‘sabiduría juguetona de su mirada’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 141), ‘engolosinado con el juego’ (Mal de amores, p. 131), ‘el tiempo es un juego para su juramento’ (Puerto libre, p. 46). Others combine play and chance: ‘juguete azaroso y efímero’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 174), ‘viciosa de los juegos que nos brinda el azar’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 158), ‘[q]uién siente que su vida está signada por el azar vive jugando a la lotería’ (‘Igual que un colibrí’, El cielo de los leones, p. 225) and even play and magic: ‘juego y conjuro’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 13). In El cielo de los leones, the essay entitled ‘Jugar a mares’ (pp. 111–13) is replete with references to play


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and children’s games as an important metaphor of humanity’s need to be distracted from the tribulations of the outside world by engaging in a fantasy world of recreation: ‘jugamos para entregar todas nuestras emociones a un solo pensamiento, al lujo de olvidar todo lo que de insoportable pueda haber en el mundo’ (p. 111–12). According to Ermarth play may be an important concept in the context of postmodern narrative but it has a lowly status in the world of affairs: ‘the very word “play” seems almost to gesture toward a realm outside value altogether’.14 But as she also points out, ‘systems that seek to exclude play are also seeking death’ (p. 148). Play is a key element in Mastretta’s writing, which demonstrates that writing may appear to be a frivolous game, yet carries subversive and serious implications in its endeavour to break with fixed generic boundaries. This concept of play is intrinsically linked to the Bakhtinian concept of carnival. Bakhtin linked the heterogeneous features of the novel to its historical roots in carnival ritual and the diverse verbal genres related to this popular practice. Carnivalized literature is the antithesis of long-established genres of official literature which are stylistically uniform. Carnivalized literature is: ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘flagrantly indecorous’, interweaving disparate styles and registers. Where the official genres are typically unitary, both generically and ontologically, projecting a single fictional world, carnivalized literature interrupts the text’s ontological ‘horizon’ with a multiplicity of inserted genres – letters, essays, theatrical dialogues, novels-within-the-novel, and so on. Carnivalized literature, in other words, is characterized by stylistic heteroglossia and recursive structure – features we are [. . .] familiar with in postmodernist fiction. (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 172)

The various intertwining modes and styles of communication in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado, and to an extent in El cielo de los leones, recall Bakhtin’s characterization of the novel as a heteroglossic genre composed of ‘subordinated, yet relatively autonomous, unities [. . .] [mixed] into the higher unity of the work as a whole’ (p. 262). A literary work is described as heteroglossic if it is artistically and strategically ‘dialogized’ (p. 272).15 A panoramic overview of Mastretta’s works reveals a heterogeneity of styles and discourses, where apparent lightness has a subversive effect. El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones are a collage of photographic images of Mastretta’s Mexico projected from an intensely personal view. To express this world of randomness, multiplicity and weightlessness, Mastretta employs a language which reflects this lightness: linguistic, ambivalent and humorous, juxtaposing and interweaving a variety of styles, intertextual citations and registers, flaunting long lists of items and eccentric turns of phrase. As we saw in the previous chapters, although 14 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 142–3. 15 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). See p. 426 for an explanation of Dialogism.


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they engage with more referential language, Mal de amores, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Arráncame la vida also contribute to this rich array of stylistic devices. Their plurality is located in their range of discourses (autobiographical, literary and journalistic) and registers (colloquial, official or specialized, such as the medical), their intertextual citations and references, and their stylistic excesses – frequent hyperbole and accumulation of verbs and adjectives. High/low discourses such as the fusion of orthodox and alternative medical terms and practices are used freely within Mastretta’s Mal de amores as a means of expressing a world where meaning and interpretation are unstable since traditional categories no longer apply. In both her fiction and non-fiction work, Mastretta flits from discourse to discourse, register to register and draws her reader into her world of change, flow, play, and pleasure often defying any possibility of rigid classification. In my interview with Mastretta, the author compared language to music, an essential component of carnival: ‘Me importa mucho como se oyen las cosas y luego cuál es el ritmo que tienen [. . .] Yo creo que la literatura está emparentada a la música y tiene pasión por la música’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 324). Mastretta’s own style is sonorous, rhythmic and playful, with individual words sometimes playing the part of musical notes. There are many references to boleros throughout her works, for example, Arráncame la vida, Temor, La noche de anoche (Arráncame la vida, pp. 148–9) and other musical allusions are commonplace: ‘últimos acordes’, ‘tristísimo cantar mexicano’ (Ninguna eternidad como la mía, p. 21) ‘bailando como un pájaro que ambiciona el universo’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 12), ‘Canto para la vejez’ (El cielo de los leones, p. 199). Mastretta’s language is informed by the musical, the rhythmic and occasionally by non-sense. Mastretta is obsessed with the sound of words (El mundo iluminado, p. 37). This obsession can be traced back to her childhood, when she would listen to her grandfather’s peculiar mode of speech: ‘hablaba poco, pero las frases que salían de su lengua sonaban redondas y misteriosas’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 183). Mastretta’s style produces a kind of linguistic carnival, characterized by the deployment of proliferating adjectives which divert the reader’s attention from meaning to sound: ‘inmensos y sagrados, estremecedores y por primera vez temibles’ (Puerto libre, p. 49) and ‘impasibles y heroicos, insaciables y remotos’ (Puerto libre, p. 49). The notion of language as a musical form is connected to the idea of narrative time: ‘postmodern narrative language undermines historical time and substitutes for it a new construction of temporality’. Ermarth calls this new construction ‘rhythmic time’ (p. 14). Mastretta’s sense of time is linked to a subjective, pulsating, often subconscious, sense of time: Tras concederles unos minutos a las pérdidas entran sin tregua los periódicos y su caos, la culpa, los buenos propósitos [. . .] Doy vueltas, me acerco al reloj cuyos números laten iluminados a mi derecha y se abre paso en la telaraña [. . .] a la trama de relaciones entre la mente y el cerebro, el tema del insomnio en curso. (El mundo iluminado, p. 94)


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In this sense Mastretta’s writing, like postmodern narrative, ‘can be instinctively thought of as a temporal instance of collage, or rather collage in motion’ (Ermarth, p. 8). In Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones, time is fragmentary and its discontinuity is reflected at the level of the texts’ heterogeneous discourses. Mastretta’s rhythmic language counters an excessively rationalist language ‘pulled taut to an extent that it “impoverishes” reality. Like historical time, the “symbolic” disposition of language [. . .] “communicates meaning” ’ (Ermarth, p. 146).

Postmodern Time: Stasis and Metamorphosis The high/low, serious/light dichotomies evident in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones are connected to the concept of postmodern time. All three texts speak of the fundamental human need to believe in dreams or alternative realities. Mastretta knows that books, like the visual arts, are written to be appropriated by other people: ‘si sólo se trata de eso la literatura, de inventar historias para que otros las hagan las suyas’ (Puerto libre, p. 104). They make people dream and visualize an alternative, superior ‘reality’ frequently confusing the boundaries of fiction and reality: ‘la literatura, como el cine, que es una forma de literatura, nos han acompañado a soñar despiertos tantas veces que no es extraño encontrarnos con ellos mientras dormimos y confundir el sueño de la noche con el de cualquier tarde’ (‘¿Quién Sueña?’, El cielo de los leones, p. 127). Literature is a well-told lie: ‘un conjunto de mentiras bien contadas’ (Puerto libre, p. 104). Writers like herself ‘mienten para hacer felices a otros, para reconstruir la realidad, para convertirla en algo menos inasible y ruin de lo que es’ (Puerto libre, p. 104). These texts could be seen as a quest for absolute wholeness in the apparent harmony of the quotidian and this is why perhaps these texts are so liberating for the writer. Literature provides that possibility of escape from reality, celebrating the private space of the home and childhood memories. These texts are in many ways a refuge for Mastretta’s imagination and mind. Indeed the full title of Puerto libre is in fact ‘Puerto libre: un refugio para el azar y la memoria’. The texts appear to be sealed off from the external world and to have a timeless, atemporal quality. As in Mal de amores, time is an important theme and is another vital element in postmodernism as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth indicates.16 Ermarth remarks that ‘time is often the missing link

16 Fredric Jameson also remarks on the dissolution of time in contemporary society which fragments it into a series of perpetual presents replicating the logic of consumer capitalism. According to Hal Foster, Jameson views the rise of pastiche (especially in film) as a human craving for a new and less problematic reality and a concomitant refusal to engage with the present – or with history (p. xiv). Jameson sees this refusal as a fundamental aspect of the ‘schizophrenia’ of consumer society (Foster, p. xiv). See Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’ and Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. ix–xvi and pp. 111–25.


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in discussions of postmodernism’ (p. 7) and it is certainly the case that both general theorists such as McHale and critics of the Latin American Post-Boom have little to say on the subject. Mastretta is much preoccupied with time, as some of the titles of the stories comprising Puerto libre (‘Don de tiempo’ p. 75) and El cielo de los leones (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, pp. 231–6) suggest, and in her own way she contributes to what Ermarth describes as ‘the historical construction of temporality’ (p. xi). Although there are many references to clock time – ‘Subí al lago a las siete y media’ (‘Celestes Resplandores’, El cielo de los leones, p. 185) and historical dates in both Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado (as in Mal de amores), time emerges not as a clear and measurable entity but rather as an abstract and subjective notion. Mastretta seems to mock clock time, ‘el reloj es su enemigo más acérrimo’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 76), and even questions the virtues of punctuality, efficiency and success (‘Barcos a la deriva’, Puerto libre, p. 21). Elswehere, Mastretta admits that her timekeeping is poor: ‘ando siempre litigando con el tiempo’ (‘El abuelo del siglo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 25) and that she has a passion for frittering time away: ‘soy [. . .] una perdedora de tiempo. Tengo pasión por perder el tiempo’ (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 232). The author provides the reader with a rather epicurean justification for her idleness. She remarks that life is there to be enjoyed – ‘mi pasión crucial es andar viva’ (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, p. 236) and that the highest good is pleasure. Mastretta is devoted to the pleasures of the senses ‘¿Qué haría uno sin pasiones?’ (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 236) and draws great personal satisfaction from life’s mundanities such as watching the world go by: ‘¿Quién mira la tarde aquí? ¿Quién se detiene a intentar asirla? Yo sé, vanamente, yo’ (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 232). And thus, we are told, ‘por eso tengo tan poco sentido de lo que significa perder el tiempo’ (‘Pasión por el tiempo’, p. 236). Mastretta often alludes to the notion of unmeasurable, limitless time: – ‘la idea del infinito y la eternidad’ (Puerto libre, p. 77); ‘una brizna de infinito’ (El mundo iluminado p. 69). The title of her novella is Ninguna eternidad como la mía. El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones often suggest that historical time has come to a halt. There are occasional references to historical events, but time is most often treated as a subjective daily experience comparable with concrete everyday objects: ‘la correa del perro, la receta del homeópata, la caja con libros para dedicar, la idea del tiempo’ (‘Las olas: ritual y democracia’, El mundo iluminado, p. 133). Indeed, it can assume a physical quality: ‘la sensación física del tiempo’ (Puerto libre, p. 76) although elsewhere physical time is connected with the senses – feeling, hearing, touching and smelling: Cerrar los ojos para discurrir el pasado [. . .] Cerrar los ojos a ratos, en días, y atisbar el mundo que nos mantiene vivos. Tener muy cerca siempre, cada vez que resulte imprescindible, la eternidad [. . .] las voces [. . .] el sabor a primaria de un pan dulce [. . .] el sexo de los otros [. . .] las manos de los muertos [. . .] y la certeza clara de que todo es posible debajo de la piel. (‘A ojos cerrados’, p. 15)


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Mastretta’s reality is set in a time and place completely separate from the ‘real’ world, and is self-centered, as for instance when she was writing her novel Mal de amores: ‘Muchas cosas, arduas e incomprensibles pasaron en el país mientras tuve media cabeza tomada por la fuerza de una realidad que a nadie sino a mí le importaba y que de nadie sino de mi dependía’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 39). Ironically, Mal de amores reproduces the historical construction of temporality common in both realist and humanist writing. Postmodern time is also connected with the notion of static time on the one hand and change on the other. In both El mundo iluminado and Puerto libre, such temporal tension is complemented on a personal level by Mastretta who experiences a conflict between her desire to return to an innocent wholeness and her desire for change and innovation. Such a conflict can also be interpreted as the author’s sense of duty to produce socially committed writing while at the same time seeking to write a subjective narrative. In El mundo iluminado and Puerto libre, Mastretta covers serious issues such as feminism (‘Guiso Feminista’, p. 125), ‘la mujer es un misterio’ (Puerto libre, p. 133) (‘Valientes y desaforadas’ and ‘La intimidad expuesta’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 51–4; 159–63), urban pollution (‘La ciudad entrañable’, Puerto libre, pp. 53–73), the death of Mastretta’s father and other people close to her (‘Muertos de todos nuestros días’, Puerto libre, pp. 223–7; ‘Ciao Marcelo’, El mundo iluminado, pp. 97–9; ‘Una voz hasta siempre’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 83–6); the process of writing (‘Soñar una novela’, El mundo iluminado pp. 33–9; ‘Divagaciones para Julio’ and ‘Planes para regresar al mundo’, El cielo de los leones pp. 91–5; 107–10); both national and international politics (‘Tributos a la vida’, El mundo iluminado, pp. 51–7; ‘Las mil maravillas’ and ‘Don lino Previso’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 69–73; pp. 165–8). But frequently the serious context of these works is overshadowed by Mastretta’s unthinking remarks regarding deeply complex and disturbing issues such as terrorism – ‘El chorro de agua de la fuente bailaba sobre mi cabeza que iba tratando de no pensar. Me alegré de no ser talibán, de no ser suicida, de haber nacido aquí’ (‘Celestes resplandores’, El cielo de los leones, p. 185) – and by the author’s reference to more apparently trivial concerns such as women’s make-up. Traditional feminist scholarship is dominated by the metaphor of surface and profundity, which may be connected to the subject of cosmetics. Cosmetics and dress are seen as a superficial tactic in the feminist struggle against male domination. Women – including some of Mastretta’s female characters – use beauty and cosmetics as instruments to erase the self and assume a different persona.17

17 See Debra Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 139. Jean Baudrillard states that through the use of cosmetics ‘the body is made to signify, but with signs that, strictly speaking, have no meaning [. . . .] The body is covered with appearances, [. . .] not in order to dissemble, nor to reveal, [. . .] nor even just for fun [. . .] what is invoked here is [. . .] a sacrificial challenge to the world to exist’. See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 91.


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According to Debra Castillo the literary correlative of make-up is the novela rosa (p. 52). Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores all contain elements of the romance novel. But unlike the romance novel with its typically conservative ideological strategies and its limited social agenda, Mastretta uses the folletín as a vehicle for satire and irony, challenging the conventional assumptions of male – female relations and denouncing social injustice against women. Castellanos urges Latin American women writers to ‘celebrate and polish the superficial as their particular charge in the world of letters’. She makes a ‘subversive call to re-examine an entire system of inherited values’ such as the view that woman is ‘artifice personified and man’s hidden dream’ (Castillo, 1992, p. 137). Castellanos proposes alternative possibilities for women and writers and advocates the withholding of ‘female’ knowledge and the affirmation of female property rights. She also proposes that real women need not conform to male-constructed images of femininity: Las novelistas latinoamericanas parecen haber descubierto mucho antes que Robbe-Grillet y los teóricos del nouveau roman que el universo es superficie. Y si es superficie pulámosla para que no oponga ninguna aspereza al tacto, ningún sobresalto a la Mirada. Para que brille, para que resplandezca, para que nos haga olvidar ese deseo, esa necesidad, esa manía de buscar lo que está más allá, del otro lado del velo, detrás del telón.18

But Castellanos is well aware of the stark social inequalities that divide Latin American societies: it is only upper-class women who are able to dress in beautiful clothes and garments and ‘likewise, it is leisure that allows for the elegancies of reading and writing’ (Castillo, p. 142). In ‘Herlinda Leaves’, Castellanos admits that she is also a privileged writer with material wealth who unconsciously refuses her own servants these commodities (Castillo, p. 142). Such issues are raised in ‘Dos alegrías para el camino’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 79–82), and particularly in ‘La mujer es un misterio’ (Puerto libre, pp. 133–42), which reveal Mastretta’s sense of solidarity with women of all classes and by showing an open disregard towards the traditional roles women have had to endure. But there is a deep irony in both these passages, as we shall see. Schaefer alludes to the shallowness of Mastretta’s attempts to cover the real differences that divide Mexican society in ‘La mujer es un misterio’. The same can be said of ‘Dos alegrías para el camino’. In this context, Schaefer compares Puerto libre to a kind of ‘cage of freedom and melancholy’ and draws on the anthropological work of Roger Bartra in La jaula de la melancolía: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (1996).19 Bartra’s study

18 Rosario Castellanos, Mujer que sabe latín (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984), p. 144–5. 19 Claudia Schaefer, ‘La jaula de la libertad: Puerto libre, de Ángeles Mastretta’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 21:2 (Winter 1997), 373–84, and Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1996).


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uses the concepts of metamorphosis (change) and melancholy (static time) as a base for the reconstruction of the Mexican national subject. He compares the Mexican archetype with an aquatic larva ‘capaz de reproducirse para conservar así una eterna juventud y eludir, por tanto, la metamorfosis’ (p. 42). But Bartra also believes that there is an ambiguity in this nationalist discourse and concludes that: de un lado se encuentra el sujeto activo y dinámico, se halla la idea de la metamorfosis y del cambio, la noción del Yo interrogante. Del otro lado se halla el Otro pasivo y oculto, el objeto melancólico y estático. Así la dualidad metamorfosis/melancolía pasará por diversas fases, para simbolizar una larga cadena de polaridades: Occidente y Oriente, civilización y salvajismo, revolución e inmovilidad, ciudad y campo, obreros y campesinos, razón y emoción. (p. 22)

For Bartra therefore there are two Mexican stereotypes: the progressive and the dynamic are opposed to the stoic and the static types. The first adapts to changing circumstances while the other suffers a sense of fragmented self in the face of change. Schaefer analyses Puerto libre in the light of these ambiguities, an analysis which can also be applied to El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones.20 In Mastretta’s works (Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado, El cielo de los leones and Mal de amores), static time is associated with memory and melancholy. It is connected with reviving the past (‘Invocando a la seño Pilar’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 79–82), with the ability to forget the past ‘Don de olvido’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 135), or with the desire to recuperate it ‘Los recuerdos del tío Aurelio’ (Puerto libre, p. 189), ‘Memoria y acantilado’ (Puerto libre, p. 229), ‘Muertos de todos nuestros días’ (Puerto libre, p. 223), ‘Ciao Marcelo’ (El mundo iluminado, p. 97), and ‘Una voz hasta siempre’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 83–9). The sea is a recurrent image in Mastretta’s writing (Mal de amores, Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes) – and is associated with past times and with nostalgia for lost innocence and youth: ‘ahora he puesto entre mis planes uno que me permita permanecer en el estado de inocencia y valor que predomina en mí cuando el mar está cerca’ (‘Jugar a mares’, El cielo de los leones, p. 111); ‘Barcos a la deriva’ (Puerto libre, p. 21); ‘Mar y volcanes’ (Puerto libre, pp. 43–6) and ‘Las olas: ritual y democracia’, El mundo iluminado, pp. 127–30)). In ‘Las canciones de don Aurelio’ (Puerto libre, pp. 205–16) the sea evokes many memories: ‘las olas crecidas le traen olores

20 Catalina (Arráncame la vida) and Emilia (Mal de amores) represent this duality: progressive and dynamic discourse of feminism and social change on the one hand, and stubborn adherence to the status quo through collusion with male norms, on the other. This duality may also be analysed in the light of Showalter’s criteria (see Chapter One, p. 4, n. 5). Catalina may be located between the feminine and the feminist and Emilia midway between the feminist and the female.


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de antes’. Mastretta sometimes halts the progress of time and recalls painful memories of the past: En esta época de pérdidas y pesares, cerrar los ojos para distinguir con exactitud no sólo aquello que no queremos perder, sino todo eso que nos urge imaginar, es además de un consuelo, un deber de asombro al que no podemos negarnos. (‘A ojos cerrados’, El mundo iluminado, p. 11)

Schaefer sees Puerto libre as representing a desire to return to a ‘puerto libre de la fantasía y a los espacios que evocan a la vez la felicidad (pérdida) y la nostalgia (presente)’. Both El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones also exude a sense of nostalgia for paradise lost – and in particular for childhood experiences and acquaintances. Memory resides within the private realm, the safe haven of family history. It also resides in the genealogy of the family (‘Parábola para un cumpleaños’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 193–8), the possessions of the family which create an inheritance ‘Cuando mi padre murió hace treinta años, me dejó como herencia una máquina de escribir’ (‘Si yo fuera rica’, El cielo de los leones, p. 121), providing Mastretta with a sense of rootedness and continuity (stasis). In Mastretta’s work, time often consists of memories and experiences jumbled together in no apparent sequence or order. This fragmentation can be related to Mastretta’s discontinuous style, as we have seen. Time may be abstract and elusive but its passage marks natural human cycles of birth and death. Mastretta draws on her fond memories of the past to recall her experience of first-time pregnancy and birth (pp. 179). The author also expresses anguish at the passing of time. She frequently refers to her age and the nostalgia she feels for her more youthful days: ‘No oigo cantar a las ranas’, p. 16. The uncertainty of the present and of things to come are recurrent concerns for Mastretta as they are linked to illness and the fear of death. Of the three texts examined here, El cielo de los leones is the most intensely personal examination of Mastretta’s private life. She reveals (‘Nueva York con Luciérnagas’, pp. 150–51) that she suffers from epilepsy – a debilitating illness which has left her feeling disempowered and anxious. Her exploration of illness is intrinsically linked to the process of writing. Mastretta explores the processes by which she can create meaning in both health and illness, weakness and strength, and how these are intimately intertwined with the way in which she creatively strives to make sense of such an experience to express herself. Through the self-conscious selection of people, events and memories within her autobiographical text, the process of writing not only helps her to recapture the past but also empowers Mastretta. Even though fear of illness and death frequently impede Mastretta’s creative process, writing is also a cathartic process which enables her to sustain a dialogue with herself. Writing enables Mastretta to come to terms with her illness and to heal the inner divisions this condition has caused her to suffer from and thus create a sense of a unified self: A veces, temo que un día la vida me cobre con dolor su generosidad, pero a diario prefiero gozarla que temer. [. . .] No es que tenga la salud de roble que


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desearía, pero fuera del tiempo, todo lo que necesito voy pudiendo pagarlo con el trabajo que me hace el favour de acudir a diario [. . .] mientras escribo, sueño que consigo entender de qué se trata este lío de estar viva. (‘Si yo fuera rica’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 122–3)

Mastretta’s essayistic texts represent a voyage into the realm of the author’s imagination, psyche and identity where public discourses have become part of the décor of Mastretta’s private ‘room of her own’ (Schaefer, p. 377). But Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones are also a site of conflict between the private and the public. The private/public tensions underlying Mastretta’s texts can be seen in her essay ‘Territorio mítico’ (El cielo de los leones, pp. 215–23) which formed the basis of her acceptance speech following the award of doctor honoris causa from Puebla University for her literary contributions. Paradoxically the subject matter of the speech is the city of Puebla which has provided the inspiration for her fictional world. Mastretta has frequently sought private refuge from the public space through a nostalgic return to Puebla. Mastretta’s mythical city – ‘mi territorio mítico’ (p. 215) – represents Bartra’s static larval world where the autobiographical ‘I’ seeks to resist change and to suppress the outside world by dwelling in an illusory world of fiction, subjective time, nostalgia and dream. Although Mastretta clearly enjoys the recognition she has received for her literary work, ‘la Universidad de Puebla me entrega hoy un grado que me enaltece y me alegra, un privilegio al que pretendo hacer honor el resto de mis días’ (‘Territorio mítico’, El cielo de los leones, p. 223), elsewhere she bemoans the public figure she has become. Mastretta explains that there are moments when she is unable to cope with the constant public focus, with the moments of exhaustion brought on by her book tours and of having to repeat the same things to journalists and literary critics: ‘no estar de humor para responder si sus personajes son simples mujeres inventadas por su delirio o feministas de los años setenta trasladadas a un contexto revolucionario y posrevolucionario mexicano’ (‘No oigo cantar las ranas’, El cielo de los leones, p. 16). Haunted by nostalgia for the past, Mastretta celebrates her private world of fantasy and privilege by trying in vain to protect herself and her reader from the atrocities of the outside world of change – ‘[Y]a se sabe que el mundo nuestro abunda en horrores, pero también es cierto que si seguimos vivos es porque sabemos que no le faltan maravillas, y que muchas de ellas están en nosotros tratar de alcanzarlas’ (‘Las mil maravillas’, El cielo de los leones, pp. 69–73) – and modernization which might destroy her neat equilibrium based upon culture, nation, self. For Schaefer, Mastretta’s idealization of her childhood and her effort to recapture harmonious images of family bliss unveils a fragmented vision of her own identity which she is keen to protect from a society experiencing constant change. Modernization has only benefitted a minority of Mexicans, the privileged bourgeois class to which Mastretta belongs. Alluding to an incident in ‘La mujer es un misterio’, Schaefer argues that Mastretta shares the traditional egoism of the materialistic and acquisitive middle classes.


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Here the cliché of the title is highlighted by Mastretta’s use of inverted commas. The tone of nostalgia disappears in this text and the negative impact of modernization is fully revealed, as is Mastretta’s personal sense of moral guilt. Mastretta for the first time is confronted with the Other, whose existence she had previously failed to acknowledge. In Mexico City, close to ‘una elegante zona commercial’ (p. 142), she is confronted by ‘la cara de lo otro, del pasado colectivo o del presente no modernizado. Es el otro lado del la melancolía’ (p. 382). Standing at the car window is an old woman dressed in rags, holding a ‘niño moquiento’ (p. 142). Recalling the reactions of Emilia (Mal de amores) and Catalina (Arráncame la vida) to the underpriviledged, the author explains the horror of the experience: her first instinct is to flee from the presence of the Other. Ironically she is just on her way to a conference to give a paper on the situation of women in Mexico, and realizes that she is not qualified to speak about underprivileged women: este recuerdo no evoca nostalgia por algo perdido sino una fuerte repulsión frente a su sociedad y pobreza. Más bien sirve para confirmar en su totalidad los espacios – tan contradictorios y a veces melancólicos en el sentido trágico del ‘sol negro’ de Julia Kristeva – que habitan aquellos que tienen que representar esta época. (Schaefer, p. 383)

Mastretta ends the text on a pessimistic and ironic tone: no eres tú. Es ella, es otra mujer. Tú eres una mujer que vive en otra parte, eres una escritora, una testigo [. . . .] sus preguntas que tan poco tienen que ver con las tuyas [. . .] Corrí. Y aquí estoy depués de darle vueltas por dos horas, todavía con la certidumbre de que no he tocado el misterio. (p. 142)

The encounter with the Other in ‘La mujer es un misterio’ has noticeable parallels and differences with Mastretta’s reaction to the female paupers in ‘Dos alegrías para el camino’ in El cielo de los leones. In the text ‘Dos alegrías para el camino’, Mastretta recounts how everyday when she leaves the house she comes across two female street vendors who have been selling confectioneries and various bric-a-brac on the same street corner for many years. Mastretta refers to her own privileged circumstances and the sense of guilt aroused in her by the underprivileged situation of these two women and their families: ‘No se puede decir que mirarlas me dé un golpe de felicidad, que no me dé pena, doble pena: de vergüenza y de tristeza, verlas vivir sin la vida cobijada y de privilegio en que vivo yo, a sólo tres esquinas de ellas’ (p. 78). But unlike in ‘La mujer es un misterio’, Mastretta overcomes or at least attempts to lessen her guilty conscience by way of indicating that these two women have learnt to cope with adversity and have found a measure of happiness in their depraved circumstances: hablaré de dos mujeres a quienes admiro por su alegría terca y su falta de piedad por sí mismas [. . .] que nunca reprochan su destino distinto, su país


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que es tan otro aunque también es mío, su mundo, por azar del destino y nuestros destinos, tan lejos de mi mundo. (pp. 76–8).

Yet this proves to be merely a superficial attempt to cover up the real fissures that threaten to destroy Mastretta’s happy, unified world. In both ‘La mujer es un misterio’ and ‘Dos alegrías para el camino’ the clash between two Mexicos – the one fluid and modern, the other static and fossilized, represented by the sophisticated driver of the car and the poor women on the street corner – opens up a tear or gash in the body of society, relentlessly encroaching upon Mastretta’s mythical world: ‘cada vez que se abre esta brecha en la falsa armonía diaria, se revelan los límites de la supuesta sociedad libre y moderna y se exponen los sacrificios reales y desiguales en los que se basa la misma imagen de armonía de la modernidad’ (Schaefer, p. 383).21 We may conclude that Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones are works which may appear rather superficial and random in their desultory flitting from theme to theme. By comparison, as has been seen in the previous chapters, Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores are more resolute than either Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado or El cielo de los leones in their pursuit of serious themes such as Mexican revolutionary history and the role of women in society. However Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones may be appreciated for their universal appeal and accessibility. Mastretta strives to express different aspects of the human psyche, and therefore seems to be ultimately serious rather than trivial. The autobiographical dimension of the texts allows the reader to delve into the mind of the author whose exploration of a wide range of human emotions – fear, happiness, love – experiences – birth and the loss of loved ones – and values – human solidarity and family unity – powerfully reflect the Borgesian universalization of the personal. Furthermore all three texts have strong links with Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores, most especially in their treatment of the carnivalesque and in their desire to challenge the validity of those binary oppositions upon which the order of Western logic is founded, as we have seen. I have argued throughout this book that Mastretta’s literary credentials have not been fully appreciated. The conclusion will highlight Mastretta’s popular appeal and her status as a writer of international standing. At first glance her writing may appear to be thematically superficial and technically unremarkable, but part of its originality and distinctiveness lies precisely in its unexpected depths, in its capacity to surprise the reader by its stylistic and technical subtleties, as we have seen. 21 Speaking of feminism in the United States, Carolyn Heilbrun remarks that: ‘sneering at privileged women, whether or not they recognize their difference in experience from workingclass women, has done nothing to aid the cause of feminism’. See Carolyn Heilbrun, ‘NonAutobiographies of “Privileged” Women: England and America’, in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, eds Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 64.


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8

Conclusion

Quiero ver si puedo contar una historia distinta aunque uno siempre cuente la misma historia porque es verdad esa teoría de que un escritor siempre está contando las mismas cosas. Las va contando de diferentes maneras. Pues, ¿qué cuenta un escritor? Cuenta lo que le duele, lo que le emociona, lo que le aflige, lo que le alegra. Eso es lo que cuenta. No puedes contar más que eso [. . .] Las realidades que imagino están emparentadas con la mía y son limitadas pero ¿qué voy a contar ahora? ____ ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: la escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad textual’, 339.

Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes, Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado, Mal de amores, Ninguna Eternidad como la mía and El cielo de los leones are all very different texts thematically and stylistically but all have enjoyed popular success. The reason is not difficult to explain. The award-winning and bestseller novels Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores have helped to reaffirm Mastretta’s central position in Mexican literature and as an author of international standing. Mastretta’s novels such as Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores are in some respects difficult to categorize: thematically they have revolutionary implications, whereas stylistically they are more restrained, hardly ever rebelling against the male order at the level of language. Mastretta’s work does not offer a frontal assault against established categories but rather provides intermittent challenges, questioning but also reinstating patriarchal values and structures. This study has analysed those neglected features of her works, particularly Mal de amores, which even critics well-disposed towards Mastretta have often failed to acknowledge: their subversion of hegemonic rationalist discourses, their comprehensive but often ambiguous feminist focus and their understated metafictional characteristics. Although I have revealed significant links – on both thematic and stylistic levels – between the Mexican Revolutionary Novel on the one hand and Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores on the other, I have also pointed to Mastretta’s creative rewriting of this tradition, an aspect of her work which has not received previous critical attention. Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores are important contributions to Mexican and, more generally, Latin American feminism. Mastretta’s feminism is in many respects ambiguous for while on the one hand


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her texts criticize machismo and invert the paradigms on which patriarchal binarism is founded (e.g. women are rational, men irrational in Mal de amores), they appear on the other hand to acquiesce to patriarchal systems.1 In this sense we do not always know exactly how to grasp her feminism. But the prevalent ambiguities may reflect Mastretta’s own personal circumstances. She began writing at a time when female writers were rebelling against male values, but paradoxically the most important men in her life – her father and her husband – do not conform to the stereotyped figures of male authority.2 However, within the wide-ranging socio-political focus of her narrative, gender concerns take on a special significance, underpinning the peculiar force of her writing. Mastretta’s works (both fictional and biographical writing) are peppered with words such as ‘iluminado’, ‘ojos grandes’, ‘lucidez’, ‘inteligencia’, ‘pasión’,’ signalling her hope for women’s sexual, intellectual and literary emancipation beyond the confines of a male-dominated society.3 The explicit descriptions of the female body and sexuality in Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores cannot fail to leave an impression on the reader. Mastretta shows a particular sensitivity towards the female body and its rhythms and the need to express hitherto repressed experiences such as female pleasure, masturbation and orgasm. Critics also seem to have overlooked this important focus in Mastretta’s texts. Since the publication of Mastretta’s first novel many changes have taken place in Mexico. Political corruption has diminished and fresh hopes for social justice have emerged. Women too have taken an enormous leap forward. They enjoy more rights and greater independence. Many writers like Elena Poniatowska, Brianda Domecq, Silvia Molina and of course Mastretta have helped to forge this new self-defined image of womanhood by providing alternatives to the traditional Malinche–Guadalupe axis.

1 Mastretta often portrays women with manly attributes – ‘mujeres briosas y valientes’, ‘La mujer es un misterio’, Puerto libre, p. 136 – and conversely men with ‘womanly’ qualities – ‘un hombre con sonrisa de mujer’, Mujeres de ojos grandes, p. 53. Elsewhere, however, Mastretta’s characterization of women and men displays essentialist proclivities: Cuenca’s wife is ‘una de las más hábiles descifradoras del silencio que ha dado la larga historia de esa profesión entre las mujeres’ (Mal de amores, p. 30); ‘era un hombre sensato y prudente como los hombres acostumbran fingir que son’ (Mujeres de ojos grandes, pp. 185–6). 2 Mastretta’s intimacy with these two men provides a sharp contrast with that of Isabel Allende’s fraught relationship with her father and grandfather both of whom stirred in her rebellious instincts against male domination. See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, pp. 14–15. 3 A direct link between Mastretta’s and Rosario Castellanos’s writing is a stylistic element which recurs constantly in their novels. The repetition of key words we find in Mastretta’s texts are similar to those we find in Castellanos’s texts such as ‘inteligencia’, ‘lucidez’, ‘plenitud’, ‘generosidad’, ‘solidaridad’ and which also signal Castellanos’s hope for women’s sexual, intellectual and literary emancipation beyond the confines of a male-dominated society. See Joanna O’Connell, Prospero’s Daughter: The Prose of Rosario Castellanos, Texas Pan American (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 212.


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During the next ten years women will increase their already significant contribution to the literary output of Mexico. The key question is whether they will continue to develop those key themes identified in the mid-1990s: non-supportive males, restrictive social norms and female desire to escape from patriarchal domination.4 Puerto libre seems to express the view that feminism has changed in the twenty-first century, despite some persistent inequalities between men and women: Las mujeres actuales tienen sus propias batallas y, cada vez más, hay quienes caminan desatadas, lejos del implacable designio de un ejército formado por hombres ciegos [. . .] las mujeres del fin de siglo ya no quieren delegar su destino y sus guerras al imprevisible capricho de los señores, ya ni siquiera gastan las horas en dilucidar si padecen o no una sociedad dominada por el machismo [. . .] Sin ánimo de volver a hacernos las mártires, debemos aceptar cuanto pesa buscarse un destino distinto al que se previó para nosotras, litigar, ahora frontalmente, dado que los movimientos de liberación femenina han sido aplacados porque se considera que sus demandas ya fueron satisfechas, con una sociedad que todavía no sabe asumir sin hostilidad y rencores a quienes cambian. (‘La mujer es un misterio’, Puerto libre, pp. 137–9)

In this sense, perhaps Mastretta may be seen as a member of a new generation of writers whose more moderate feminism focuses on the communal struggle against social injustice. As we have seen, Mastretta’s feminism is not static: Catalina’s selfish individualism in Arráncame la vida is replaced by Emilia’s active contribution to the revolutionary cause in Mal de amores. El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones have been enjoyed by many readers as they offer insights into the author’s range of feelings – nostalgia, fear, sorrow, joy – which will resonate with most of us. Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and to an extent El cielo de los leones are contagiously celebratory and marked by an uncomplicated, light and often playful style. The appeal of the other works can be attributed to some extent to their popular and romantic qualities.5 Mastretta herself sees an important link between lo popular and her reader: ‘todo eso está, yo creo, emparentado con el alma de la gente’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 313). All of Mastetta’s texts offer considerable entertainment irrespective of the reader’s level of competence precisely because they go against the illusion-breaking thrust of much postmodern writing which forces the reader to unravel structural and technical complexities. Silvia Molina’s La familia vino del norte (1989) and Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir

4

Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 212. 5 The achievement of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus can also be partly attributed to the same qualities. See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, p. 96, and Rodrigo Cánovas, ‘Los espíritus literarios y políticos de Isabel Allende’, Journal of Hispanic Research, 2 (1993–4), 269–78 (p. 285).


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deal with Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Mexico and therefore coincide in thematic coverage with Mastretta’s two main novels, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores; but the two former writers, to a far greater extent than Mastretta, are technically complex and work consciously against undemanding readability. Nevertheless, Mastretta’s greater attraction to a wider and less competent readership does not mean that her texts lend themselves to passive consumption: thematic complexity, discursive ambiguity, the convergence of various levels of reality and the often playful and artful style are sure to test any reader. Umberto Eco remarks that it is possible to encounter ‘elements of revolution and contestation in works that lend themselves to facile consumption’ while other seemingly provocative works ‘do not really contest anything’.6 In this sense, Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores contest masculine orthodoxy and discourse while they remain accessible to the ordinary reader. Mastretta’s achievement is all the more impressive since her work appeals to a diverse readership rather than being confined, like that of many of her contemporaries, to a closed and elite literary circle.7 Mastretta’s popularity has caused resentment among high-culture critics keen to maintain the divide between high and low art: Mastretta’s film-star image and appearance on television chat shows can only serve to widen this gap. Like Isabel Allende, Mastretta has either been omitted altogether from critical surveys or received cursory mention – despite her success in winning important literary prizes. Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones are a clear demonstration of Mastretta’s flexible narrative, which combines fictive, journalistic and historical discourse. These three collections of essays and short stories deal with topical issues such as feminism, politics, environmental pollution, love and death but the serious messages associated with such matters are often lost in the welter of seemingly inane references to popular culture. Puerto libre’s obsessive efforts to fit the whole world into 236 pages remind the reader of Borges’s La biblioteca de Babel (1941) where the author contemplates the impenetrable books as a way of expressing his chaotic vision of the universe. Borges uses the library as a metaphor of man’s ultimately futile quest for an explanation for existence. Mastretta’s El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre and El cielo de los leones are reminiscent of Borges’s ‘catálogo de catálogos’, but rather than posing an intellectual challenge for her readers, Mastretta often adopts a flippant tone, 6 See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avante-garde, Decadence, Kitch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 285. From this point of view Mastretta’s narratives may seem unambitious, but Terry Eagleton makes a very similar remark: ‘It is unwise to assume that ambiguity, indeterminacy, undecidability are always subversive against an arrogantly monological certitude; on the contrary, they are the stockin-trade of many a juridical enquiry’. See The Ideology of the Aesthetic, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 37–80. 7 In our interview it emerged that Mastretta considers the lightness of her writing as a strength rather than a weakness: ‘A mí el calificativo de ligero no vayas a creer que me hace tan infeliz porque me adscribo a la ligereza que a mí me conviene’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastertta’, 314).


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appearing to celebrate the uncertainty of human existence. These two collections seem to be mere exercises in frivolity, obsessive works of self-indulgence where individualism prevails: thus the taste of piping hot soup takes precedence over Mexico’s struggle for survival (Puerto libre, pp. 107–10). At times it is such flippancy that calls into question Mastretta’s ethical commitment. I have argued throughout this study that the main attraction of Mastretta’s writing is its elusive qualities – a kind of narrative statuslessness which resists critical analysis. It is significant that critical theory appears to have had little impact on her work – although she clearly has a subtle understanding of feminist theory, as emerges in our interview. In El mundo iluminado she openly ironizes postmodernist obsession with the superficial and inane although she herself shares this same obsession: alegraba el fastidio de semejante tumulto la presencia de dos famosas de la moda: Kritzia, la de los perfumes, las sedas y los desvaríos, y Prada la de los plásticos, y la extravagancia postmoderna capaz de pagar más caro el hule que el cuero. Tales personajes como éstos está claro son enemigas. ¿Qué diría Stendhal de la nueva nobleza de Milán? Tema, estoy segura, no le faltaría. (El mundo iluminado, ‘Lo que guarda el río’, p. 119)

The promotion of her book Male de amores on an Italian chat show was a unique experience which the postmodern Mastretta clearly relished: Tuve, para decir lo peor [. . .] que acudir a un programa de televisión llamado Constanzo Show, coordinado por un señor mezcla implacable de taxista conversador y cura de pueblo [. . .] así que además de soportar dos horas y media de un espectáculo en vivo en el que participábamos al mismo tiempo un mago, una mujer que, dada la lentitud de la justicia italiana, debía entrar a la cárcel cinco años después de haber encontrado la vida inútil y respetable que no tenía cuando cometió delitos contra la salud, robos y desfalcos, esta buena mujer lloraba [. . .] había también una vedette como de plástico, con el cabello pintado de rubia [. . .] por supuesto tenía unos pechos como pelotas de tenis y una cintura flexible y diminuta que tiñeron mi ánimo de una nostalgia por el cuerpo que nunca tuve. (El mundo iluminado, ‘Lo que guarda el río’, p. 117)

Such irony is not common in either El mundo iluminado, Puerto libre or El cielo de los leones, devoted in their different ways to the celebration of ignorance and superficiality, reflected in Mastretta’s endless lists of questions which often go unanswered (Puerto libre, ‘Don de lengua’, p. 59). This aspect of her work recalls ironic postmodern treatment of master discourses such as psychoanalysis and Marxism.8 Such lists of unanswered questions represent not only 8 For an interesting discussion of the ironic treatment of master narratives see Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, 10 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).


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Mastretta’s liking for linguistic play but also point to her desire to contest rationalist narratives by emphasizing human fallibility. Mastretta challenges set discourses as a means of emphasizing the plurality of meanings. Although critical theory seems to have had little impact on Mastretta’s writing, the broad affiliation of Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida with certain strands of New Historical writing deserves mention. Both qualify as New Historical texts according to the criteria formulated by Seymour Menton.9 New Historicism, which has influenced literary critics and historiographers, seeks to challenge authoritative (male) forms of historical writing by redirecting interest towards the non-canonical, episodic, subjective (female) aspects of history. Historical writing has long rejected the opinions of marginalized groups such as the lower classes, women, and the non-Europeans.10 Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida can be seen as historical texts in their widest sense, but their otherness comes to light in their emphasis on popular custom (Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes, Mal de amores) and mythical belief (Mal de amores). Their optimism (both political and personal) derives from the celebration of those female values suppressed by society: imagination, intuition, desire and magic (particularly in Mal de amores). At the end of the 1990s, Mastretta was going though an unproductive phase in her literary career: her inability to break new ground is clearly signalled in El cielo de los leones, which covers many of the same topics and issues as we find in Puerto libre and El mundo iluminado, and in her novella Ninguna eternidad como la mía (1999) which adopts the narrative perspective first developed in Mujeres de ojos grandes: por eso no hice una novela de ese libro porque yo sigo metida en ese aire. Igual a lo mejor ese va a seguir siendo el aire que yo respire siempre. Ya no puedo estar fundando nuevos lenguajes y muy distintos personajes cada vez. Sigo haciendo los textos cortos que me piden. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338–39)

But she did not want to repeat the same old over-used patterns: Yo no puedo dejar de ser escritora. No puedo dejar de contar historias porque voy a perder una parte de mí, y no la quiero perder, pero tampoco quiero contar sólo por contar. No puedo ponerme a repetir. Yo puedo inventar ahorita a otra mujer que defienda su derecho y su cuerpo y que quiera ser libre. Puedo inventarla pero ¿cuál va a ser el chiste de eso? ¿qué va a ver allí de nuevo que 9

Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). For Menton, the New Historical Novel is reserved for those works ‘whose action takes place completely (in some cases, predominantly) in the past – arbitrarily defined here as a past not directly experienced by the author’ (p. 16). The various aspects of New Historicism are explored in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (ed.) Kieran Ryan (London: Edward Arnold, 1986). See also Chapter Two, p. 33, p. 37 n. 31, p. 43 and p. 46 n. 55. 10 See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, (trans.) Tom Coley (New York: Columbia Press, 1998), pp. 249–50.


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me voy a contar a mí misma? Porque a lo mejor a los lectores les interesa leer una variante de lo que ya hice, pero a mí no me interesa contarlo o no necesariamente seguir contando la misma historia de otra manera. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338–39)

At that point, despite Mastretta’s disappointing level of productivity, it seemed unlikely that she had exhausted her creative potential. Indeed, she claimed to be working on a new project – an autobiographical novel set in the 1960s, the time of the destape, sexual liberation and drugs: Yo quiero contar eso. Por ejemplo, tú de pronto despertabas en una cama a la que no habías querido llegar y dices pero, ¿por qué estoy aquí? Sólo para que no me dijeran que yo era una recatada y una pudorosa, pues yo hubiera dicho no soy una recatada y una pudorosa, pero no me quiero ir a acostar contigo. Eso no aprendimos a hacerlo. Aprendimos después a hacerlo. Entonces esa historia puede ser muy divertida y muy ardua. Pero no sé cómo contarla y en ésas estoy. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 340)

Yet the publication of her most recent text, El cielo de los leones (2003), is a painful admission by the writer that she continues to be ‘metida en ese aire’, suggesting that she has not yet found the means of overcoming that fear of replicating old story lines: only a few pages into El cielo de los leones, Mastretta alludes to the female protagonist of her best-selling novel Mal de amores, professing that Emilia Sauri is ever-present in her mind: ‘la doctora Sauri, un personaje cuya propensión médica no he podido sacar de mi entrecejo’ (p. 16). I sense in Mastretta’s most recent publication a deep-seated feeling of anxiety, which only surfaced during our brief encounter: an irrational fear of not being able to achieve her successful writing efforts of the past. In El cielo de los leones, Mastretta touches upon issues of writer’s block. Just because Mastretta is not producing works which are not of the same quality as her previous writings, this does not necessarily mean that the novelist is suffering from writer’s block. When working on a narrative, some authors may take a break for several years and dedicate themselves instead to editing articles at a newspaper or magazine and producing shorter pieces of work such as lighthearted columns for national newspapers – as is the case with Mastretta (‘Sigo haciendo los textos cortos que me piden’, ‘Entrevista con Ángeles Mastretta’, 339). It is clear, however, from El cielo de los leones that at present Mastretta is finding the process of writing difficult, even onerous at times: ‘llevo meses perseguida por el deber como un loro perseguido a trapazos’ (‘Planes para regresar al mundo’, p. 108), suggesting the writer’s loss of confidence in her own craft.11 It appears at times that Mastretta has also lost all sense of direction in

11 Journalist Fabiola Santiago notes that despite Mastretta’s literary success her literary production is not as ‘copious as is expected in a marketplace where authors often produce to the tune of a book a year’. In her article, Santiago cites Thomas Colchie, Mastetta’s literary


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a welter of rambling thoughts, frequently bogged down by lack of inspiration, ‘Llevo varios meses en vilo’ (‘Planes para regresar al mundo’, El cielo de los leones, p. 107), which she blames on sleep depravation, but more significantly by the anguish she feels at the passing of time, the uncertainty of things to come, illness and death (‘No oigo cantar a las ranas, pp. 16–17). In spite of the anxiety she expresses regarding her inability to be productive, contradictorily writing is something she cannot do without: ‘mi terror al deber, mi pánico a perderlo’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 95). Mastretta is surrounded by the books of Kant, Cortázar, Austen and other writers who have been intensely productive during their literary lives. The evidence is all around Mastretta, on her bookshelves in her study. She understands why it is that the most prolific writers achieve the great successes they do and why they do not get blocked: discipline. Such writers set a daily minimum of time in front of the computer, while others prefer to write a minimum number of pages. They also produce meticulous plans for their novels: ‘sé que hay escritores que escriben tras haber diseñado el plan general que guiará su novela; es más, sé que entre esos escritores están algunos de los que admiro como nadie’ (‘Planes para regresar al mundo’, p. 109). But this sort of discipline is precisely something which Mastretta herself admits is lacking in her. As already mentioned, Mastretta talks about her predilection for writing in fragmentary rather than in uniform and continuous prose, blaming her disorganised disposition (‘Yo soy muy desordenada y atisbo la vida en fragmentos’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320) which hampers all attempts to design a plan for her next novel: ¿Cuál podría ser la metodología más adequada para organizer una lista de planes? Yo no lo sé porque siempre hago planes en desorden y me doy el lujo de suponer que en esto está la gracia de los planes [. . .] Ni con esto, yo he podido siquiera poner entre mis planes el plan de intentar un plan de novela. (‘Planes para regresar al mundo’, p. 109)

For a writer who associates writing with discipline (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320), it seems somewhat paradoxical that Mastretta should indulge herself in a series of playful activities which divert her attention from writing. Mastretta explains that during the rainy season, the month of July is an ideal period for the creative imagination: ‘es un mes hermoso para pensar, para escribir, para tener nostalgia y contar historias’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 93). Yet rather than pursuing such an endeavour, she provides the reader with an inventory of commonplace reasons and excuses for not sitting down at her desk to

agent, who remarks that Mastretta ‘publishes novels rarely, she writes every day – a diary, journalism, essays, etc. But when it comes to fiction, especially the novel, I have seen that she is very tough on herself and, more importantly, very patient. She does not leave her computer still typing away while she goes out to lunch, as some writers do. She doesn’t publish a novel a year [. . .] The marketplace is not her muse’. See http://www.hispaniconline.com/ magazine/2004/april/Features/angeles.html (Last accessed: 21 Sep. 2004).


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write: ‘No sé porqué me voy de vacaciones cuando tengo cuatrapeada en el alma una novela que ahora empezaba a buscar rumbo. Pero uno es así, cuando ve cerca el fuego se echa a correr [. . .] Iré de viajes’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 93). She frets at the thought of not accompanying her family on vacation and with child-like insistence, she is adamant that she will go with them rather than staying alone trapped in her study: ‘a mí me gana [. . .] el mundo moviéndose, desafiando, saliendo al paso de mi encierro [. . .] sino aquí me quedaría, con los dos julios en el pequeño cuarto que es mi estudio, viendo llover y pensando cuando fui joven’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 94). In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explores the view that women’s intellectual development and literary creativity are partly dependent on women’s leisure time, a room of one’s own and financial dependence. Mastretta enjoys all of these conditions: she is a writer who is intellectually free and has the financial resources to spend her time writing. Additionally Mastretta’s writing has access to and success in the male-dominated world of publishing, which suggests that the writer is privileged with an independent private space, a study of her own. In Puerto libre, the ‘room of one’s own’ had provided an airy, secure space for creative freedom. In El cielo de los leones, however, Mastretta’s study has become a threatening, stifling enclosure (‘mi encierro’), an anguished space, where the writer incessantly dwells on a more youthful and more productive past. Her fictional study is a space of claustrophobic imprisonment in which the author, suffering from mental exhaustion and anxiety, is unable to find inspiration to write her next novel. El cielo de los leones abounds in contradictory images of material comfort, on the one hand and images of escape and refuge, on the other. Such imagery points to the way in which Mastretta’s writing is marked by tensions between an almost Woolfian desire for a female space which will foment artistic creativity, on the one hand, and a fear of isolation, on the other. Within the sanctuary available to Mastretta in Puerto libre female solitude helped the author in bringing the world outside to her private space. In direct contrast to such a positive representation of female solitude, in El cielo de los leones a retreat of one’s self from the world outside does not foster in Mastretta literary and artistic creativity. On the contrary, Mastretta craves to leave behind the solitude in which she initially tried to seek artistic inspiration and now yearns to escape her self-imprisonment in favour of active participation with the real world outside. But Mastretta’s dereliction of her duties as writer arouses guilt feelings in the author: ‘Saldré corriendo de mi deber y aunque no quiera me siento culpable’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 94), and she comes to the realization that a writer cannot make much headway if sidetracked by time-honoured distractions: ‘si uno enciende pasión por las palabras no puede andar perdiéndolas cada vez que le silba la curiosidad cada vez que [. . .] Madrid como la puerta a los amigos que no ha visto, a la sopa de almejas [. . .] Qué poca personalidad’ (‘Divagaciones para Julio’, p. 94). She resorts to commonplace remedies that the blocked writer may follow to become un-blocked. For example, she uses writing to vent her blockage and describe her feelings: the frustration and doubts and fears writing can cause; she resorts to freewriting techniques by writing about anything that


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comes to her mind in no particular order of preference, by recording pell-mell daily life experiences such as drinking coffee, chatting to friends and street passers-by, watching birds flitting around on a tree, or by writing down her thoughts and ideas on the pleasures of parenting, the democratic election of Fox Quesada and feminism. Having previously provided a list of activities that hinder creativity – Mastretta now attempts to pursue her block consciously with a programme, by producing a to-do list which she hopes might instil in her the discipline to write at will and to increase her creative flow. Mastretta now reverses the process: she makes writing her first priority. All the rest is what she will do after writing. The list reads as follows: 1.

De diez a dos de la tarde, todos los días y hasta conseguirlo, redactar el plan que ordenará mi siguiente novela. 2. Conseguir una pianola. 3. Ir a la gimnasia. 4. Hacerme el análisis de colesterol. 3. Leer a Kant, a Dante, a Broch. A Jane Austen en inglés y al Quijote sin saltarme páginas. [. . .]. 5. Dormir siete horas. 8. Comprar plantas para Gijón. 12. No decirles a mis hijos que la disciplina es prescindible. 13. Tener esta certeza: todo sueño cabe en una lista de planes, incluso el que nos predispone a soñar, escribir, volver a las vacaciones (‘Regresar al mundo’, pp. 109–10) Deceptively resolute, the list appears to provide a clear outline of the author’s aims and objectives. Mastretta, the planner, can now set herself the task of writing a novel. But on a closer reading the reader soon becomes aware that the listed items do not in fact follow a conventional numeric order: thus objective ‘3. Leer a Kant . . . ’ is preceded by objective ‘4. Hacerme el análisis de cholesterol’, and ‘8. Comprar plantas para Gijón’ by ‘5. Dormir siete horas’. Mastretta’s list-making does not follow normal principles of selection and order applied to traditional inventories, and so the author seems to be mocking the conventional notions of logic and order. But Mastretta’s list also suggests that the author is unable to develop the discipline needed to establish and maintain a regular writing schedule. For Mastretta, discipline is the motive force of writing, but without discipline, writing remains an unrealizable dream: ‘todo sueño cabe en una lista de planes, incluso el que nos predispone a soñar, escribir’. Mastretta’s open and (apparently) honest writing about writer’s block could be regarded as an interesting and constructive contribution, allowing those who are not creative writers an insight into a very real problem which writers frequently experience. But one may also question whether in fact in texts such as ‘Divagaciones para Julio’ and ‘Planes para regresar al mundo’ the autobiographical also becomes in a sense the pre-text for creative writing in which Mastretta has created a fictitious author called Mastretta, pointing to the author’s ever playful and ambiguous style.


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It is clear, however, that the present impasse is difficult for Mastretta but at least her published work continues to attract attention. In 2003, Ernesto Clavijo brought to the stage at the Candela theatre in Montevido (Uruguay) a theatrical adaptation of Mujeres de ojos grandes by using a number of the vignettes relating to those indomitable aunts whose seemingly boring lifestyles are spiced-up by irrepressible sexual drives and extramarital affairs. A film version of Arráncame la vida is currently in preparation with Mexican actress Salma Hayek in the leading role.12 Stephen Hart remarks that the film version of Como agua para chocolate (1989) was successful because Esquivel’s humour and metaphorical style was transferred effectively to the screen.13 Both Catalina’s easy sociability, her crude humour and her dangerous liaisons on the one hand and Andrés’s childlike ebullience and forthright hypocrisy on the other would seem to lend themselves to cinematic portrayal. Mastretta writes because she loves to write for herself, her readers, and above all for those who have neither voice nor means to tell their own story. Mastretta writes because it is her way of expressing her mostly optimistic vision of the world, not only by using words as instruments of communication but also by emphasizing their sensuous texture and rhythm. As I read her novels, her humour, frivolity, vanity, energy and strength, revealed at first hand during our interview, condition my reading experience, making it intimate and personal as well as challenging and occasionally perplexing.

12

For an update on the projected plans for the film, see Terra, México, 14 Dec. 2001, http://www.terra.com.mx/entretenimiento/articulo/049638/, (Last accessed: 15 Apr. 2004). Mastretta is also now negotiating a film based on Mal de amores which is to be filmed in the US. Mastretta will not be writing the script for her later novel although she will have an important role during production. See Bárbara Mujica, Arráncame la vida Ángeles Mastretta: ‘Women of will in love and war’, Américas, 4 (1997), 36–43. 13 Stephen M. Hart, White Ink: Essays On Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America, Támesis, Serie A: Monografías, 156 (London and Madrid: Támesis, 1993), p. 151.

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Main works Details of first editions are followed by those referred to in the book: ——, Arráncame la vida (Mexico City: Océano, 1985) 5th edn (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1996) ——, Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos (Alfaguara Ediciones: 2003) ——, El cielo de los leones (Mexico City: Editorial Seix Barral, 2003) ——, El mundo iluminado (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1998) 4th edn (Mexico City: Cal y arena, 1999) ——, La pájara pinta (Mexico City: Altiplano, 1975) ——, Mal de amores (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1996) 5th edn (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996) ——, Mujeres de ojos grandes (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1990) 6th edn (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996) —— Ninguna eternidad como la mía (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1999) ——, Puerto libre (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1993) (Madrid: El País/ Aguilar, 1994) Other Fem, ‘El albañil de los ojos oscuros’, 16 (1980), 69–70 ——, ‘Rosa Luz Alegría: ¿Triunfo feminista?’, 15 (1980), 83–4 ——, ‘Un amante con lengua de cometa’, 49 (1987), 61–2 Mastretta, Ángeles, et al., Explore the World: Nelles Guide Mexico, 2nd ed. (Slovenia: Nelles, 1998) Nexos Virtual, ‘Ecos del imperio: Una conversación de Fernando del Paso y Ángeles Mastretta’, http://www.nexos.com.mx/archivo_nexos, July 1989: 138 (last accessed: 23 Dec. 2004) ——, ‘Laura Díaz y Carlos Fuentes: la edad de sus tiempos’, http://www. nexos.com.mx, July 1999: 259 (last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004) Ovaciones, ‘Del absurdo cotidianio’ Interviews with Ángeles Mastretta Carrera, Mauricio, ‘La tierra de la gran promesa’, La Jornada, 20 July 1997, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1997/jul97 (last accessed: 14 Dec. 2004) De Beer, Gabriella, ‘Interview with Ángeles Mastretta’, Latin American Literature and Arts, 48 (Spring 1994), 14–17 García, Kay S, ‘Ángeles Mastretta: Interview.’ in Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 71–87


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Hernández, Arturo García, ‘Galardón a Mastretta’, La Jornada, 5 July 1997, http:// www.jornada.unam.mx/1997/jul97/970705/mastretta.html (last accessed: 19 Dec. 2004) Lavery, Jane, ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: la escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad textual’, Anales de literatura hispanoamericana, 30 (2001), 313–40 Litwin, Adriana. ‘Lo privado y lo público según Ángeles Mastretta’, La feria del libro de Buenos Aires. 10 May 1997, http//www.bigital.com (last accessed: 20 Dec. 2004) Peralta, Braulio, ‘Mi novela es una historia, no un ensayo feminista: Ángeles Mastretta,’ La Jornada, 11 June 1985, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/index.html (last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004) Ravelo, Renato, La Jornada, 7 Dec. 1998, ‘El escritor se mira en un espejo que puederompery recrear’, http://serpiente.dgsca.unam.mx/jornada/1998/dic98 (last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS Accettola, Jennifer R., ‘La flor de un sexenio: Women in Contemporary Politics’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tulane, 1995. Dissertation Abstracts, 1995. 1376436, http://www.planetx.org. (last accessed: 10 Sept. 2004) Adams, J. N., The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982) Alegría, Juana Armanda, Psicología de las mexicanas (México: Editorial Samo, 1974) Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espíritus (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1982) Anderson, Danny J., ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida, by Angeles Mastretta’, PMLA, 21:1 (Spring 1988), 15–27 ——, ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida’, in Ibsen, pp. 13–27 Apter Cragnolino, Aida, ‘Jugando con el melodrama: género literario y mirada femenina en Arráncame la vida de Angeles Mastretta’, Confluencia, 11:1 (Fall 1995), 126–33 Arciniega, V. Díaz, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989) Azuela, M., Los de abajo (1911), NRM, I (El Paso, Texas, 1916), pp. 53–113 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) ——, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, I (Austin: University of Texas, 1981) Balderston, Daniel, ‘The New Historical Novel: History and Fantasy in Los recuerdos del porvenir’, BHS, 66 (1989), 41–6 Barbara Mujica, ‘Ángeles Mastretta: women of will in love and war’, Las Mujeres, http://www.lasmujeres.com/angelesmastretta/women1.shtml (last accessed: 14 Apr. 2004) Barnet, M., ‘La novela testimonio. Socio-literatura’, in Testimonio y literatura, eds René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986) Barrera, Trinidad, ‘Tácticas, estrategias y utopías de Ángeles Mastretta’, Insula, 618–619 (June–July 1998), 33–5


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Turner, Frederick C., ‘Los efectos de la participación femenina en la revolución de 1910’, Historia Mexicana, 16 (1966–67), 603–20 Usigli, Rodolfo, ‘Doce Notas’, in Teatro Completo de Rodolfo Usigli III (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979), pp. 478–94 Vattimo, Gianni, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) Vaughn, Jeanne, ‘¿En dónde van a florear?: La “Flor de Lis”, and the Problematics of Identity’, in Ibsen, pp. 41–56 Villegas Cosío, D., et al. (eds), Historia mínima de México, 6th edn (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1981) Vital, Alberto, ‘Erotismo, feminismo y postfeminismo’, Texto Crítico, 7 (JulyDecember 1998), 25–34 Volek, E., ‘Mexico: 20th-century Prose and Poetry’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy Dearbourn, 1997), pp. 548–55 ——, ‘Testimonial Writing’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith, pp. 783–5 Walker, Nancy A., Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990) West, Alan, ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, eds R. Ferguson et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990) Whitford, M. (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) Wilde, Alan, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) Williams, Raymond Leslie, The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture and the Crisis of the Truth (London: Macmillan, 1995) Williamson, E., The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin Books, 1992) Winnet, Susan, ‘Coming Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure’, PMLA, 105 (1990), 505–9 Wise, Yael Halevi, ‘Storytelling in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate’, in Ibsen (1997) pp. 123–31 Woiwode, Kristen M., ‘El uso del bildungsroman en ‘Arráncame la vida’: la desmitificación del estereotipo femenino en la literatura mexicana’. Unpublished Master of Arts, University of Rice, 1998. MA Abstracts, 1389134 Yáñez, A., Al filo del agua, 15th edn (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1978) Young, Dolly J., and William, D., ‘The New Journalism in Mexico: Two Women Writers’, Chasqui, 12:2–3 (1983), 72–80 Yúdice, G., ‘¿Puede hablarse de posmodernidad en América Latina?’, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 4.1 (1990), 105–28 ——, ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’, Latin American Perspectives, 70:1 (1991), 15–32 ——, et al. (eds), On Edge: the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, Cultural Politics, 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)


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Index The titles of Mastretta’s works are emboldened. Accettola, Jennifer R., 40–41, 40–41 n.40 adultery in Arráncame la vida, 57, 58, 60, 63, 69, 70, 76, 110, 111, 141–42 146, 149–50, 151, 155, 175, 178, 179, 180–81 in Mal de amores, 98, 104, 109, 110, 126, 147–49, 178, 180–81, 182 in Mexican society, 43 in Mujeres de ojos grandes, 178, 178 n.31, 180–81, 184–86 novel of adultery, 148–49, 150 Agustín Lara, 17 n.35, 120–21, 203 in Arráncame la vida, 17 n.35 Luis Miguel, 17, 209–10, 211 Allende, Isabel, 6, 7, 10, 11, 43 n.44, 61, 119, 123, 126, 127, 130, 131, 158, 158 n.26, 225, 225 n.2, 227 see also Davies, Lloyd Hughes Amaryll, Chanady, 129–30, 129 n.2, 129 n.5 Anderson, Danny J., 62, 67, 77, 175 antiespañolismo, 24–26 see also Díaz, Porfirio antiyanquismo, 23, 24–26, 31 see also Díaz, Porfirio Apter-Cragnolino, Aída Arráncame la vida and La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, 55–56 Arciniega, V. Díaz, 35 Arráncame la vida, 1, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16–20, 22, 24–26, 30–32, 37, 42, 43, 47, 48–84, 85–89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 112–14, 120, 121, 124, 136, 137, 139, 141–43, 146–53, 154–58, 154 n.23, 156 n.24, 157 n.25, 160, 169–76, 178, 181, 182, 188, 189, 191, 214, 218, 219, 219 n.20, 222–27, 229, 234, 234 n.12 and literary parallels with La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 55–56 as Bildungsroman, 89–90

carnivalesque in, 136–39, 141–42, 144, 146–53 and the grotesque, 153–58 comparative analysis with Mal de amores, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17–19, 22, 24, 48, 50, 67, 73, 84–93, 95, 97, 101, 104, 112–14, 120, 124, 142, 143, 146–48, 150, 153, 154, 170–72, 175, 181, 182, 188, 224–27, 229 critical studies on, 16 death and murder in, 27, 50, 52, 54, 58–61, 64, 65, 70, 82, 97, 156 father figures in, 52, 57–58, 60–63, 70, 173 female characters in, 50, 51, 66, 69, 70–71, 86–95, 112–15, 137, 144–45, 148–50, 157–58 female solidarity, 141–42 lack of female solidarity in, 66, 67, 70, 93, 111–15 male characters in, 51, 54, 59, 66, 69, 70–71, 91, 94, 148, 150, 152 monstrous motherhood in, 154–58 see also Camacho, Maximino Ávila; Catalina Guzmán (Arráncame la vida); Cárdenas, Lázaro; characters (Arráncame la vida); female sexuality; feminism; Mexican Revolution; Mexican Revolutionary Novels; testimonial narrative Azuela, Mariano, 34, 34 n.23, 86, 126 Bakhtin, Mikhail and carnival, 136, 136 n.13 on dialogism, 87, 213 n.15 on eccentricity, 150 on heteroglossia, 213, 213 n.15 on parody, 152 see also carnivalesque Barnet, Miguel, 71, 71 n.25, 72, 72 n.26, 74 n.35 Barrera, Trinidad, 85, 87


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Barthes, Roland, 7 and jouissance and plaisir, 190, 190 n.47, 191, 192, 192 n.49, 193 and structuralist analysis of myth, 125 n.1 on corporeal tissue, 187, 187 n.42 see also Cixous, Hélène; Kristeva, Julia Bartra, Roger in El cielo de los leones, 221 in Puerto libre, 218–19 on caciquismo, 53–54, 54 n.8 on melancholy and metamorphosis, 125, 125 n.1, 218–19, 219 n.20, 221 Baudrillard, Jean, 217 n.17 Beardsell, Peter, 129, 129 n.4, 130, 167 best-seller, 47, 224 see also light writing Beverley, John, 5, 74, 78, 83 body, 45, 104, 106, 161, 162–96, 165–66, 208, 225 and binary structures, 9, 131, 136, 148, 176, 177 and feminist theory, 12 n.25, 15 and magic, 127–28, 131 and rape, 174 and retribution, 45 n.52 and the semiotic, 188 n.43 as abject condition, 156, 158, 170–71 as commodified good, 137–40, 142, 145, 147 as ‘dark continent’, 165 as disease, 157–58, 157 n.25, 169 as locus of self and identity, 165, 179, 179 n.32, 187, 192 n.49 as place of entrapment, 157 n.25 as text écriture féminine, 12, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 190, 190 n.47, 191–95, 195 n.53, 196 male/female sexual act as act of writing, 189 sensuous writing, 3, 8, 192–93, 193 n.50 text/body link, 87–96 textual/sexual fragmentation and multiplicity, 187–95 see also Barthes, Roger; Cixous, Hélène; Kristeva, Julia; masturbation; orgasm; Rodgers, Catherine; textual open-endedness as weapon, 175, 175 n.25 bodily cycles and fluids, 127, 169–71 bodily excess, 8, 139, 193–94 bodily loss of control, 139, 169–71, 173–76, 193–95, 193 n.51, 194 n.52 body/food references, 172, 172 n.20, 206

female body as site of liberation and Revolution, 173–76, 175 n.25, 180 female body/identity as a site of lack, 166, 173–76, 180, 183 n.35 mapping women’s bodies, 166–68, 167 n.12 menstruation and menstrual blood, 169–72 parts of female body, 168–69, 179–80, 182–83, 183 n.35 pregnancy, 154–58, 170–72 socially-constructed female body, 180 vagina, 127, 169, 180 n.33, 184, 184 n.38, 184 n.39 see also male gaze; masturbation boleros, 8, 120–21, 188–89 Boom, 1, 8–9, 8 n.15, 36, 43, 44, 71 n.25, 85, 129, 163, 200 see also Post-Boom Borges, Jorge Luis, 76, 199, 207 n.12, 209, 212, 223, 227 Boullosa, Carmen, 137 Braun, Diane, 16, 48–50, 54, 58, 62–64, 168, 176–78, 196 female body as weapon, 175, 175 n.25 bricoleuse Mastretta as, 78, 200 n.7 Brook, Barbara on menstruation and menstrual blood, 170, 171 Brooks, Peter, 189 n.46, 191 Brooksbank Jones, Anny, 14, 15, 15 n.32 Brownmiller, Susan, 139, 139 n.17 Brushwood, J.S., 35 n.25 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine ‘feminization’ of culture, 90–91 Calinescu, Matei, 227 Calvino, Italo on lightness, 201, 201 n.8 on multiplicity, 199 Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 201 Camacho, Maximino Ávila, 30–32, 49–50, 53–54, 54 n.8, 55, 58, 60, 61 Andrés Ascencio as fictional portrayal of, 53 cacicazgo avilacamachismo, 31, 31 n.17, 53 in Arráncame la vida, 53 caciquismo, 54, 54 n.8 Margarita Ricardi, wife of, 50, 53, 82, 82 n.53 representation and ironization of in Arráncame la vida, 55, 60–61, 60 n.11


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see also Andrés Ascencio under characters (Arráncame la vida); Arráncame la vida; García, Kay S.; Pansters, Wil Camín, Héctor Aguilar, 3, 30 n.16, 103 n.14 Campobello, Nellie, 2, 39–40, 39 n.34, 39 n.35 Cananea Mining Company, 24 death of miners of, 102 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 35 n.25, 50, 53 and antiyanquismo, 25–26 and avilacamachismo, 31 n.17 and expropriation of the foreign oil companies in Arráncame la vida, 25–26 and women, 42 economic miracle, 30, 30 n.16 presidency of, 30, 32 carnivalesque, 5, 91, 116, 118, 124, 125, 134–61, 136 n.12, 192, 203, 208, 213, 214 and dress, 136–45 and laughter, 152–53 and monstrous motherhood, 154–58 and the grotesque, 153–61 simulation and disguise, 143–48 unrestrained sexuality, 148–52 Carpentier, Alejo Los pasos perdidos, 120, 120 n.7 Casa de la Estrella, 102, 107 Castellanos, Rosario, 2, 6, 39, 43, 43 n.45, 44–46, 44 n.46, 44 n.47, 44 n.49, 45 n.50, 45 n.51, 45 n.52, 45 n.53, 71 n.24, 106, 154, 154 n.23, 156–58, 157, n.25, 162, 165, 166, 186, 225, 225 n.3 and cosmetics, 217–18 and female bodily pleasure, 45 n.52 and malinchismo, 71 n.24 and Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad, 44 female body as site of disease, 158 Indigenismo, 44 n.46 monstrous motherhood, 154, 154 n.23, 156–58, 157, n.25 Mujer que sabe Latín, 44 n.49, 218, 218 n.18 ‘rey de la creación’, 106, 106 n.16 Sobre cultura femenina, 45, 106 women as complicitous with male power, 45, 45 n.51 see also O’Connell, Joanna Catalina Guzmán (Arráncame la vida), 1–2, 25–26, 42, 45 n.51, 49–71, 76–78,

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82–84, 128, 137–39, 141–42, 146, 148, 149, 151, 154–58, 156 n.24, 169–76, 179–82, 184 n.37, 188–89, 188 n.43, 191, 193, 193 n.51, 219 n.20, 222, 226, 234 ambivalent portrayal of, 61–71 and Andrés Ascencio see Andrés Ascencio under characters (Arráncame la vida) and bilingualism, 62, 67–68, 76–77 and Carlos Vives see Carlos Vives under characters (Arráncame la vida) and education, 91, 101 and father figures, 52, 57–58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70, 170, 173 and innocence, 52, 56–58, 61–62, 97 and self-development, 50, 51, 61–64, 66, 70–71 and silence, 49, 62–65, 65 n.16, 138, 140, 168 as cómplice oficial, 67–71, 110 as fictional representation of Margarita Ricardi, 50, 53, 82, 82 n.53 as Malinche/Guadalupe, 68–71, 71 n.24, 100, 109, 155, 157, 181 see also Cypess, Sandra Messinger; Franco, Jean as mother, 65, 69, 70, 95, 171 and grotesque motherhood, 154–58 comparative analysis with Emilia, 4–5, 7, 47, 50, 59, 61, 63, 67, 71, 83–85, 86–93, 95–97, 99, 101–05, 105 n.15, 106, 109–15, 120–21, 128, 137, 146, 148, 149, 151, 175, 179–82, 188 n.43, 219 n.20, 222, 226 complicitous/duplicitous with male power, 67–71 eluding male grasp, 63, 70–71 in the context of carnival and dress, 137–39, 141–43 masculinized view of women, 70, 89, 96 political and feminist conscience, 50, 55, 58, 59–60, 60 n.11, 62, 63–65, 66–67, 70 sexual/romantic affairs see Arráncame la vida under Adultery strategies of survival, 146, 148 see also Arráncame la vida; Female sexuality Certeau, Michel de, 229, 229 n.10, 167, 1 67 n.12


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characters (Arráncame la vida) Andrés Ascencio, 25–26, 32, 47, 49–65, 67, 69–71, 71, 81–82, 89, 96, 97, 100, 103, 106, 109–13, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150–52, 154, 155, 156, 158, 171, 173–6, 180–82, 191, 234 see also Camacho, Maximino Ávila Carlos Vives, 52, 57–59, 62, 67, 69, 70, 76, 104, 141, 146, 150, 155, 181, 188–89 Catalina’s father, 52, 57–58, 60–63, 70, 170, 173 see also Catalina Guzmán (Arráncame la vida); grotesque motherhood see under motherhood characters (Mal de amores) Antonio Zavalza, 86, 91, 93, 94, 96–97, 107–09, 111, 112, 114, 122, 126, 132–34, 147, 148, 181, 182 Daniel Cuenca, 25, 27, 29, 47, 59, 84, 86, 90, 92, 94–97, 98, 99–100, 102, 104–12, 114, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 134, 140, 141, 143–48, 151, 159, 160, 161, 169, 171–72, 181–82 Diego Sauri, 27, 29, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97–101, 103, 103 n.14, 104, 107, 109, 116, 119, 123, 126–27, 128, 131, 134, 135, 140, 142, 143, 148, 151, 170, 171 Josefa Sauri, 23, 27, 86, 91, 94–103, 103 n.14, 104, 105, 109, 119, 123–24, 126–28, 130, 131, 134–36, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150–51, 163, 170–73, 189 n.46 Milagros Veytia, 22, 23, 27, 29, 86, 91, 92, 94, 95–96, 98, 99, 100–02, 104, 105, 118, 121, 123, 124, 131, 132, 134, 135, 139 n.18, 140, 144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 164, 170, 179 Octavio Cuenca (Dr), 91–95, 107, 126, 132, 140–42, 144, 145, 160–61 Rivadeneira, 22, 92, 95, 98, 99, 121, 144, 149 see also Emilia Sauri Cixous, Hélène, 14 and binary divisions, 176 and écriture féminine, 12, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 190, 190 n.47, 191–95, 195 n.53, 196 and language, 194 on female text and open-endedness, 190, 190 n.47 Clavijo, Ernesto, 234 Coetzalan, 60

Colás, Santiago, 9–10, 10 n.18, 71 n.25 Colchie, Thomas, 230 n.11 Condé, Lisa P. on the maldito corsé, 139, 140 Coria Sánchez, Carlos M., 1 Cortázar, Julio, 116, 191, 209–10, 211, 231 cosmetics, 217 n.17 see also Castellanos, Rosario costumbrismo, 33, 116, 117 Coward, Rosalind, 166, 166 n.9, 166 n.10 Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos, 3 Cypess, Sandra Messinger, 68, 68 n.22 see also Jean Franco Daniel, Lee A., 169 n.17 Davies, Lisa, 154, 154 n.23, 157 Davies, Lloyd Hughes, 7, 7 n.10, 66, 66 n.17, 90–91, 92, 119, 126, 127, 132, 132 n.9, 158, 158 n.26, 225, 225 n.2, 226, 226 n.5 de Beauvoir, Simone, 171 de Beer, Gabriella, 6, 6 n.7, 46 n.54, 81–82, 163, 163 n.4 de Gortari, Carlos Salinas, 2, 19 n.2 de la Madrid, Miguel, 30, 30 n.15 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 78–79, 79 n.43 death, 213, 220 in Arráncame la vida, 52, 54, 56–61, 64, 65, 70, 97, 141, 156, 175 in El cielo de los leones, 202, 210, 212, 220, 231 in El mundo iluminado, 202, 211, 212, 227 in Mal de amores, 27, 97, 102, 107, 150, 154, 158–60, 220 in Puerto libre, 212, 217, 227 del absurdo cotidiano, 1, 200, 200 n.7 del Paso, Fernando, 37, 37 n.37 Derrida, Jacques ‘dangerous supplement’, 176–77, 190 n.47 see also masturbation Díaz, Porfirio, 20, 21–24, 26–27, 55, 60 and foreign presence in Mexico, 21–22, 21 n.5, 21. n.6, 22 n.7, 22 n.8, 24, 24–26, 24 n.9, 55, 60 and middle-classes, 22–23, 26 anti-foreign sentiment in context of, 21 antiyanquismo and antiespañolismo in context of, 23, 24–26, 31 dissatisfaction with, 23–26 during Reforma period, 21 in Arráncame la vida, 55, 60 in Mal de amores, 24


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Mexican miners’ strike at Cananea, 24 Porfirismo, 28 n.13 positivism, and foreign policies, 21, 22, 24, 24 n.9 regime of, 22–27 revolutionary stirrings, 26, 26 n.11, 26 n.12, 27, 29 suppression of revolutionary activities, 27 see also Garner, Paul; Pansters, Wil Difusión Cultural de la ENEP-Acatlán, 1 Domecq, Brianda, 46, 133, 133 n.11, 156, 225 dress see carnivalesque Eagleton, Terry, 12 n.26, 83, 83 n.55, 136 n.12, 227, 227 n.6 Eco, Umberto, 227, 227 n.6 écriture féminine, 12, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 119 n.24, 190, 190 n.47, 191–95, 195 n.53, 196 and testimonial writing 195 n.53 see also Cixous, Hélène Edwards, Alice Anne, 89, 89 n.9 Ekland, Charlotte, 187–88, 188 n.43 El Avante, 58, 60, 138 El cielo de los leones, 2–3, 5–6, 93 n.12, 168, 196, 97, 199, 200, 200 n.7, 201–04, 205 n.10, 206, 209–17, 219–24, 226–33 see also Postmodern; Postmodernism El mundo iluminado, 2, 3, 5–6, 75 n.36, 168, 172, 183, 188 n.44, 193–94, 196, 197, 200, 200 n.6, 200 n.7, 201–04, 205 n.10, 206–17, 219–21, 223–24, 226–29 see also play; Postmodern; Postmodernism Eltit, Damiela, 7, 137 Emery, A. F., 81, 81 n.51 Emilia Sauri (Mal de amores), 2, 22–23, 26–27, 29, 41, 44 n.46, 47, 85–124, 125–28, 132–35, 139–41, 139 n.18, 143–51, 153, 158–61, 169–72, 175, 178, 179–82, 219 n.20, 222, 226, 230 ambivalent portrayal of, 88, 109 and Antonio see Antonio Zavalza under characters (Mal de amores) and Daniel see Daniel Cuenca under characters (Mal de amores) and education and medical training, 91–94, 101–03, 107, 112, 112 n.17, 127 and medicine, 126–27, 132–35 and rules of the game, 146–48

253

as angelic, 130–31 as Malinche/Guadalupe, 100, 109, 181 as matrioska, 108–11 comparative analysis with Catalina, 4–5, 7, 47, 50, 59, 61, 63, 67, 71, 83–93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101–05, 105 n.15, 106, 109–15, 120–21, 128, 137, 146, 148, 149, 151, 175, 179–82, 188 n.43, 219 n.20, 222, 226 complicitous/duplicitous with male power, 108–11 criticism of revolutionary ideals, 107–08 development of, 86–91, 97, 103–06, 108–15, 179–82 eluding male grasp, 110–11 in the context of carnival and dress, 139–41, 143–48 in the context of the grotesque, 158–61 objectified by male gaze, 140–41, 145–46 sexual and political awakening, 86–87 sexual/romantic affairs see in Mal de amores under adultery social commitment, 103–06, 105 n.15, 107, 108, 111–15 upbringing, 86, 97–106, 125–26 see also Mal de amores; Mal de amores under adultery ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 16, 17, 17 n.34, 35, 52, 52 n.5, 56, 66, 76–78, 82, 82 n.53, 104, 105 n.15, 110, 116, 166, 172, 182, 183, 187, 189–90, 193 n.50, 200 n.7, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 224, 226, 227 n.7, 229–30, 231 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 115–16, 213, 214, 215–16 Esquivel, Laura, 6, 8, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 104, 163, 164, 165, 166, 172, 179, 186, 234 Excélsior, 1 eyes, 44 n.46, 93, 100, 151, 168–169, 169 n.17, 182–84, 184 n.37, 193, 201 father, 188, 188 n.43, 190 n.47 in Arráncame la vida, 52, 57–58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70, 173, 170, 173 in El cielo de los leones, 93 n.12 in Mal de amores, 44 n.46, 86, 91, 92, 93, 93 n.12, 94–96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 170 in Puerto libre, 217 Mastretta’s father, 1, 52, 52 n.5, 93, 93 n.12 and grandfather, 225 n.2 Mujeres de ojos grandes, 185–86


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Felski, Rita, 195, 195 n.53 Fem, 1, 1 n.1 female empowerment, 5, 63, 65, 65 n.16, 71, 73, 71 n.24, 110, 111, 139–40, 165–68, 168–71, 173–76, 176, 179, 178, 180, 186 n.40, 186 n.41, 191, 195–96, 218, 224 disempowerment, 5, 44 n.47, 58, 61, 62–63, 65, 91, 95–96, 139, 165–68, 168–71, 173–76, 179, 180, 193–95, 193 n.51, 194 n.52 see also body; female sexuality female sexuality, 17, 158, 162–87, 164–68, 166 n.9, 177–78, 183 n.35, 186 n.41, 188 n.44, 189–91, 190 n.47, 191, 195–96, 195 n.53, 218, 225, 225 n.3, 230, 234 and excess, 8, 139, 148–53 and female loss of control, 63, 139, 169–71, 173–76, 193–95, 193 n.51, 194 n.52 and identity, 9, 11, 44 n.49, 71, 88, 91–93, 96, 97 and magic, 127–28 and melodrama, 121–22 Ave María, 183 comic approach to sex, 152–53, 174, 174 n.24, 178, 184–85 contravening the ‘rules’, 70–71 in Arráncame la vida, 57, 58, 61, 62–63, 64, 65 n.16, 66, 70–71, 76–77, 88, 91, 106, 110–13, 137, 141–42, 154–55, 160, 169–76, 179, 180–82, 189, 191, 193, 225 in Mal de amores, 61, 65 n.65, 71, 91–92, 96, 97, 98, 104, 106, 108–13, 132, 143, 148–51, 161, 168–72, 175, 178, 180–82, 183, 187, 189 n.46, 193, 225 in Mujeres de ojos grandes, 2, 71 n.24, 128, 137, 149, 168, 169 n.17, 172, 175, 177–78, 178 n.31, 179–80, 182–83, 184–89, 191, 192, 194, 195, 208, 218, 219, 223–25, 234 liberation and repression, 11, 36, 45 n.52, 63, 65, 65 n.16, 71 n.24, 91, 98, 110, 111, 139, 157 n.25, 164–66, 168, 176, 179, 180, 180 n.33, 180 n.34, 183 n.35, 195–96 Malinche, 68 unrestrained sexuality, 148–53 see also body; masturbation; orgasm female solidarity in Mal de amores, 87, 93, 111–15, 132–34, 158

lack of in Arráncame la vida, 66, 67, 70, 93, 111–15 feminism, 10, 32, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 72, 73, 165 n.8, 217 and Mastretta, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 11–12, 16, 19, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50, 66, 68–69, 73, 74, 83–90, 93, 104, 112, 113, 162–64, 166, 171, 176–79, 191, 195–96, 217, 218, 221, 224–25, 226–28, 233 in Mexico, see Mexican Feminism Latin American, 13–16, 224 Postmodern, 9, 11, 12, 12 n.25, 13, 13 n.28 Western, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 13 n.27, 170, 171, 173, 176 See also Cixous, Hélène; Kaminsky, Amy; Kristeva, Julia; Mexican feminism Fernández, Salvador C., 200, 200 n.6 Fiddian, Robin W., 37 n.31 Finnegan, Nuala on ‘light’ writers, 46, 46 n.56, 46 n.57 on monstrous motherhood, 154, 154 n.23, 156, 157 n.25, 157–58 on popular writing, 46, 46 n.56, 46 n.57 Fletcher, John, 120, 120 n.25 Flores, Ángel, 129, 129 n.2 Foster, Hal, 215, 215 n.16 Foucault, Michel on sexuality and subjectivity, 166, 166 n.10 on the order of things, 207 n.12 Franco, Jean, 14, 33–34, 34 n.21, 73, 73 n.30, 73 n.32, 77, 77 n.41 on malinchismo, 71, 71 n.24, 77, 77 n.41 Freud, Sigmund, 100, 115, 115 n.19, 173, 176, 176 n.28 Fuentes, Carlos and postmodern experimentation, 115 La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 36, 37, 55–56 and literary parallels with Arráncame la vida, 55–56 La región más transparente, 36 Los años con Laura Díaz, 73–74, 74 n.33 on the Novel of the Mexican Revolution, 75, 78 Furnival, Chloe, 44, 44 n.47, 44 n.49 Gallagher, D.P., 34 n.22 García, Kay S., 16, 18, 56, 59, 60, 60 n.11, 67–68, 69, 109, 113, 114, 130, 133, 133 n.11, 162, 169, 169 n.17, 183, 226, 226 n.4 Garner, Paul on Porfirismo, 28, 28 n.13, 103, 103 n.14 see also Díaz, Porfirio


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Garro, Elena, 2, 6, 39, 43, 43 n.44, 43 n.45, 44, 85, 126, 130 n.7, 162, 166, 226–27 Gilbert, Sandra, 13 n.27 names and naming, 63 Gold, Janet N., 56, 67 González, Aníbal, 7, 73, 75, 75 n.36, 76, 78 González, Aralia López, 6 n.6, 58 González, Stephan on androcentrism, 54 Grosz, Elizabeth A., 171, 171 n.19 Gubar, Susan, 13 n.27 names and naming, 63 Guzmán, Martin Luis, 2, 35 Hall, John, 36, 36 n.28 Hart, John Mason, 24, 24 n.9 Hart, Stephen M., 43, 43 n.45, 65, 65 n.14, 65 n.15, 65 n.16, 234 Hasta no verte Jesús mío see Poniatowska, Elena Hayek, Salma, 234, 234 n.12 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 113, 223, 223 n.21 Hernández, Arturo G., 6, 6 n.8 Hulme, Meter, 167, 167 n.12 Hutcheon, Linda, 83 Ibargüengoitia, Jorge, 37, 72, 73 Ingenieros, José, 146 Irigaray, Luce, 131, 167, 179 n.32, 190 n.47, 194 Isla Mujeres, 20, 126, 127 Izúcar, 20, 112, 128, 159 Jagoe, Catherine, 172, 172 n.20 Jameson, Frederic, 215, 215 n.16 Jardine, Alice feminine foils, 165, 165 n.8 gynocritics and gynesis, 12, 12 n.25 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 13 n.27, 173, 173 n.23, 190, 190 n.47 journalism, 1, 2, 25, 27, 32, 35, 41, 43, 60–61, 60 n.11, 75–76, 194 and literature, 4, 33, 35, 50–51, 55, 60 n.11, 73, 75–76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 110, 124, 163, 194, 196, 202, 207, 208, 214, 221, 227, 230, 230 n.11 jugar, see play Kaminsky, Amy Katz, 11, 12, 14, 15, 15 n.32, 16, 72, 72 n.29, 75, 195 n.53 Katz, Friedrich, 21, 21 n.6, 22 n.7, 22 n.8 Kerr, Lucille, 80, 80 n.47 Kostopulos-Cooperman, Celeste, 65, 65 n.16

255

Kristeva, Julia, 14 notion of an integrated self-identity, 179, 179 n.32 on the abject, 156, 158, 170–71 on the semiotic and the symbolic, 188, 188 n.43 sol negro, 222 La pájara pinta, 1 La voz de la verdad, 20 Labanyi, Jo, 1, 1 n.1, 183 Laffey, Sheryl Lee-Ann, 16, 87 LaFrance, David G., 19 n.1, 23, 24, 26, 26 n.11, 27, 28, 29 see also Madero, Francisco I. Lagos-Pope, María Inés, 80, 80 n.49 language as antidiscourse, 76–77 bilingualism, 62, 67–68, 77 female sexuality as correlative of sensuous bodily language, 187–96 language of excess, 187–96, 213–14 lenguaje popular, 76–78, 146 Lavery, Jane, see ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’ Leal, Luis, 68 Leduc, Renato, 67, 77 Lerner, Gerda women as colluders with patriarchy, 66, 66 n.17, 66 n.18 women in history, 47 ‘Ley de Nacionalización’, 60 Lichem, Maria Teresa, 87 light writing and lightness, 2–8, 11, 46, 46 n.56, 46 n.57, 75, 75 n.36, 76, 79, 115, 120–22, 147, 162, 162 n.2, 188, 189, 197, 197–213, 215, 217, 223, 224, 226, 227 n.7, 229 lists, 118, 194, 203, 204, 206–07, 213, 228–29 Litwin, Adriana, 38, 38 n.33 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 9, 34, 34 n.22, 36 n.27, 74 n.34 Loaeza, Guadalupe, 8, 46, 46 n.57, 75 n.36, 205, 205 n.9 Lodge, David, 116 love in Arráncame la vida, 3, 69, 70, 155, 156, 160, 173–76, 180–82, 188 see also adultery in El cielo de los leones, 3, 202, 210, 212, 223


256

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love (cont.) in El mundo iluminado, 172, 202, 210–12, 223, 227 in Mal de amores, 89, 95, 98, 102, 108, 110, 111, 112, 120, 121, 124, 130, 147, 149, 150–51, 160–61, 180–82 Mujeres de ojos grandes, see in Mujeres de ojos grandes under adultery in Puerto libre, 202, 206, 212, 223, 227 see also mother; motherhood Luis Miguel, see boleros Lyotard, Jean François, 228, 228 n.8 machismo, 40, 40 n.39, 41, 42, 47, 53, 58, 68, 77, 92, 96, 112–13, 147, 175, 186 Macías, Anna, 40, 40 n.39, 41, 41 n.41 Madero, Francisco I., 26–30, 26 n.12, 60 and the failure of Maderista Movement, 28–30 in Arráncame la vida, 60 in Mal de amores, 26–30, 102–03, 103 n.14, 105, 110, 121, 127, 143, 144 see also Pansters, Wil Magical Realism, 5, 7–9, 43 n.44, 44, 65 n.16, 72, 116–17, 119, 125–36, 132 n.10, 133 n.11, 160, 172, 177 Mal de amores, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16–20, 22–30, 36, 38, 41–43, 47, 50, 67, 73, 84, 85–124, 125–54, 158–61, 162–64, 168, 169, 170–72, 175, 179, 180–83, 187, 189 n.46, 212, 214, 215, 218, 219, 219 n.20, 222, 223, 224, 225, 225 n.1, 226, 227, 229 as Bildungsroman, 89–90 carnivalesque in, 1, 136–53 and the grotesque, 153–54, 158–61 collective voice, 86, 111–15 comparative analysis with Arráncame la vida, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17–19, 22, 24, 48, 50, 67, 73, 84–95, 97, 101, 104, 112, 113, 114, 120, 124, 142, 143, 146, 147–48, 150, 153, 154, 170–72, 175, 181, 182, 188, 224–27, 229 critical studies on, 16, 87 death and murder in, 27, 97, 102, 107, 141, 150, 154, 158, 159, 160, 167 destruction of high/low dialectic, 92, 99, 107, 112, 112 n.17, 126, 132–34, 133 n.11, 115, 210 father figure in, 44 n.46, 86, 91, 92, 93, 93 n.12, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 170 female bonding and solidarity in, 84, 87, 93, 111–15, 127, 132–34, 133 n.11, 158

female characters in, 50, 71, 86–96, 99–100, 103, 112–15, 127, 131–32, 133, 137, 140, 144–45, 148, 150, 157–58 gender stereotypes in, 91–93 innocence in, 97–104, 125–26, 128, 141, 157–59 love in, 22, 89, 95, 98, 100, 102, 106, 108, 110–12, 117–21, 124–26, 130, 134, 147, 149, 150–51, 160–61, 178, 180–82 magical realism in, 97, 130–36 male characters in, 54, 89, 91–94, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 107, 140, 148, 150 melodrama in, 120–22 metaphor of weaving, 114–15, 131, 187 mythical origins and utopia, 125–28 narrative modes in, 115–24 social commitment in, 111–15 stylistic diversity in, 115–24 see also characters (Mal de amores); Emilia Sauri (Mal de amores); female sexuality; feminism; Mexican Revolution; Mexican Revolutionary Novels; testimonial narrative male authority and ideology, defiance of, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 13 n.27, 16, 19, 32, 37–39, 40–43, 44, 45, 45 n.51, 45 n.52, 46–48, 50, 51, 54, 59, 61, 65–71, 77, 83, 90–92, 95, 96, 99, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 122, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140–42, 145–48, 154–58, 164, 166, 167, 171, 173, 175, 177–83, 185–86, 186 n.40, 187, 189, 191, 194–95, 208, 217, 218, 224, 225, 226 male gaze as objectifying the female body, 11, 141, 142, 145–46, 165, 166, 167, 174, 179–81, 183, 187 Malinche/madonna dialectic, 180, 181, 225 in Arráncame la vida, 68–71, 71 n.24, 100, 109, 155, 157, 181 in Mal de amores, 100, 109, 181 in Mujeres de ojos grandes, 180 and marianismo, 185–86, 186 n.40 see also Stevens, Evelyn P. malinchismo, see Malinche/madonna dialectic Márquez, Gabriel García, 8, 37 n.31, 119, 126, 130, 130 n.7, 153 Martínez, Mucio P., 27 Marting, D. E., 46 n.54 Masiello, Francine, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146


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Mastretta, Ángeles and feminism, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 11–12, 16, 19, 38, 47–50, 66, 68–69, 73, 74, 83–90, 93, 104, 112, 113, 162–64, 166, 171, 176–79, 191, 195–96, 217, 218, 221, 224–28, 233 biographical aspects, 1–3 interview with, 17–18 see also ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’ lo privado es público y lo personal es político, 11, 16, 35, 38, 50, 51, 54, 67, 86, 87, 91, 97, 109, 127, 141, 164, 196, 221 writer’s block, 230–34 see also female sexuality; light writing; Mexican Revolution; Mexican Revolutionary novels masturbation, 187, 195 and celebration of female orgasm, 176, 177 as dangerous supplement, 176–77 in Arráncame la vida, 175–76, 193–94, 194 n.52 in La “Flor de lís”, 193 n.51 in Mujeres de ojos grandes, 175–76, 189 Mastretta on, 165–66 notions of sin and evil, 177–78, 178 n.31 see also body; female sexuality; Winnet, Susan Mata, José Trinidad, 60–61 McHale, Brian, 7, 76, 77, 208, 213, 216 medicine, 92, 99, 107, 112, 112 n.17 curanderismo and magic, 132–35, 133 n.11 in La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora, 133, 133 n.11 orthodox and unorthodox practices in Mal de amores, 115, 126, 127, 132–34, 133 n.11 melodrama, 53, 120–22 memory, 3, 4, 43, 113, 168, 200, 219–20, 221 and nostalgia, 93 n.12, 198, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 231 and time, 215, 219, 221, 222 individual and collective, 39, 44 n.46, 79, 112, 114, 115, 202, 211 see also Bartra, Roger; testimonial narrative Menchú, Rigoberta, 72 menstruation, see menstruation and menstrual blood under body Menton, Seymour

257

on New Historicism, 49, 51, 85, 85 n.2, 165 n.8, 229, 229 n.9 see also New Historicism Mexican feminism, 40–43, 40 n.39, 40 n.40, 41 n.41 Carranza’s divorce decree of 1915, 42 in Arráncame la vida, 42 women’s right to vote, 40 n.40, 42 Mexican history, 4, 19, 19 n.1, 19 n.2, 20–32, 43, 53, 54, 55 Carranza, Venustiano, 42 foreign intervention and domination, 21, 21 n.6, 22 n.7 Huerta, Victoriano, General, 20, 30, 50, 53, 55, 60 Juárez, Benito, 21, 21 n.5 Mexican-American War, 21, 21 n.6 Rosas, Francisco, General, 43 War of Independence, 21 War of Reform, 21 see also Cárdenas, Lázaro; Díaz, Porfirio; Madero, Francisco I.; Pansters, Wil Mexican Revolution, 2, 4, 19–32, 42, 53–54, 54 n.8, 55, 58–60, 60 n.11, 173, 221, 223 and Post-Revolution in Arráncame la vida, 2, 30–32, 53–54, 54 n.8, 55, 58–60, 60 n.11, 173, 226–27 Constitution of 1917, 42 in Mal de amores, 85–90, 92, 96, 98, 101, 102, 104–13, 118, 119, 123, 125, 125 n.1, 127, 131, 132, 140, 143, 144, 147, 148, 153–54, 158–60, 169, 171, 173, 181, 188, 226, 226–27 in women’s writing, 37–48, 163, 164 and influences on Mastretta’s writing, 37–48 see also antiyanquismo; Camacho, Maximino Ávila; Cárdenas, Lázaro; Díaz, Porfirio Mexican Revolutionary Novels, 4, 5, 32–48, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 83, 111, 162, 163, 164, 224 ‘afeminamiento’ of literature, 35 definitions of, 33–34, 33 n.18, n.19 influence on Mastretta’s writing, 32–48 Mexicanidad, 24, 33, 39, 46 see also testimonial narrative Mexico City, 1, 17, 20, 26 n.12, 32, 55, 60, 121, 122, 127, 202, 222 Meyer, Doris, 39, 39 n.35, 80 n.48 middle-class, 22, 23, 26, 28, 35, 54, 54 n.8 Miller, Jane, 67, 68 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 65 n.16


258

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mise-en-scène, 121 Moi, Toril, 13, 13 n.27 Molina, Silvia, 32, 43, 46, 53, 73, 78, 255 Monegal, Emir Rodríguez, 136 Moreno, Laura García, 9, 9 n.16, 10, 10 n.18, 10 n.20, 205 Morton, F. Rand, 33 mother, 3, 44 n.46, 45 n.51, 70, 86, 93–95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 138, 148, 154–58, 171–72, 173, 176, 178, 183, 185, 186 as absent figure, 52, 70 mother-daughter relationship, 23, 86, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 138, 173 motherhood, 68, 69, 171 celebration of in Mal de amores, 95, 171–72 grotesque motherhood, 154–58 rejection of in Arráncame la vida, 95, 154–58, 171 Mujeres de ojos grandes, 2, 3, 6, 43, 44 n.46, 71 n.24, 93, 100, 113–15, 127, 128, 130, 137, 140, 142, 149, 152, 168, 169 n.17, 172, 175, 177–78, 178 n.31, 179–80, 179 n.32, 180 n.33, 182–83, 184–86, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 208, 214, 218, 219, 223, 224, 225, 227, 229, 234 Mulvey, Laura on visual pleasure, 166 Mundaca, Fermín, 127 Muñoz, Rafael F., 24, 35 n.26, 39–40 myth, 125–28, 125 n.1 Neorealism, 116–17, 117 n.23 Neruda, Pablo, 167 New Historicism, 4, 39, 43, 43 n.44, 46, 49, 51, 53, 85, 85 n.2, 162, 165, 165 n.8, 229, 229 n.9 Nexos, 3, 37 n.31, 196, 200 n.7 Niebylski, Dianna, 2, 178, 185, 174 n.24 Ninguna eternidad como la mía, 2–3, 3 n.4, 224, 229, 212, 214, 216 Norat, Vanessa Vilches, 79, 79 n.45 Norris, Christopher, 78–79, 79 n.43 novela rosa, 8, 35, 218 Ocampo, Aurora, 45 n.53 O’Connell, Joanna, 44, 44 n.49, 45, 45 n.50, 45 n.52, 225, 225 n.3 Olmos y Contreras, José, 7, 20, 27 orgasm, 165, 174, 177–78 in Puerto libre, 203, 207 interview with Mastretta, 189–90 see also female sexuality; masturbation

Other(ness), 11, 12 n.25, 44 n.46, 80, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90–91, 97, 105, 105 n.15, 111–14, 130, 132, 158, 162, 164–65, 167, 179 n.32, 195, 197, 205 n.9, 222–23 encounter with, 105 n.15, 222–23 privilege and guilt in context of, 222–23 Ovaciones, 1, 194, 200 n.7, 204 Overton, Bill, 149 Pansters, Wil, 2, 2 n.1, 28, 28 n.14, 30 Andrés Ascencio, 32, 53, 55, 60–61 avilacamachismo, 31 Maximino Ávila Camacho, 31, 31 n.17, 32, 58, 60–61 Parker, Rosika, 12 Paz, Octavio, 10 El Laberinto de la soledad, 44, 46, 163, 167 questioning of Mexican female stereotypes in, 44, 46, 163 Piedra de sol, 191 Peden, Margaret Sayers, 18, 18 n.36 Peralta, Braulio, 53 play, 43, 52, 56–58, 61–62, 68, 76–77, 90, 98, 115–24, 136, 140–41, 142, 155, 160, 179, 181, 192–94, 210, 212–13, 214, 231 as celebration of intellectual ignorance, 208–09 carnivalesque discourse, 8, 142 in the context of carnival, 136 linguistic and experimental playfulness, 5, 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 37, 84, 115–24, 133, 160, 177, 178, 192, 193, 197, 202, 207, 211, 212–13, 226, 227, 233 Pollack, Griselda, 12 Poniatowska, Elena, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 32, 34, 35 n.26, 37–39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 53, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80–81, 80 n.47, 80 n.48, 81 n.50, 83, 85, 115, 116, 161, 162, 162 n.2, 163, 164–66, 173, 175–80, 180 n.33, 180 n.34, 181, 182, 184 n.37, 184 n.38, 184 n.39, 186, 186 n.40, 188, 188 n.43, 192 n.49, 193 n.51, 194 n.52, 195, 195 n.53, 196, 225 popular culture, 75 n.36, 120–22, 132, 132 n.10, 133–36, 188, 189, 197–213, 215, 217, 223, 224, 226, 227 n.7, 229, 230 see also light writing porfiriato, see Díaz, Porfirio Portal, Marta, 25, 33, 33 n.18, 36 n.27, 37, 37 n.31, 72


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Post-Boom, 6, 7, 8, 8 n.15, 9, 10, 11, 37, 111, 163, 163 n.3, 197, 200, 216 Postmodern, 83, 115 and Latin American context, 9–16 and Mastretta’s writing, 2, 7–9, 34, 34 n.23, 40, 46, 73, 78, 88, 90, 137, 164, 165, 172, 190 n.47, 194, 226, 228 celebration of ‘lightness’ and the nonofficial, 197–221, 226, 228 chaos and multiplicity, 197–204 consumerist excess, 203–05, 205 n.9, 205 n.10 feminism, 5, 10–16, 90–91, 179 n.32, 194, 190 n.47 ‘feminization’ of culture, 46, 90–91 high/low dialectic, 205–15 pastiche of discourses, 202, 205–06, 208–09, 212, 213–14, 219 time, 215–17 treatment of master narratives, 228 un livre sur rien, 207–08 see also Bartra, Roger; Postmodernism Postmodernism and Borges, 115 and modernisation, 198, 221–22 and Modernism, 197 as engagement with the ordinary, 209–12 definition of, 9–10, 197 in Latin American context, 7–16 see also El cielo de los leones; El mundo iluminado; Puerto libre Premio Mazatlán, 1, 49 Premio Rómulo Gallegos, 2, 85 Prendergast, Christopher, 120, 122 PRI, 19 n.2 Puebla, 1, 20, 22–24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 31 n.17, 32, 42, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 76, 81, 82, 82 n.53, 105, 107, 108, 112, 122, 126, 142, 143, 147–48, 151, 221 Puerto libre, 2, 3, 5–6, 75 n.36, 164, 168, 188 n.44, 194, 196, 197–99, 200, 200 n.6, 200 n.7, 201–04, 205 n.10, 206–09, 211–24, 225 n.1, 226–29, 231 see also play; Postmodern; Postmodernism Puig, Manuel, 6, 205 Quesada, Vicente Fox, 19, 19 n.2, 233 Ravelo, Renato, 200, 200 n.7 Ricardi, Margarita, 50, 53, 82, 82 n.53 Richard, Nelly, 13, 13 n.28 Rivera Villegas, Carmen M., 59, 87, 94, 96, 97, 106, 108, 109

259

on Arráncame la vida, 59, 96, 97, 106 on feminization of historical space, 38, 39 on Mal de amores, 59, 87, 94, 96, 97, 106, 108, 109 on the novel of the Mexican Revolution, 46 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 115–16, 218 Rodenas, Adriana Mendez, 119, 119 n.24 Rodgers, Catherine archetypal images of body, 195 destruction of the world/ self, 192 n.49 effect of desire on the body and text as body, 182–83, 183 n.35 Roh, Franz, 129 Romance novel folletín, 77 see also melodrama; novela rosa Romanticism, 117, 117 n.23 Rowe, William and Vivian Shelling, 90, 90 n.11, 132, 132 n.10 Rulfo, Juan, 36, 44, 209 Rutherford, John, 33, 33 n.19, 36, 39 Ryan, Kieran, 229, 229 n.9 Sábato, Ernesto, 115, 115 n.20 Sainz, Gustavo, 88, 88 n.7, 200, 200 n.6 Santiago, Fabiola, 230 n.11 scatology, 159, 169, 194 n.52 Schaefer, Claudia on Arráncame la vida, 120, 189 on Puerto libre, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222 see also Bartra, Roger Scholes, Robert, 189, 189 n.46 Schor, Naomi, 115, 115 n.19 Serdán, Aquiles, 20, 27, 28, 33, 150 sexual affairs, see adultery Shaw, Deborah A., 47, 47 n.58 Shaw Donald L., 6, 7, 7 n.12, 8, 9, 10, 10 n.20, 88–89, 88 n.6, 88 n.7, 163 n.3, 200, 200 n.6 Showalter, Elaine, 12 n.25, 12 n.26, 12 n.27, 14, 14 n.31 and ‘féminine’, ‘feminist’, ‘female’, 4 n.5, 50 n.3, 166 n.9, 219 n.20 silence, 11, 16, 49, 62, 63, 64, 65, 65 n.16, 92, 97, 103, 138, 140 Skármeta, Antonio, 8, 10 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 5, 48, 74–75, 74 n.35, 83, 83 n.55, 123 n.28 Smith, Paul Julian, 43 n.45, 188 n.43 Smith, Verity, 6 soldadera, 41, 81 n.50, 97, 98, 107, 112, 132, 169 see also Mexican feminism Soriano, Juan, 20, 50, 64


260

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Stalleybrass, Peter, and Allon White, 136 Stevens, Evelyn P., on Marianismo, 186, 186 n.40 Stommes, Ivelisse Santiago, 206, 206 n.11 Tanner, Tony, 149, 155 testimonial narrative, 4, 5, 6, 10, 32–35, 37, 39, 44, 51, 71–83, 162, 162 n.2, 195, 195 n.53 and journalism, 73, 75, 75 n.36, 76, 78 and Mexican Revolutionary novel, 32–35, 39, 44, 48, 74–76, 78, 80, 81 n.51, 83 and novels as historical documents, 73 and voice as metaphor of truth, 79, 79 n.43 communal voice, 79, 79 n.46, 111 female testimonial novels, 37, 72, 72 n.29, 73, 73 n.30, 195, 195 n.53 in Arráncame la vida, 10 n.20, 51, 71, 73–77, 81–83 in Mal de amores, 75, 111, 123, 123 n.28, 124 lenguaje popular, 76–78 ‘pluriautoridad’, 79, 79 n.45 testimonialistas, 79 see also Beverley, John; Poniatowska, Elena; Testimonio Testimonio, 71–72, 71 n.25, 71 n.26, 74 n.35, 79 n.45, 79 n.46, 82 see also Sklodowska, Elzbieta text/body see body textual fragmentation, 187–95, 197, 200, 208, 220 visual fragmentation, 180 n.33, 188 n.43, 188 n.44, 208 textual open-endedness, 150, 189–90, 190 n.47, 191 as expression of a diversity of female sexual/life experiences, 111, 157, 158, 182, 191

unconventional conclusions in Mastretta’s fictional works, 184–86 see also body; Cixous, Hélène transmission of alternative medicines, 126, 132–34, 133 n.11 of female values, 44 n.46, 111–15, 168–69, 175, 182–84 of historical memory, 114, 115 of indigenous popular knowledge and culture, 44 n.46, 101, 135–36 Turner, Frederick, 41 n.42, 42 Unomásuno, 1 Usigli, Rodolfo, 122, 122 n.27 Vattimo, Gianni, 205, 205 n.9 Vital, Alberto, 89 Volek, Emil, 72, 72 n.26, 72 n.27 Waldseemuller, Martin, 167 n.12 Walker, Nancy A., 164 West, Alan, 198, 198 n.2, 199 Wharton, Edith, 201 White, Allon, and Peter Stalleybrass, 136 wild woman, 133, 133 n.11 Wilde, Alan, 199, 210 Williams, Raymond L., 9, 9 n.17 Winnet, Susan and ‘tumescence’ and ‘detumescence’, 189 on masturbation, 189, 189 n.46 Wise, Yael Halevi, 172, 172 n.21 Woiwode, Kirsten M., 68 Woolf, Virginia, 13, 14, 232 Yáñez, Agustín, 36, 36 n.27, 36 n.28 Young, Dolly J., and William D. Young, 75 n.36 Yucatán, 27, 128 Yúdice, George, 9, 79, 79 n.46 see also testimonial narrative

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