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Chronotope and the Female Journey

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CHRONOTOPE AND THE FEMALE
JOURNEY

By

Cynthia Lynn Schoﬁeld

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1996

ABSTRACT
CHRONOTOPE AND THE FEMALE JOURNEY
By

Cynthia Lynn Schoﬁeld

This study investigated the use of chronotope in the female journey. The following
questions were explored: What chronotopes are utilized in the female journey; what
activities occur within the chronotopes; do the activities differ from the traditional
Bildungsroman or hero's journey?

A review of the literature pertaining to the hero's journey and the male Bildungsroman
was provided to the reader. In addition, Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as a unit of
analysis for dealing with time and space was examined and criticism of the historical issue
of space was presented. The review was followed by the investigation of four novels -
Kim Chernin's In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (1983), Christina Garcia's
Dreaming In Cuban (1992), Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate (1992) and
Amy Tan's 77w Joy Luck Club (1989). The investigator, through chronotopic analysis,
examined the texts for their construction of the female journey.

The investigator found that each of the novels utilized everyday, biographical and
historical chronotopes. The everyday chronotope recognized the repetition of women's
days. Within these moments of repetition the space was provided for personal afﬁliations,
transmission of culture, and the teaching of resistance through the telling of stories. The
biographical chronotope conveyed the protagonists' life spans. Within this chronotope the

women were provided the space to testify to the monumental moments in their lives and to

bear witness to their era. The historical chronotope dominated the texts and offered the
space for historical perspective and the individual's context in history was given new
meaning when layered upon the personal and historical context of others. In this space a
feminist consciousness was given voice.

The investigator concluded that not one of the texts resorted to the traditional
Bildungsroman formula/hero's journey. The formats were modiﬁed to recognize and
reﬂect the diverse barriers to women's self-discovery. The authors, through chronotope,
provide the reader not so much a clear deﬁnition of self-discovery or a woman's journey
but rather a penetrating examination of the obstacles - familial, cultural, racial, sexual,

intellectual, and political - incorporated into their journeys.

COPyright by
CYNTHIA LYNN SCHOFTELD
1996

F r my grandmother, Maybelle Ruth Henry
her sisters, Mildred Marie Judkins and

Dorothy Elizabeth Tallmadge

And for my mother, Beverly Jo Henry

I am the keeper of your stories.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Individuals who have participated in the creation of this text through inspiration/support.
Dr. Marilyn Wilson. Mentor. Friend. Guide in my professional development.

Dr. Kathleen Geissler. Who awakened me to a new arena of knowledge.

Dr. Diane Brunner. For your suggestions and the introduction to Kristeva.

Dr. Patricia Stalk. For introducing Bakhtin and chronotope.

Beverly Jo Henry. Mother. I love you just the way you are.

Phil Schillaci. Husband. Who supported my dream. Not enough love in the world.
Jeffery Keith Nulf. Brother. Friend. My childhood. Your reading is my inspiration.
Ronald Keith Nulf. Father. You imagined possibilities for a little girl.

Michael and Courtney Schoﬁeld. Daughters. In you I see possibilities.

Bryon and Andy Schillaci. For providing me the experience of sons.

Barb Remaley. Friend. Sounding Board. Baby-sitter. You were there.

Dr. Jo Sinclair. Editor. Who reappeared in my life when I needed her.

Ellen Elizabeth Everett. Friend. Editor. I treasure our "her"story.

Jim Newnum. Friend. Conﬁdant. Who shares my passion for literacy.

Gerri Newnum. Friend. You have the gift of making one feel treasured and valuable.

The Board: Sarita, Linda, Jackie, Ginger, and Barb. My experiential model of community.
Leo Schillaci, Kevin Berg and B. Frank Henry. You are missed and your stories continue.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
A PERSONAL CONTEXT

Chapter

I.

II.

III.

IV.

FOUNDATIONS

The Role of Myth
The Hero's Journey
The Chronotope
Method of Analysis

THE "RE"BUILDING OR "RE"VISION OF A HOUSE

Everyday Time
Biographical Time
Historical Time

SHIFTTNG BOUNDARIES AND DREAMING NEW ONES

Everyday Time

Biographical Time
Celia
Lourdes

Historical Time

A RECIPE OF RESISTANCE
Everyday Time

Biographical Time
Historical Time

iii

Page

12
22

28

31
37
46

55

58
63
64
70
79

86
87

94
101

V. A COMMUNAL JOURNEY: 106
EMBRACING HER STORY IN OUR STORY

Everyday Time 109
Biographical Time 1 15
Historical Time 122
VI. CONCLUSION OR A BEGINNING? 129
"Re"view 129
Everyday Time 134
Biographical Time 140
Historical Time 146
Differences For Future Investigation 151
PostScript 157

LIST OF REFERENCES 158

INTRODUCTION

A PERSONAL CONTEXT

Perhaps it is appropriate to offer a "her"story of my fascination with myths and the
woman's journey. I taught emotionally impaired students for over ten years, at a variety
of age levels. Myths, no matter what the age level of students, enabled my students to
perceive their lives with new understanding. Students particularly identiﬁed with the

hero's journey, a journey easily applied to the journey of adolescence to adulthood. I too

could identify with the hero's journey. Though long past adolescence, I felt the call to
adventure, the need for mentors, and was actively engaged in a search for an elixir.

In 1992 I entered graduate school and became aware of the male stance I acquired
each time I identiﬁed with the hero in the hero's journey. I was a woman, with two
teenage stepsons and two pre-school daughters. I was embarking upon a journey with
encumbrances and gifts that the hero's journey with its generic view of hu"man" did not
incorporate. My journey could not be an individual achievement nor could it be a solitary
event; friends and family would be participants. My life was too connected to others to
separate at the call to adventure. I had to discover and envision a hero's journey that
included the presence of others.

My quest led me to the texts of women. I found myself discovering women writers

2
who "re"framed the monomyth of the hero's journey. Their voices alluded to alternative
journeys. In addition, the years of graduate school reinforced my suspicions that my
journey was not the traditional hero's journey. For example, my tests were not of physical
endurance, unless sleep deprivation counts, but rather they were feats of balancing. Car
pools, graduation and ﬁrst communion parties were balanced against and/or interwoven
with comprehensive exam weekends and dissertation chapters. Meals, laundry, baths and
bedtimes were woven amidst journal entries, assigned readings and required papers.
Seldom was I blessed with solitude or a room of my own.

Yet, the gifts were numerous. If I was overwhelmed with the needs of others, I was
also blessed with the support of others. My mother met my eldest daughter's needs and
established a relationship with her that I believe will be enduring. My husband assumed
a greater role in parenting and never once complained of ﬁnancial difﬁculties due to the
loss of half of our household income. My brother, Jeffery, ﬂew me to Washington DC.
when I was overwhelmed and needed a room of my own. He willingly slept on his sofa so
that I might have the quiet and solitude I craved. Women friends were willing baby sitters
and sounding boards. It was apparent that my becoming affected and involved the
becoming of my family and friends.

However, I was constantly reminded of my privileged status. I was surrounded by
other women graduate students whose children did not have milk with all their meals or
faced their quest without the aid of a spouse. Others did not always have the luxury of a
childhood grounded in the canon nor the support system one establishes through a lifetime

in the same city. Thus, our journeys were similar yet different. Autobiographies of

3
women and texts by women emphasized the variety of journeys available to women. I
searched for a pattern.

My committee led me to chronotopes as a way of framing and analyzing journeys. If
women's journeys were different from men's journeys, then how did time and space play a
role in that difference? It became clear that the chronotopes of my life impacted my
perception of my journey. Many of the obstacles I faced were within the everyday
chronotope. Often, I was so immersed in everyday time, I lost the whole picture of
historical time. Yet, there were moments of grace when I perceived a historical context.
Usually, I associated historical time with those moments that I perceived a generational
pattern. A consciousness has developed over the generations in my family and perhaps
this consciousness is my legacy to my daughters.

If "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons," perhaps the giﬁs of the mothers
are visited upon the daughters. I saw my emergence and becoming affect my daughters'
emergence and becoming. They are becoming critical readers of their world. They are
perceiving choices for their future unattainable in my grandmother's era. Yet, I am
conscious of the fact that these choices are due in part to my grandmother's achievements
and the achievements of her sisters. The family mythology has enabled me to envision an
open future. My life is not preordained by fate.

My consciousness is reinforced and reaffirmed by literature about women by women.
This personal knowledge could have tremendous implications for my future English
classrooms. What would happen if I introduced mythology in the classroom that did not

immediately force young girls to take a male stance or be "other." What would happen if

4
the ﬁrst line of a text started with the words, "Call me Cynthia," instead of "Call me
Ishmael?" What insight, inspiration, or options did literature of women's quests offer me
in my own journey? Thus, this private journey of knowledge may have implications for
public knowledge. My journey is a woman's journey. It is a journey that will continue
after my death through my daughters and perhaps the following dissertation is my

contribution to their feminist consciousness.

CHAPTER I
FOUNDATIONS

I would like to imagine the way to womanhood
not as a single path to a clear destination but as the
endless negotiation of a crossroads. Women take
various routes depending on what class of woman
they are, each woman, at the same time, is divided
among several routes, so that she lives her gender
as a continuous movement in contradictory
directions, some more sanctioned than others.

Susan F raiman, Unbecoming Women

In researching and writing this dissertation, I set out on a journey, in search of an
answer to my question: is the female journey signiﬁcantly different from the male journey?
I discovered that I had to narrow my search to one concept. The question became not
are the journeys different but which difference should I explore? I narrowed the
difference/question to the use of time and space in the female journey and turned to
Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as a unit of analysis for dealing with time and space.
Bakhtin borrowed chronotope from Einstein's theory of relativity and adapted it for
literary criticism. Chronotope recognizes that time and space are not separate but rather
fused and recognition of time and space/chronotope can provide insights to the nature of
actions and events. Thus, my journey became the exploration of the chronotope in four
novels «Kim Chernin's In My Mother’s House: A Daughter 's Story (1983), Christina

5

6
Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban (1992), Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate ( 1992)

and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) -- all have women's journeys at the core of their
plots. That, of course, is one reason I have selected them. Yet, I also chose these novels
because they are written by women, are multicultural and matrilineal, provide more than
one possible journey, and utilize time and space in a nonlinear manner. More importantly,
I chose these novels because I was haunted by them. Perhaps that is an unscholarly
admission for the opening of one's dissertation, but I chose all four of the novels because
they deal with mothers and daughters, a relationship I am continually examining in my
own life. I am a mother of daughters and I am a daughter. My quest or journey is
intricately connected to my identity as a mother and as a daughter and my relationships to
my mother and daughters.

Initially, it seemed to me that I was studying two disparate things: the female quest
and chronotope in the novel. Yet, as I continued in my reading and journey, I came to the
realization that the author's choice or construction of chronotope emphasizes, according
to Bakhtin, "the image of a person in the process of becoming in the novel" ("The
Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 19). Thus, in the opening
chapter, I have sketched for the reader a review of the existing literature as it pertains to
the areas to be examined in this dissertation. First, I review the role of myth and our need
for myth. Second, I take a look at some of the major criticism of the hero's journey.
Third, I explore the historical issue of space and Bakhtin's deﬁnition of chronotope.
Finally, I examine Bakhtin's theories on historical time and establish his work as a

framework for my dissertation.

THE ROLE OF MYTH
Myths serve a variety of roles and purposes within given cultures. Joseph Campbell

in his text, The Power of Myth (1988), perceives four ﬁrnctions of myth. According to
Campbell; the ﬁrst ﬁrnction of myth is the mystical ﬁrnction, the second is the
cosmological dimension, the third function is sociological and the fourth is the pedagogical
ﬁrnction. I am concerned with all four functions but particularly in the sociological and
pedagogical functions of myth. Campbell states,

Every mythology has to do with the wisdom of life as related to a speciﬁc

culture at a speciﬁc time. It integrates the individual into his society and the

society into the ﬁeld of nature. It unites the ﬁeld of nature with my nature.

It's a harmonizing force. (55)
Campbell's words indicate the social role of myth. It is necessary for a culture, if it is to
survive, to maintain consistency through generations. Myths offer a means by which to
maintain the values of a society. Furthermore, they provide models which enable
individuals to integrate their society and contribute to the maintenance of the status quo.
Levi-Strauss elaborates upon the social role of myth in his text, Myth and Meaning
(1978). He states,

. . . in our societies, history has replaced mythology and fulﬁlls the same

function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim

of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible - complete closeness

is obviously impossible - the ﬁrture will remain faithful to the present and

to the past. (42)
It is interesting to note Levi-Strauss's inference that mythology and history serve similar

functions. History also enables a culture to maintain and convey its rules, beliefs, and

rituals. His words indicate the tremendous power myths and history can have in our

8
lives. If our myths and history change, so too does our construction of ourselves.
Rollo May expands upon the role of myth in the construction of self in his text, The

Cry For Myth (1991). He states,

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are

narrative patterns that give signiﬁcance to our existence. Whether

the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own

individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is meaning

we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the

same; myths are our way of ﬁnding this meaning and signiﬁcance.

Myths are like the beams in a house; not exposed to outside view, they

are structure which holds the house together so people can live in it. (15)
May's deﬁnition alludes to the social and personal function of myth. Myths are "a way of
making sense in a senseless world." Furthermore, they offer a "narrative pattern that gives
signiﬁcance to our existence." May in his text, The Cry For Myth (1991), examines a
variety of literature and the myths they convey. He states "that myths do not require that
one have read them speciﬁcally" (37). Instead myths are, as he points out, archetypal
patterns in human consciousness, and "The great dramas like Hamlet are mythic in the
sense that they present the existential crises in everyone's life" (3 7). At a later point he
states,

Great dramas, like Hamlet and Macbeth, speak to the hearts

of all of us. By the same token they remain in our memories as

myths, year in and year out, giving us an increasingly profound

application of our humanness. (42)
It is interesting to note that May's text is devoid of myths or literature written by women.
Rather, he applies male myths/literature to women and men in psychotherapy. For

example, he offers Alex Haley's text, Roots, as one man's search for his own myth.

He compares Haley's search to Oedipus in Oedipus Rex. "In both ﬁgures, Haley and

9
Oedipus, having a myth of their past was crucial to having a present identity and, if the
truth were known, crucial to having a future as well" (48). Yet, if myths of the past are
crucial in present and future identity, could gender play a role in that identity?
Furthermore, could gender affect the conclusions and telling of the past? Oedipus and
Haley are not alone in their search for roots or meaning. Kim Chernin states, in the
forward of In My Mother's House: A Daughter’s Story (1983),

My mother always said, "Behind every story is another story."
This is one of the stories. It must have been there, but could not
be told until the other story had been completed. The story
behind another story, which emerges spontaneously when the ﬁrst
story falls silent, then joins up with that string of revisionary acts
through which the story is questioned, added onto, annihilated,
embellished. (xvii)

I would suggest that it is revisionary in today's world to give voice to the woman's search
for meaning. In fact, only in recent years has the journey or quest of the woman been

recognized.
THE HERO'S JOURNEY

Joseph Campbell, in his text, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1968), summarizes
the traditional hero's journey. He states,

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or
castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the
threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that
guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power
and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother battle, dragon-battle;
offering charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death
(dismemberrnent, cruciﬁxion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero
journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces,
some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give
magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological
round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward... The ﬁnal

10

work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now

sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he ﬂees and is pursued

(transformation ﬂight, obstacle ﬂight). At the return threshold the transcendental

power must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread

(return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).

(245-246)
Campbell, pronounced that his pattern was equally applicable to both sexes: "The hero,
therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past her personal and local
historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms . . . The hero has died as
a modern man; but as eternal man - perfected, unspeciﬁc, universal man - he has been
reborn" (19-20). Campbell reveals his primary concern with the male as hero by his
"generic" use of "he" and "man". He was not alone. Until the rise of feminist criticism,
the Bildungsroman and the hero's journey were traditionally regarded as narratives that
dealt with the development or journeys of young men. During the nineteen seventies
feminist critics began to identify a new or at least a revised genre, the female
Bildungsroman, the novel of the development of a female protagonist.

The cacophonous discourse and interest that resulted over women's stories and
perceptions encouraged a "re"examination of the symbols, metaphors, and plots in the
quest motif of women's literature. Furthermore, contemporary feminist critics began to
question whether Campbell's grid, the classic analysis of the quest motif, can be accurately
used to describe the journeys which female characters make. Contemporary writers began
to note dramatic changes in the hero's journey in the twentieth century. For example,

Jungian analyst June Singer in "Finding the Lost Feminine in the Judeo-Christian

Tradition" (T 0 Be A Woman 1990) deﬁnes the hero as follows:

l l

. . . the individual who by strength or wit has prospered — oﬁen at the

expense of less ambitious, weaker, or more socially conscious individuals. . .

The hero myth in modern culture expresses itself in the growth of great

corporations, conceived and developed by dedicated individuals who

let nothing stand in the way of their accomplishments. (224-225)
Thus, the ﬁrst part of the heroic journey is accomplished. The hero continues to
successﬁrlly set out alone and slay the dragon. However, the second part of the journey is
abandoned. Maureen Murdock in her text, The Heroine 's Journey: Woman '3 Quest for
Wholeness (1990), states, "Missing in today's heroic pattern is the triumphant return of the
hero to the community in a relational capacity, in which he brings with him a spirit of
cooperation and joint accomplishment rather than that of competition and dominance"
(74).

Nadya Aisenberg elaborates upon the negative attributes or consequences of the
traditional hero's journey. In her text, Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male Myth
(1994), she states, "Speciﬁcally, what must be exposed are the heroic emphasis upon
physical courage, the hero's position as separate from his society, the premise of a god-
given destiny - the hero as savior, that is - and most importantly, the prototype of the hero
as warrior" (12). She goes on to state,

Examining the hero, we discover his essential narrowness which

neglects concerns with community, negotiation, nature, human

relations, and the ennoblement of individual destinies to ﬂourish in

their differentness. The heroic code is conservative in its essence,

which means it does not commit itself to broad social issues particular

to a time, such as the illiteracy, poverty and violence which permeate our
society now. (12)

Murdock and Aisenberg both allude to the need of a hero/heroine with new strengths.

Their words also emphasize the separateness of the hero. Our national myths are ﬁlled

12
with single heroic ﬁgures who make it alone. For example, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and
Charles Lindbergh embody the "American Spirit" of individualism. Thus, it is not
surprising that until recently the Bildungsroman was deﬁned and examined in terms of a
single hero whose character enabled him to reach his destiny.

Christa Wolf in her text, Casandara (1984), asks, "What would happen, if the great
male heroes of world literature were replaced by women? Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus,
Oedipus, Agamemnon, Jesus, King Lear, Faust, Julien Sorel, Wilhelm Meister?" (260).

I suggest, in a partial response to her question, that the replacing of heroes with heroines
creates narratives of affiliation. Susan Fraiman in her text, Unbecoming Women: British
Women Writers And The Novel 0f Development (1993), suggests that female
protagonists "tend to insist that personal destiny evolves in dialectical relation to historical
events, social structures, and other peOple" (10). So, how do these protagonists "insist"
their destiny is connected to historical events, social structures, and other people? How
do the authors of these female protagonists emphasize their connection? It is my
contention that chronotope plays a cmcial role in the author's conveyance of the female
journey and the female protagonist's connection with others.

THE CHRONOTOPE

The issue of space is not new to feminist critics. Virginia Woolf noted the importance
of space in a woman's life in her text, A Room of One '5 Own (1929), and her essay
"Professions For Women" (1942). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their text, The
Madwoman in the Attic (1984), explore in depth the patriarchal structures which enclosed

19th century women writers. They note Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte,

13
Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson and Slyvia Plath all struggled, through their novels, with
their anxiety over space. Gilbert and Gubar emphasize the struggle with space through
Charlotte Perkin Gilman's poem, "In Duty Bound".
In duty bound, a life hemmed in,
Whichever way the spirit turns to look;
No chance of breaking out, except by sin;
Not even room to shirk -
Simply to live, and work.
An obligation preimposed, unsought,
Yet binding with the force of natural law;
The pressure of antagonistic thought;
Aching within, each hour,
A sense of wasting power.
A house with roof so darkly low
The heavy rafters shut the sunlight out;
One cannot stand erect without a blow;
Until the soul inside
Cries for a grave - more wide.
(cited in The Madwoman in the Attic 84)
"Literally conﬁned to the house, ﬁguratively conﬁned to a single place, enclosed in parlors
and encased in texts, imprisoned in kitchens and enshrined in stanzas, women artists
naturally found themselves describing dark interiors and conﬁrsing their sense that they
were house-bound with their rebellion against being duty bound" (The Madwoman in the
Attic 84).
Space continues to be an issue for contemporary writers. For example, Nadya
Aisenberg explores space as a traditional form of conﬁnement for the would-be heroine.

She states in her text, Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male Myth (1994),

. . . space, instantly provides a contrast between the hero, whose
god-given destiny most frequently impels a literal and metaphoric

l4

quest journey, and the heroine, whose circumscribed state, also

literal and metaphoric, inhibits adventure. The heroine, operating

within narrow bounds, has difﬁculty claiming a public space, a

stage from which to air her views. Further, genderization also denies

her the space of solitude in which to develop selfhood and to grow

in ways that would in turn strengthen her contribution to the community.
Finally, traditional gender views of woman's space lead to debilitating
passivity; the fairy tale princess awaiting the rescuer from the outside world
becomes the contemporary victim of agoraphobia. As gender roles
become less rigid, the heroine's relation to space alters accordingly. (21)

Aisenberg perceives women's space as deﬁned through the perceptual modes of biological

and social deﬁnitions. It is her belief that both perceptual modes contribute to a woman's

gendered sense of identity; she suggests that the predominately women's diseases of

anorexia and agoraphobia are results of the resistance to and internalizing of biological and

social deﬁnitions.

The examination of women and space has not been limited to literature. Sandra Lee

Bartky, in her essay, "Foucault, Femininity and Patriarchy" (Femininity and Domination:

Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression 1990), cites remarkable evidence of
women's relation to space in a different type of text:

In an extraordinary series of over two thousand photographs, many candid
shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has
documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture.
Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands

folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned
inward, and legs pressed together . . . Men on the other hand, expand into
the available space, they sit with legs far apart and arms ﬂung out at some
distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male ﬁgures is
what Wex calls the "proffering position," the men sit with legs thrown
wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing outward, often with an arm and
casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread thigh. (68)

Wex's examination of women and space is limited to photographs. However, the

15
realization of space and women has been recognized in a variety of texts. For example,
Teresa de Lauretis (A lice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema 1984 and Technologies
of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction 1987) has expanded the dialogue to
include cinema.

Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson in their text, A Voice of One 's Own:
Conversations With America '5 Writing Women (1992), emphasize the issue of space as an
area of exploration for many women writers. They state,

To quote Francine Pose, "It's not about the space you're in, it's

about the space that's in your head . . . It's not accidental, it's not biological,

that women tend to write about the family, the garden and [that] men,

for whatever reason, feel free to write about seafaring and wargoing. That's

about the life you live. J ane Austen was not going to write Moby Dick."

Alsion Lurie talked about "the war between men and women for control of

space." Where women are concerned, "If you can't range freely, then the

space you live in becomes more important to you." The "landscapes" of

men and women, said Alice McDermott, "probably are different." Much more

conversation took place in these interviews about the usually enclosed emotional,

physical, psychological, and ﬁnancial spaces of women, ﬁctional or

otherwise, and about what we might call the "right space". (4)
It is apparent the issue of space will continue to prompt lively theoretical debate among
feminist critics and authors. However, an area for ﬁrture exploration and an area that this
text will attempt to identify is the connection between time and space in the female novel
of awakening. Bakhtin's theory of chronotope adds a ﬁrrther dimension to the issue of
space in the woman's journey.

Mikhail Bakhtin recognized that all contexts are shaped fundamentally by the kind of

time and space that operate within them. In his essay, "Forms of Time and of the

Chronotope in the Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 1981), he gives the name

l6
"chronotope (literally, "time space") to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (84). Gary Morson and Caryl
Emerson state in their text, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990), "Bakhtin's
crucial point is that time and space vary in qualities; different social activities and
representations of those activities presume different kinds of time and space" (367).
Literature is heterochronous, it offers a multiplicity of chronotopes. Bakhtin claims in his
essay, "Forms Of Time And Of The Chronotope in the Novel" (The Dialogic
Imagination 1981), some genres do a better job than others of "assimilating real historical
time and space" and placing "actual historical persons in such a time and space" (84). He
notes, in each chronotope, "time thickens, takes on ﬂesh, becomes artistically visible;
likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time, plot and
history" (84). The image of a person offered through a genre is due in part to the
chronotopes utilized. Thus, chronotopes can impact readers' insight into the actions,
events and experiences of individuals in their world.

For example, adventure time, one of the chronotopes identiﬁed by Bakhtin in his
essay, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination
1981), is particularly evident in the "adventure novel of ordeal. "

"Suddenly" and "at just that moment" best characterize this type of time,
for this time usually has its origin and comes into its own in just those
places where the normal, pragmatic and premeditated course of events is
interrupted - and provides an opening for sheer chance, which has its own
speciﬁc logic. This logic is one of random contingency [sovpadenie], which
is to say chance simultaneity [meetings] and chance rupture [nonmeetings],
that is, a logic of random disjunctions in time as well. In this random contingency,

"earlier" and "later" are crucially, even decisively, signiﬁcant. Should something
happen a minute earlier or a minute later, that is, should there be no chance

17

simultaneity or chance disjunctions in time, there would be no plot at all, and
nothing to write a novel about. (92)

Adventure time is controlled by chance. The heroes act or react to adventure time, "as
merely physical persons, and the initiative does not belong to them" (95). Adventure time
continues to shape our view of the world as is apparent through our fascination with
romance novels or adventure movies like Waterworld, Mad Max, Rambo or Raiders of the
Lost Ark. Gods, fate, demons, sorcerers, fairies and villains decree the ﬁrture and take the
initiative. The hero "enters adventuristic time as a person to whom something happens.
But the initiative in this time does not belong to human beings" (95). The hero is not any
different at the end of the adventure than he/she was at the start of the adventure.

The hero is "ready-made" and "predetermined". The events or actions do not form or
change the hero and "in that very immutability of the hero lies the entire point" ("The
Bildungsroman and its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 13).

The novel of ordeal always begins where a deviation from the normal

social and biographical course of life begins, and it ends where life

resumes its normal course. Therefore, the events of a novel or ordeal,

whatever they may be, do not create a new type of life, a new human

biography that is determined by the changing conditions of life. Beyond

the boundaries of the novel, biography and social life remain ordinary and

unchanged. ("The Bildungsroman and its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism"

14-15)
Thus, the world does not change the hero nor does the hero change the world. Individuals
are completely passive and endure events. "The hammer of events shatters nothing and
forges nothing - it merely tests the durability of an already ﬁnished product" ("Forms Of

Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 107). "This explains why the nature of

heroism is so unproductive and uncreative in this type of novel (even when historical

18
heroes are depicted)" ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism"
16).

No particular space is required in adventure time. However, a great deal of space is
necessary for pursuit, separation, escape, persecution, quests and various obstacles. Space
is "interchangeable." The adventure requires an alien country, but any alien country will
do. Rambo can take place in Vietnam, an African country or any land that is alien to the
hero and the reader. The same is true with romance novels. Any foreign space will
achieve the heroine's pursuit and capture. Note the following cover descriptor of a
current romance novel by Iris Johansen.

Now, from nationally best-selling Iris Johansen comes a thrilling tale of

abduction, seduction, and surrender that sweeps from the shimmering

halls of Regency England to the decadent haunts of a notorious rouge . . . .

(The Beloved Scoundrel I994)
The heroine does not change the world in the romance novel. However, she does endure
and "unexpectedly" discovers love. Pratt and White ("The Novel of Development" 1981)
state,

In the woman's novel of development (exclusive of the science ﬁction

genre), however, the hero does not choose a life to one side of

society after conscious deliberation on the subject; rather, she is

radically alienated by gender-role norms ﬁom the very onset. Thus,

although the authors attempt to accommodate their hero's Bildung, or

development, to the general pattern of the genre, the disjunctions that

we have noted inevitably make the woman's initiation less a self-determined

progression towards maturity than a regression from ﬁrll participation in

adult life. It seems more appropriate to use the term Entwicklungsroman, the

novel of mere growth, mere physical passage from one age to the other

without psychological development, to describe most of the novels that

we have perused. (in Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction 36)

It would be interesting to know the chronotopes utilized by the novels of development

19
Pratt and White examined. Could chronotope be a means by which to maintain the status
quo? If so, could the recognition of the operation of chronotopes have pedagogical
signiﬁcance?

For example, Pratt and White note, in the woman's novel of development, "mere
physical passage from one age to the other" (3 6). Their words indicate a cyclical time.
Bakhtin elaborates on cyclical time in his essay, "The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance
in the History of Realism. "

Another type of cyclical emergence, which retains a

connection (but not such a close one) with man's age, traces

a typically repeating path of man's emergence from youthﬁrl

idealism and fantasies to mature sobriety and practicality. This

path can be complicated in the end by varying degrees of skepticism

and resignation. This kind of novel of emergence typically depicts

the world and life as experience, as a school, through which every

person must pass and derive one and the same result: one becomes

sober, experiencing some degree of resignation. (22)
Note that though the hero changes and emerges in this chronotope, the ﬁrture is
predetermined. Fate continues to designate his/her destiny. The world remains
unchanged.

However, Bakhtin does identify the Bildungsroman as a novel of emergence in which
the hero emerges "along with the world and he reﬂects the historical emergence of the
world itself" (23). According to Bakhtin, the emergence takes place in the
chronotope of historical time. In historical time, the choices made by the hero develop
his/her identity rather than just reveal it. In addition, this chronotope conceives of the

world as not given, but created through the effort of individuals. The individual and

society shape one another. Bakhtin attributes crucial chronotopic discoveries to Goethe

20

and celebrates Goethe's ability to "see time" and "read time." To see time involves seeing
"heterochrony. "

The main features of this [chronotopic] visualization are the merging

of time (past with present), the fullness and clarity of the visibility of

the time in space, the inseparability of the time of an event from the

speciﬁc place of its occurrence (Localitat and Geschichte), the visible

essential connection of time (present and past), the creative and active

nature of time (of the past in the present and of the present itself), the

necessity that penetrates time and links time with space and different times

with each other, and ﬁnally, on the basis of the necessity that pervades

localized time, the inclusion of the future, crowning the ﬁrllness of time in

Goethe's images. ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History

of Realism" 41-42)
Goethe understood time and its interconnection with speciﬁc space and space as saturated
with historical time. In historical time the past is interconnected to the present and ﬁiture.
Furthermore, in the intersection of past, present, and future time is the space for dissent,
contingency and change. I would suggest the authors I am examining are attempting to
create such a space. All realize that their present is connected to the past. For example,
in Like Water For Chocolate (1992), Laura Esquivel writes, "They say that under those
ashes every kind of life ﬂourished, making this land the most fertile in the region" (241).
Under the ashes of our past life blooms our present and future.

Chernin, Garcia, Esquivel and Tan are involved in providing space for the examination
of the intricate interconnection of the past, present and future. Amy Tan starts The Joy
Luck Club (1989) with a story. The story attempts to convey a Chinese imrnigrant's
reason for coming to America.

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration

officials pulled her swan away from her leaving the woman ﬂuttering her
arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to

21

ﬁll out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she
had left behind. (3)

Only a portion of the woman's memory remains. It has been ripped from her being. Yet,
through Tan's novel/story her memory gains ﬂesh, her feather becomes a swan. Tan's
intention to connect with the past from the present moment is apparent in her dedication,

To my mother
and the memory of her mother

You asked me once
what I would remember,

This, and much more.
This is not the end. Through the past, the ﬁrture and present are laden with possibility and
endowed with potential.

Finally, it is important to note "the chronotope is the place where the knots of the
narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualiﬁcation that to them
[chronotopes] belongs the meaning that shapes narrative" ("Forms Of Time And Of The
Chronotope In The Novel" 250). In addition, texts often contain more than one
chronotope. "Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven
with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or ﬁnd themselves in ever
more complex interrelationships" (252). It is at this intersection my journey begins.
What is the nature of the interactions among chronotopes in the novels by Chernin,
Garcia, Esquivel and Tan? How do they (chronotopes) interact dialogically? "How are

the chronotopes of the author and the listener or reader presented to us?" (252).

22
METHOD OF ANALYSIS

The following text examines four female novels of emergence. Each novel offers a
generational perspective of a family. The family lineage provided to the reader is through
the female line. Yet, what is unique about these novels is their creative exploration of time
and space. As previously mentioned, Bakhtin noted that in the Bildungsroman, the hero's
emergence takes place in the chronotope of historical time. He acknowledges the visible
signs of historical time in his essay, "The Bildungsroman" (Speech Genres & Other Late
Essays 1986).

These are visible vestiges of man's creativity, traces of his hands and

his mind: cities, streets, buildings, artworks, technology, social

organizations, and so on. (25)
However, historically women's visible vestiges of creativity have not been "cities, streets,
buildings, technology, social organizations, and so on." Their historical legacies have been
less visible. Recipes, family stories and rituals are often not recognized as valuable
contributions to historical time. In addition these legacies often are nurtured and
developed in other chronotopes, for example biographical and everyday time. It is
through the link of generations they become historical.

Bakhtin does not offer an in-depth analysis of the chronotopes that intersect with
historical time. However, he notes Goethe's use of everyday time and biographical time
in his historical vision. According to Bakhtin, Goethe was concerned with the internal
necessity of a creative work.

Goethe searches for and ﬁnds primarily the visible movement of
historical time, which is inseparable from the natural setting (Localitat)

23

and the entire totality of objects created by man, which are essentially
connected to this natural setting. (32)

He goes on to state,

. . . Goethe's historical vision always relied on a deep, painstaking, and

concrete perception of the locality (Localitat). The creative past

must be revealed as necessary and productive under the conditions

of a given locality, as a creative humanization of this locality, which

transforms a portion of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for

people, into a corner of the historical world. (34)
Goethe's historical time relies on "man the builder" to transform the world through visible
creative works deemed "essential" and "necessary" by historical man. These creative
works are "visible, concrete, and material" (39).

He builds, drains marshes, lays routes across mountains and rivers,

develops the minerals, cultivates the irrigated valleys, and so on. One

sees the essential and necessary character of man's historical activity.

And if he wages wars, one can understand how he will wage them (that

is, there will be necessity here, too). (38)
Yet, seldom do women leave such monuments. How is their historical time recognized?
How do women create historical time if not through amphitheaters, temples and
aqueducts? Could their historical time be less visible to the hu"man" eye?

The following four chapters utilize chronotopes as a unit of analysis. Yet, they "re"vise
the deﬁning characteristics of chronotopes. Adrienne Rich, in her essay "When We Dead
Awaken: Writings as Re-Vision" (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-
19 78 1979) deﬁnes re-vision.

Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh
eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is
for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is

an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions
in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And

24

this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search

for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of

male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in

its impulse, would take the work ﬁrst of all as a clue to how we live,

how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves,

how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very

act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can

begin to see and name - and therefore live - afresh. A change in the

context of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see

the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution.

We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than

we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold

over us. (35)
I relay this long passage for a purpose. Adrienne Rich envisions the act of reading as a
cultural strategy toward revisioning our identity. The recognition of chronotopes plays a
crucial role in this self-knowledge. The time and space in which we envision ourselves can
affect our visions of possibilities. In addition, it plays a role in our imagined identities. It
offers insight into the "assumptions in which we are drenched." It can awaken our
consciousness to a "her"story.

My goal is to show that a feminist "re"vision of historical time and its intersecting
chronotopes can construct new visions of possible journeys and dismantle the traditional
vision of a solitary hero's journey. In each novel, historical time is recognized by the
daughter or granddaughter through the matrilineal line. It becomes apparent, as the
women tell their stories, that their stories cannot be conveyed or evaluated until the entire
"her"story is known and understood. Thus, through multiple layers of biographical time,
the authors weave a vision of historical time. Yet, historical time in these novels of

emergence is not recognizable through "essential" and "necessary" man-made artifacts. It

is less visible. The heroines become, through story, conscious and awake to the past's

25
contribution to the present and ﬁiture. Their historical time is not made of brick and stone
but rather memory and metaphor.

The mothers and/or grandmothers have ceased to perpetuate the patriarchal history by
daring to voice their own stories and ways of knowing. Their stories are an attempt to
resist hegemony. The daughters' internalizing and voicing of their mothers'/grandmothers'
stories and knowledge are able to emerge in historical time. However, the daughters do
not discount the time and space of their ancestors, rather they value and evaluate the other
chronotopes of "her"story, reﬁrsing to discount their contribution to the present. For
example, the traditional acts of their foremothers, through historical time, are recognized
as essential and necessary. Consequently, they celebrate the traditional acts of their
foremothers and at the same time celebrate their ability to transcend and resist the cultural
deﬁnitions of gender.

Often the chronotopes are revealed through the external and internal dialogue of the
characters. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson note in their text, Mikhail Bakhtin:
Creation of a Prosaics (1990), the connection between discourse and chronotope theories
of the novel.

In effect, the discourse and chronotope theories of the novel
are two aspects of the same theory. The form-shaping ideology of
the novel includes both a view of languages of heteroglossia and a
way of understanding time and space. (3 72)
Thus, in order to establish the chronotopes utilized, I quote liberally from the four texts

examined in the following chapters. In addition, the discourse compliments the insight

available through chronotopic analysis. For example, does the chronotope contribute to

26
and/or resist hegemony? Does the selection of certain chronotopes reinforce scripted
roles or offer the possibility for the disruption of assigned roles?

In the texts I examine, the women resist the gendered scripts of their culture
and through their acts enable their daughters to envision possibilities. Madeleine Grumet
in her text, Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (1988), emphasizes the possible potential
of thinking back through our mothers.

What would thinking back through our mothers mean to us, we

the women who educate? It invites us to recollect, to re-collect the

process of our own formation. Rarely does one hear, a woman

proclaim, "I made myself“; the defensive arrogance of the self-made

man is not available to women, who cannot forget what men cannot

remember. Because our separation from our mothers is rarely

as deﬁned as that of our brothers, we are more modest, a bit unsure.

Beginnings and endings are not quite so clear to us, where one leaves

off and another begins. . . . (191)
The daughters, through historical time, are able to recognize and embrace their mothers'
journeys and their mothers in themselves. Thus, they are embracing more than the
culturally assigned roles of gender. They are embracing their courageous acts of
resistance and through voice their mothers' resistant acts become visible.

My project is to examine the chronotopes in four novels and to locate in the
chronotopes the journeys of women. I submit that a reader's recognition of chronotope
can expand the exploration and dialogue of the female Bildungsroman. Bakhtin
elaborates upon the crucial connection of chronotope and meaning in his essay, "Forms Of
Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel":

We somehow manage however to endow all phenomena with

meaning, that is, we incorporate them not only into the sphere
of spatial and temporal existence but also into a semantic sphere.

27

. . . For us the following is important: whatever these meanings turn
out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social
experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible

and visible for us (a hieroglyph, a mathematical formula, a verbal

or linguistic expression, a sketch, etc). Without such temporal-
spatial expression, even abstract thought is impossible. Consequently,
every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through
the gates of the chronotope. (277-258)

Chronotope provides, as a unit of analysis, a means by which to "re"vise our
reading/listening of texts. My effort, then, is to identify the chronotopes of the texts and
construct meaning through the "gates of chronotope." If the female journey is signiﬁcant
to our becoming, as I maintain, than chronotopic analysis adds new dimensions to its

possibilities.

CHAPTER II

THE "RE"BUILDING OR "RE"VISION OF A HOUSE

1 permit no woman to teach . . . she is to keep silent.

- St. Paul

Kim Chernin's title, In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (1983), notiﬁes

the reader of a reclaiming of the past. One is immediately reminded of the biblical
quotation, "In my Father's house are many rooms." Yet, Chernin is claiming the space to
"re"vise the patriarchal past. Her story is not of the father, but of the mother. It is the
matrilineal that she is attempting to explore. At one point in the text, she promises her
dying Aunt Gertrude to tell the story of her sister Celia. Gertrude shouts to her sister
Rose to tell the story of their sister Celia and then,

. . . in a voice grown dreadfully weary, so that I imagine her whole life

now repeats its sacriﬁce, its typical gesture, "Do this for me, Rose.

Do this for me." (52)
One is once again reminded of a biblical phrase, "Do this in remembrance of me." Mary
Daly in her text, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women 's Liberation
(1973), states, "it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the
power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name

ourselves, the world, or God" (8). Kim Chernin is attempting to name herself and realizes

28

29
that her naming of self is connected to the past, to her mother's house.

Kim Chernin conveys the importance of her story, a woman's journey, in the foreword
of her text. She quotes her mother, "You want to ﬂy? Grow wings. You don't like the
way things are? Tell a story" (xxiii). The story or myth has the potential to change the
world. The telling of the story opens the space for possibility. Yet, she realizes that her
shaping of the present is grounded in her shaping of the past.

I sat down one day to tell my mother's story. I wrote for seven
years. Each time I ﬁnished I started again, something was missing, the
untold had not yet been told. Writing that book, I was so preoccupied
with the struggle to be different from my mother that I did not notice how
much I regretted my failure to become one of the things she undeniably is.
For my mother, in spite of critical ideology and personal ambivalence,
is very much a Jewish woman. (xvii)
Her present is bounded by the constraints of the past. Yet, the past also endows the
present with potential. It is at this point, a point of recognition, that she begins her story.
This recognition is apparent in her dedication,
For my mother, Rose Chernin
For her mother, Perle Chernin
And for my daughter, Larissa Chernin.
The naming is through the mother, not the father. Once more a clear indication of an
attempt to "re"vise the patriarchal past. Judith Butler in her text, Bodies That Matter: On
The Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), states, "The patronymic operation secures its
inﬂexibility and perpetuity precisely by requiring that women, in their roles as wives and
daughters, relinquish their name and secure perpetuity and rigidity for some other

patronym, and daughters-in-law are imported to secure the eternity of this patronym"

(216). Through the characters' dialogue the theme is emphasized and given voice.

30
For example, we learn in the ﬁrst chapter, through her mother's dialogue, that Kim
Chernin's work is "Mat-ri-archy" (6). In addition, we learn through Kim's dialogue to her
mother, the two women share common ground through their individual heroes, namely
Marx and Engels, as both "believed there was once a matriarchal stage of social
organization" (8). Chernin is interested in forming a space for a story beyond the
traditional role of mother and wife. Yet, the story must recognize the traditional roles are
part of the narrative. She is a mother as was her mother and her mother before her.
The issue of time and space is initially brought up in the foreword of the text. Chernin

writes,

When I ﬁrst began to work on In My Mother's House I recorded my mother

telling her stories, then transcribed the tapes. The words missed her, they

suffered from her absence . . . To get my mother to sound like my mother on a

page, I had to ﬁnd a voice that was as richly textured as her presence, a voice

that could, being a paper voice, rely entirely on itself, having been forced to

dispense with lemon, teacups, apples, living breath. (x)
Chernin is in another chronotope, one that is recognized by Bakhtin. "If I relate (or write
about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event
am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred" ("Forms Of Time And
Chronotope In The Novel" 256). Her represented world can never be "chronotopically
identical with the real world it represents . . ." (256). However, she can create a "zone of
familiar contact" ("Epic and Novel"). Her creation of a "zone of familiar contact" enables
the reader to identify with the heroines in a present-day reality.

Time is not distanced through an image of the absolute past. One is immediately

drawn into a space familiar to women. Note the beginning of Chernin's text,

31
July I 974
She calls me on the telephone three times the day before I am due
to arrive in Los Angeles. The ﬁrst time she says, "Tell me, you still like
cottage cheese?" "Sure," I say, "I love it. Cottage cheese, yogurt, ricotta..."
"Good," she says, "we'll have plenty."
The second conversation is much like the ﬁrst. "What about chicken?
You remember how I used to bake it?"
The third time she calls the issue is schav - Russian sorrel soup, served
cold, with sour cream, chopped egg, and onion, large chunks of dry black
bread. "Mama," I say. "Don't worry. It's you I'm coming to visit. It doesn't
matter what we eat. " (3)
Chernin's mother is comically familiar. She wears a human face and creates a familiar
space. "Laughter destroyed epic distance; it began to investigate man freely and familiarly,
to turn him inside out, expose the disparity between his surface and his center, between his
potential and his reality" ("Epic and Novel" 35). Thus, Chernin reminds us at the
beginning of her text of a reality and space familiar to women. The potential has yet to be
revealed, though it is alluded to in the ﬁrst page.
She worries. She is afraid she has not been a good mother. An activist
when I was growing up, Communist Party organizer, she would put up
our dinner in a huge iron pot before she left for work each morning,
in this way making sure she neglected no essential duty of a mother
and wife. For this, however, she had to get up early. (3)
Through these words the reader becomes aware that this is not a story of entrapment.
This is a story that will transcend traditional roles and stereotypes and perhaps offer an
alternative journey.
EVERYDAY TIME

Three chronotopes are particularly evident in Kim Chernin's text, In My Mother’s

House (1983). Each chronotope provides space for crucial dialogue and emphasizes three

32
journeys of women. The ﬁrst apparent chronotope is everyday time. It is in the space
provided through everyday time that the private lives of the heroines are revealed. It is in
this space that the personal afﬁliations and relationships are revealed, often around food.
In fact, a food motif plays a crucial role in the chronotope of everyday time. Kim Chernin
writes, "I learned to understand my mother's life when I was a small girl, waiting for her to
come home in the afternoons. Each night I would set the table careﬁrlly, ﬁlling three small
glasses with tomato juice while my father tossed a salad" (13). Note, it is in this space
she learns "to understand" her mother. This is a space of nurturing, often through food,
and intuition. The mundane detail of meal preparation becomes a crucial moment of
memory and insight. The patriarch tradition is "re"vised. The father, through food,
participates in the nurturing of the mother.
Mary Ann Doane in her text of women's ﬁlms of the forties, The Desire To Desire

(1987), notes the constrictions of home space.

Space is constricted in the woman's ﬁlm, usually to the space of the

home. The opposition between inside and outside in relation

to the house attains a signiﬁcance which it rarely reaches in other

genres . . . In this narrowing of space the most humble object signiﬁes . . .

In a patriarchal society, women's genres are characterized by a kind of signifying

glut, an overabundance of signiﬁcation attached to the trivial. In the woman's

ﬁlm there is a hypersigniﬁcation of elements of the domestic - doors, windows,

kitchens, bedrooms . . . In watching a woman's ﬁlm, one actively senses the

contraction of the world attributed to the woman, the reduction of

meaning and its subordination to affect. (179)
I suggest that the "overabundance of signiﬁcation attached to the trivial" emphasizes

everyday time and in this time the trivial detail becomes heroic. Lives are comprised of

everyday details and every day acts have a heroic quality. The acts themselves dramatize a

33
type of strength not based on physical domination.

She was a woman who woke early, no matter how late she
went to bed the night before. Every morning she would
exercise, bending and lifting and touching and stretching,
while I sat on the bed watching her with my legs curled up.
Then, a cold shower and she would come from it shivering,
smelling of rosewater, slapping her arms. She ate
toast with cottage cheese, standing up, reading the morning
paper. But she would always have too little time to ﬁnish her coffee. . .
It was the invariable pattern of her life, as I learned to know it
when I was a little girl, still hoping to become a woman like
my mother. To this day 1 rise early, eat a frugal meal, take a cold
shower and laugh as I slap my arms, bending and stretching, touching
and reaching. (13-14)

Through an everyday ritual, the mother's physical and internal strength is revealed. Rose
celebrates her physical being through a common-day act of life, a tradition which in turn
establishes a family tradition and a cyclical motif is established through the daughter's
repetition of her heroic act.

Bakhtin notes in Goethe's text, Italian Journey, his depiction of everyday time.

All his descriptions of Italian everyday life are pervaded with a
sense of everyday time, measured by the pleasures and labor of the
vital human life . . .

Against the background of these times of nature, daily existence,
and life, which are still cyclical to one degree or another, Goethe also
sees interwoven with them signs of historical time - essential traces of
human hands and minds that change nature, and the way human reality
and all man has created are reﬂected back on his customs and views.
("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 32)

At a later point in his essay, Bakhtin deﬁnes the "historically active man."

Historically active man is placed in this living, graphic, visual system

of waterways, mountains, valleys, boundaries, and routes. He builds,
drains marshes, lays routes across mountains and rivers, develops the
minerals, cultivates the irrigated valleys, and so on. ("The Bildungsroman
and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 37-3 8)

34
Thus, the historically active man is creator and builder. Yet, the history of woman is not
one of draining marshes and irrigation of valleys. Her history is ignored in this deﬁnition
of time and space and ﬁnds voice and space in the everyday chronotope.

Woman's building is celebrated in everyday time. Bakhtin recognizes the celebration of
everyday time in his carnival chronotope. However, though everyday time is celebrated in
the carnival chronotope, it is often celebrated through exaggeration. In contrast, everyday
time in Chernin's text does not depend upon exaggeration for celebration. Chernin sees
what Bakhtin and Goethe do not see because she sees through a mother's and daughter's
eyes, a point that she emphasizes in her text. She sits down next to her daughter and sees
a "deep look in her eyes, which at such times are so much like the eyes of my mother"
(30). She goes on to state,

These eyes run in our family. In the older world, my mother

says, they were known as the eyes of the macheschaefe, the witch.

But then, I su’spect, the word was never used lightly and I wonder

what it means that my grandmother used it of my own mother,

who has frequently used it of me. (30-31)
The ability to see is a multigenerational gift. With her question, she raises the issue of
perception or gaze. "The Gaze" has been and continues to be a crucial subject with
feminists. For as Nadya Aisenberg points out in her text, Ordinary Heroines:
Transforming The Male Myth (1994), "the gaze is male, and in itself constitutes

gender positioning, the displacement of women's experience and her deﬁnition as 'other

(63). She goes on to state,

Creating a female gaze can only follow from a change from women as
object viewed to women as subject viewer. (71)

35

Kim Chernin sees her mother and her daughter. Thus, Chernin, as narrator and
protagonist, is offering the reader a female gaze. It is a gaze her daughter will continue.

For an instant she glances again into my eyes, touching a careﬁrlly

guarded place few people are able to reach. And then something

closes inside her, locking the words away. Later, they will

become her conscious knowledge. For now they are simply the

guarantee that understanding is possible. (31)
Kim Chernin's daughter, Larissa, will need a female gaze if she is to understand the
possible.

Chernin, the narrator, conveys the value she places on her mother's gaze and her
daughter's gaze as she gives both space in the text. She mentions, throughout the text,
their gazes as well as hers. Often the gaze is celebrated in the chronotope of everyday
time. In the chronotope of everyday time we come to know our mothers. We acquire our
perceptions of them through their housekeeping acts and through their play. At one point
in the text, Kim and Rose make a bed. Later, Rose and Larissa undo the bed.

My mother looks down at her, startled, suspicious and then,

as she takes in the expression on her face, triumphant. "Ha,"

she says and picks up a comer of the blanket. She holds it up

in the air and gazes at it reverently. "Oy, my enlightenment,"

she chants, winking at my daughter, "how shall I fold you

so that you will never come out from your fold again?" (33-34)
In the chronotope of everyday time, the female gaze offers enlightenment. However, too
often the chronotope of everyday time is offered through the male gaze. In her text,
Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media (1994), Susan Douglas

reveals the far reaching implications of such a gaze.

When our mothers sat back to relax in front of the TV after a
twelve-to-ﬁfteen-hour day, they were surrounded by allegories

36

about masculine heroism and the sanctity of male gonads. Rarely,

if ever, did they see any suggestion that the incessant, mundane, and

often painful contortions of a woman's daily life might, in fact, be heroic

too. (44)
There is liberation and celebration in the female gaze and as Chernin implies,
"enlightenment. " The daily, incessant, and mundane become heroic through the female
gaze.

The male gaze often deﬁnes women through their bodies. The female gaze "re"deﬁnes
the value of the body. Chernin's female gaze celebrates the female's body and her daily
acts. She writes of her Aunt Gertrude, "it is her hands that betray the greatest eloquence.
They are, unmistakably, the hands of a nurse and they carry the story of her life's long
sacriﬁce. In them, I see the history of beds turned, heads lifted, pillows straightened,
bedpans emptied, all the patient heroisms of her compassion" (50). In addition, through
Chernin's female gaze we come to the realization that knowledge and culture are
transmitted through daily acts.

Now we are making the bed together, smoothing the sheet and

tucking it with careful folds at the corners, while my mother

discourses upon women and the making of beds. Listening, half-

listening to her, I observe the way she never loses an opportunity

for giving instruction. "My own mother, " she says, "told me not to

learn to cook or sew. 'You'll marry a rich man? then you won't

need it. If he's a poor man, better you don't know how to become

his slave.” (29)
The chronotope of everyday time provides a space for female stories and training.
Perhaps it is in this space, through a female gaze, women can "re"vise their identities and

liberate themselves from the male gaze.

Kim Chernin's attributes to her grandmother the query, "What is the background,

37
this matters also to the story" (55). The daily acts of women make up the background of
other stories. Perhaps that is why Chernin chooses to begin her last chapter the way she
begins her ﬁrst, in the everyday chronotope.

She calls us on the telephone two times the day before we are
due to arrive in Los Angeles. The ﬁrst time she says: "You know that
spinach loaf I make? You think Larissa would like it?" "The spinach
loaf? With carrots and wheat germ? She'd love it." "Good," says my
mother, "I already baked it." (295)

BIOGRAPHICAL TIME
Kim Chernin's text also utilizes the chronotope of biographical time. Bakhtin describes
biographical time as "quite realistic."

All of its moments are included in the total life process, and

they describe this process as limited, unrepeatable, and irreversible.
Each event is localized in the whole of this life process and therefore

it ceases to be adventure. The moment, the day, the night, and
immediate contiguity of short moments lose almost all of their
signiﬁcance in the biographical novel, which works with extended
periods, organic parts of the whole of life (ages and so forth). Arranged
against the background of this basic time in the biographical novel is,

of course, the depiction of individual events and adventures on a larger
plane, but the moments, hours, and days of this larger plane are not
adventuristic and are subordinate to biographical time. They are immersed
in that time, and it ﬁlls them with reality. ("The Bildungsroman and Its
Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 17-18)

Biographical time introduces the concept of generations. Chernin's text emphasizes the
concept of generations. "Generations introduce a completely new and extremely
signiﬁcant aspect into the depicted world; they introduce the contiguity of lives taking
place at various times" ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism" 18). According to Bakhtin, the family-biographical novel took shape in the

eighteenth century. It was constructed "not on deviations from the normal and typical

38
course of life but precisely on the basic and typical aspects of any life course; birth,
childhood, school years, marriage, the fate that life brings, works and deeds, death,
and so forth, that is exactly those moments that are located before the beginning or after
the end of a novel of ordeal" ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism" 17). Chernin is able through biographical time to bring in the life course of the
generations.

Her text is the story of her "mother's aging" (xxiii). Biographical time offers
Chernin the space to convey her mother's life course and to recognize the role of her
mother's mother in this story. She writes, "My mother, her daughter, was obsessed by the
fate of her mother and this obsession has descended to me" (15). Thus, she recognizes she
cannot explore her mother's life without the exploration of her grandmother's life.

For here ﬁnally is the clear shape of the story my mother wants me to
write down - this tale of four generations, immigrants who have come
to take possession of a new world. It is a tale of transformation and
development - the female reversal of that patriarchal story in which
the power of the family's founder is lost and dissipated as the inheriting
generations decline and fall to ruin. A story of power. (16)
Chernin introduces her mother's biographical time through alternate chapters in the ﬁrst
two-thirds of her text. Note the following chapter titles,
The First Story My Mother Tells: Childhood in Russia
The Second Story My Mother Tells: America, the Early Years
The Third Story My Mother Tells: A Larger World

The Fourth Story My Mother Tells: I Fight for My Mother

The Fifth Story My Mother Tells: Motherland

39

The Sixth Story My Mother Tells: The Organizer

The Seventh Story My Mother Tells: Letters

The Eighth Story My Mother Tells: A Birth and a Death
It is through these chapters that the reader witnesses Rose's birth, childhood, marriage etc.
In addition, it is through these chapters, in biographical time that the reader is exposed to
the journey of aging. Germaine Greer in her text, The Change: Women, Aging and the
Menopause (1991), notes,

In ﬁction, whether written by men or by women, middle-aged women

are virtually invisible. All our heroines are young. Even women writers

who are themselves ﬁfty or over write about young women. Barbara

Cartland, who is over ninety, has written more than 550 books,

but I doubt that one of them has a heroine over twenty-ﬁve. Older

women themselves suffer from youthism, and contribute to the prejudice

against themselves; they endure the never-ending gibes against menopausal

women, against mothers-in-law, against crones in general, without a

word of protest. Even the Women's Liberation movement has consistently

identiﬁed with the young, sexually active woman, and treated the

older woman as one of her oppressors. (20-21)
It is interesting to note Barbara Cartland is a writer of romance. The romance genre, as
mentioned in chapter one, often occurs in adventure time. In the Greek romance, as in
contemporary romance, there is no "biological or maturational duration" ("Forms Of Time
And Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 90). "At the novel's outset the heroes meet each
other at a marriageable age, and at the same marriageable age, no less fresh and
handsome, they consummate the marriage at the novel's end" (90).

Chernin's use of biographical time offers the heroine or heroines a place/space to age,

thus providing the reader a role model for the journey of aging. In this text, Chernin

offers a vision of how one might deal with the loss of a parent, the growing away of

40
children and increasing inﬁrmities of age. Once more she accomplishes this feat through
the female gaze.

What does she see? I look at myself with her eyes. Suddenly, I'm

a giant. Five feet, four and a half inches tall the last time I measured
myself, now I'm strolling along here as if I'm on stilts. She has to tip
back her head to look into my eyes. This woman, whose hands were
once large enough to hold my entire body, does not now reach as high as
my daughter's shoulder. (italics mine, 4)

Biographical time recognizes the aspect of physical aging. For example, Kim Chernin
notes her Aunt's physical appearance, "I watched the wrinkles gnawing at her face,
deepening perceptibly every time I saw her" ( 10).

Biographical time provides space for the realistic portrayal of death.

When I lean close to her I can smell the acrid

sweetness I have known since childhood, when my sister
was dying. It makes me want to run toward her, to grab her
so tight death cannot get hold of her, and it makes me

want to run away. (10)

The contradictory emotions one feels with the death of a loved one is recognized and
afﬁrmed in this space. In fact, the general contradictory emotions of life are recognized.
Note the contradictory emotions she experiences when asked by her mother to write the
story of her life.

"You are a writer," she says, "So, do you want to take down the
story of my life?"
I am torn by contradiction. I love this woman. She was my ﬁrst
great aching love. All my life I have wanted to do whatever she asked
of me, in spite of our quarreling.
She's old, I say to myself. What will it take from you? Give this to her.
She's never asked anything from you as a writer before. Give this. You
can always go back to your own work later.
But it is not so easy to turn from the path I have imagined for myself. This
enterprise will take years. It will draw me back into the family, waking its ghosts.

41
It will bring the two of us together to face all the secrets and silences we have
kept. The very idea of it changes me. I'm afraid. I fear, as any daughter would,
losing myself back into the mother. (12)
The female gaze is a "and/both" rather than an "either/or" gaze. Thus, Chernin through
biographical time and the female gaze is able to emphasize the reality of "and/both"
emotions.

Biographical time allows space for the "private life". Thus, the "internal man" or
woman in this space is allowed voice. The chronotope of biographical time illuminates
the decisions and the actions of the heroines. For example, Rose's words to Kim provide
the reader insight into her mothering and the choices she made as a mother.

"You never knew how to protect yourself, " she says, "You

never knew. I would stand there and watch you weep. You wept

for everything. The whole world seemed to cause you pain.

And I would say to myself, This one I will strengthen. This one I

will make a ﬁghter. And you, why can't you forgive me I wanted to teach

you how to struggle with life? Why can't you forgive?" (17)
The words alone do not offer the insight. However, through biographical time they gain
meaning. The reader learns Rose has lost a daughter and that her mother, a victim of
spousal abuse, tried to commit suicide. It becomes clear why she wants her daughter to
know "how to protect" herself. She wants her daughter to possess the knowledge that she
herself acquired. Through the chronotope of biographical time she relays her
confrontation with her father.

All we wanted was for him to leave Mama alone. One day,

ﬁnally, I said to him, "If you ever hit my mother again I am going

to hit you back." (41)

She goes on to state, "After that childhood everything was easy, Nobody could break me.

42
I knew, even as a child, that this would be so" (41).

Yet, woman as victim and a woman's life as "hell on earth" (48) is not limited to the
journey of Rose's mother, Perle. Through biographical time we are able to see similar
journeys. "You think maybe you invented the struggle for women. But this struggle we
knew, believe me, already in our time" (59). Rose's story reveals the abuse of her sister,
Gertrude.

"Mama and Gertrude were cut from the same cloth. That we have

always known. What Celia and I never wanted to be, Gertrude

became. The man she manied, could you say he was like Papa?

Maybe not, maybe not. But still, I tell you, the way he treated Gertrude

was like Papa." (82)
The reader learns that Rose attributes to her father the breaking of their spirits. She writes
of her mother, "She was a gentle person and he broke her spirit. He broke her mind" (3 8).
On the next page she writes, "I loved my mother, I wanted to help her. I would lie awake
at night and remember those ﬁsts beating at her, breaking her down. Destroying her. And
I knew it would not be me. I would not be my mother and no child of mine would be my
mother. I would see to it" (3 9). After her father beats her sister Gertrude, she states, "I
am witness to this: she has never lost her temper again. He broke her spirit. Never again
in childhood, never again in adulthood. She never stood up to anything or anybody. And
I tell you this, you my children, I date her character back to this ﬁrst night. After that, she
was a good girl, self-denying, always giving to others" (36). Rose, through biographical
time, is able to transmit numerous examples of journeys.

Biographical time allows Rose space to reveal and acknowledge her strengths and

weaknesses. For example, she admits to her role in the oppression of her sister and

43
mother. She recognizes that as a child she did not support her mother. She states, "We
kids were mean to her, too. We couldn't sympathize with her; we preferred our aunt and
our aunt encouraged us against our mother. From the time we came to this country it was
unmitigated misery in our home" (3 7). She later states, "We forgot it could be different"
(3 7). She also admits to her participation of Gertrude's oppression. She states, Gertrude
"never got a chance to come to New York. After Mama broke down, Gertrude took care
of the family. She did the very thing Celia and I didn't want to do" (66). Only through the
chronotope of biographical time could such intricacies be revealed.
In biographical time the family mythologies are given voice. A family consciousness is

given space. Kim Chernin states,

But who could have imagined these old stories would awaken my

child to an interest in the family? She is growing up, I say to

myself, she is becoming conscious, my heart already stirred by the

magnitude of this, she is entering the mythology of this family. (15-16)
Rose Chernin has already inferred the potential of story. Throughout biographical time
Rose states, "What could I do?" The reader, in another chronotope, realizes she could tell
a story. How else can alternative journeys be revealed? Note, her journey is not the
journey of her mother or her sister Gertrude.

If you have sisters, and one of them lives a story, the others listen.

That is what my mother used to say. And you know what

she meant? What one sister does, the others will follow. Oy,

will it come out the same? (54)
Gertrude's journey is similar to her mother's journey. Yet, Rose is allowed the space to

give voice to another path. She states, "a woman is not the same thing as a slave" (63).

Later, she admits she was hesitant to marry, "I felt that there must be more to me

44
than would be developed at a kitchen sink" (65).

Rose's choice of an alternative journey is due in part to her mother's journey and her
sister's journey. She listened to their stories and their stories contributed to her story.
Her story incorporates their stories. In the text, Interpreting Women 's Lives: Feminist
Theory and Personal Narratives (1989), the authors write,

. . . women's personal narratives suggest how women's

lives are shaped through and evolve within relationships with others.

Feminists have long noted the special reliance of women upon the

resources of networks of family and kin, and the important role

women play in nurturing and maintaining such networks. (20)
Rose's story is not one of isolation. Biographical time reveals the role of others in her
story. The lives of others are entangled in her life. They have participated in each other's
stories. Rose admits their participation and hers. For example, she encouraged her sister
to marry Harry as she thought his security would be a "good thing" for her sister. "Who
could foresee, one day because of this my sister would break down and go into a mental
hospital, like Mama? Could I know the future? Could I tell one day Celia would kill
herself?" (70-71). How can one untangle the journeys? Rose's listening to others' stories
was crucial in the construction of her own.

Bakhtin writes,

Biographical time as real time cannot but be included (participate) in
the longer process of historical, but embryonically historical, time . . .
Generations introduce a completely new and extremely signiﬁcant
aspect into the depicted world; they introduce the contiguity of lives
taking place at various times . . . This already provides an entry into
historical duration. But the biographical novel itself does not yet know

true historical time . . . Secondary characters, countries, cities, things,
and so on enter into the biographical novel in signiﬁcant ways

45

and acquire a signiﬁcant relationship to the main hero. ("The Bildungsroman
and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 18)

I would suggest that the "secondary characters" in Rose's life become primary. It is their
stories that "acquire a signiﬁcant relationship" to Rose. "My sisters you can only
understand if you know my mother's life. And my life, too, you can only understand if you
know my mother" (82). Though Rose mentions the countries, cities, ideologies and other
"things" in her life, it is the people within her life that are signiﬁcant. In this space she asks
Kim, "Could I love anybody better than I love you?" (156) and in this space the text
offers its ﬁnal words, "I love you more than life, my daughter. I love you more than life"
(307). Love for others, particularly women, deﬁnes her life.

Finally, I would like to conclude with the idea that the biographical chronotOpe allows
voice space for a feminist consciousness. Through the act of storytelling the private has
become public. Rose's voice is given space. Kim Chernin states, "My mother is a brave
woman; she will say what everyone is terriﬁed of hearing and this utterance will often
prove to be everyone's release" (51). Through the chronotope of biographical time, Kim's
mother, Rose is allowed the space to release others. For example,

"Daughter," she will say in a voice that is stern and admonishing,
"always a woman must be stronger than the most terrible circumstance.
You know what my mother used to say? Through us, the women

of the world, only through us can everything survive." (16)

Kate Richards O'Hare became for meotrhe symbol of what I

wanted to be. A woman who stands up to injustice. I sat there,

and I thought, why shouldn't I be a woman like this? What is to

stop me? (43)

Her voice offers the reader a different possibility. Adrienne Rich in her text, On Lies,

46
Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979), states,
In teaching women, we have two choices: to lend our weight

to the forces that indoctrinate women to passivity, self-depreciation,

and a sense of powerlessness . . . or to consider what we work

against, as well as with, in ourselves . . . And this means, ﬁrst of all,

taking ourselves seriously: Recognizing that central responsibility of

a woman to herself, without which we remain always the Other, the

deﬁned, the object, the victim; believing that there is a unique quality

of validation, afﬁrmation, challenge, support, that one woman can

offer another. Believing in the value and signiﬁcance of women's

experience, traditions, perceptions. Thinking of ourselves seriously,

not as one of the boys, not as neuters, or androgynes, but as women. (240)
Rose sees herself as a woman. She names herself woman. At one point in the text she
relays to her daughter her meeting of a prostitute in prison. The woman states to Kim,
"Your mother, she saved me." Rose tells her daughter,

When the others would talk to us, she would look over,

the eyes angry. Then, one day, she and I began talking.

She could tell right away, I had no senses of us and them.

We were people together, prisoners. She saw in me,

a possibility, no more, no less. (21)
Rose's voice in biographical time enables us to envision possibility, no more, no less. It is

a possibility that is illuminated and elaborated upon through the next chronotope of
historical time.
HISTORICAL TIME

The text, In My Mother’s House, is dominated by the historical chronotope. Bakhtin
notes, "Within the limits of a single work and within the total literary output of a single
author we may notice a number of different chronotopes and complex interactions among
them, speciﬁc to the given work or author; it is common moreover for one of these

chronotopes to envelop or dominate the others" ("Forms of Time And Of The Chronotope

47
In The Novel" 252). Chernin, through historical time, is given the space for historical
perspective and that which appears "stable" and "immutable" in the previous chronotopes

"begins to pulsate."

. . . historical time, which is inseparable from the natural

setting (Localitat) and the entire totality of objects created

by man, which are essentially connected to this setting. ("The
Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 32)

Historical time recognizes that "All history is encamped about us and all history sets forth

again from us" (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 40).
Photographs with commentary, after the foreword, reveal a biographical chronotope

utilized by Kim Chernin. Next to a picture of herself and her sister, Nina, she states,

I think it would have been my sister who prepared the family
album, perhaps with my father's help. My mother cherished

it, in the sense of hiding it away, preserving it, but after my sister
died, it took great courage to look into it. For the most part,

I was the only one equal to that. (xxxv)

Kim Chernin is "equal" to the task of historical perspective, painful as it may be. Her
mother, Rose, has cherished and preserved the stories revealed, to the reader, in the
biographical chronotope. Yet, the stories gain signiﬁcance in another chronotope.

I came into the world as my mother's listener, saturated in

the broodings, misunderstandings, visions of a life that had
begun in the ﬁrst year of the twentieth century, long before
the First World War, in which my father was too young

to ﬁght. During the Second World War he was, by

the time of my birth, too old. Both these

wars, the revolutions that followed them, the sufferings

that gave rise to them, had made their way into my mother's
stories, along with the lost world of European Jewish life. (xi)

Historical time recognizes the impact of the world upon the lives of these women and at

48
the same time recognizes their impact upon the world. Individual agency and social
structure shape one another.
Rose, born in a Russian shtetl, grew up in poverty and oppression. Her involvement in
communism introduces her to "culture", "politics" and "what was possible for a worker."
In the Russian Club we were speaking every day about

what happened in Russia. The years passed, the revolution

maintained itself. You see what this meant? The people

were governing. They were transforming old Russia. They

were creating a new world.

The people were doing this. Think of it. The people. (italics mine, 63)

She begins to perceive herself not as a Jew, but as the people. Socialism and Communism
offer a new vision of the world.

. . . suddenly, she is standing outside of time. This, I imagine,

is what she was like when she climbed up on a soapbox in the

Bronx. There is that quality, a fervor, a capacity for vision, which

makes you want to listen to whatever she has to say. Does it matter

that the dream failed to come true so long ago? The wonder is, simply,

she is still a dreamer. (83)
It is important to note that the "dream" initiates in Rose's private life. Her mother, Perle,
committed by her father to an insane asylum, begs Rose to release her. Rose achieves the
impossible.

This was the ﬁrst battle I won against injustice. It made on me a

deep impression. I had a sense now of what was possible.

An ignorant woman could oppose a doctor. She would win

against an educated man. A woman could stand up against an

institution. (88)
Historical time reveals the individual's knowledge that fate is not predestined. Rose can

stand up against oppression and communism offers her a vehicle for change. The future is

not closed. In fact, it becomes open and ﬁlled with potential and possibility.

49
Historical time enables Kim's voice to emphasize, through distance, insight not
attainable in biographical time. Kim states,

I see the truth of her life in her eyes, in all its severe, problematical
beauty, willing the world to ﬁt the architecture of her dream. (125)

Rose continues, even in her old age, to dream that communism is the answer. Yet, Kim
reveals her own disillusionment. "To tell her life I would have to be able to listen to these
stories about the Soviet Union the way I listened as a child. But now I can only hear them
through my disillusion" (124). Kim is aware of a reality Rose is not aware of in her space.
Kim knows of the failure of the revolution. Kim, by revealing her trip to the Soviet Union
in 1957, enables the reader to witness her knowledge.
Traveling in a bus with Tolya, one night I saw two

women standing outside the subway station. He told

me they were prostitutes and at ﬁrst I wouldn't believe

him. How could there be prostitution in a socialist county?
Through historical perspective the reader is allowed to see the world's impact on
individuals. An ideology that promised to change the world is merely maintaining the
status quo. Adrienne Rich in her text, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution (1976), states,

Frederick Engels identiﬁed father-right and the end of the

matrilineal clan with the beginnings of private ownership and

slavery. He saw women as forced into marriage and prostitution

through economic dependency, and predicted that sexual emancipation

would come with the abolition of private property and the end of

male economic supremacy. For Engels (as for succeeding generations

of Marxists) the oppression of women has, simply, an economic

solution. He actually discourages our trying to speculate on how the

transaction to sexual equality would come about. (110)

Kim, through historical time, enables the reader to see the merging of the past, present and

50

ﬁlture.
. . . the revolution had not occurred.
A great change was coming, but it would take much

longer than she imagined. It would not happen ﬁrst out there,

in the social world. It would happen slowly, to one human

being after another. It would be subtle and overpowering and

would take the form of a gradual change of heart. (273)
The possibility still exists. One wonders if she perceives women's telling of their stories as

contributing to the "subtle and overpowering change of heart. "
In historical time, the reader is able to see the generational patterns of pain inﬂicted

upon the mothers by the daughters. A pain that is generated by the patriarchal society.
Adrienne Rich deﬁnes "Matrophobia" as the "fear not of one's mother or of motherhood
but of becoming one's mother" (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution 235). She goes on to state,

Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self,

in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers'

bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for

the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our

personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our

mothers'; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother

ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery. (237)
Historical time reveals matrophobia. Kim Chernin writes, "Tradition is the mother one
ﬁnds oppressive, the source of one's inspiration, and intolerable" (xxii). Throughout the
text, Kim struggles with her relationship to her mother. Her struggle appears similar to
Rose's struggle with her mother Perle.

Historical time allows the space for the pattern to emerge. Thus, when Gertrude's

daughter, Vida, withdraws all her mother's money, Rose refuses to judge her actions.

51

"But who," she says ﬁnally, "am I to judge or forgive? I'm not
God. I'm not a God of vengeance. And wasn't I once," she asks,
with only the slightest tremor in her voice, "wasn't I once also a
daughter?" (1 15)

The reader is reminded of Rose's abandonment of her own mother. Yet, the ﬁrture is
open:

Larissa will not look up at me; but that is a relief . . .

But then she takes my hand and squeezes it, insisting
that I look at her. She says nothing, but her eyes tell me
she sees. I look closer. Has she already caught the habit
of seeing things in patterns? She grabs my arm and leans
passionately against me. For a moment we think the same
thought, both of us stricken by the fear that one day the
same thing will happen between us. (114)

It does not have to continue. Yet, the pattern is there. It is up to the present and ﬁrture

generations to break the cycle.

The most important thing one woman can do for another

is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.
For a mother, this means more than contending with the
reductive images of females in children's books, movies,
television, the schoolroom. It means that the mother herself
is trying to expand the limits of her life. To refuse to be a
victim: and then to go on from there. (Of Woman Born:
Motherhood as Experience and Institution 246)

Rose attempts to offer that vision to her daughter and Kim attempts to offer the vision to
the reader.

Yet, both women acknowledge the inﬂuence of the world upon their perception of self.
Rose would look at her mother and think of her own life. "Hers was so small. And mine?
Who could describe it? The revolution was coming, I would play a part. But I could

never forget my mother's words. 'I? A Communist? I am an ignorant woman" (162).

52
Several times in the text, Rose refers to herself as an "ignorant woman. " She has been
shaped by her culture and her time. She states in her sixth story,

A person who works for the people grows bigger than himself.
If this is a miracle, there you have it, a Communist miracle. (italics mine, 157)

Her words reveal her identiﬁcation with the male stance. This woman, who has struggled
all her life for "the people", perceives the "Communist miracle" as male and herself as an

"ignorant woman."
The historical chronotope recognizes historical context.

But how could I become my mother? She arrived in this
country as a girl of twelve. An immigrant, struggling for
survival, she supported her family when her father ran off and
deserted them. To me she gave everything she must have wanted
for herself, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, walking home from the
factory, exhausted after a day of work.

What she is grows up out of her past in a becoming, natural
way. She was born in a village where most women did not know
how to read. She did not see a gaslight until she was twelve years
old. And I? Am I perhaps what she herself might have become if she
had been born in my generation in America? (14-15)

The history of the world illuminates Rose's history and Rose's history illuminates the
history of the world. Kim's journey cannot be identical to Rose's journey. Her world is
different. Her journey will grow up "out of her past in a becoming, natural way." Her
world will grow out of her historical context and her mother's journey and her
grandmother's journey and ultimately her daughter's journey will grow out of her journey.

In My Mother's House offers possibilities. The chronotope of historical time
encourages the reader to "re"vise "his"story.

Maybe she's been able to do what she's done because she
believes so strongly in something. There are hundreds

53

of people who would have been jailed or deported if it

weren't for her. Or some other organizer with the same system
of belief. It makes you wonder, should you judge a life by

the ideology that inspires it? Or by what that ideology, true

or false, inspires the life to do? It's a whole different way to
measure truth. (301)

Bakhtin writes that what was important to Goethe was "Not abstract moral truth (abstract

justice, ideology, and so on), but the necessity of any creative work or historical deed . . .'
("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 39). Kim has come
to the realization that Rose's historical deed was necessary. Together, they have come to
the recognition that the telling of women's stories is necessary.

I can feel from my own love for her the certainty that
nothing can destroy the bond between us. It is stronger
than ideology, unshakable in its binding. It is not the
birth bond which made us a mother and daughter; that
we could have trampled down, in our impatience and
conﬁrsion. This bond is comradeship, won from the work
we have done together. It comes so rarely to a mother
and daughter, but once it is achieved it tangles itself in with
all the nature and shared ﬂesh. And then even they,
if they wished, could no longer pull it down. (263)

They are comrades, separated by chronotope, united through their telling of stories.
Historical time enables the author to convey an alternative vision of the future. Kim

writes of her mother;

She would always ﬁnd it hard to step back into domestic life.

We limited her, we tied her back down to the earth. She

was made for larger confrontations, for crises and battles.

And I, seeing this, knew I was exactly the same. Someday,

when my time came, I would be just like her. (23 7)

Larissa's presence symbolizes the ﬁrture possibility. Her presence reminds the reader that

the past, present and future are intersecting in historical time. She is the reason for the

54
stories.
She was born in the ﬁrst years of this century, in that shtetl culture

which cannot any longer be found in this world. Her language is

that haunting mixture of English, Yiddish, and Russian, in which

an old world preserves itself. It is a story that will die with her generation.

My own child will know nothing of it if it is not told now. (17)
What a loss that would be! If the story is not told the individual effort will not lead to a
collective advancement in consciousness. Larrisa has the opportunity to break repetitive
destructive patterns.

. . . here of course, we have come to Larissa's story. For me, the

narrative is almost at an end. Those years, after her birth, belong to

my daughter and must be told, if ever, in her voice. That, after all,

is the pattern my mother has established. (294)

The reader is left with the sense that Larissa's story will be told. After all, the pattern has

been established.

CHAPTER III
SHIFTING BOUNDARIES
AND
DREAMING NEW ONES
O woman, you are not merely the handiwork
of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing
you with beauty from their own hearts . . . You are

one-half woman and one-half dream.
- Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener (ca. 1920)

Dreaming In Cuban (1992) is the story of a family divided politically and
geographically by the Cuban revolution. The author, Cristina Garcia, utilizes a variety of
chronotopes to emphasize the emergence of her characters. The genealogy of the family is
provided to the reader prior to the story, through a patriarchal family tree. The matriarch,
Celia, has three children. The eldest daughter, Lourdes, born in 193 6, moves to America
shortly after the Cuban revolution. The middle child, Felicia, born in 193 8, remains in
Cuba until her death. The youngest child and only son, Javier, born in 1946, migrates to
Czechoslovakia in 1966. The family tree, strategically placed at the start of the text, notes
their marriages, dates of birth and the birth of their children. However, it is through
everyday time, biographical time and historical time that Garcia reveals their lives. Their
voices, through internal and external dialogue, ﬁll in the spaces so evident in the

55

56
hierarchical genealogy. Thus, though Garcia's text acknowledges the patriarchal history
through the family tree format, her chapters attempt to create or establish a family self
consciousness through women's voices.
Bakhtin notes the Roman patrician family engaged in autobiographies in an attempt to
testify "to a family-clan consciousness of self. " He states,
Self-consciousness organizes itself around the particularized memory
of a clan and ancestors, while at the same time looking toward future
descendants. The traditions of the family and clan had to be passed
down from father to son. Thus every family had its own archive, in
which written documents on all links in the clan were kept.
("Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" 137-138)
Note the concern with the patriarchal "his" story of the Roman family. Bakhtin does not
mention any concern with the traditions of women. Yet, this is not surprising given the
fact that women's stories, among other stories, are noticeably omitted in history books.
Garcia's text repeatedly refers to these missing stories in history and at the end of the text,
the heroine Celia assigns to her granddaughter, Pilar Puente del Pino, the task of memory.
Celia's Letter: 1959
January 11, 1959
My dearest Gustavo,
The revolution is eleven days old. My granddaughter, Pilar
Puente del Pino, was born today. It is also my birthday. I am

ﬁfty years old. I will no longer write to you, mi amor. She
will remember everything.

My love always,
Celia (245)
Throughout the text, Pilar's internal dialogue justiﬁes Celia's faith. Pilar remembers the

stories of the oppressed as well as the stories of her grandmother.

57

My father knew I understood more than I could say. He told
me stories about Cuba after Columbus came. He said that
the Spaniards wiped out more Indians with smallpox than
with muskets. (28)

and

I think about all the women artists throughout history who
managed to paint despite the odds against them. People still
ask where all the important women painters are instead of
looking at what they did paint and trying to understand the
circumstances. (139)

Pilar gives voice to those who have no voice. Garcia, through Pilar's internal dialogue,
reminds the reader of countless stories beyond Celia and her children. Thus, though Pilar
is assigned the family stories, she expands her role to incorporate stories of others. She
becomes a keeper of stories as is evident in her bus ride to Miami.

The bus ride down isn't too bad. After New Jersey, it's a
straight shot down I-95. I'm sitting next to this skinny woman
who got on in Richmond. Her name is Minnie French . . . Minnie
tells me she was born in Toledo, Ohio, the last of thirteen children,
and that her mother died giving birth to her. The family split up
and Minnie was raised by a grandmother who can quote the Bible
chapter and verse and drives a beat-up Cadillac with a CB radio in it.
. . . When Minnie wakes up, . . . Minnie says she's going down to Florida
to see a doctor her boyfriend knows and get herself an abortion. She
doesn't have any children and she doesn't want any either, she tells me.
Her voice is ﬂat and even and I hold her hand until she falls asleep again.
(27 - 31)

Minnie ﬂoats in and out of sleep/consciousness. Pilar keeps her story, offers comfort, and
has no solution. At one point she attempts to engage Minnie in the questioning of history.
"Why don't we read about this in history books?" I ask Minnie.
"It's always one damn battle after another. We only know about

Charlemagne and Napoleon because they fought their way into
posterity." Minnie just shakes her head and looks out the window. She's

58

starting to fall asleep. Her head is lolling about on her shoulders and her
mouth is half open. (28)

Minnie's inability to respond and her temporary escape through sleep is reminiscent of
a defense mechanism. Note Pilar's consciousness continues through Minnie's slumbering.
If it were up to me, I'd record other things. Like the time there was
a freak hailstorm in the Congo and the woman took it as a sign that they should
rule. Or the life stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why don't I know anything
about them? Who chooses what we should know or what's important?
I know I have to decide these things for myself. Most of what I've learned
that's important I've learned on my own, or from my grandmother. (28)
Pilar is awake. Sleep offers her no escape.
I know what my grandmother dreams. Of massacres in
distant countries, pregnant women dismembered in the squares.
Abuela Celia walks among them mute and invisible. The thatched
roofs steam in the morning air. (218)
Abuela Celia "mute" and "invisible" bears witness to the oppression and atrocities towards
women. Pilar, vocal and visible, offers voice to the stories of their lives. Pilar's [mowing is
intuitive. Yet, by giving voice to her knowledge she enables the reader to envision
"her"story.
EVERYDAY TIME
Garcia, throughout her text, utilizes the chronotope of everyday time to emphasize the
daily existence of her heroines. Through the female gaze, in the everyday chronotope, the
daughters and mothers bear witness to each other's courage.
Felicia turns to her mother as if seeing her for the ﬁrst time. Seaweed
clings to her skull like a lethal plant. She is barefoot and her skin, encrusted

with sand, is fringed a faint blue. Her legs are cold and hard as marble. (10)

01'

59
She combs her daughter's room for the Jimi Hendrix poster she
made her take down and tacks it back on the wall. Then Lourdes
scoops up an annﬁrl of Pilar's grubby overalls and her paint-spattered
ﬂannel shirts and lies beneath them on her daughter's bed. She inhales
the turpentine, the smell of deﬁance that is Pilar. (23)
In this text, the understanding of one another eludes each mother and daughter. The
mothers and daughters are often separated ideologically. Yet, in the everyday chronotope
they are able to recognize and celebrate the various forms of deﬁance necessary to survive
in a patriarchal culture.
In addition, when the deﬁance is drained, it is in the everyday chronotope that they
nurture one another through their despair.
. . . Felicia remains quiet. She has no energy left for deﬁance.
Celia strokes her daughter's hair, murrnuring a worn lullaby, a
poem she set to music once. Felicia remembers the tune,
mouths the words as she cries. (91)
or
We wash Abuela's hair and rinse it with conditioner, then we
pat her dry with towels as if this could somehow heal her. Abuela says
nothing. She submits to my mother like a solemn novitiate . . .
Mom replaces Abuela's bedding with fresh sheets and a lamb's
wool blanket we brought from home. I help Abuela into a new
ﬂannel nightgown while Mom prepares bouillon and instant tapioca
pudding. Abuela Celia tastes a spoonful of each, swallows a vitamin
C tablet, and falls into a deep sleep. (218)
Note, the nurturing primarily involves the act of maintaining the body's strength and spirit.
The space is noticeably devoid of man-made words, but a language is spoken through the
acts of these women. Celia's lullaby is "worn" indicating it has been used countless times

through Felicia's life. It is Celia's own creation, "a poem she set to music once" and it is

well known to Felicia as she "mouths the words as she cries." Lourdes and Pilar create

60
space for Abuela to rest and heal. The bouillon and tapioca are to sustain the body's
strength, but the space they provide for sleep sustains the spirit.
In contrast, Garcia provides a different mother and daughter scenario in everyday time
through the dialogue of Silvia Lores.
"It was my daughter who turned me in for insisting we say

grace at the dinner table, " Silvia Lores complains. "That's what they

teach her at school, to betray her parents. (108)
Consequently, Silvia Lores is assigned to a unit of malcontents to be integrated into
society and reshaped as a revolutionary. The reader can infer from Silvia's dialogue that
her relationship with her daughter is barren of mutual nurturing. The daughter does not
turn to her mother but rather turns her in to a government that does not value deﬁance.

Garcia utilizes the everyday chronotope to emphasize the daily rituals of life.

Felicia pulls a rusted nail ﬁle and a small plastic bottle of hand

cream from her knapsack, and gets to work. She pushes back

her cuticles with the rounded edge of the ﬁle, then expertly picks

and scrapes under her nails until they are spotless. With short, brisk

strokes she evens the broken nail on her left thumb. Then she

squirts the pink lotion onto the backs of her hands, massages

it in with a circular motion, and rubs her palms together until

her hands are soft and slightly greasy again. (108)
Felicia perceives little choice or control in the direction of her life. The maintenance of her
hands is an act of deﬁance. She begins to lose her identity as she is forced to march and
be "re"shaped into a revolutionary. Her internal dialogue indicates the separation of her
self from her self, "Her hands are a stranger's, swollen and coarse, her ﬁngernails dirty"

(106). Thus, Felicia's care of her hands is an attempt to "re"discover or "re"eonnect with

her self.

61
Felicia's silent act speaks to the brigade of the deﬁance they once possessed.

The other members of the troop, except for Lieutenant Rojas,
who is listening to a crackling radio in her tent, watch Felicia
attentively, as if witnessing an intricate ritual they'll be required
to duplicate, like the dismantling and reassembling of their riﬂes.
When Felicia ﬁnishes, they turn away, clumping together in twos
or threes to talk. (108)

Felicia's deﬁance was acquired through her mother, in the everyday chronotope, in a space
void of man-made language.

Sometimes, when Felicia was a child and couldn't sleep, she'd
join her mother on the porch. They'd sit together for hours listening
to the rhythm of the sea and the poems her mother recited as if
in a dream . . .

Felicia learned her ﬂorid language on those nights. She would
borrow freely from the poems she'd heard, stringing words
together like laundry on a line, connecting ideas and descriptions
she couldn't have planned. The words sounded precisely right
when she said them, though often people told her she didn't make
any sense at all. Felicia misses those peaceful nights with her mother,
when the sea had metered their intertwined thoughts. (109—110)

The heroines in Garcia's text, unlike Chernin's text, communicate in a language that
transcends words. Felicia's language makes no "sense" to other people, just as her
mother's language made no sense to her husband, Jorge del Pino.
"I left her in an asylum. I told the doctors to make her forget.
They used electricity. They fed her pills. I used to visit her every Sunday.
She told me to turn on my electric brooms and then laughed in my
face. She told me that geometry would strangle my nature. She made a friend
there who had murdered her husband, and I became afraid. Her hands were
always so still." (195)
She reﬁrses to speak the linear language of men exempliﬁed by " geometry" and attaches

herself to a woman who symbolically deﬁes the patriarchal rules.

Garcia emphasizes the language of her heroines through her table of contents. Her

62
choice of words creates images that transcend man-made language as the headings in the

table of contents show:

Contents
ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS
Ocean Blue
Going South

The House on Palmas Street
Celia's Letters: 1935-1940
A Grave of Lemons

The Fire Between Them
Celia 's Letters: 1942-1949

IMAGINING WINTER

The Meaning of Shells
Enough Attitude

Baskets of Water

Celia '5 Letters: 1950-1955
A Matrix Light

God 's Will

Daughters of C hango
Celia ’3 Letters: I 956-1958

THE LANGUAGES LOST

Six Days in April
Celia '5 Letter: 1 95 9

The only linear time, recognized in the Table of Contents, are Celia's Letters.
For twenty-ﬁve years, Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter
on the eleventh day of each month, then stored it in a satin-
covered chest beneath her bed. (3 8)
Celia forsakes the letters and the linear time of man with the birth of Pilar, her

granddaughter. She entrusts her stories to Pilar whose birth coincides with the birth of the

revolution.

63
The chronotope of everyday time provides Celia the space to convey "her"story to her
granddaughter. Celia notes, "Solitude, . . . exists for us not to remember but to forget"
(92). Everyday time provides Celia the space to tell her story.

Abuela Celia is in her wicker swing looking out to sea. I settle
in beside her. There's a comforting wilderness to Abuela's hands, to
the odd-shaped calluses, the split skin on her thumb.

"When I was a girl, I used to dry tobacco leaves one at a time,"
she begins in a quiet voice. "They stained my hands, my face, the rags
on my body. One day, my mother bathed me in a tin tub behind our house
and rubbed me with straw until my skin bled. I put on the rufﬂed dress she
had made, a hat with ribbons, and patent-leather shoes, the ﬁrst I ever
wore. My feet felt precious, tied up like shiny parcels. Then she left me
on a train and walked away." (221-222)

The reader does not know if Celia's story is known by her daughters. However, Pilar's
"re"telling indicates its continuation. Pilar's acquiring of Celia's stories, in the everyday
chronotope, ensures Celia will be remembered and not forgotten.
BIOGRAPHICAL TIME

Garcia interweaves Pilar's biographical chronotope with other biographical
chronotopes to create a unique vision of "her" story. The Cuban Revolution offers the
characters a temporary carnival. Bakhtin deﬁnes carnival in his text, Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984). He states,

The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the
structure and order of ordinary life, that is noncamival, life are suspended
during carnival: what is suspended ﬁrst of all is hierarchical structure
and all forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with
it - that is, everything resulting from sociohierarchical inequality or any
other form of inequality among people (including age). All distance between
people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free
and familiar contact among people. (137-138)

Yet, as Bakhtin notes, the carnival cannot last. The Cuban Revolution resisted established

 

 

 

64

conventions and revised them, without destroying them completely. Patriarchy is still
ﬁrmly entrenched in the lives of each of these women. Garcia reveals, through their
biographical chronotopes, their reinvented lives. Each woman "re"invents her life in a
different way. Thus, a multitude of women's journeys/stories are provided to the reader.

Garcia identiﬁes the various biographical chronotopes through the use of individual
names. The chapter either starts with a speciﬁc name and/or names are bold printed and
centered within chapters. Thus, the reader is able to shift from one biographical
chronotope to biographical chronotope. Within the biographical chronotopes the various
journeys are revealed and interwoven. Each biographical chronotope offers an image of
being and argues an ideology of existence. Thus, Garcia's biographical chronotope differs
from Chernin in that she emphasizes the protagonists' ideologies through their actions
rather than their words. It is crucial to note Garcia's protagonists are geographically
separated. Celia never leaves Cuba. Thus, her biographical chronotope is impacted by the
events of Cuba after the revolution. In contrast, Lourdes leaves Cuba for the United
States. The majority of Lourdes biographical chronotope takes place in a different
country and space. I have examined the biographical lives of Celia and Lourdes to
emphasize the differences in their biographical chronotope due to geographical space and
culture.

CELIA

Celia del Pino, grandmother to Pilar and matriarch of the family remains in Cuba after

the revolution. The reader meets her on the ﬁrst page of the text "wearing her best house

dress and drop pearl earrings" sitting in a wicker swing "guarding the North coast of

65
Cuba" (3). Celia's biographical chronotope since the revolution has been intricately
interwoven with the life of the collective.
The radio in the background alludes to her existence since the revolution.

Eleven years ago tonight, companeros, you defended our
country against American aggressors. Now each and every one
of you must guard our future again. Without your support, companeros,
without your sacriﬁces, there can be no revolution. (4)

Celia has dedicated her life to an ideology which promotes the collective.

Celia is honored. The neighborhood committee has voted
her little brick-and-cement house by the sea as the primary
lookout for Santa Teresa del Mar. (3)

She has been willing to sacriﬁce her life to "the greatest social experiment in modern
history" (1 17).

One can understand Celia's connection to the collective. Prior to the revolution she
was aware of her powerlessness to implement change.

I'd forgotten the poverty of the countryside. From the trains,
everything is visible: the bare feet, the crooked backs, the
bad teeth. At one station there was a little girl, about six, who wore
only a dirty rag that didn't cover her private parts. She stretched out her
hands as the passengers left the train, and in the bustle I saw a man
stick his ﬁnger in her. I cried out and he hurried away. I called to
the girl and lowered our basket of food through the window. She
ran off like a limping mongrel, dragging it beside her. (54 - 55)

Before the revolution she could only offer temporary relief to a few. However, even
within her powerlessness she imagined alternatives.

If I was born to live on an island, then I'm grateful for one
thing: that the tides rearrange the borders. At least I have
the illusion of change, of possibility. To be locked within
boundaries plotted by priests and politicians would be

the only thing more intolerable. (99)

66
The revolution offered her the possibility to change the existing world.
Celia's exterior life/collective life is emphasized through folkloric chronotopic motifs.
Bakhtin distinguishes between chronotopes of whole genres and "chronotopic motifs."

When a word ﬁgures frequently in utterances belonging to a

speciﬁc genre, the values and meanings of that genre will somehow

be sensed when the word is spoken. The word acquires a "stylistic

aura," and that aura is likely to remain even when the word is used

in a different genre; the word in effect "remembers" its past. (Mikhail Bakhtin:
Creation of a Prosaics 3 74)

Garcia's use of words associated with folkloric collective life emphasizes Celia's ideology.
For example, Garcia emphasizes Celia's exterior life through the chronotopic motif of the
public square.

Celia del Pino settles on a folding chair behind a card table
facing the audience. It is her third year as a civilian judge. Celia
is pleased. What she decides makes a difference in others' lives,
and she feels part of a great historical unfolding. What would have
been expected of her twenty years ago? To sway endlessly on her
wicker swing, old before her time? (11)

Celia's sense of self is ﬁrmly rooted in the public square. The public square emphasizes
the collective life and her connection to the collective.
Her connection to the collective is also emphasized through the chronotopic motif

of collective time.

Since her husband's death, Celia has devoted herself
completely to the revolution. When El Lider needed volunteers to
build nurseries in Villa Clara province, Celia joined a microbrigade,
setting tiles and operating a construction lift. When he launched a
crusade against an outbreak of malaria, Celia inoculated
schoolchildren. And every harvest, Celia cut the sugarcane that
El Lider promised would bring prosperity. Three nights per
month, too, Celia continues to protect her stretch of shore
from foreign invaders. (111-112)

67

However, what there is no space for in the collective life is "interior time." Bakhtin notes,
in collective life "the individuum lives completely on the surface, within a collective
whole" ("Forms Of Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 207). He deﬁnes
collective time as follows:

. . . it is differentiated and measured only by the events

of the collective life; everything that exists in this time exists solely

for the collective . . . This is the time of labor. Everyday life and

consumption are isolated from the labor and production process.

Time is measured by labor events . . . This sense of time works itself

out in a collective battle of labor against nature. The practice of collective

labor gives birth to this new sense of time, and the ends of this practice

serve to differentiate and reshape this sense of time. ("Forms Of Time And

Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 206-207)
After the revolution, Celia measures her life by collective events. However, through her
internal dialogue the reader gains insight into her individual life.

Celia turns to daydreams in search of a private sphere. In addition, Garcia emphasizes

Celia's private sphere by exposing the reader to her old letters to her ﬁrst love, Gustavo.

We also ﬁnd oriental and fairy-tale motifs that are ultimately linked

to the issue of identity: enchantments of every sort, which temporarily

take a man out of the ordinary course of events and transport him

to a strange world. ("Forms Of Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel"

151)
Celia's dreams of El Lider "transport" her out of her ordinary existence. The reader is
reminded of romance texts and their similar effect upon readers. Celia envisions being
"feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by El Lider himself on a red
velvet divan" (3). In fact, the reason she protects her stretch of the shore wearing red

lipstick is due to the fact that she "imagines that El Lider is watching her, whispering in

her ear with his warm cigar breath" (I 12).

68

Dreams of romance and fairy tales offer the promise of a happy ending. It is interesting
Celia needs to feel desired by El Lider in order to fulﬁll her night vigils of shore
protection. She cannot conceive of changing society other than through a powerful man.
In effect, Celia, through her fantasies, positions herself as the object of another's desire,
namely El Lider. Janice A. Radway suggests in her text, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984), "a demand for real change in power relations
will occur only if women also come to understand that their need for romances is a
ﬁrnction of their dependent status as women" (220).

Yet, Celia acknowledge her illusions. Even before the revolution she infers in a letter
to Gustavo that illusions offer her hope (99). At the end of the text she recognizes the
reality of her situation.

It occurs to Celia that she has never been farther than a hundred
yards off the coast of Cuba. She considers her dream of sailing to
Spain, to Granada, of striding through the night with nothing but
a tambourine and too many carnations. (243)
She removes her pearl earrings, a symbol of her belief in romance and offers them to the
sea.
Celia reaches up to her left earlobe and releases her
drop pearl earring to the sea. She feels its absence between
her thumb and foreﬁnger. Then she unfastens the tiny clasp
in her right ear and surrenders the other pearl. Celia closes
her eyes and imagines it drifting as a ﬁreﬂy through the darkened
seas, imagines its slow extinguishing. (244)
With her symbolic act she has surrendered her illusions. It is for the reader to determine

whether or not her belief in the collective is as effectively extinguished as her illusions of

romance.

69
It is interesting to note that Celia's daughter, Felicia, also turns to fantasies of romance.
Her acquisition of this escape technique has been effectively modeled by her mother. She
is comfortable with her illusions. "Her eyes, she decides, could get accustomed to this
darkness. Perhaps she should have lived in the night all along, with the owls and bats and
other nocturnal creatures" (109). When she attempts to become a "New Socialist
Woman" she turns to El Lider as her fantasy man.
Still, Felicia muses, what would he be like in bed? Would

he remove his cap and boots? Leave his pistol on the table?

Would guards wait outside the door, listening for the sharp pleasure

that signaled his departure? What would his hands he like? His

mouth, the hardness between his thighs? Would he churn inside

her slowly as she liked? Trail his tongue along her belly and lick her

there? Felicia slips her hand down the front of her army fatigue

pants. She feels his tongue moving faster, his beard against her

thighs. "We need you, Companera del Pino," she hears him murmur

stemly as she comes. (1 10-11 1)
Though her dreams of romance are more graphic than Celia's dreams of romance, they
effectively connect her to a man of power. Both women, through their fantasies, address
their unmet needs. In addition, their illusions do not upset the status quo of patriarchy.
They do not challenge the male right to politics or power. Their illusions reconcile and

reintegrate them to their current existence and world.

Finally, Garcia utilizes a folkloric chronotopic motif in Celia's biographical chronotope.

Bakhtin notes,

Folklore is in general saturated with time; all of its images are
profoundly chronotopic. Time in folklore, the fullness of time in it,
the folkloric future, the folkloric human yardsticks of time - all these
are very important and fundamental problems . . . Each spring, hillock,
grove, and bend in the coastline had its own legend, its own memories,

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its own events, and its own heroes. ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance
in the History of Realism" 52-53)

The community legends play a crucial role in Celia's life and through her internal dialogue
and memories the reader is able to envision objects "saturated" with time. For example,
the ceiba tree in the Plaza de las Armas.

She places an orange and a few coins by its trunk, and says
a short prayer for her daughter. (90)

Though the particular historic legend concerning the ceiba tree is never revealed, it is
inferred.
Tia Alicia took her to museums and the symphony and the
ancient ceiba tree. Celia ran around it three times for every
wish, until the tree repeated itself like a ﬂashing deck of cards. (93)
The tree is seeped in time. As a child Celia wished upon it and as an adult she continues
to believe in its magical power. Garcia emphasizes folkloric time by interspersing the local
myths throughout her text.
LOURDES
Lourdes, Celia's eldest daughter and mother to Pilar perceives no hope in the great
socialist experiment her mother embraces. She has personal knowledge of the patriarchal
violence embedded in communism. The "greatest socialist experiment in the modern
history" ( 1 l7) punished her for her strength and voice.
"Get out of my house!" Lourdes yelled at the men, more
ﬁercely than she had the week before.
But instead of leaving, the tall one increased the pressure

on her arm just above the elbow. (71)

She is raped.

71
When he ﬁnished, the soldier lifted the knife and began
to scratch at Lourdes's belly with great concentration. A primeval
scraping. Crimson hieroglyphics. (72)
The men have embedded their words in her skin. Man-made language has literally been
engraved upon her being. The violation is implicit.

Consequently, Lourdes rejects the opportunities and oppression of Cuba's new
government and turns towards the North and capitalism. She is her father's daughter.
Adriene Rich (0f Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 1986) writes,
"It is a painful fact that a nurturing father, who replaces rather than complements a
mother, must be loved at the mother's expense, whatever the reasons for the mother's
absence" (245).

Ironically, it is Lourdes's father who is physically absent. However, her mother
appears to Lourdes to be emotionally absent. Thus, Lourdes directs all her love towards
her father.

When Lourdes was a child in Cuba, she used to wait anxiously for
her father to return from his trips selling small fans and electric brooms
in distant provinces. He would call her every evening from Camaguey or
Sagua la Grande and she would cry, "When are you coming home, Papi?
When are you coming home?" Lourdes would welcome her father in
her party dress and search his suitcase for rag dolls and oranges. (68)

Lourdes does not comprehend the love her mother bears her. It was because of her birth
Celia remains in Cuba and sacriﬁces her dreams of Spain.

If she had a girl, Celia decided, she would stay. She would
not abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the
columns of blood and numbers in men's eyes, to understand the

morphology of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard
ﬂames. (42)

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Yet, the misunderstanding of mother love continues through the generations. Lourdes
believes her own daughter hates her. She states, "No matter what I do, Pilar hates me"
(74). Her father's specter responds,

"Pilar doesn't hate you, hya. She just hasn't learned to love
you yet." (74)

Lourdes dilemma is not unique. Adrienne Rich elaborates upon the complex relationship
of mother and daughter.

Few women growing up in patriarchal society can feel mothered
enough; the power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their
struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom
patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations.
The anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a
degrading and dispiriting role can hardly be termed "mothering, "
even if she does this believing it will help her daughter to survive.
(0f Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 243)

Lourdes had a choice to identify with her apparently healthy traveling father or her
powerless mother who was a temporary resident of a mental institution. It is not
surprising she choose her father. Her father's life appeared to be ﬁlled with adventure and
travel. Her mother's life was ﬁlled with a "shifting horizon" (53) and no concrete or
absolute answers.
Lourdes's father, Jorge, offered the concrete and absolute answer of capitalism.
For many years before the revolution, Jorge had traveled ﬁve

weeks out of six, selling electric brooms and portable fans for

an American ﬁrm. He'd wanted to be a model Cuban, to prove to

his gringo boss that they were cut from the same cloth. Jorge wore

his suit on the hottest days of the year, even in remote villages where

the peOple thought he was crazy. He put on his boater with its

wide black band before a mirror, to keep the angle shy of jaunty. (6)

He believed in capitalism. In fact, Lourdes attributes her joining of the auxiliary police

73
"so she'd be ready to ﬁght the Communists when the time came" (132) to her father's
spirit.
Maureen Murdock (The Hero's Daughter 1994) deﬁnes a father's daughter as follows:
Because a father's daughter had a strong positive relationship
with her father as a child, as an adult she identiﬁes primarily
with him, favors men and male power, and views as secondary
the opinions and values of women. During childhood, a father's
daughter is her father's conﬁdante, functioning more as a wife than
as a daughter. (7)
Lourdes was her father's conﬁdante. After his "terrible accident" Lourdes "reﬁrses to
leave his side." Her mother is forced to "set up a child's cot for her next to his bed" (54).
She would welcome him home "in her party dress and search his suitcase for rag dolls and
oranges" (68).
On Sunday afternoons, after high mass, they went to baseball
games and ate roasted peanuts ﬁ'om brown paper cones... These
are her happiest memories. (68)
As a child Lourdes assumed a role that was more of a wife than a daughter. Given her
identiﬁcation with her father, it is not surprising she transplants her family to the United
States of America.
Nor is it surprising she is ﬁnancially successful in America. Maureen Murdock notes,
a father's daughter "demands perfection from herself and has little tolerance for her own
vulnerability. She is considered a success by the standards of a patriarchal, goal-oriented,
power-based culture" (The Hero’s Daughter 8). Though Lourdes starts off in a new

country with "riding crops, and her wedding veil, a watercolor landscape, and a paper sack

of birdseed" (69), she becomes a "proprietor" of two successful bakeries in New York.

74
Lourdes ordered custom-made signs for her bakeries in red,
white, and blue with her name printed at the bottom right-hand corner
LOURDES PUENTE, PROPRIETOR. (170)
Her ﬁnancial success validates her choice and her father's choice.
A father's daughter embodies her father's potential ﬁrture; she
will make him whole. She will carry his youth, his whimsy, his
intellect, his spirit, his unrealized dreams. She will continue his life. (14)
It is interesting to note, Lourdes credits her dead father with the idea of a second
bakery. Even after his death she continues to wait for his visitations. "The phantom father
has just as much power as a father who is present, but his power comes from his absence
and the promise of his return" (The Hero 's Daughter 135).

Whereas Celia's biographical chronotope emphasizes the collective, Lourdes's
biographical chronotope emphasizes her "interior nature." Bakhtin notes, "Out of the
common time of collective life emerge separate individual life sequences, individual fates"
("Forms Of Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 214). He goes on to state,

Within the boundaries of individual life-series, an interior aspect

makes itself apparent. The process of separating out and detaching

individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its highest point

when ﬁnancial relations develop in slaveholding society, and under

capitalism. Here the individual sequence takes on its speciﬁc private

character and what is held in common becomes maximally abstract. (215)
Lourdes's ﬁnancial success emphasizes her "individual life-sequence." She has assimilated
to capitalism and embraced the values of her new country. For example, Pilar indicates
that the holidays of Lourdes's new country hold special meaning for Lourdes.

The worst is the parades. Mom gets up early and drags us
out on Thanksgiving Day loaded with plastic foam coolers,

like we're going to starve right there on Fifth Avenue. On New Year's
Day, she sits in front of the television and comments on every single

75

ﬂoat in the Rose Parade. I think she dreams of sponsoring one herself
someday. Like maybe a huge burning eﬂigy of El Lider. (137)

Lourdes does not appear to retain or celebrate any of her native holidays. She "considers
herself lucky. Immigration has redeﬁned her, and she is grateful" (73). Her side line
participation as a spectator in America's national holidays enables her to exhibit her
patriotism and nationalism. Furthermore, it enables her to nurture and retain the bond that
existed between her and her father. "The internalized phantom father reigns like an
overthrown monarch; he rules his daughter's psyche in absentia. She continues to uphold
the values she knows he supports" (The Hero's Daughter 136). Lourdes and her father
shared a belief in capitalism, the American way and America's obsession with baseball.
Even while he was dying in the hospital, they embraced and laughed when the Mets won
the championship.

Lourdes' obsession with food serves as a constant reminder of America's obsession
with weight and emphasizes her separateness from others. Lourdes' eating is not a
celebration but rather an attempt to feed or nurture the emptiness within her. She initially
opens a bakery because she wants to work with bread and perceives no sorrow in the
working of bread. She turns to food and sex as a substitute for love and nurturing as she
observes her father deteriorate physically.

. . . after her father arrived in New York her appetite for sex and
baked goods increased dramatically. The more she took her
father to the hospital for cobalt treatments, the more she reached
for the pecan sticky buns, and for Ruﬁno. (20)

and

Ruﬁno's body ached from the exertions. His joints swelled like

76

an arthritic's. He begged his wife for a few nights' peace but

Lourdes's peals only became more urgent, her glossy black

eyes more importunate. Lourdes was reaching through

Ruﬁno for something he could not give her, she wasn't sure what. (21)
She is alone. Her eating is not done with others or in a community setting but rather
it serves to illustrate and emphasize her isolation. She does not battle her cravings; rather
she submits to them. However, no matter what she eats, the craving continues.

Her weight loss also serves to emphasize her aloneness. She contributes her 118
pound weight loss to "Willpower" (172). Thus, she infers one can achieve any goal
through "Willpower." The reader is reminded of American individualism and the
numerous American heroes who achieved their goals through "willpower." Joyce Warren
notes in her text, The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women In Nineteenth-
Century American Fiction (1989), the heroes of America "were all solitary male ﬁgures,
without wife, family, or any other human relationships" (13). Garcia, through the word
"willpower," is able to emphasize the extent Lourdes has assimilated into American
culture.

Finally, Lourdes' weight serves another purpose. It insulates her from being seen as a
sexual being. Her weight makes her visible in terms of geographical space, but causes her
to be invisible to others as a sexual object. She notes, "men's eyes no longer pursued her
curves" (21). Her weight serves to insulate her from the eyes of others as does winter.

Lourdes relishes winter most of all - the cold scraping sounds on side-
walks and Windshields, the ritual of scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in

coat linings. Its layers protect her. (73)

Her uniforms emphasize her insulation and isolation.

77
Lourdes puts on a size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets
and ﬂat, rubber-soled shoes. She has six identical outﬁts in the
closet, and two more pair of shoes. Lourdes is pleased with her
uniform's implicit authority, with the severity of her unadomed face
and blunt, round nose. (17)
Note, she celebrates the uniform's "implicit authority" similar to the authority she achieves
through her auxiliary police uniform. She is fascinated or obsessed by objects of power.
Lourdes slides her hand up and down her wooden nightstick.
It's the only weapon the police department will issue her. That and
handcuffs. (129)
The wooden nightstick, a phallic symbol, enables Lourdes to transcend her powerlessness
momentarily through fantasy. Her act, reminiscent of masturbation, is done in solitude.
The fantasy is temporary. Even with her uniforms of authority and objects of power, she
remains powerless. She cannot save a boy from drowning nor herself from the pain of
the rape. Her exhibition of external power are merely symbols of patriarchy. She is still
imprisoned in a patriarchal society that envisions power as power over others.

Power over others is lonely. Lourdes appears to feel little connection with others
though her desire for food and sex imply a desire to be nurtured and connected. Her
journey is one of assimilation. She has reinvented and redeﬁned her role at a great cost.

. . . fathers' daughters worn out by their efforts to be like men.
They commonly reported signiﬁcant professional and economic
success, yet, at the same time, they expressed a deep sense of
alienation. They had dutifully followed the rules and guidelines
of the patriarchal culture, and, as a result, their inner lives were

in disarray. Their overidentiﬁcation with their fathers and their
quests to be like their fathers left them with unanswered questions
about how to be comfortable with who they were as women.

(The Hero's Daughter xiii)

Lourdes has followed the "rules and guidelines of the patriarchal culture, " but is alienated

78
ﬁ’om her mother, daughter and self. "Central to the experience of being a father's daughter
is a rejection of the mother" (The Hero’s Daughter 10).
The subtle collusion between daughter and father, with

its implicit rejection of the mother, constitutes the initial wounding

of the daughter's feminine nature. This wounding impedes or

entirely blocks off her receptivity to her intuition, her tolerance

of feelings, and her acceptance of the wisdom of her natural body

rhythms. In rejecting her mother, the father's daughter rejects herself

as a woman. (The Hero’s Daughter 13-14)
Lourdes was loved by her mother, but does not retain this memory and thus rejects her.
Ironically, her mother, Celia, has participated in Lourdes's rejection of her "feminine
nature" and "intuition." Celia shares with Pilar her maternal goals in raising Lourdes. She
states, "I made a promise to myself before your mother was born not to abandon her to
this life, to train her as if for war" (222). Celia at that time believed that raising Lourdes
as a warrior would protect her from harm. Yet, by buying into the patriarchal values she
has essentially wounded her daughter and separated her from a potential inner power and
power with others.

Carol 8. Pearson notes in her text, The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By
(1989), "it is the archetype of the Warrior that is our culture's deﬁnition of heroism" (74).
The warrior represents the traditional hero's journey. Lourdes is unable to think about the
world in an affiliative manner. She envisions power as mastery, domination, achievement
and agency. Thus, she is constantly engaged in battle with others. For example, when
visiting her mother in Cuba, she attempts to convert those she comes into contact with on

her trip.

"Look at those old American cars. They're held together

79

with rubber bands and paper clips and still work better than the

new Russian ones. Oye!" she calls out to the bystanders. "You

could have Cadillacs with leather interiors! Air conditioning! Automatic

windows! You wouldn't have to move your arms in the heat!" Then

she turns to me, her face indignant. "Look how they laugh, Pilar!

Like idiots! They can't understand a word I'm saying! Their heads

are ﬁlled with too many companero this and companera that!

They're brainwashed, that's what they are!" (221)
She is not interested in being a part of a collective community. "Companero" and
"companera" hold no meaning for her, nor have they ever held meaning. Her biographical
chronotope is seeped in chronotopic motifs of the individual. She has lost the language of
the collective, "The language she speaks is lost to them. It's another idiom entirely" (221).
She has been socialized from birth to be a Warrior. Carol Pearson deﬁnes the warrior in
her text, The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By (1989).

The hero's task is to defeat or subject whatever is inferior, within

or without, to his will. This phase typically is not only sexist,

but racist and classist. (81)
Lourdes has embraced this task at the expense of her inner self No food will ever ﬁll the
emptiness within her being.
HISTORICAL TIME

Pilar's biographical chronotope is constantly intersecting with historical time.
For there to be a real sense of becoming, according to Bakhtin,

the ﬁxture, and especially the immediate or near ﬁrture in which we

concretely act, must be seen as signiﬁcant, valuable, and open to

change. (Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics 397)

Pilar is struggling to keep her future open. She recognizes the necessity of connecting to

the past if she is to keep the future open. Thus, she resists the destruction or revision of

"her"story.

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I resent the hell out of the politicians and the generals who

force events on us that structure out lives, that dictate the

memories we'll have when we're old. Every day Cuba fades

a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me.

And there's only my imagination where our history should be. (138)
She has an intuitive sense that her present and future are connected to the past. Yet, as an
immigrant and product of another culture, she can never fully comprehend the past. She
recognizes this difficulty through her internal dialogue.

Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony. We can

reach it by a thirty-minute charter ﬂight from Miami, yet never

reach it all. (219)
Like her grandmother, she is aware of boundaries. Like her grandmother, she resents the
patriarchal forces and resists traditional history. Yet, unlike her grandmother, she
struggles with the loss of her mother tongue and native culture. However, she recognizes
that by connecting to the mythic past of Cuba and/or her grandmother, she might be
provided with a potential avenue of freedom from the state of loss and alienation.

Pilar struggles to ﬁnd a voice and a language that can represent her becoming. Her
music and painting serve as her attempts to transcend man-made language and the
language of her oppressors.

. . . who needs words when colors and lines conjure up their
own language? That's what I want to do with my paintings,
ﬁnd a unique language, obliterate the clichés. (139)

Painting is her form of resistance and provides her the space for voice.
. . . a paintbrush is better than a gun so why doesn't everybody
just leave me alone? Painting is its own language, I wanted to
tell him. Translations just conﬁrse it, dilute it, like words going

from Spanish to English. I envy my mother her Spanish curses
sometimes. They make my English collapse in a heap. (59)

81
Pilar, unlike her mother, is not interested in carrying a gun, a patriarchal symbol of power.
She wishes to resist and speak in her own language.

Pilar's music serves a purpose similar to her painting. She buys an acoustic bass after
her lover betrays her with another. It is interesting to note, she discovers the bass for sale
under a subheading of "WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN". The lover who betrayed her
spoke Spanish.

We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an
impossible language for intimacy. (180)

She believed Spanish to be the "language for intimacy" and discovers that the man-made
language of Spanish was just as much a vehicle for betrayal and pain as English. So, she
turns to another language and purchases the bass. She states, "It's like I'm buying my own
heirloom." (181) and in a sense she is buying her own heirloom.

I don't know what I'm doing but I start thumping that old spruce

dresser of an instrument for all it's worth, thumping and thumping,

until I feel my life begin. (181)
She is creating a new language. No longer will she trust the language of men.

Pilar's painting of the Statue of Liberty is her attempt to transcend man made language,
capitalism, and patriarchy. She takes a symbol of the United States, the Statue of Liberty,
a promise of freedom to incoming immigrants, and transforms it into a statement of
injustice and disillusion.

. . . I do a perfect replication of her a bit left of center canvas, changing
only two details: ﬁrst, I make Liberty's torch ﬂoat slightly beyond her
grasp, and second, I paint her right hand reaching over to cover her left
breast, as if she's reciting the National Anthem or some other slogan.

The next day, the background still looks off to me, so I take
a medium-thick brush and paint black stick ﬁgures pulsing in the air

82

around Liberty, thorny scars that look like barbed wire. I want to go

all the way with this, to stop mucking around and do what I feel,

so at the base of the statue I put my favorite punk rallying cry: I'M A

MESS. And then careﬁrlly, very carefully, I paint a safety pin through

Liberty's nose. (141)
She is refusing to embrace the assimilationist affirmation of the melting pot. Her
"re"vision of the past makes possible an open future. The Statue of Liberty ceases to be a
ﬁxed symbol of the epic past.

But epic time itself, in its entirety, is an "absolute past," a time

of founding fathers and heroes, separated by an unbridgeable gap

from the real time of the present day (the present day of the creators,

the performers and the audience of epic songs). ("Forms of Time And

Of The Chronotope In The Novel" 218)
Pilar's Statue of Liberty is "from the real time of the present day" and recognizes the
possibility of change. The safety pin in the nose and punk rallying cry are present day
symbols of resistance. Fate is not ﬁxed. Pilar's painting reclaims the present and as a
result reinterprets the past.

Pilar's geographical and generational distance and her connection to the historical past
enables her to see historical time. In contrast, Celia and Lourdes are unable to connect to
a past beyond their biographical time and thus cannot see historical time. For a variety of
reasons, neither Celia or Lourdes are aware of their mothers' "her"story. Or, aware in only
a limited manner. Thus, there is no connection to the past and their consciousness does
not go beyond their own time. Pilar notes her connection to her Abuela Celia. She states,

. . . she's left me her legacy nonetheless - a love for the sea and
the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words,
sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries. Even

in silence, she gives me the conﬁdence to do what I believe is right,
to trust my own perceptions. (176)

83
Celia has given her granddaughter what she did not receive as a young woman and what
she was unable to give her own daughter, the knowledge of inner power.

Whereas Celia and Lourdes fantasize and/or depend on men for their power, Pilar is
attempting to establish or trust her inner power. In addition, she is struggling between the
separate ideologies her grandmother and mother embraced. Her inner dialogue
emphasizes her struggle between individualism and the collective. For example, "The
family is hostile to the individual" (134). She is unsure of her place in the world and
believes connection to her cultural roots will offer her insight into the ﬁiture. Her trip to
Cuba awakens her to the world's effect on her emergence.

I wonder how different my life would have been if I'd stayed
with my grandmother. I think about how I'm probably the only
ex-punk on the island, how no one else has their ears pierced
in three places . . . I ask Abuela if I can paint whatever I want in Cuba
and she says yes, as long as I don't attack the state. Cuba is still
developing, she tells me, and can't afford the luxury of dissent. (235)
Cuba is not what she imagined and yet her connection to it is crucial in her historical
emergence.
I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened
before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is
changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic
here working its way through my veins. There's something about
the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning
bougainvillea, the ﬂamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing
from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees . . . I'm afraid to lose
all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I'd have to
return to New York. I know now it's where I belong - not instead of here,
but more than here. (pp. 235-236)

Pilar is emerging into a new woman, a woman that could not exist in previous times and

cultures. She is in transition and this transition is accomplished in her and through her.

84
Bakhtin elaborates upon emergence in historical time. He notes that in the novel of

historical emergence the hero "emerges along with the world and he reﬂects the historical
emergence of the world itself“ (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism" 23). He goes on to state,

He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs,

at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is

accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a

new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here

is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held

by the ﬁrture is therefore extremely great here - and this is not, of course,

the private biographical ﬁrture, but the historical ﬁrture. It is as though

the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change

along with them. ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History

of Realism" 23-24)
Pilar takes Cuba with her into the future. She cannot go back to Cuba. There is no room
for dissent and dissent is a crucial element in her emergence. Yet, she will not forget the
others. Like her grandmother, Pilar is aware of those who have no voice. She loves Lou
Reed's concerts because "he sings about people no one else sings about - drug addicts,
transvestites, the down-and-out" (13 5).

Pilar must return to the United States. Yet, she will not embrace the United States of
her mother's dream, economic individualism. Pilar is interested in talking back, resisting
and dissenting against the part of American culture that emphasizes individualism,
competition, and ignores the collective. Nor, will she deny or forget her heritage. She
will retain her memories, unlike the boys in the park who sexually assaulted her. "Their

eyes are like ﬁreﬂies, hot and erased of memory" (201). The boys are products of

individualism. They are isolated from other human beings, no memory attaches them to

85
others. Rollo May elaborates on memory in his text, The Cry For Myth (1991). He
states,
Memory can liberate us from attachment from desire or attachment
to the wrong things. Memory is our internal studio, where we let our
imaginations roam, where we get our new and sometimes splendid
ideas, where we see a glorious future that makes us tremble. (70)
Pilar's memory is part of her marrow. It connects her to others. It enables her to envision
an open ﬁrture.
Pilar's grandmother, Abuela Celia, has entrusted her with her memories and her unsent

love letters.

As I listen, Ifeel my grandmother's life passing to me through her
hands. It's a steady electricity, humming and true. (222)

It is through Pilar that Celia will live. "Death begins nothing decisive, and ends nothing
decisive, in the collective and historical world of human life" ("Forms of Time And Of The
Chronotope In The Novel" 204).

Women who outlive their daughters are orphans, Abuela tells me.

Only their granddaughters can save them, guard their knowledge

like the ﬁrst ﬁre. (22)
Pilar's return to Cuba was an act of survival. Her previously fragmented and unarticulated
"her" story has become integrated and interwoven in her emergence. Her "re"connection

with Celia was a crucial element in the integration of her being. For Pilar, having a myth

of her past is essential to having a present and ﬁrture identity.

CHAPTER IV
A RECIPE OF RESISTANCE
We uphold the custom which, rectifying the errors
of the law, denies women the right to give evidence.
We hereby give this custom legal force and forbid
women's evidence to be taken in matters concerned
with contracts. But in purely feminine affairs, where men
are not permitted to be present - I refer to childbirth
and other things which only the female eye may see -
women may testify.
- Byzantine Law, By Emperor Leo The Wise,
Novels Of Leo (ca. AD. 900)

Laura Esquivel's text, Like Water For Chocolate (1992), offers another matrilineal
story/myth. Her myth involves the resisting of a repressive patriarchal tradition. Yet, she
embraces and interweaves the creative traditions of women. Through recipes, tall tales
and home remedies she constructs an alternative vision and tradition. She "re"claims

"her"story. The novel begins with a revealing epigram,

To the table or to bed
You must come when you are bid.

The reader is immediately reminded of the role or function of women in a patriarchal
society, a life of servitude to others' needs is the legacy women inherit. The epigram infers
the physical and sexual demands placed upon women. Esquivel, through this initial
phrase, recognizes women's history in "his"story.

The story, Like Water For Chocolate, is about a Mexican family at the turn of the

86

87
century. It centers around a woman, Mama Elena, and her three daughters. Mama
Elena's rigid and repressive rules evoke different responses in each daughter. Gertrudis,
the eldest daughter, abandons Mama Elena's house to become a prostitute and eventually a
general in the revolution. Rosaura, the middle daughter, never questions the traditions of
the family and attempts to establish them in the succeeding generation. Tita, the youngest
of the family is provided with a unique and repressive script, revealed through the mother's
dialogue.

You know perfectly well that being the youngest daughter means
you have to take care of me until the day I die. (9)

Tita attempts to respond, "But in my opinion . . ." (9). Mama Elena silences her with the
following words:

"You don't have an opinion, and that's all I want to hear about

it. For generations, not a single person in my family has ever

questioned this tradition, and no daughter of mine is going to

be the one to start." (9)
Yet, Tita does have an opinion and reﬁrses to embrace the fate allotted to her through
tradition; through her story alternative possibilities are revealed to the reader. Esquivel
utilizes a variety of chronotopes to unveil "her"story.
EVERYDAY TIME

Esquivel, as in the previous texts by Chernin and Garcia, emphasizes the connection

between the past and present. However, she accomplishes this feat through a unique use

of time and space. The story is framed through the chronotope of an anonymous woman.

Thus, readers are encouraged to make her story their story.

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PREPARATION:

Take care to chop the onion ﬁne. To keep from crying when you

chop it (which is so annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit on your

head. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping

gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you

know you just can't stop. I don't know whether that's ever happened to you,

but I have to confess it's happened to me, many times. Mama used to say

it was because I was especially sensitive to onions, like my great-

aunt, Tita. (3)
Esquivel, through everyday time, is "preparing" the reader for a female stance. Women's
lives are ﬁlled with the preparation of food. Esquivel, by creating a "zone of familiar
contact" ("Epic and Novel"), enables the reader to identify with the family story about to
be revealed.

Maxine Harris in her text, Down From The Pedestal: Moving Beyond ldealized
Images of Womanhood(1994), states,
One of the ﬁrst places that we learn of speciﬁc idealized images

of womanhood is from our personal families. Each woman extends

back in time to her mother, grandmother, and to her foremothers in

the distant past. (10)
The anonymous woman in Like Water For Chocolate is extending back in time through
her foremothers. She is not offering a "idealized" image of woman. Her story/myth is
ﬁlled with onions and tears. Her words foreshadow and "prepare" the reader for the pain.
Yet, her "recipe" acknowledges the joy of creation.

INGREDIENTS:

1 can of sardines

1/2 chorizo sausage

1 onion

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oregano
1 can of chiles serranos
10 hard rolls
The same ingredients can be used in a variety of recipes. Laura Esquivel is merely
offering possibilities.

In each chapter, Esquivel draws the reader into a space familiar to women. The
chapters are introduced with the ingredients of a recipe and the subsequent directions of
preparation. For example,

Begin shelling the nuts several days in advance, for that is a

big job, to which many hours must be devoted. After the nut

is taken from the shell, you still have to remove the skin that
covers the nut. Take care that none of this skin, not a single bit,

is left clinging to the nuts, because when they're ground and mixed
with the cream, any skin will make the nut sauce bitter, and all of
your previous work will have been for nothing. (223)

and

First the beans have to be boiled with baking soda, and then washed
and boiled again with pieces of pork and pork rind. (203)

and
Heat the vinegar and add the chiles after removing the seeds. When
the mixture comes to a boil, remove the pan from the heat and put
a lid on it, so that the chiles soften. (83)
Esquivel, by interweaving the chronotope of everyday time, disintegrates epic distance and
enables the reader to identify with the heroines in a present-day reality.

Yet, everyday time is not solely conveyed through Tita's grand niece. Tita's life

story is often revealed through everyday time. This is particularly evident in the narrator's

9O
description of Tita's food preparation.
The quail are placed on a platter, the sauce is poured over them, and
they are garnished with a single perfect rose in the center and rose petals
scattered around the outside; or the quail can be served individually, on
separate plates instead of a platter. That's how Tita liked to do it, because
then there was no chance of the garnish sliding off center when it was served,
and that's what she speciﬁed in the cookbook she started writing that night,
after crocheting a big section of bedspread, as she did every night. (55-56)
The placement of garnish is an event of everyday time. Tita's life is comprised of everyday
details. The heroic quality of her life is voiced through her creation of a cookbook and
bedspread.

It is important to note that Tita has no voice space. It is only through the cookbook
she is able to speak and leave pieces, fragments and/or clues to "her"story.

. . . she looked over the recipe she had written to see if she had

forgotten anything. And added: "Today while we were eating

this dish, Gertrudis ran away . . . " (57).
Tita reveals, through everyday time, her personal afﬁliations and relationships. It is
through this space that she is able to acknowledge the actions of Gertrudis. The mundane
detail of garnish placement provides her with a crucial moment of memory.

In fact, Tita's memory is often provided space through everyday time. Not only does
everyday time provide Tita with memory and/or voice space, it also provides her the
opportunity to conjure her memories. Given her physical space, the kitchen, it is not
surprising her memories are evoked or triggered through aromas.

. . . smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds
and even other smells that have no match in the present. Tita liked

to take a deep breath and let the characteristic smoke and smell
transport her through the recesses of her memory. (7)

9 1
and/or

The moment Tita opened the jar, the smell of apricots transported her
to the afternoon they made the marmalade. (29)

Tita's memories are limited to her experiences and her experiences are limited to the
domestic art of cooking.

In contrast to Gertrudis' extraordinary life, Tita's life is ordinary. She has not
participated in "the revolution" nor has she been the leader of men. She has been conﬁned
to the kitchen. "Tita's domain was the kitchen" (5). Nadya Aisenberg states in her text,
Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male Myth (1994),

Socially, space also shapes a woman's deﬁnition, her gendered sense

of her identity. Women are projected into a domestic space, which is

again an interior space, a space which contains the container, and within

which the activities of the house are enacted. (45)
Tita is "attuned to the kitchen routine" (5), it is her space. It is her identity.

. . . for Tita the joy of living was wrapped up in delights of food.

It wasn't easy for a person whose knowledge of life was based

on the kitchen to comprehend the outside world. That world was an

endless expanse that began at the door between the kitchen and the rest

of the house, whereas everything on the kitchen side of that door, on

through the door leading to the patio and the kitchen and herb gardens

was completely hers - it was Tita's realm. (5-6)
Tita's realm is saturated with everyday time. The cooking and preparing of food for a
family is a continual activity. Esquivel emphasizes this point at the conclusion of each
chapter with these words: "TO BE CONTINUED . . ."

The sense of continuation is further emphasized through the motif of cyclical time. The

text is comprised of 12 chapters, each chapter is titled with the name of a month and a

corresponding food. The titles are chronological. For example:

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

January
February
March
April

May

June

July
August
September
October
November

December

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Christmas Rolls

Chabela Wedding Cake

Quail in Rose Petal Sauce

Turkey Cole With Almonds & Sesame Seeds
Northem-Style Chorizo

A Recipe For Making Matches

Ox Tail Soup

Champandongo

Chocolate and Three Kings' Day Bread
Cream Fritters

Beans With Chile Tezcucanna-style

Chiles in Walnut Sauce

Tita's everyday time is comprised of months and eventually years of recipes. Many of the

recipes are connected or linked to the holidays, the seasons and a community of women.

On Mama Elena's ranch, sausage making was a real
ritual. The day before, they started peeling garlic, cleaning
chiles, and grinding spices. All of the women in the family had to
participate: Mama Elena; her daughters, Gertrudis, Rosaura, and
Tita; Nacha, the cook; and Chencha, the maid. They gathered
around the dining-room table in the afternoon, and between the
talking and the joking the time ﬂew by until it started to get dark. (8)

and

To get the number of eggs together, they preserved all the
eggs laid by the best hens for several weeks. This preserving technique
had been employed on the ranch since time immemorial to ensure a
supply of this nourishing and indispensable food throughout the winter. (23)

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Esquivel's use of a cyclical motif merely emphasizes the everyday time of women.
The chronotope of everyday time provides Tita with space for female stories, identity
and training. It is in the kitchen, through Nacha, the cook, Tita learns of her birth.
Tita made her entrance into this world, prematurely, right
there on the kitchen table amid the smells of simmering noodle
soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and,
of course, onion. Tita had no need for the usual slap on the bottom,
because she was crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she
knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage. The way
Nacha told it, Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide
of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and ﬂooded across
the kitchen ﬂoor. (4)
Her birth is celebrated by Nacha. Note, Nacha has no children of her own. Nor is Tita's
destiny motherhood. However, both women in everyday time and through their recipes
have left a legacy for future women, as is evident through Tita's grand niece's retelling of
the story.
Finally, it is in the chronotope of everyday time through which Tita's power is revealed.
Her power is not of physical courage or strength, though her kitchen realm requires

physical endurance. Her power is from her creations.

The moment they took their ﬁrst bite of the cake, everyone was
ﬂooded with a great wave of longing. (3 7)

and/or
With that meal it seemed they had discovered a new system of
communication, in which Tita was the transmitter, Pedro the receiver,
and poor Gertrudis the medium, the conducting body through which
the singular sexual message was passed. (48)

Tita's options are limited. She is deﬁned by her space. Yet, she refuses to be limited by it.

In his essay, "Forms Of Time And Chronotope In The Novel," Bakhtin states,

94

It is always the case that the hero cannot, by his very nature, be

a part of everyday life; he passes through such life as would

a man from another world . . . Everyday life is that lowest

sphere of existence from which the hero tries to liberate himself,

and with which he will never internally fuse himself. The course

of his life is uncommon, outside everyday life; one of its stages just

happens to be a progression through the everyday sphere. (121-122)
Tita cannot just pass through such life. She cannot liberate herself from the everyday
sphere. However, she can liberate herself within this sphere through her cooking
creations. Her common and traditional acts, when examined closely, are uncommon and
in reality she is creating new traditions.
BIOGRAPHICAL TIME

Laura Esquivel's text also utilizes the chronotope of biological time. Biographical

time, as mentioned in Chapter One, introduces the concept of generations. Biographical
time offers Esquivel the space to convey Tita's life course. The story begins with her birth
and ends with her death, it notes the crucial events in her life. Biographical time enables
Esquivel to reveal Tita's aging, longings, losses, disappointments and joys. Thus, the
reader is provided a role model for these experiences. In this text, Esquivel offers a vision
of how one might deal with the loss of love, the resistance of tradition, and the individual's
responsibility to community and ﬁrture generations. Questions are voiced, through Tita's
internal dialogue, that can only be answered through historical time. For example

Doubts and anxieties sprang to her mind. For one thing, she wanted

to know who started this family tradition. It would be nice if she could let

that genius know about one little ﬂaw in this perfect plan for taking care of

women in their old age. If Tita couldn't marry and have children, who

would take care of her when she got old? Was there a solution in a case

like that? Or are daughters who stay home and take care of their mothers
not expected to survive too long after the parent's death? And what about

95

women who marry and can't have children, who will take care of them? And
besides, she'd like to know what kind of studies had established that the
youngest daughter and not the eldest is best suited to care for their mother.
Had the opinion of the daughter affected by the plan ever been taken into account?
If she couldn't marry, was she at least allowed to experience love? Or not
even that?

Tita knew perfectly well that all these questions would have to be
buried forever in the archive of questions that have no answers. In the De la
Garza family, one obeyed - immediately. (IO-11)

Tita questions the tradition of her family, symbolic of the unquestioned patriarchal family
tradition. However, due to the family rule, "discussion was not one of the forms of
communication permitted in Mama Elena's household, " she is denied the answers to her
questions. Her gift, in biographical time, is to record her journey, so future generations
will not be deprived of the knowledge of "her"story.

Nadya Aisenberg elaborates upon the gift of story and women's voices in her text,
Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Axiale Myth (1994).

As long as women remain silent, history will be a recital of
male patronymics. How can anyone, male or female, decide
whose version of experience, of culture, is authoritative, signiﬁcant,
true, normative, when we possess but one account? (105)

She goes on to state,

To the extent that women, for historical, social and biological reasons,
experience a different reality from men's they complete an incomplete story.
Women writers, for instance, are able to describe from their own knowledge
a different role for the mother, a role apart from Freud's Oedipal romance.
Women's writing is a directive toward autonomy, presenting faithfully
what the reader's sense of experience tells her is true. (105)

Tita's reﬁrsal to remain silent offers another account of history. It adds another version or

experiential account of a life.

Yet, Tita's biographical life is not the story of one life. Her sisters' lives are also

96
revealed through the biographical chronotope. The reader learns of Gertrudis' success
and independence.
She was a general in the revolutionary army. The commission had been
earned by sheer hard work, she fought like mad on the ﬁeld of battle.
Leadership was in her blood, and once she joined the army, she began a
rapid ascent through powerful positions until she arrived at the top;
moreover, she was coming back happily married to Juan. (175)
Note, Gertrudis' experience closely resembles the male model of "his"story. She is
honored and revered among men. Yet, she prays for Tita.
Eyes closed, Gertrudis offered up a silent prayer, asking that Tita
be granted many more years in which to prepare the family recipes.
Neither she nor Rosaura knew how to make them; when Tita died,
her family's past would die with her. (175-176)
Gertrudis shapes her destiny through a classical hero's journey. She abandons all
relationships to follow her calling. Her journey leads her into unknown geographical
space. In contrast, Tita shapes her destiny within her space. Tita maintains her
relationships and envisions an alternative beyond the existing scripts.
Nadya Aisenberg explores in her text, Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male

Myth (1994), the contrasting visions of the classical hero and the heroine' journey. She

states,

. . . the classical hero as warrior ceases to think of the future

because he must stake everything on the success of the moment.

The heroine, with a vision of change, has, by contrast, a ﬁrturistic

sense of time. Like the postmodern artist and writer, the new heroine

works without established rules, formulating in the present what needs

to be done. Her actions are more improvisatory [sic] because she has not
inherited the legacy of male goals: to win a princess, to be initiated into

a fraternity, to defeat a mythical beast, to carve a glorious name for herself. (34)

Gertrudis is her father's daughter. She inherits his "rhythm and other qualities" (176). In

97
addition, she achieves the male goals: she wins a mate, is initiated into an army, defeats
men on the battle ﬁeld, and carves a glorious name for herself. She has embraced the rules
or recipe for success in a patriarchal society. Yet her achievement has come at a high
price. She is unable to participate in the creation of a recipe. "Gertrudis read this recipe as
if she were reading hieroglyphics" (186). Only through Tita's cooking can she return to
her "maternal home" (175). In contrast, Tita carries the maternal home within her and
changes the rules and/or recipes as needed.

. . . it was like the fear she felt when she was cooking and

didn't follow a recipe to the letter. She was always sure when

she did it that Mama Elena would ﬁnd out and, instead of
congratulating her on her creativity, give her a terrible tongue-

lashing for disobeying the rules. But she couldn't resist the temptation
to violate the oh-so-rigid rules her mother imposed in the kitchen . . .
and in life. (193)

and/or

Instead of eating, she would stare at her hands for hours on end. She
would regard them like a baby, marveling that they belonged to her.

She could move them however she pleased, yet she didn't know what

to do with them, other than knitting. She had never taken time to stop
and think about these things. At her mother's, what she had to do with her
hands was strictly determined, no questions asked . . . Now seeing her
hands no longer at her mother's command, she didn't know what to ask
them to do, she had never decided for herself before. They could do
anything or become anything. They could turn into birds and ﬂy into the
air! (105)

Tita envisions other alternatives, beyond those prescribed by the culture.
Whereas Gertrudis embraces the classical male myth, Rosaura and Mama Elena can
only envision one female myth. They can not recognize alternatives to tradition. Rosaura

assigns her daughter, Esperanza, her fate or role in life at birth.

98
. . . this little girl was destined to take care of her until the day she
died, Tita felt her hair stand on end. Only Rosaura could have
thought to perpetuate such an inhuman tradition. (146)

and/or

Her only consolation was that at least she had her daughter
Esperanza, who was obliged to stay with her forever. (167)

Rosaura bequeaths to her daughter a scripted life. Adrienne Rich in her text, Of Woman
Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986), states, "As daughters we need
mothers who want their own freedom and ours. We need not to be the vessels of another
woman's self-denial and frustration" (247). Rosaura cannot envision her own freedom,
nor her daughter's ﬁ'eedom. Her daughter is merely a vessel placed upon the earth for her
needs. It is not surprising that when Rosaura shrieks, the baby, Esperanza, wails (209).
Rosaura's anger and bitterness can only offer Esperanza sorrow. It is only through Tita's
intervention she avoids such a fate. However, the creation of an alternative vision or
alternate tradition is not without a struggle, "The house became a battleﬁeld" (234).

She fought with everything she had, she fought like a lioness to

defend what according to tradition was her right - a daughter who

would stay with her until she died. She kicked, she screamed, she

yelled, she spit, she threw up, she made desperate threats. (234)
Yet, in the end Tita triumphs. She does not allow Rosaura to poison her daughter "with
sick ideas" or "ruin her life" by "forcing her to follow some stupid tradition!" (209).

Biographical time enables Tita to reach an understanding of her mother and a

consequential healing.

Only now after her death, she saw her as she was for the ﬁrst time
and began to understand her. (132)

99
and/or
During the funeral Tita really wept for her mother. Not for

the castrating mother who had repressed Tita her entire life,

but for the person who had lived a frustrated love. (135)
Tita does not possess the knowledge of her mother's institutionalized oppression in her
youth. Thus, a healing was impossible. However, with her mother's death and her legacy
of old love letters, Tita is able to acquire intuitive insight. Mama Elena's vision of
motherhood is culture-bound, it was based upon her own experience as a daughter.

When Mama Elena's parents discovered the love that

existed between their daughter and this mulatto, they were

horriﬁed and forced her into an immediate marriage with

Juan De la Garza, Tita's father. (134)
She could not envision an alternative relationship of communication. Germaine Greer
writes in her text, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1991),

It is a permanent aspect of all kinds of oppression among human

groups that the oppressed are forced to act out institutionalized

oppression and exert pressure on those immediately beneath them

in the power structure. (236)
Mama Elena's power over her daughters and hired help was abusive. She exerted her
oppressive pressure over her daughters' lives throughout her life. Yet, through the written
letters she leaves behind, she provides Tita with an understanding not possible during her
life.

Finally, Bakhtin notes in biographical time, events in a life are consequently

"unrepeatable and irreversible" ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of

Realism" 17-18). Tita's journey is a series of events that are unrepeatable and irreversible.

Her mother's refusal to let her marry her one love, Pedro, cannot be reversed. However,

100

she has choices, as is evident by her decision to carry on an affair with Pedro rather than
marrying John. Her emergence is the result of "changing life circumstances and events,
activity and work" (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism"
22). Yet her destiny is not fated. She is awake to her choices.

Life had taught her that it was not that easy; there are few

prepared to ﬁrlﬁll their desires whatever the cost, and the

right to determine the course of one's own life would take

more effort than she had imagined. (164)
Tita has the opportunity to have Pedro, but is not willing to fulﬁll her desires whatever the
cost.

She and Pedro were on one side; on the other, at a total

disadvantage, was her sister. Rosaura was weak, it was

important to her how society saw her . . . What would happen if

Pedro abandoned her for Tita? How much would that hurt Rosaura?

What about Esperanza? (182)
She is connected to others and her internal dialogue indicates her journey is not an
individual accomplishment. She is conscious of the effect her decisions have upon others
in her world.

However, she is also conscious and awake to her own needs.

"I know who I am! A person who has a perfect right to live her
life as she pleases. (194)

When her sister, Rosaura, accuses her of breaking family tradition, she responds, "And I'm
going to break with it several more times if I have to, as long as this cursed tradition
doesn't take me into account" (207). Tita's breaking of family tradition is her gift to the
ﬁrture.

Tita is not alone in her awakeness to choice. Gertrudis also leaves a legacy of choice.

101

Gertrudis thanked her sister for the happy moments she had spent with

her, advised her not to give up the battle for Pedro, and before

departing gave her a recipe the prostitutes use so they don't get

pregnant: after having intimate relations, use a douche of boiled

water with a few drops of vinegar. (197)
The recipes of creation are not limited to food. The family cookbook reveals a choice
over motherhood. Adrienne Rich in her text, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected
Prose 1966-1978 (1979), elaborates upon this essential choice. She states, "This
elemental loss of control over her body affects every woman's right to shape the imagery
and insights of her own being" (196). When Tita writes of this recipe, it enables ﬁrture
generations the right to imagine other possibilities.
HISTORICAL TIME

Esquivel introduces historical time through the insight of the anonymous woman, Tita's
grand niece. In historical time, "human emergence is of a different nature. It is no longer
man's own private affair" (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism" 23). Tita's grand niece has given voice to Tita's story and thus what was once
private is now public. The reader, through Tita's grand niece's dialogue and insight, is able
to see and/or reﬂect upon "the historical emergence of the world itself" (The
Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 23).
Tita had little time for reﬂection. Her biographical life was seeped with everyday

chores.

She couldn’t continue her reﬂections because the chickens
were starting to make a huge ruckus on the patio. (emphasis mine, 211)

Yet, her grand niece does have the time necessary to make connections with the past. In

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addition, through Tita's written text, she has an opportunity denied to Tita.

When Esperanza, my mother, returned from her wedding trip, all

that she found under the remains of what had been the ranch was

this cookbook, which she bequeathed to me when she died, and which

tells in each of its recipes this story of a love interred.
Questions that remained unanswered in Tita's life span can be answered in the life of her
grand niece, through Tita's recipes/words, she has a "her"story.

Gerda Lemer's text, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages
to Eighteen-seventy (1993), explores women's deprivation of knowledge of their own
past. She states,

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past

knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant

of their own history, did not know what women before them had

thought and taught. So, generation after generation, they struggled

for insights others had already had before them. . . . the endless

repetition of effort, the constant reinventing of the wheel. (19)
Tita never knew "her"story, except through individuals in her immediate life. Thus, she
had to reinvent the wheel. However, her grand niece is spared the reinvention and
provided space for further imaginings. Due to her connection to the past, she is able to

build upon the inventions and images of her grand aunt Tita.

I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great—aunt, who will go
on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes. (24])

Tita's gift to historical time is a feminist consciousness.
In addition, Tita's story offers future generations a different image than the one culture
espouses. Few images were available to Tita when envisioning possibilities. Her mother's

specter, who rants and raves at her acts and actions, indicates the idealized image of

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womanhood according to tradition and culture.

"What you have done has no name! You have forgotten all morality,
respect, and good behavior. You are worthless, a good-for-nothing
who doesn't respect even yourself. You have blackened the name of
my entire family, from my ancestors down to this cursed baby you
carry in your belly!" (169)

Tita is offered no alternative image. Maxine Harris elaborates upon this dilemma in her

text, Down from the Pedestal: Moving Beyond Idealized Images of Womanhood ( 1994).

Almost ﬁfty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir had warned us
that the positive images which keep us securely perched on pedestals
are far more difficult to ignore than the negative images which leave
us feeling bad about ourselves. When we identify with the images
that are valued by our families, honored by our culture, and immortalized
by our mythologies we win love and approval for ourselves. (x)

She goes on to say,
Women who are trapped by idealized images do not change

when the time and context changes, not because these women

will not change, but because they cannot change. They are so

conﬁned within the bounds of a particular image that they do not

have within their emotional and behavioral repertoire the new actions

and behaviors that are demanded by the new circumstances. (31)
Tita's mother could not envision an alternative image. Thus, she participated in the
perpetuation of an oppressive culture. However, Tita created a new image and through
her creation has provided future generations with other possibilities of being.

Tita's new images are often relayed through her words. For example, she does not

deny her sexuality, but rather embraces it through her metaphors.

Tita knew through her own ﬂesh how ﬁre transforms the elements,

how a lump of corn ﬂour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul

that hasn't been warmed by the ﬁre of love is lifeless, like
a useless ball of corn ﬂour. (65)

104

Tita, through voice, is able to gain access to her own inner thoughts and feelings. By
applying her personal knowledge to new experiences, she is able to construct new
knowledge thorough the creation of metaphor. Her metaphors, along with her recipes
are passed down to future generations. Future generations build upon her knowledge.

. . . she could not ﬁnd the words for what she was feeling.

How unfortunate that black holes in space had not yet been

discovered, for then she might have understood the black hole

in the center of her chest, inﬁnite coldness ﬂowing through it. (14)
Like her predecessor, her great aunt Tita, the anonymous writer is attempting to capture in
words, through metaphor, the experience of the female journey.

Adrienne Rich explores the necessity of making visible the experience of women in

her essay, "Conditions for Work" (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-
1978, 1979). She states, "For spiritual values and a creative tradition to continue
unbroken we need concrete artifacts, the work of hands, written words to read, images to
look at, a dialogue with brave and imaginative women who came before us" (205). The
reader of Like Water For Chocolate (1992) is aware of a continuing creative tradition.
Tita's recipes and metaphors live on through her grand niece.

Yet, it is not just Tita who lives on through the metaphors and recipes. Tita's writing
and vocalizing of the stories and recipes enables the voices of Nacha, Morning Light, and
Gertrudis to be heard. However, the reader is unsure what is written and what is oral.

Tita wanted Esperanza to have a different education from the
one Rosaura had planned for her. So even through it wasn't
part of the deal, she took advantage of the moments Esperanza

spent with her to provide the child with a different sort of knowledge
than her mother was teaching her. (232)

105
The medium varies, but the message remains the same. There is a "her" story of women
who have refused to be limited and conﬁned by others' imposed ideas.
The reader has no doubt the "her"story will continue through the grand niece. Yet, the

story will be different,

. . . I am preparing Christmas Rolls, my favorite dish. My

mama prepared them for me every year. My mamal. . .

How wonderful the ﬂavor, the aroma of her kitchen, her

stories as she prepared the meal, her Christmas Rolls! 1

don't know why mine never turn out like hers . . . (241).
The rolls cannot be the same from generation to generation. The creative act changes the
recipe, but the ingredients remain the same. This anonymous woman has a different
"potential" and different problems of freedom and necessity" (The Bildungsroman and Its
Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 24). Yet, one does not doubt that her "creative

initiative" (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 24) will

prevail.

CHAPTER V
A COMMUNAL JOURNEY:
EMBRACING HER STORY IN OUR STORY
Eighteen goddess-like daughters are not equal to one son with a hump.
- Chinese Proverb
Amy Tan's text, The Joy Luck Club (1989), is a narrative account of eight women, four

mothers and their daughters, whose blurring of voices and interwoven stories provide the
reader a "her"story of one family or human community. Each woman's journey/story is
framed and/or linked by the stories of other women. Thus, Tan's text structure
emphasizes the women's interconnection to one another. David Leiwei Li summarizes the
structure of the text in his essay, "Chinese American Literature" (1992).

The Joy Luck Club is organized into four "sections" (my word instead of

"chapters" because of the latter's suggestion of sequence) and each section

contains four stories. All sixteen stories are told by a narrative "I" who is

differentiated each time by her name and the title preceding the story. With

the exception of the ﬁrst and last stories - where ling-Mei Woo substitutes her

mother Suyuan Woo's narrative voice as she does in replacing her mother's

place at the mah jong table - the ﬁrst section of the book reads like the

autobiographical narratives of the four mothers, the next two depict

the journeys of the four daughters, and the last one returns to the

mothers. (Understanding Others: Cultural and C ross-C ultural Studies and the

Teaching of Literature 196)

David Leiwei Li's words indicate the circular nature of the text and story. However, I

would argue Jing-mei Woo is not substituting her mother's voice, but rather incorporating

106

107
her mother's voice into her own journey. In addition, she is not replacing her mother at
the mah jong table, she is embracing her mother's place in her own story. "I am sitting at
my mother's place at the mah jong table, on the East, where things begin" (32). "I am here
in her spirit, to be the fourth comer and carry on the idea my mother came up with on a
hot day in Kweilin" (17).
In the ﬁrst chapter, Jing-mei Woo introduces her mother and the creation of the Joy
Luck Club.
My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club

in 1949, two years before I was born. This was the year my mother

and father left China with one stiff leather trunk ﬁlled only with fancy

silk dresses. (6)
The reader quickly recognizes J ing-mei's knowledge of the details and facts of her
mother's life, as well as her knowledge of her own place in the story. Her mother, Suyuan
Woo, through the ritual of story telling, has ensured ling-mei's connection to the past.

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days

of her ﬁrst marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's

why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. It was the story

she would always tell me when she was bored, when there was

nothing to do, when every bowl had been washed and the Formica

table had been wiped down twice, when my father sat reading the

newspaper and smoking one Pall Mall cigarette after another, a

warning not to disturb him. (7)
It is through the "re"tellings of the stories, Jing-mei has been able to internalize the words.
She states, "Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew
darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine" (7). Yet, though

Jing-mei knows the words of the stories, the meanings of the stories elude her.

My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated

108

each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said,
while my mother heard more. (27)

Jing-mei's journey is the journey of all four daughters; a search for meaning. It is a search
that can only be achieved through the mother.

In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful

of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see

daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese,

who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English.

They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that

to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does

not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without

any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. (31)
The daughters appear to be as lost to their mothers as the mothers are lost to their
daughters. This is particularly evident, when the three remaining Aunties of the Joy Luck
Club provide Jing-mei Woo the opportunity to visit her two last sisters in China.

"You must see your sisters and tell them about your mother's death."

says Auntie Ying. "But most important, you must tell them about her
life. The mother they did not know, they must now know." (30)

Jing-mei responds,
"See my sisters, tell them about my mother, " I say, nodding.
"What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't
know anything. She was my mother." (3 0-3 1)
Jing-mei does not know her mother and thus the journey begins for Jing-mei and the
reader. Indeed the loss of mother is apparent in each daughters' story. Adrienne
Rich indicates the tragedy of such a loss in her text, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution (1986).
The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the

daughter, is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge
Lear (father-daughter split), Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus

109

(son and mother) as great embodiments of the human tragedy; but there
is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture. (23 7)

Tan emphasizes the mothers' concern over the loss of their daughters through their
internal and external dialogue. For example, Ying-ying St. Clair, mother of Lena St.
Clair, states,
For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selﬁsh desires
would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my
daughter does not hear me. (64)
Lindo Jong, mother of Waverly long, states,
It's too late to change you, but I'm telling you this because I
worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will say,
"Thank you, Grandmother, for the gold bracelet. I'll never
forget you." But later, she will forget her promise. She will
forget she had a grandmother. (42-43)
Each woman combats the loss through story and through a collective story "re"claims the
past. Thus, through stories the mothers and daughters are awakened to their present and
ﬁrture "her"story. Tan's use of chronotopes accentuates the loss and discovery of "the
mother" in each woman's quest.
EVERYDAY TIME
Tan, throughout her text, utilizes the chronotope of everyday time. The chronotope of
everyday time, as in the previous texts, often revolves around food and conversation. For
example, Jing-mei Woo, one of the four daughters, states on the ﬁrst page of the text,
The week before she died, she called me, full of pride,
full of life: "Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck.
I'm going to cook black sesame-seed soup."
"Don't show off, " I said.

"It's not Showoff." She said the two soups were almost the
same, chabudwo. Or maybe she said butong, not the same thing

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at all. It was one of those Chinese expressions that means the

better half of mixed intentions. I can never remember things I

didn't understand in the ﬁrst place. (5-6)
Thus, Tan reveals through everyday time, the call of Jing-mei Woo's journey. It is in the
simple conversations of everyday time, the quest is revealed to the reader. Yet, it quickly
becomes apparent that Jing-mei's journey of discovery and understanding cannot be
achieved alone. It is only through the Joy Luck Club stories that the expressions which
evade her become clear.

Lena St. Clair indicates a similar conﬁrsion over her mother's words. "I could
understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings. One thought led to another without
connection" (109). Her words could easily be applied to Tan's text. Yet, if the reader and
daughter are awake, the questions raised in one section are answered in the next.

Insights to questions are often conveyed through everyday conversations of "daily
existence" ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 32).
For example, Auntie An-mei conveys to Jing-mei the meaning of joy luck during the
preparation of food.

"We used to play mah jong, winner take all. But the same people
were always winning, the same people always losing, " she says. She
is stufﬁng wonton, one chopstick jab of gingery meat dabbed onto
a thin skin and then a single ﬂuid turn with her hand that seals the skin
into the shape of a tiny nurse's cap. "You can't have luck when
someone else has skill. So long time ago, we decided to invest in the
stock market. There's no skill in that. Even your mother agreed." (18)
Jing-mei, raised in a capitalistic/individualistic society, is given a lesson community. Thus,

what appears to be a traditional and common act, the preparation of food, is in reality an

opportunity to instruct the next generation in resistance.

l 1]

Partial insights or clues are given during everyday time. Jing-mei's conversation with
her mother, while cleaning up after a meal, reveals crucial information. The space and
time, available through the everyday chronotope, enables her to continue her quest of
knowing the mother, while at the same time establishing a sense of community that even
death can not destroy. Her mother unclasps her gold necklace containing a jade pendant
and places it in Jing-mei's palm. Jing-mei protests and her mother responds,

"Nala, nala" - Take it, take it - she said, as if she were scolding
me. And then she continued in Chinese. "For a long time, I wanted
to give you this necklace. See, I wore this on my skin, so when you
put it on your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life's
importance." (23 5)

Jing-mei still has to uncover the meaning of her mother's existence. However, a clue has
been given, a clue that becomes more clear through the revelation of others.

Jing-mei is conscious, after her mother's death, that she could ask her Aunts the
meaning of the pendant. Yet, she states, "I also know they would tell me a meaning that
is different from what my mother intended" (222). Thus, she is constantly reﬂecting upon
its meaning.

And because I think about this all the time, I always notice
other people wearing these same jade pendants - not the
ﬂat rectangular medallions or the round white ones with holes
in the middle but ones like mine, a two-inch oblong of bright apple
green. It's as though we were all sworn to the same secret convenant,
so secret we don't even know what we belong to. Last weekend, for
example, I saw a bartender wearing one. As I ﬁngered mine, I asked him,
"Where'd you get yours?"

"My mother gave it to me, " he said.

I asked him why, which is a nosy question that only one Chinese
person can ask another; in a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people
are already like family.

"She gave it to me after I got divorced. I guess my mother's telling me

l 12
I'm still worth something."
And I knew by the wonder in his voice that he had no idea what the pendant

really meant. ( 222)
However, the reader notes the community established in a kitchen is being continued in a
bar. Jing-mei is connected to others through the pendant and consequently she belongs to
a community of people who "are already like family" (222). The pendant appears to
transcend one meaning and offers the wearer the message he/she needs to hear. It is
important to note that Jing-mei's mother gave her the necklace after an evening of
humiliation. Jing-mei feels small, tired and foolish. Yet, her mother's words in the kitchen
are said "in a way as if this (her acts) were proof - proof of something good" (234). Thus,
the bartender's message is applicable to Jing-mei.

Jing-mei, through the everyday chronotope, is provided the space to acquire the
literacy of her mother and consequently her Chinese heritage.
Every time I went with her to Chinatown, she pointed out other Chinese

women her age. "Hong Kong ladies, " she said, eyeing two ﬁnely dressed

women in long, dark mink coats and perfect black hairdos. "Cantonese,

village people, " she whispered as we passed women in knitted caps,

bent over in layers of padded tops and men's vests. And my mother -

wearing light-blue polyester pants, a red sweater, and a child's green

down jacket - she didn't look like anybody else. . . . My mother came from

many different directions. (223)
Note, Jing-mei's use of "every time." Her mother is seventy-one, they have made this
journey to Chinatown numerous times and the ritual of the journey has enabled her to
acquire the knowledge to tell the story. Her mother is dead, but Jing-mei can distinguish

between Hong Kong ladies and Cantonese village people.

Yet, there are gaps in her literacy and these gaps become evident through the

113
chronotope of everyday time.
I picked up my mother's plate, the one she had carried

into the kitchen at the start of the dinner. The crab was untouched.

I lifted the shell and smelled the crab. Maybe it was because I didn't

like the crab in the ﬁrst place. I couldn't tell what was wrong with it. (233)
Jing-mei can not distinguish between a good crab and a crab "Not so good" (234). Yet,
everyday time allows her the space to give voice to her questions and continue her
acquisition.

"What happened to your crab? Why'd you throw it away?"

"Not so good," she said again. "That crab die. Even a beggar
don't want it."

"How could you tell? I didn't smell anything wrong."

"Can tell even before cook!" She was standing now, looking

out the kitchen window into the night. "I shake that crab before cook.

His legs - droopy. His mouth - wide open, already like a dead person." (234)
Suyuan Woo knows through experience what Jing-mei Woo has yet to learn. The
chronotope of everyday time provides her the space to reinforce her belief in Jing-mei's
ability to eventually achieve her quest. Her words, while presenting Iing-mei with her
pendant, serve as a blessing.

"Not so good, this jade, " she said matter-of-factly, touching the

pendant, and then she added in Chinese: "This is young jade. It is

very light color now, but if you wear it every day it will become green." (235)
Note, Suyuan's choice of words. She describes the crab and the pendant as "Not so
good." However if given time, she informs Jing-mei, the pendant will deepen to a rich
color. So too, will Jing—mei deepen as she experiences life. The pendant, worn next to

Suyuan's skin will now be worn next to Jing—mei's skin and her "life's importance" (235)

will deepen through her daughter's existence.

114
The everyday chronotope enables each character the space and time to acquire their
mothers' stories and literacies. For example, An-mei Hsu, mother of Rose Hsu Jordan,
relays an incident of her youth. Her mother, a widow and ﬁrst wife of a scholar, is tricked
and then forced into marriage as a fourth wife. An-mei, naive of the intrigues and politics
of her new home accepts a "beautiﬁrl piece of jewelry" from the second wife. "It was
designed in the Western style, a long strand, each bead the same size and of an identical
pinkish tone, with a heavy brooch of ornate silver to clasp the ends together" (259-260).
It is over tea, in the everyday chronotope, An-mei's mother reveals her lesson.
"Be careﬁrl, An-mei," she said. What you hear is not genuine.
She makes clouds with one hand, rain with the other. She is trying
to trick you, so you will do anything for her." (260)
Yet, An-mei does not hear her mother- So, the lesson continues.
"You do not believe me, so you must give me the necklace. I will
not let her buy you for such a cheap price."
And when I still did not move, she stood up and walked over,
and lifted that necklace off. And before I could cry to stop her, she
put the necklace under her shoe and stepped on it. When she put it
on the table, I saw what she had done. This necklace that had almost
bought my heart and mind now had one bead of crushed glass. (260-261)
Later, An-mei's mother removes the crushed bead and knots the necklace to look whole
again. In addition, she has An-mei wear the necklace "every day for one week so I would
remember how easy it is to lose myself to something false" (261).
And after I wore those fake pearls long enough to learn this lesson,
she let me take them off. Then she opened a box, and turned to me:
"Now can you recognize what is true?" And I nodded.
She put something in my hand. It was a heavy ring of

watery blue sapphire, with a star in its center so pure that I never
ceased to look at that ring with wonder. (261)

115
The lesson is learned. An-mei states, "I saw second Wife's true nature" (268). More
importantly, she acquires knowledge of her mother's nature and her own value and worth.
BIOGRAPHICAL TIME
Tan, as did the previous authors, utilizes the chronotope of biographical time to convey
the concept of generations.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out
the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born
a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are
like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same
way. (241)
Biographical time enables Tan the space to convey the "unrepeatable, individual stages"
(The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 22) of a life and at the
same time provide the correlation between generations and the individual. However, the
chronotope of biographical time, in this text, provides more than the "testifying to a
family-clan consciousness of self" ("Forms Of Time And Of The Chronotope In The
Novel" 137). Tan is concerned with the testimony of a family/community that extends
beyond blood lines.

Tan, at the beginning of her text, after the dedication page and the table of contents,

incorporates the following table of sisterhood.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB
THE MOTFERS THE DAUGHTERS
Suyuan Woo Jing-mei "June" Woo
An-mei Hsu Rose Hsu Jordan
Lindo Jong Waverly Jong

Ying-ying St. Clair Lena St. Clair

116
David Leiwei Li analyzes the table in his essay, "Chinese American Literature" (1992).
He states,

This table certainly has a semblance to the kind of family
tree format of the nineteenth century realistic tradition, but the
analogy stops there. Instead of a hierarchical genealogy, Tan's
is a horizontal one. Instead of tracing the progenitor of a family,
Tan groups four families unrelated by blood under the seal of the
club, signifying a formal sharing of communal identity. (Understanding
Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of
Literature 197)

There is no quest or recognition of a speciﬁc family lineage. Rather, the table recognizes
"the destinies of mother—daughter are ﬁliated as the course of life among mothers and
daughters are affiliated" (Understanding Others: Cultural and C ross-C ultural Studies
and the Teaching of Literature 197-198).

Tan emphasizes the familial relationship among club members through their stories.
Note, Jing-mei's description of Waverly.

We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters
squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part,
we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. (148)

The daughters display typical sibling rivalry. Yet, they acquired this rivalry through their
observations of their mothers. Jing-mei states,

Auntie Lin and my mother were both best friends and
arch enemies who spent a lifetime comparing their children.
I was one month older than Waverly Jong, Auntie Lin's
prized daughter. From the time we were babies, our mothers
compared the creases in our belly buttons, how shapely our
earlobes were, how fast we healed when we scraped our
knees, how thick and dark our hair, how many shoes we wore
out in one year, and later, how smart Waverly was at playing chess,
how many trophies she had won last month, how many newspapers
had printed her name, how many cities she had visited. (27)

1 l7
Jing-mei has yet to learn the power and support of community. It is only when her
Aunties fulﬁll her mother's dream through her that she begins to comprehend "the mah
jong table is not for an individual's gain but for the interest of the club, and when the
Aunties saved money for June Woo to fulﬁll her mother's wish to ﬁnd her lost daughters in
China, one begins to understand the transgenerational and transfamilial tenacity of a
community" (Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the
Teaching of Literature 198).

Biographical time offers Tan the space to convey the characters' life courses. For
example, through biographical time, Tan reveals the crucial events of their lives. The
reader experiences their births, their aging, and their deaths as well as their friendships.
Carolyn Heilbrun notes in her text, WritingA Woman 's Life (1988), the rarity of space
available for the stories of friendship between women.

Indeed, friendship between women has seldom been recounted.

Women have been seen to support one another in the crises of their
lives, particularly in those family crises so central to a woman’s experience
of marriage, birth, death, illness, isolation. From the love of women for one
another as they work and live side by side, however, recorders of
civilization have, until the last decade, averted their eyes... If one sets
out to survey the annals of friendship (as annals go, a rather short
collection), one ends by reading - in Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch,
Erasmus, Montaigne, Johnson, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, et a]. - of male
friendships. If the ﬁiendships of women are considered at all, and that is
rare enough, they intrude into the male account the way a token woman
is reluctantly included in a male community. (98—99)

Membership in the Joy Luck club is a crucial life event in each character's life. Suyuan,

the initiator of the club in China and America, indicates the importance of the club.

"So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had
become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs

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done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted,

we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories.

And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only

joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck." (12)
Note, each week is a new year. Thus, according to the Chinese zodiac cycle, an
opportunity for a new beginning and new joy luck for each individual. Biographical time
offers the space for the creation of new traditions. However, the value of new traditions is
not revealed except through historical time. Biographical time merely enables the
characters to record their journeys, so future generations can grasp the alternatives
available in "her"story.

Biographical time, as in the previous stories, concentrates "on deeds, feats, merits, and
creative accomplishments, or on the structure of the hero's destiny in life, his happiness,
and so on" (" The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 17). For
example, Waverly Jong, the child prodigy, reveals her accomplishments.

I was ten years old. Even though I was young, I knew my

ability to play chess was a gift. It was effortless, so easy. I could

see things on the chessboard that other people could not . . . And

this gift gave me supreme conﬁdence. I knew what my opponents would

do, move for move. I knew exactly what point their faces would fall

when my seemingly simple and childlike strategy would reveal itself as

a devastating and irrevocable course. I loved to win. (187)
Waverly, through biographical time and in the ﬁrst person, reveals her gifts and talents.
Yet, because this is a collective story, the reader gains insight into her accomplishments
through the voices of others. The reader, through Jing-mei's voice, learns of Waverly's

continued success. She is a tax attorney at Price Waterhouse. Thus, she continues to

utilize her ability for strategy and seeing what other people can not see. In addition, she

1 19
continues to love to win. It is her words that leave Jing-mei feeling as if her "hair were

coated with disease" (229).
However, biographical time does not only reveal the strengths of the characters.

I [Lindo Jong] wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at
what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more
valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside
that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I
was like the wind. (53)

It also provides the space for the acknowledgment of individual weaknesses. The
characters' ability to perceive their weaknesses is painfully apparent.

. . . I [Jing-mei] looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink

and when I saw only my face staring back-and that it would always
be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made
high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out

the face in the mirror. (144)

Tan's use of a mirror motif emphasizes the characters' self reﬂection. Their ability to give
voice to their reﬂections reminds the reader of their internal quests. Yet, their answers are
not to be revealed in an individual reﬂection. Their answers are to be found within the
reﬂections of themselves and others. Tan reveals this insight through Waverly and her

mother Lindo at the beauty parlor.

So my daughter and I are alone in this crowded beauty parlor.
She is frowning at herself in the mirror. She sees me looking at her.

"The same cheeks," she says. She points to mine and then pokes
her cheeks. She sucks them outside in to look like a starved person.
She puts her face next to mine, side by side, and we look at each other
in the mirror.

"You can see your character in your face, " I say to my daughter without
thinking. "You can see your future."

"What do you mean?" she says.

And now I have to ﬁght back my feelings. These two faces, I think,
so much the same! The same happiness, the same sadness, the same good

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fortune, the same faults.
I am seeing myself and my mother, back in China, when I was a young

girl. (291-292)
Lindo proceeds to ﬂash back to her youth. She relays to her daughter her mother's
examination of her [Lindo's] own character. Lindo and her mother shared the same nose,
chin, forehead and eyes. Waverly cannot achieve her quest of knowing herself or her
mother without reﬂecting upon her mother and her mother’s mother. This reﬂection can
only occur through the historical chronotope, an issue to be explored at the end of this
chapter.

Biographical time offers the characters space to convey their lives, their mothers' lives
and to recognize the role of their mothers' in their stories. Note, though the chapters are
identiﬁed by the individuals telling their stories, it is impossible for them to separate their
stories from their mothers' stories or the others in their lives. For example, the ﬁrst
chapter/story told by Jing-mei Woo mentions her mother, Suyuan, her Auntie Lin, Auntie
An-mei, Auntie Ying, Rose, Waverly, Lena and Jing-mei's twin sisters lost in China. Her
biographical life is connected to her community. Her journey is not a solitary journey.
There is no one character the reader can recognize as the heroine. David Leiwei Li states,

The tables with which Tan begins her novel are therefore
ploys that may give illusory satisfaction to those of us who are
prone to identify the individual heroines of the book, while they
serve others as a moral about enabling communions. In a decade
of greed when American individualism takes the shape of predatory
egoism, the narrative structure of Amy Tan's may be suggesting an
alternative of a fructifying collectivity. . . . The blurring of voices and

indistinguishable qualities of the characters therefore help to create
a narrative sense of personal and social dependency not as symptoms

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of immaturity as male-centered Western psychology will diagnose it,

but as signs of healthy human relationships. (Understanding Others:

Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature 198)
Jing-mei's journey is intricately connected to the journeys of all the club members. Her life
is interwoven with their lives. Thus, her "birth, childhood, school years, marriage, works,
deeds, death and so forth," ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism" 17) must be told in relationship to the others in her life.

Finally, biographical time allows the characters to reveal the process of aging, and give
voice to their individual losses, particularly the loss of their mothers through death or
separation. In addition, each woman must deal, in biographical time, with the
deterioration of her own body and her own unﬁrlﬁlled dreams. For example, Lindo Jong
notes the drooping of her mouth (293) and Ying-ying her "poor feet, once so small and
pretty! Now they are swollen, callused, and cracked at the heels. My eyes, so bright and
ﬂashy at sixteen, are now yellow-stained, clouded" (279).

Yet, it is not their physical decline they most mourn. Rather, it is the loss of their
mothers. An-mei's poignant memory of her grandmother's death and her mother's action
illustrates the depth of grief involved with the loss of a mother.

And then my mother cut a piece of meat from her arm. Tears
poured ﬁom her face and blood spilled to the ﬂoor.
My mother took her ﬂesh and put it in the soup. She cooked

magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one

last time . . . She fed her this soup, but that night Popo ﬂew away

with her illness.

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the ﬂesh and
the worth of the pain.
This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep

it is in your bones. The pain of the ﬂesh is nothing. The pain you
must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember

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what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your

mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar,

no skin, no ﬂesh. (41)
The mother is bred in the bones, she is in the marrow of each woman. To lose her is to
lose a part of the self, to lose her memory is to lose "her"story.

. . . I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with

a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what

is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what

is underneath, what started the pain. (40)
It is through historical time the generational pain is revealed as well as the generational
hope.
HISTORICAL TIME

Historical time is revealed through the entire collection of stories. Bakhtin, as
mentioned in previous chapters, notes in historical time the "hero emerges along with the
world and he reﬂects the historical emergence of the world itself" ("The Bildungsroman
and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 23). Individually, the chapters are
incapable of revealing the historical emergence of the heroines or the world. Yet, when
connected they create a vision of "her"story.

For example, the new traditions, mentioned in biographical time, gain historical
signiﬁcance when contrasted with the traditions of old. Carolyn Heilbrun in her text,
Writing/1 Woman 's Life (1988), states, "Women have long been nameless. They have not
been persons. Handed by a father to another man, the husband, they have been objects of

circulation, exchanging one name for another" (121). This is particularly evident in the

story of An-mei, in her chapter titled "Magpies." Her mother is stripped of her identity

123
and given the name or title "Fourth Wife." The other women of the household carry
similar titles of possession; First Wife, Second Wife, Third Wife and Fifth Wife.
Julia Kristeva in her text, About Chinese Women (1986), explores the interaction of
women within the Chinese patriarchal household.

Without a right to the human - i.e. male - hierarchy, and,
consequently, largely without an education: condemned to r
endless humiliation if she is not a 'principal wife' and back-breaking
labour when she doesn't belong to a wealthy family, woman is
subjected as well to the internal rivalry within the female contingent of
the family, which reﬂects in microcosm the power—structure in the male
hierarchy. Internal rivalries between wives and concubines at various
levels (ﬁrst wife, second wife, etc), but also between daughter-in-law, t
where the war between the brothers for succession to the fathers is
echoed . . . Thus, in their own society, they give free rein to the
impassioned violence that gnaws at the apparent interior harmony of
the patriarchal class . . . they reveal the vvretchedness of the female
condition . . . (77)

 

An-mei is raised in a house of women in constant competition with one another. She has
no model or script of a community in which all can gain through a collaborative effort.
Yet, her mother’s suicide is an attempt to offer her a new vision, "When the poison broke
into her body, she whispered to me that she would rather kill her own weak spirit so she
could give me a stronger one" (271).

Her mother has broken from the patriarchal script and provided her daughter, through
her act, an opportunity for an alternative destiny. Her careﬁrl planning of her death, two
days before the lunar new year, ensures her daughters security and ﬁrture.

. . . on the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle
scores. In my mother's case, this would be the ﬁrst day of the lunar
new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or

disaster and misfortune will follow.
So on that day, Wu Tsing, fearful of my mother's vengeﬁrl spirit,

124

wore the coarsest of white cotton mourning clothes. He promised her

visiting ghost that he would raise Syaudi and me as his honored children.

He promised to revere her as if she had been First Wife, his only wife. (271)
An-mei's mother's sacriﬁce is given new meaning through Ying-ying's vignette.

My half-sisters were all dreaming of being married to

worthless young boys from families not as good as ours.

My half-sisters did not know how to reach very high for a

good thing. They were the daughters of my father's concubines.

I was the daughter of my father's wife. (278)
There is no future for the daughter of a concubine. Ying-ying's half sisters illustrate the
scripted bondage awaiting An-mei.

Yet, because of her mother's gift, An-mei discovers her voice and thus, changes her
script. On the day her mother's spirit returns to settle scores, An-mei achieves what her
mother could not achieve given her script in patriarchy.

And on that day, I showed Second Wife the fake pearl necklace

she had given me and crushed it under my foot.

And on that day, Second Wife's hair began to turn white.

And on that day, I learned to shout. (272)
An-mei's mother had no voice. Her story is told to An-mei through Yan Chang, her
mother's servant. Her mother, trapped in a script she did not write, leaves her daughter
the legacy of voice and thus the potential to write her own script. Her gift is given
historical signiﬁcance through Rose Hsu Jordan's story.

Rose, An-mei's daughter, in the midst of a divorce, perceives no choices.

She cried, "No choice! No choice!" She doesn't know. If
she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try,
she can lose her chance forever.
I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught

to desire nothing, to swallow other peOple's misery, to eat
my own bitterness. (241)

125

An-mei, before her mother's death, swallowed her words. Her mother, perceiving no
choice, swallowed opium.

That is why the story of Persephone and Demeter is the story

of all women who marry: why death and marriage, as Nancy

Miller pointed out in The Heroine ’s Text, were the only two

possible ends for women in novels, and were, frequently, the same

end. For the young woman died as a subject, ceased as an

entity. (WritingA Woman’s Life 121)
An-mei, due to her mother's gilt, recognizes the alternatives available to her daughter.
She realizes her mother had no choice. "That was China. That was what people did back
then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was
their fate" (272). She goes on to state,

But now they can do something else. Now they no longer

have to swallow their own tears or suffer the taunts of magpies. I

know this because I read this news in a magazine from China. (272)
Her daughter, Rose, because of "her"story, has a choice.

Rose's choice is revealed to her through her mother's words. Initially, Rose hopes to
ﬁnd a solution to her problems through a psychiatrist. Yet, An-mei knows the solution
does not lie in therapy. "A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you
to dream some more, to ﬁnd the pond and pour more tears into it" (272). The psychiatrist,
according to An-mei, merely participates in her continued oppression. He reinforces her

immobilization. Whereas, her mother's words offer liberation.

"I am not telling you to save your marriage," she protested.
"I only say you should speak up." (216)

Rose follows her mother's advice and arranges a ﬁnal meeting with her husband. During

this meeting she announces she has "found a place" (219) to live, she will not surrender

the house.

Ted pulled out the divorce papers and stared at them. His
x's were still there, the blanks were still blank. "What do you think
you're doing? Exactly what?" he said.

And the answer, the one that was important above everything
else, ran through my body and fell from my lips: "You can't just
pull me out of your life and throw me away."

I saw what I wanted: his eyes, confused, then scared. He was
hulihudu. The power of my words was that strong. (219)

Her grandmother, with the advent of the Fifth Wife, had been thrown away. Historical
time provides Rose the space for a new script. She is "re"constructing her house. Yet,
the "re"construction is due to her grandmother's act which resulted in her mother's voice.
The garden, no longer well groomed, is according to Ted, her husband, "a mess" (218).
In response, Rose, through her internal dialogue, states,

And I knew he was calculating how long it would take to
get the place back into order. (218)

Then, through external dialogue, she responds to his remark.

"I like it this way," I said, patting the tops of overgrown
carrots, their orange heads pushing through the earth as if about
to be born. And then I saw the weeds: Some had sprouted in
and out of the cracks in the patio. Others had anchored on the
side of the house. And even more had found refuge under loose
shingles and were on their way to climbing up to the roof. No
way to pull them out once they've buried themselves in
the masonry; you'd end up pulling the whole building down. (218)

Rose has been "re"born. The weeds, symbolic of women's stories, are literally buried in
the masonry of her house. Women are no longer possessions to be used and discarded.
The stories told in everyday time and preserved in biographical time gain signiﬁcance in

historical time. Historical time recognizes their impact on "her"story. Her grandmother's

127
story fought its way out through a "crack in the patio" that was the only space available.
Her mother's story is "anchored on the side of the house" and her story is "climbing up to
the roof."

Carolyn Heilbrun states in her text, WritingA Woman '3 Life (1988), "Women must
turn to one another for stories; they must share the stories of their lives and their hopes
and their unacceptable fantasies" (44). Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club, offers a vision, to
the reader, of women sharing their stories and the consequential power it creates.

The daughters, through historical time, "re"discover their mothers. This is particularly
evident in the last chapter, told by Jing-mei and titled "A Pair of Tickets. " Jing-mei, sent
by the Joy Luck Club to China, meets her twin sisters.

I am thirty-six years old. My mother is dead and I am
on a train, carrying with me her dreams of coming home. I am
going to China. (307)
Yet, the Joy Luck Club is not content with merely sending Jing-mei to China. They ﬁrst
send her sisters a letter, a collaborative endeavor.
So this is what they wrote to my sisters in Shanghai: "Dearest
Daughters, I too have never forgotten you in my memory or in
my heart. I never gave up hope that we would see each other
again in a joyous reunion. I am only sorry it has been too long.
I want to tell you everything about my life since I last saw you.
I want to tell you this when our family comes to see you in China."
. . . They signed it with my mother's name. (309)
Suyuan is dead. Yet, the community gives her voice. She lives on through their words.
In China, Jing-mei discovers her mother's name means "Long-Cherished Wish" and her

own name translates to "pure essence" and "younger sister. "

I think about this. My mother's long-cherished wish. Me,

128

the younger sister who was supposed to be the essence of
the others. I feed myself with the old grief, wondering how
disappointed my mother must have been. (323)

The night before meeting her sisters, Jing-mei cannot sleep.

I lay awake thinking about my mother's story, realizing
how much I have never known about her,
grieving that my sisters and I had both lost her. (330)

However, it is not too late. She "re"discovers her mother in China through her sisters.

And now I see her again, two of her, waving, and in one hand
there is a photo, the Polaroid I sent them. As soon as I get beyond
the gate, we run toward each other, all three of us embracing, all hesitations
and expectations forgotten.

"Mama, Mama, " we all murmur, as if she is among us.

My sisters look at me, proudly. "Meimei jandale," says
one sister proudly to the other. "Little Sister has grown up."

I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them.
Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is
Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
After all these years, it can ﬁnally be let go. (331)

Jing-mei's quest is complete. Through community her mother is revealed. Her father
captures the moment with a Polaroid and the sisters "watch quietly together, eager to see
what develops" (33]).

Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her

same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-

cherished wish. (332)

The mother is within them and lives through their lives and stories. The Joy Luck Club

has ensured her memory will not be forgotten.

CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION OR A BEGINNING?
I suspect that female narratives will be found where women
exchange stories, where they read and talk collectively of

ambitions, and possibilities and accomplishments.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, WritingA Woman’s Life

"RE"VIEW

I began this dissertation/journey in the hopes of gaining insight into the female journey.
The chronotope, as a unit of analysis, focused me effectively upon women's use of time
and space. I speciﬁcally examined, though there are a multitude of chronotopes, the
authors' use of everyday time, biographical time, and historical time. Future studies will
need to incorporate additional chronotopes, speciﬁcally collective time, if the dialogue is
to continue. In addition, the female Bildungsroman pool of texts examined through
chronotope needs to be expanded if cross-cultural comparisons are to be introduced into
the theoretical debate.

A search of available research reveals, to date, no texts pertaining to chronotope and
the female journey or the female Bildungsroman. However, a great deal of research is
available on the female journey or the female Bildungsroman. I refer the reader to Laura

Sue Fuderer's annotated bibliography of criticism titled, The Female Bildungsroman in

129

130
English (1990). Her text effectively compiles the research available through books,
chapters in books, articles in periodicals and dissertations. It serves as a springboard for
those interested in further reading concerning the female Bildungsroman.

In contrast, less information is available on chronotope and the literature available is
primarily an analysis of Bakhtin's work. However, as a unit of analysis, it has been applied
to other types of literature. For example, in one instance it is applied to children's
literature by M. Mackey in an essay titled, "Ramona The Chronotope, The Young Reader
And Social Theories Of Narrative." Its impact upon female consciousness has yet to be
explored.

The novels examined, in this text, of four women writers, each from a different cultural
background, have been examined for their use of chronotope. The four novels - Kim
Chernin's In My Mother’s House: A Daughter's Story (1983), Christina Garcia's
Dreaming In Cuban (1992), Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate ( 1992) and Amy
Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) - effectively utilize everyday time, biographical time and
historical time. Consequently it is possible, due to their similarities, to draw conclusions,
limited in scope, as to the contribution chronotope analysis brings to the study of the
female Bildungsroman/ j oumey/ myth.

I return to the role of myth before proceeding to the use of chronotopes in the novels,
elaborated upon in chapter one. Joseph Campbell in his text, Myths T 0 Live By (1972),
notes "man's" consciousness of "himself" and his unique awareness that "he, and all that he
cares for, will one day die" (20). He goes on to state,

This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend

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it is the ﬁrst great impulse to mythology. And along with this there

runs another realization; namely, that the social group into which the

individual has been borne, which nourishes and protects him and

which, for the greater part of his life, he must himself help to

nourish and protect, was ﬂourishing long before his own birth and will

remain when he is gone. (20)
Thus myths enable individuals to integrate their society and provide members of the
community with a sense of historical time. However, Campbell notes, the hero-cycle of
the modern age collapses the social group. "The social unit is not a carrier of religious
content, but an economic-political organization . . . in hard and unremitting competition
for material supremacy and resources" (The Hero With A Thousand Faces 387).

The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite
to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great
co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all

meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none
in the self-expressive individual, today no meaning is in the group- none

in the world: all rs in the individual. (WM 388)
Campbell wrote these words in 1949 and they are applicable today. With the advent of
modern individualism the community lost its meaning. The male Bildungsroman
exempliﬁes individualism as it concerns the development of a single male protagonist. The
initial female Bildungsroman imitated the male pattern. It concerned itself with the
development of a single female protagonist. Yet, the formal pattern of the European
(male) Bildungsroman proved to be "inadequate as a vehicle for portraying the reality of a
woman who, from her earliest years, is aware of herself living a number of lives
simultaneously" (" The Female Bildungsroman in Commonwealth Literature" 260-261).
Consequently, the form changed due to the "recognition of the duality of women's

existence: the self and the social role" ( " The Female Bildungsroman in Commonwealth

132
Literature" 26 l ).

Women's journeys incorporate their roles as daughters, mothers, lovers and
friends. Their journeying is a collaborative endeavor. Thus, in the female Bildungsroman,
community still maintains meaning. The four novels examined emphasize the number of
lives connected to a life. The reader can note similarities in their stories. However, there
are also apparent differences. According to Campbell, mythology recognizes the "unity"
of our species, and the "differentiation" of our species. For example, "Not only does all
mankind face death, but the various peoples of the world face death in greatly differing
ways. A cross-cultural survey of the mythologies of mankind, consequently, will have to
note not only universals but also the transformations of those common themes in the
ranges of their occurrence" (Myths T 0 Live By 21). Campbell notes the differentiation of
species, but not of gender. Traditionally, males have been the constructors of myth. It is
their "his"story that has deﬁned time and space.

Anne Valley-Fox recalls a meeting with Joseph Campbell in 1972 in her co-
authored text with Sam Keen titled, Your Mythic Journey (1973).

. . . he spoke with us of the danger and bliss of the hero's journey. I was

twenty-ﬁve at the time, still reveling in the aftershocks of the 19605

in America - socially disillusioned, yet expecting somehow to stun the

world through my personal brilliance. So I asked Campbell how

it was that the hero was so often cast in masculine form. Surely

women are heroic, too? He didn't respond by narrating, as I had

hoped, any of the hundreds of myths at his ﬁngertips featuring intrepid

females. What he did say caused everything else we spoke of that day to

fall out of my memory. He said that he and his wife, Jean, had chosen

not to have children because their life's work was already cut out

for them. But most women are set inexorably on the heroic path
through childbirth and the challenge of maternity. (xx)

133
At the time Anne "refused" to think of herself as "most women." Yet, she now states,
twenty years later, "I am, as Joseph Campbell prescribed it, a woman among women,
surrounded by mate, children, friends, and world peoples journeying together some
distance down a road" (Your Mythic Journey xxi). Campbell's vision of women's journeys
is prescriptively narrow. His words indicate maternity as the heroine's journey and though
I concur it is a challenge, to simplify it to this role alone ignores the complexity of the
journey and the alternative journeys. In contrast, Anne Valley-Fox's deﬁnition of self as "a
woman among women" rings true. There is an openness in her deﬁnition that allows
space for the differentiation of race, color, class and choice.

Campbell was a product of his time. The myths he examined were primarily products
of patriarchal cultures as is indicated by the male hero and though he allows for cultural
differences, he avoids the differences of gender in the construction of myths. Yet, to be
fair, the myths bequeathed to us by tradition were in all probability told, then written, by
men. The advent of women writers allows space for the construction of alternative myths
and a "re"telling of myths heretofore conveyed through oral story.

Julia Kristeva's essay, "Women's Time," notes the possibilities of these "recent
productions by women, the symptom is there - women are writing, and the air is heavy
with expectation: What will they write, that is new?" (The Kristeva Reader 207). The
authors examined in this text offer new myths. They attempt to give voice to the voices
left mute by "his"story. Within each text, multiple journeys are conveyed and given
recognition. The journey of motherhood is recognized in each novel, but not all the

protagonists choose this journey. Nor is their journey totally deﬁned by this choice.

134
Toril Moi, editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986), summarizes Kristeva's distinction
between two generations of feminists and the emergence of a new generation.
. . . the ﬁrst wave of egalitarian feminists demanding equal rights with
men or, in other words, their right to a place in linear time, and the second
generation, emerging after 1968, which emphasized women's radical
difference from men and demanded women's right to remain outside the
linear time of history and politics. . .

A new generation of feminists is now emerging, however, a generation
which will have to confront the task of reconciling maternal time (motherhood)
with linear (political and historical) time. . . The new generation, or more
accurately the corporeal and desiring mental space now available to women
is one that advocates the parallel existence or the interrningling of all three
approaches to feminism, all three concepts of time within the same historical
moment. Presupposing as it does the deconstruction of the concept of
'identity', this demand opens up a space where individual difference is allowed
free play. (The Kristeva Reader 187)

I suggest that Tan, Chernin, Garcia and Esquivel, in their texts, are attempting to
deconstruct the concept of identity and through their use of chronotope "re"construct a
"her"story that provides space for the "parallel existence or the intermingling" of
stories/journeys/myths. Their texts are attempts to transform the female myth by
recognizing the complexity of the female experience.
EVERYDAY TIME

Everyday time is recognized in each of the four texts. In this chronotope the
personal lives of the women are revealed through their inner and outer dialogue. This
chronotope recognizes the repetition of their days, the time that is spent in the preparation
of food, the maintenance of a household and the caring of others in their lives. Tan and

Esquivel particularly note the time spent in the kitchen and the revealing dialogue that

emerges in this setting.

135
"Now we're alone in the kitchen, so go ahead and cry, my
child, because I don't want them to see you crying tomorrow."
(Like Water For Chocolate 27)
The chronotope of everyday time offers personal space for the protagonists to reveal their
emotions, thoughts, and personal lives. In addition, it allows the reader to witness their
tears, laughter, pain and joy.
My father hasn't eaten well since my mother died. So I am
here, in the kitchen, to cook him dinner. I'm slicing toﬁr. I've
decided to make him a spicy bean-curd dish. My mother used to
tell me how hot things restore the spirit and health. But I'm making
this mostly because I know my father loves this dish and I know how to
cook it. (The Joy Luck Club 236)
Women's lives are ﬁlled with the preparation of food and the care of others. In these few
words Tan captures, in everyday time, a familiar act of the female experience. However,
there are moments when this chronotope offers only the repetition and monotony of the
moment.
She ﬁnishes chopping the onions and stirs them in a frying pan
with a teaspoon of lard. They turn a golden yellow, translucent and
sweet. (Dreaming In Cuban 48)
Yet, it is within these moments of repetition and monotony the space is provided for
personal afﬁliations and the telling of stories.
Everyday time initiates women to the myths/stories of "her"story. The four novels use
this space and time to convey family mythologies. The myths provided, in this space and
time, connect the young to the stories of the past and enable them, through repetition, to

internalize the words until they are part of their being. Note, the ability of Kim Chernin's

daughter, a second generation American, to translate her grandmother's song.

136
My mother reaches up for a pillow and puts it under Larissa's head.

"Ticha smotret mesyats yasni," she sings. And Larissa says, "I know

what it means. The bright moon looks on quietly. "

(In My Mother 's House 305)
The daughters or granddaughters, in each story, are able to convey their mothers' stories.
They acquire the stories/myths of "her"story while watching their mothers make beds,
wash laundry and dishes, out vegetables and cook meals.

In addition, the authors of these texts utilize this space and time to convey a female

gaze. The reader and the heroines are able to perceive the daily, incessant, and mundane

 

acts of women as heroic.

They often made enormous batches of jam, using whatever
ﬁ'uit was in season, which they cooked in a huge copper saucepan
on the patio. The pan was set up over a ﬁre, and they had to
cover their arms with old sheets to stir the marmalade. This
prevented the bubbles from boiling up and burning their skin.
(Like Water For Chocolate 29)

01'

Milagro touches a blister on her grandmother's palm. Celia displays
her hands, marred by cuts and callouses. Her granddaughters explore
the scarred terrain. (Dreaming In Cuban 46)

The physical stamina required of women in the maintenance of a household is recognized
and consequently, as it is given voice space, celebrated. Each text, through the female
gaze, recognizes the value of these acts.

Now she is telling us, as the blanket ﬂaps up into the air,
and, laughing, we take hold of the comers and spread it
out, the way the world is ordered by these smoothings and tuckings.
The way, as I remind her, I needed her there at night when I was
a child because no one else could tuck me in tightly enough. How,
when she was arrested during the McCarthy time and went to
jail, it seemed that my father, no matter how hard he tried, could

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not make the bed covers smooth, and could not braid my hair so

that the braids were tight enough. The way, without her, things

always seemed to come undone. (In My Mother's House 29)
It is during this everyday time that the daughters are trained in the traditional tasks of
women. In this space and time, they acquire the knowledge necessary to maintain the
status quo.

Now we pull the comers taut and slip them under the mattress.

My mother passes her hand over the blanket and I recall how much

I loved this gesture when I was a girl, believing it made sleep possible

and kept it peaceﬁrl. (In My Mother's House 29)
The acts of women are crucial in the daily existence of life and the maintenance of
consistency. The reader knows innately that Kim makes a similar gesture during the act of
making a bed with her daughter.

Everyday time provides the space for the transmission of culture. Esquivel emphasizes
the transmission of culture through the motif of recipes, each chapter relays a recipe and a
story.

CHAPTER NINE
SEPTEMBER
Chocolate and Three Kings' Day Bread
INGREDIENTS FOR THE CHOCOLATE:
2 pounds Soconusco chocolate beans
2 pounds Maracibo chocolate beans

2 pounds Caracas chocolate beans

4 to 6 pounds sugar, to taste

1 3 8
Esquivel, through Spanish words and Mexican holidays, incorporates and transmits the
Mexican culture. Tan conveys the transmission of culture through the relaying of Chinese
tradition.

"Put it back, " whispered my mother. "A missing leg is a bad
sign on a Chinese New Year." (The Joy Luck Club 225)

Culture is transmitted in Garcia's text through a folklore motif.

. . . Celia wanders to the ceiba tree in the corner of the

Plaza de las Armas. Fruit and coins are strewn by its trunk

and the ground around the tree bulges with buried offerings.

Celia knows that good charms and bad are hidden in the

stirred earth near its sacred roots. Tia Alicia told her once

that the ceiba is a saint, female and maternal. She asks the

tree permission before crossing its shadow, then circles

it three times and makes a wish for Felicia. (Dreaming In Cuban 43)

and

Now and then she runs into Herminia Delgado carrying baskets

ﬁlled with crusty roots and ratoons and fresh, healing spices for

Felicia. Aniseed for hysteria. Sarsaparilla for the nerves and any

remaining traces of syphilis. River fern and espartillo to ward off

ﬁthher evil. Herminia never mentions the ceiba tree, but Celia

recognizes the distinct cluster of its leaves among her many herbs.

(Dreaming In Cuban 90)
Each author, through her speciﬁc choice of motifs and the chronotope of everyday time,
recognizes her unique culture. Thus, the culture is preserved in the chronotope of
everyday time. Additional texts will need to be examined to determine if the motifs
utilized are author speciﬁc or culture speciﬁc.

Yet, if everyday time enables women to preserve and maintain culture, it also offers the

space and time for the teaching of resistance and acts of resistance. For example, Pilar's

painting is an act of resistance.

139

I suppose I'm guilty in my own way of a creative transformation or two.
Like my painting of the Statue of Liberty that caused such a
a commotion at the Yankee Doodle Bakery. (Dreaming In Cuban 177)

Tita offers an active form of resistance with her experimentation of recipes.

Tita was never able to convince her that she had only added one extra
ingredient to the cake, the tears she had shed while preparing it.
(Like Water For Chocolate 39)

Kim is taught resistance, in the everyday chronotope, through a more organized and
structured form of resistance/protest.

. . . I remember my carriage. My mother, walking behind me,

pushing. I am folding blue papers. "Hold tight," she says,

"don't let them go." We come to a place. There are mothers

pushing. Children, holding blue papers in their hands. "Look,"

my mother says, "there they are." And then all of us, the children

and the mothers, walk around and around in a big circle. The mothers
are singing and they are carrying signs. (In My Mother's House 204-205)

Rose Hsu Jordan is taught resistance through allegory.

. . . for thousands of years birds had been tormenting the
peasants. They ﬂocked to watch peasants bent over in the ﬁeld
bent over in the ﬁeld, digging the hard dirt, crying into the
furrows to water the seeds. And when the people stood up, the
birds would ﬂy down and drink the tears and eat the seeds. So
children starved.

But one day, all these tired peasants - from all over China -
they gathered in ﬁelds everywhere . . . And they said, "Enough of this
suffering and silence?" They began to clap their hands, and bang
sticks on pots and pans and shout, "Sz! 82! S2!" - Die! Die! Die!
(The Joy Luck Club 272-273)

Rose's challenge, the challenge of all the protagonists in the texts, is the decoding of her
mother's meaning. She must apply the lessons learned in everyday time to her biographical
chronotope.

In conclusion, everyday time provides the space for the telling of story. In this

140
chronotope, "her" stories are given voice space. Women transmit culture as well as
resistance through their stories and acts. Yet, through the female gaze, their daily struggle
is recognized as heroic. Tan, Garcia, Esquivel and Chernin recognize the crucial role of
everyday time and effectively utilize it to convey their stories/myths.
BIOGRAPHICAL TIME
Biographical time is utilized by the authors to convey the protagonists' life spans and
the life changing events that impact their lives. It is interesting to note the similar life
experiences offered voice space in each novel. Each author has at least one character
relay the birth of her spiritual and/or biological daughter.
I don't know what caused me to change. Maybe it was my

crooked nose that damaged my thinking. Maybe it was seeing

you as a baby, how you looked so much like me, and this made

me dissatisﬁed with my life. (The Joy Luck Club 303)

and

I knew that I had been born quickly and that my mother had

not cried out. I, too, wanted to be brave, but the baby had

its head in the wrong position, the delivery was slow and long

and painful . . . I had the overwhelming feeling that I was at

the hub of the world. I knew that God existed, tears were

pouring down my face, my pain seemed transﬁgured and I

wept because I knew that I was giving birth to my new

self. (In My Mother's House 288-289)

and
I've named my new baby Felicia. Jorge says I'm dooming her.

She's beautiful and fat with green eyes that ﬁx on me disarrningly.

I'll be a good mother this time. Felicia loves the sea. Her skin is

translucent, much like the ﬁsh that feed along the reefs. I read her

poetry on the porch swing. (Dreaming In Cuban 52)

and

141
She chose instead to provide Esperanza with the same diet Nacha
had used with her when she was a tiny baby: gruels and teas.
She was baptized Esperanza at Tita's request. Pedro had insisted

that the child should be given the same name as Tita, Joseﬁta. But Tita

reﬁrsed to hear of it. She didn't want her name to inﬂuence the child's

destiny. (Like Water For Chocolate 142)
The advent of the next generation forces the women to reﬂect upon their past and present
lives and envision an alternative journey for their daughters. The birth of a child
transforms a woman's identity of self and has monumental consequences. Adrienne Rich's
text, Of Woman Born (1976), indicates the potential interruption a child can create in a
woman's life, "The mothers: collecting their children at school, sitting in rows at the
parent-teacher meeting; placating weary infants in supermarket carriages . . . wakened by a
child's cry from their eternally unﬁnished dreams . . ." (280). Rich's examples are
noticeably culturally biased. Yet, each author notes the unﬁnished dreams interrupted by
the experience of motherhood and provide them voice space in the biographical
chronotope.

. . . "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there

nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's

belch. " (The Joy Luck Club 3)

and

I look at you. I think about my mother. I think, perhaps in you
her great spirit has another chance at life. (In My Mother’s House 180)

and

If she had a girl, Celia decided, she would stay. She would not
abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the columns
of blood and numbers in men's eyes, to understand the morphology
of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard ﬂames.
(Dreaming In Cuban 42)

1 42
and

"There's one thing for sure. I'm not going to allow you to poison
your daughter with those sick ideas you have in your head. I'm not
going to let you ruin her life either, forcing her to follow some stupid
tradition!" (Like Water For Chocolate 209)

The unﬁnished, aborted, and/or unspoken dreams are given voice. The mother, spiritual
or biological, becomes awake to her place in her daughter's story.

In addition, in the biographical chronotope, the dreams of the mothers and
grandmothers are transferred to the daughters . The biographical chronotope provides the
time and space for the characters to experience a sense of generation and thus a sense of
continuity. They awake to the possibilities that are open to the next generation. Their
mothers‘ stories hold more meaning and a distance is gained that is not possible in
everyday time.

"0!" Hwai dungsyi" - You bad little thing - said the woman, teasing
her baby granddaughter. "Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?"
As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in
her heart.

"Even if I could live forever, " she said to the baby, "I still don't know
which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too
laughed for no reason.

"But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And
then I taught my daughter, your mother to shed her innocence so she
would not be hurt as well . . .

The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother's laments.

"O! 0! You say you are laughing because you have already lived
forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen
Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good,
good, I am listening. . .

"Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same
lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh
forever. " (The Joy Luck Club 239)

Biographical time connects the generations across time and space. Adrienne Rich infers in

 

143
her text, Of Woman Born (1976), the necessity of this experience. "Until a strong line of
love, conﬁrmation, and examples stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to
woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness" (246).
The consciousness or awakening of self to generational history provides a seed/embryo
of historical time. The impact of generation recognition is particularly evident by three of
the authors’ dedications.

To my mother

and the memory of her mother.

(The Joy Luck Club)

For my mother, Rose Chernin

For her mother, Perle Chernin

And for my daughter, Larissa Chernin

(In My Mother's House)

For my grandmother,

and for Scott

(Dreaming In Cuban)
They cannot write a woman's life or women's lives without recognizing those that went
before them in "her"story. Their dedications indicate the impact their mothers and
grandmothers had upon their imagining of possibilities and alternative joumeys/myths.

Historical context, the speciﬁc time period of the protagonist, is provided space and
time in the biographical chronotope. Each author, reveals through the characters and
biographical time, the political events impacting their lives and the lives of those they love.
Two young soldiers were pointing their riﬂes at Ruﬁno. His
hands circled nervously in the air. She jumped from her horse and

stood like a shield before her husband. (Dreaming In Cuban 70)

and

144

The threat of the revolution hung over them, bringing famine and
death in its wake. But for those few moments they all seemed
determined to forget the bullets ﬂying in the village.

(Like Water For Chocolate 78)

and

I sat in the dark corners of my house with a baby under each arm,
waiting with nervous feet. When the sirens cried out to warn

us of bombers, my neighbors and I jumped to our feet and
scunied to the deep caves to hide like wild animals.

(The Joy Luck Club 9)

and

When I was a girl we lived with my grandfather in a town called Chasnik,
in the Russian Pale of Settlement. What was the Pale? It was the area,
inside greater Russia, where the czar made Jews live. If there were Jews
who wanted to live or to work in any area outside the Pale, they had to
get a special permit. (In My Mother's House 19)

Their biographical lives are impacted by the events of the world, just as their mothers
before them. Consequently, the ideologies and beliefs offered in this space in time directly
reﬂect their perception of the world and their interaction with the world.

Reform, not punishment, is her modus operandi, and Celia has

succeeded in converting many young delinquents into productive

revolutionaries. (Dreaming In Cuban 112)

and

Tita held her and comforted her as she had every night since

her return. She couldn't see any way to draw Chencha out of

her depression, to dissuade her from the belief that no one

would marry her after the violent attack she had suffered at the

hands of the bandits. (Like Water For Chocolate 131)

and

My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hide it.
She found only greater misery and ﬁnally could not hide that.

145

There is nothing more to understand. That was China. That

was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could

not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate.

(The Joy Luck Club 272)

and

"In 1950," she repeats . . . "I founded an organization to protect the

people arrested for deportation. It was called the Los Angeles

Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born." (In My Mother's

House 210)
Rose Chernin's life is impacted by the fact she is a Jew and a Russian immigrant. In
addition, the rise of communism and capitalism affect her biographical chronotope. Just as
they affect Celia del Pino, an ocean away in physical space. The women, through
biographical time, are provided the space to testify to the monumental moments in their
lives and to bear witness to their lives and their time era. Additional texts need to be
examined, as to the historical events shaping women’s biographical chronotope, before
cross-cultural distinctions can be determined.

I noted the monumental moment of childbirth earlier in this section. In addition to
childbirth, the women in the texts note their marriages, the loss of their mothers, the aging
process and their acts of resistance. Each author, through the biographical chronotope,
offers her protagonists' individual stories as a possibility, one script among many. Thus,
their lives provide the reader a model/script of one possibility among multiple possibilities.
Carolyn Heilbrun in her text, WritingA Woman ’5 Life (1988), notes the potential power
one life can inscribe upon the female imagination. She notes, speciﬁcally, her ﬁctional

character, Kate F ansler.

Her beauty was the only attribute I regretted bestowing, and age has

 

146

tempered that, although, unlike her creator, she is still a fantasy ﬁgure in

being eternally slim. But most important, she has become braver

as she has aged, less interested in the opinions of those she does not

cherish, and has come to realize that she has little to lose, little any longer

to risk, that age above all, both for those with children and those without

them, is the time when there is very little "they" can do for you, very little reason

to fear, or hide, or not attempt brave and important things. Lear said,

"I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the

terrors of the earth." He said this in impotent rage in his old age, but

Kate Fansler has taught me to say it in the bravery and power of age. ( 123)
Tan, Garcia, Esquivel and Chernin, through the biographical chronotope, are offering the
time and space for women to tell their individual stories of bravery.
HISTORICAL TIME

The texts discussed in this study are dominated by the historical chronotope. "Within

the limits of a single work and within the total literary output of a single author we may
notice a number of different chronotopes and complex interactions among them, speciﬁc
to the given work or author; it is common moreover for one of these chronotopes to
envelop or dominate the others" ("Forms of Time And Of The Chronotope In The Novel"
252). The authors, through historical time, are given the space for historical perspective.
The individual's context in history is given new meaning when layered upon the personal
and historical context of others. The multiple "her"stories add a complexity and depth not
available in biographical time. Patterns are revealed, patterns too great in scope to be
recognized through a family mythology. "All history is encamped about us and all history
sets forth again from us" (The Bildungsroman and its Signiﬁcance in the History of

Realism" 40).

The reader, in historical time, gains the perspective to see the complex interaction

 

147
among the stories and the chronotopes. Consequently, she can envision/perceive choices
beyond the family myths. Kristeva's use of 'generation' indicates the potential power,
offered through historical time, of such a vision.

My usage of the word 'generation' implies less a chronology
than a signifying space, a both corporeal and desiring mental
space. So it can be argued that as of now a third attitude is
possible, thus a third generation, which does not exclude -
quite to the contrary - the parallel existence of all three in the
same historical time, or even that they be interwoven one
with the other. ("Women's Time" 209)

The texts, through historical time, offer space for the dialogue between possible
joumeys/identities. The women are given, through historical time, the voice space to
explain their choices, to tell their stories, share their dreams and engage in a dialogue not
possible in any other space. Carolyn G. Heilbrun's text, Hamlet’s Mother And Other
Women (1990), indicates the power of women's words/stories.

In the old myths, weaving was women's speech, women's
language, women's story. Of all human accomplishment, Freud
granted woman only the invention of weaving: an art, he conjectured,
they had devised to conceal their genital deﬁciencies. But the old stories
conﬁrm that women wove, not to conceal, but to reveal, to engage,
to counter male violence. For this they are punished, but not before "the
voice of the shuttle" had been heard, if only to be silenced again. Women's
weaving was women's answer to their enforced silence about their own
condition, their own mutilation. (120)

Tan, Garcia, Esquivel and Chernin are weaving. They are weaving words. Their texts
cannot be silenced. Heilbrun goes on to state,

It is, of course, ironic that Freud's annoying question of what
women want must still haunt us. It is not a question we can answer,
because we cannot tell stories we have never heard. We women
today who have entered the public sphere exist there in a state of
intermittent anxiety and pain. Nor is it possible to foretell the source

148

of the pain or the pattern it will follow. When women have had their

stories written for them, played out their destinies toward marriage or

death, they knew the pain that might follow: the ﬁrst penetration; childbirth;

rejection; aging; the suffering of one's children; the diverted attention of one's

husband; the rending away from women whose place, like one's own, changed

at the behest of male relatives. Pain is not easier for having been suffered

before in the same way, but it is more bearable for having been

narrated. That, indeed, is the chief source of patriarchal power: that

it is embodied in unquestioned narratives. (127)
The authors examined in this text question the narratives of patriarchy in their
"re"construction of stories. They provide story space for past, present and future women.
In addition, they provide the reader the space to piece together new stories. They
recognize new journeys.

Historical time allows the reader to go beyond the biographical chronotope of an
individual and perceive the multiple choices available beyond the marriage plot. For
example, in Laura Esquivel's text, each of the three sisters chooses a different path. Tita
chooses against marriage but incorporates a passionate life-long love affair into her life.
Rosaura chooses a loveless marriage and motherhood. Gertrudis chooses to become a
general in the army and ultimately settles for a career and a passionate and childless
marriage. In addition, Esquivel reveals through Gertrudis' recipe of birth control the
possibility of choice in the matter of motherhood, yet reveals through Rosaura's life the
lack of choice available to some women. Esquivel does not just offer the choices of the
Dela Garzas. She reveals, through historical time, the choices of Tita's great-niece and
John's grandmother, "a Kikapu Indian who John's grandfather had captured and brought
back to live with him, far from her tribe" (Like Water For Chocolate 107). It is the story

of John's grandmother, Morning Light, that enables Tita to heal and "re"create her story.

149
She stayed with the woman for a little while. The

woman didn't speak either, but it wasn't necessary. From

the ﬁrst, they had established a communication that went far

beyond words. (Like Water For Chocolate 106)
The dialogue between these two stories is possible only in historical time. Morning Light
is not a "biological" ancestor. She would not be incorporated into the traditional
biographical time of a biography or autobiography. Nor, due to her death, would it be
possible for them to meet in everyday time. Yet, through historical time, her story is
shared and interwoven into Tita's vision of possibility.

. . . each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we

can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment,

we need oxygen and a candle to help . . . Each person has to

discover what will set off those explosions in order to live,

since the combustion that occurs when one of them is

ignited is what nourishes the soul. (Like Water For Chocolate 112)
Esquivel's words could easily be applied to the female journey and the awakening of the
female consciousness. Each woman must discover her own journey, "Each person has to
discover what will set off those explosions in order to live." The stories of other women
through historical time provide the "oxygen" and light necessary to ignite our own
journeys.

Bakhtin notes in historical time, "One sees the essential and necessary character of
man's historical activity" (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of
Realism 38). In each of the examined texts, the stories of the women are revealed as
essential and necessary in the search for identity. He goes on to state,

Goethe cannot and will not see or conceive of any locality,

any natural landscape, as an abstract thing, for the sake of
its self-suﬂicient naturalness, as it were. It must be illuminated

150

by human activity and historical events. A piece of the earth's

space must be incorporated into the history of humanity. Outside

the history it is lifeless and incomprehensible, and nothing can be

done with it. But, conversely, nothing can be done with the

historical event, with the abstract historical recollection, if it

is not localized in terrestrial space, if one does not understand

(does not see) the necessity of its occurrence at a particular time

and in a particular place. (The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the

History of Realism 38)
Women's stories illuminate their activities and historical events. There are no aqueducts or
pyramids to note the necessity of their actions. Their necessary actions, cooking, washing,
cleaning, sewing, giving birth, caring for the young, ill and elderly, leave no trace upon a
"piece of the earth's space." Thus, without their stories their "her"story is lifeless and
incomprehensible." Yet, through stories, the homes that were burned, as in Esquivel's
text, or left behind in another country, as in the texts by Garcia, Tan and Chernin, are
saturated with time. Consequently, the women's achievements are "localized in terrestrial
space" and the necessity of their acts "at a particular time and in a particular place" are
revealed. Their stories "incorporate" them into "his"story and create a "her"story.

Finally, Bakhtin notes historical time includes the fullness of the future ("The
Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History of Realism" 42). Tan, Chernin, Garcia,
and Esquivel offer visions of possibilities. The ﬁiture is open. Each novel includes a
generation yet to be ﬁilly lived. Yet these women of the future possess what their
predecessors did not possess. They are enriched with stories and a past. They have
acquired a consciousness of "her"story. Bakhtin cites Goethe's Italian Journey to

emphasize the inclusion of the ﬁiture in historical time.

The observation that all greatness is transitory should not make

151

us despair; on the contrary, the realization that the past was great

should stimulate us to create something of consequence ourselves,

which, even when, in its turn, it has fallen in ruins, may continue to

inspire our descendants to a noble activity such as our ancestors

never lacked. ("The Bildungsroman and Its Signiﬁcance in the History

of Realism" 41)
The heroines, in each of these texts, by "re"discovering the past and its stories realize
their potential/possibilities. They are inspired to continue the journey and through their
self discovery they contribute to their inheritance of a legacy of consciousness. They
create new stories interwoven with those of the past and construct new possibilities for
those who are to follow.
DIFFERENCES FOR FUTURE INVESTIGATION

It becomes clear that the authors of each text examined and employed the everyday,
biographical and historical chronotope. However, not one of the texts resorts to the
traditional Bildungsroman formula. The format is modiﬁed to recognize and reﬂect the
diverse barriers to a woman's self-discovery. Each text offers several journeys. In
addition, the journeys vary according to each heroine and her particular set of
circumstances. Thus they provide the reader not so much a clear deﬁnition of self-
discovery or a woman's journey but rather a penetrating examination of the obstacles -
familial, cultural, racial, sexual, intellectual, and political - incorporated into their journeys.
A noticeable difference between the texts is the struggle of the heroines with language.

Their struggle with language appears to be directly proportional to their generational

distance from the homeland of their ancestors. Esquivel's heroines never deal with

immigration. Her text, originally written in Spanish, takes place in Mexico and the

152
generations remain in Mexico. Thus, her heroines are not actively searching for a lost
language but rather attempting to recognize in their cooking a language void of words.
Chernin's heroine, Kim, is three generations removed from immigration. She interweaves
a motif of language but primarily incorporates Russian words, phrases, and poems into her
stories. The words are liturgical and have been passed down with a translation. Tan's
heroine, Jing-mei Woo, is a generation removed from immigration. She has yet to
translate the words of her mother. The meaning of Chinese words elude her and she is
actively engaged in a translation that will give meaning to her life. Finally, Garcia's
heroine, Pilar is an immigrant and mourns the loss of her language. Intimacy eludes her in
this foreign country due to the loss of language and she is actively engaged in the
pain/violence of assimilation. Additional texts will need to be examined in order to note if
the search/use of language in time and space is directly proportional to the heroine's
generational distance from her ancestral homeland.

Only Tan's text, of the four texts, actively envisions a community beyond family blood
lines. Only in The Joy Luck Club (1989), though all texts include stories of women
outside the family, is the reader exposed to a vision of community larger than blood
family. However, Chernin and Garcia do note a collective vision via communism. Their
visions fall short of providing a speciﬁc model of community. Cross-cultural comparisons
are needed in order to note if the employment of time and space in this vision of
community is unique to certain cultures.

The abundant poetic, dramatic, and novelistic gestures of family

devotion, be it biological or cultural, demonstrate some
consensual movement toward the end of Chinese American

153

literary reconstruction. The ﬁliative tribute to ancestors and the

affrliative effort at community building interact to claim both

historical anchorage and present legitimacy for the ethnic entity.

What appear at ﬁrst glance as separate textual maneuvers have,

in fact, constituted a nourishing dialogue, ensuring the continuity

and contemporaneity of Chinese American expression. (Understanding

Others: Cultural and C ross-C ultural Studies and the Teaching of

Literature 198)
David Leiwei Li's words indicate a potential pattern, but the chronotope as a unit of
analysis has yet to be applied to the texts he notes in his essay, "Filiative and Afﬁliative
Textualization in Chinese American Literature." In addition, it has yet to be applied to
texts beyond the four examined in this essay. Noticeably lacking in this text is a female
journey by an Aﬁican American author. If cultural heritage impacts the vision of
community, it could be that the examination of African American literature would add
another dimension to this dialogue as historically African Americans were forced to create
communities, due to slavery, beyond family blood lines. Furthermore, this text lacks a
female journey by a Native American. I am wondering if tribe affiliation would impact
perceptions of community and family.

Finally, Garcia's text appears to be substantially different in its concept, structure and
execution of chronotope. I have already mentioned Pilar's struggle with language as an
immigrant. However, she faces additional layers of complexity. First, the women in
Garcia's text are geographically separated. It is physically impossible for Pilar to
consistently experience everyday time with her grandmother. Nor, is she able to witness

certain aspects of her grandmother's biographical chronotope, for example, aging.

Consequently, Garcia interweaves motifs of additional chronotopes to emphasize their

154
geographical, cultural and ideological separation. For example, Garcia's use of a collective
time motif enables Celia the time and space necessary to convey the impact of the era on
her biographical chronotope. However, through a fantasy time motif, Celia is provided
the space and time to give voice to private aspects of her biographical chronotope. In
addition, Garcia's use of a folkloric chronotopic motif enables her to bridge the
geographical distance. Celia and Pilar speak to one another over the ocean.
I might be afraid of her if it weren't for those talks I have with

Abuela Celia late at night. She tells me that my mother is sad

inside and that her anger is more ﬁ'ustration at what she can't

change. (Dreaming In Cuban 63)

or

For many years, Celia spoke to Pilar during the darkest part of

the night, but then their connection suddenly died. Celia understands

now that a cycle between them had ended, and a new one had not

yet begun. (Dreaming In Cuban 119)
Garcia's use of a folkloric time motif enables a transference of stories. Additional texts of
the female Bildungsroman whose heroines are separated geographically and divided
ideologically ﬁ'om their mothers and grandmothers due to migration need to be examined.
Speciﬁc attention should be given to the implementations of chronotopic motifs by authors
to deal with the transference of stories across geographical distance.

Thus, I end this text with questions. The journey continues. The quest continues.
Carolyn Heilbrun states,
Why do I say Penelope is without a story? Because
all women, having been restricted to only one plot, are
without story. In literature and out, through all recorded

history, women have lived by a script they did not write. Their
destiny was to be married, circulated; to be given by one man,

155

the father, to another, the husband; to become the mothers

of men. Theirs has been the marriage plot, the erotic plot, the

courtship plot, but never, as for men, the quest plot. Women

have been tempted into romantic thralldom, and then married, like

the heroines of our great novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

or like the heroines of Harlequin romances. Their story was over.

(Hamlet's Mother And Other Women 126)
Given the gender of the author of Penelope's story, Heilbrun's words raise another possible
investigation: the exploration of chronotopes in male generated stories of women's
journeys. However, I quote her here not for possible ﬁiture investigations but rather to
point out that the story is far from over. In fact, the stories are just beginning to be
constructed and women's use of time and space is a crucial element in understanding the
possibilities of the future. An individual's perception of time and space can change one's
view of self - say, from the role of enduring victim to the role of active participant. Texts,
such as the ones explored in this dissertation have the potential to dramatically change
women's view of self.

New destinies/plots are emerging as the world emerges. The use of chronotope by
Esquivel, Garcia, Tan and Chernin illustrates the impact of time and space in a woman's
journey. The actions of the protagonists in their texts may appear, at times, stereotypic.
Yet, through historical time the reader is able to recognize the complexity of the female
journey. The journeys of their foremothers, as well as their own journeys, are impacted by
race, culture, era and socio-economic status. Consequently, the activities and dialogues
within a chronotope vary according to the story. For example, in Garcia's text, the

protagonist Celia spends a portion of her everyday time guarding the boarders of Cuba

against possible aggressors. In contrast, her granddaughter, Pilar spends a portion of her

156

everyday time expanding her boundaries through her painting. The reader can only
imagine the activities that will occur in the everyday time of Pilar's granddaughter.

Women are molded by their environment but also mold their environment. Historical
time recognizes the relationship between the individual and the world. Chronotope
analysis, in the female journey, awakens the reader to the fact that the sacriﬁces of the past
are directly connected to the possibilities of the future. The stories of our foremothers,
when perceived through historical time, provide us with a rich "her"story and offer more
than one plot. There is no one female journey. There are many female journeys. Each
separate journey, in all its complexity, is a gift to the past, present and ﬁiture.
Acknowledging the relationship between past, present and future journeys is crucial if a

"her"story is to be constructed and celebrated.

PostScript

I have acquired a consciousness of time that I did not possess at the start of this
journey. I am awake to the moments in everyday time when my daughters are acquiring
stories and/or I am acquiring stories. I am awake and more reﬂective upon the
choices/scripts I provide them through my biographical time and space. Finally, I am
awake to the necessity of historical time if a legacy of "her"story is to be continued.
Literature provides my daughters more possibilities than I can possibly offer/expose them
to through family and ﬁiends. So I will continue my quest in the belief that my
emergence and becoming will continue to affect their emergence and becoming. I will
continue to expand my family mythology to include other women's stories because it can
only provide ﬁirther possibilities. I will continue and my daughters will continue after me
and their daughters after them. I am the crossroads. The past leads to me and the future

leads from me and it is with this knowledge that I will go on in my quest.

157

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