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MYTHIC REWRITING IN THE WORKS 0F
ADELAIDA GARCIA MORALES, CARMEN LAFORET,
MONTSERRAT ROIG, AND ESTHER TUSQUETS

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Maureen Tobin Stanley

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MYTHIC REWRITING IN THE WORKS OF
ADELAIDA GARCIA MORALES, CARMEN LAFORET,
MONTSERRAT ROIG, AND ESTHER TUSQUETS

By

Maureen Tobin Stanley

A DISSERTATION

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

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Romance and Classical Languages

2000

ABSTRACT

MYTHIC REWRITING IN THE WORKS OF
ADELAIDA GARCIA MORALES, CARMEN LAFORET,
MONTSERRAT ROIG, AND ESTHER TUSQUETS

By

Maureen Tobin Stanley

Montserrat Roig, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Carmen Laforet, and Esther
Tusquets have rewritten previous storylines, exemplified in the Ariadne and
Penelope myths. Since myths personify an ideology, these authors have
rewritten the mythical plots in order to provide and alternative worldview. The
myth of Ulysses, Penelope, and the Sirens (recontextualized by Roig in L’hora
violeta and Garcia Morales in El silencio de Ias sirenas) and that of Ariadne,
Theseus and the Minotaur (recast in Nada by Laforet, El mismo mar de todos Ios
veranos by Tusquets, and El Sur by Garcia Morales) are phallogocentric myths
that polarize the perception of female experience and binarily oppose maleness
(the superior center) to femaleness (the inferior margin). Feminist mythic
rewriting combats patriarchalism, reconsiders sexuality and sexual identity and
provides an altogether different symbolic order that does not force knowledge,
experience, and reality into a binarily oppositional hierarchical structure.

I have termed the phenomenon of rewriting a myth as a feminist strategy
“feminist remythification.” Mythology is more than a familiar storyline whose

outcomes vary throughout time and space; mythology embodies a way of looking

 

at the world. Feminist remythification conveys the concept of the recreation of a
myth without the element of apotheosis. It is mythoclastic in that is shatters the
concept of “Myth” (capitalized) as a lofty tale that explains origins or the
unexplainable and elevates the protagonist to the status of hero while debasing
his opponents; furthermore, feminist remythification redefines “myth" (lower case)
to connote a story that depicts a worldview from which icons and epic heroes are
absent and in which the focus is on relationships between the characters, not the
characters themselves. Feminist remythification attempts to capture the essence
of human bonds that reveal themselves through the “heroic feats” of everyday
life, through the courage needed to triumph personally, socially, and

psychologically on a daily basis in the face of masculinist, hegemonic pressures.

Copyright by
MAUREEN TOBIN STANLEY
2000

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1
1. Theoretical and Historical Background ............................................................. 5
The Myth of Ulysses, Penelope, and the Sirens

2. “A la recerca d’unes arrels en naufragi": The Sexual and Linguistic
Politics of Montserrat Roig .............................................................................. 25

3. Inter-Woven Women: Adelaida Garcia Morales’ Intertextual
Tapestry of Penelope and the Sirens in El silencio de Ias sirenas .................. 75

The Myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur

4. Happily Ever After?: Fairy-tale, Bildung, and Mythological Motifs in
Nada by Carmen Laforet ............................................................................... 114

5. Ariadne Unraveled: Esther Tusquets’ Road to Canonization and
Mythical Reconfiguration in El mismo mar de todos los veranos .................. 168

6. Adriana’s Labyrinth of Oedipal Desire: From Castration, Mutilation,
and Horror to a Feminist Manipulation of Penis Envy in El Sur by

Adelaida Garcia Morales .............................................................................. 215
Conclusion: Tying Up Loose Threads ............................................................... 257
Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 268

INTRODUCTION

Montserrat Roig, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Carmen Laforet, and Esther
Tusquets are contemporary Spanish women authors Who have rewritten and
recontextualized two myths: the Penelope, Sirens, and Ulysses myth (Roig in
L’hora violeta; Garcia Morales in El silencio de Ias sirenas) and the Ariadne,
Minotaur, and Theseus myth (Laforet in Nada, Tusquets in El mismo mar de
todos los veranos, and Garcia Morales in El Sur). The intertextuality of these
works obliges the reader to ponder and analyze. The reader cannot mindlessly
relax and enjoy their complexly intertextual and allusive works; instead, slhe is
forced to question the relationship between the mythological allusions and the
main plot in each of the works. Such is the purpose of this dissertation: to explain
the textual dialogue between the ancient myths and the contemporary novels by
these Spanish women authors.

The parallel to be drawn between the ancient Greek ideology reflected in
the myths and that of a considerable portion of the twentieth century in Spain is
that the power of the phallus (be it literal or metaphorical) determined a climate of
perceived and accepted male supremacy. The political atmosphere of Spain that
most affected the four authors was the nearly forty years of Francisco Franco’s
fascist dictatorship, a time when the patriarchal hierarchy obligated women to
limit their existence to passive, patient, and self-abnegated wifedom, and
motherhood. Francoism’s mythological overtones, which depicted maleness as

Ulysses-like virility, also propagated the Penelope-esque ideal femenino.

 

The myth of Penelope, the Sirens, and Ulysses and that of Ariadne, the
Minotaur, and Theseus consist of three archetypes: the hero (Ulysses and
Theseus), the patient woman who awaits the hero’s return (Penelope and
Ariadne), and the monster (the Sirens and the Minotaur). These myths exemplify
a phallogocentric view of the world. According to this world view, all is viewed in
direct relation to the male; perception is divided into binary oppositions and is
organized into a hierarchical structure; the male (the center) is deemed good;
women (either idealized or repudiated) are considered complementary or
secondary to the male; and the monsters are regarded as entirely antithetical and
unrelated to the male hero.

The feminist rewriting of these myths puts into question the validity of each
of the factors enumerated above. According to the neo-mythic feminist renditions
of Roig, Tusquets, Laforet, and Garcia Morales, women should not be male
complements, nor are they as a class to be dichotomized. A female being can be
a protagonist whose existence is not contingent on a man. Experience is not
expected to conform to a hierarchy of binary oppositions. Relationships among
women do exist and play a role of great importance in shaping a woman’s
identity and well-being. In the five works studied the adversarial perception of the
monster is rewritten to view it in a different light. V\fith the ancient myths, the
reader (or listener) was expected to identify with the male hero and to join in his
animosity toward the monster. The readers of these neo-mythic renditions are
expected to identify with the monsters’ pain. The monster in women's narrative

reflects the view of women within society as marginal. In such narratives, literary

 

monsters such as the Minotaur and the Sirens must also be seen as a liberating
force, a rejection of an ideology which divides experience into good and evil,
dehumanizing that which bears the rubric of “evil.” Feminist remythification
integrates the polarities established by phallogocentric thought and denotes a
radical change in world view. I shall use the neologism “feminist remythification"
to convey the concept of a recreation of a myth without apotheosis (or heroism).
This new term reduces “Myth" (capitalized)—a lofty tale that explains origins or
the unexplainable and elevates the protagonist to the status of hero while
debasing his opponents to a villainous condition—to “myth" (lower case)—a story
that depicts a world view where icons and epic heroes are absent and in which
the focus is on relationships between characters, not on the characters
themselves. Feminist remythification attempts to capture the essence of human
bonds and to embrace intrinsically human traits: love, fear, loneliness, and the
need to feel complete.

Mythology, as the personification of an ideology, provides identifiable
figures which function as both positive and negative models. By rewriting the
aforementioned myths, authors invalidate patriarchal, hegemonic reasoning and
offer a new symbolic order where life is not viewed in masculine terms and the
world does not revolve around a central male figure. In feminist mythic rewriting,
Ulysses and Theseus are no longer heroic. The Sirens are not malevolent.
Penelope's twenty-year wait seems foolish. Ariadne laments having left the
labyrinth and deeply regrets the death of her brother the Minotaur. Roig, Garcia

Morales, Laforet, and Tusquets reevaluate the dominant discourse and

denounce it as the creator of the equation “femaleness = status of disadvantage.’
The works highlight the dilemma of social inequality and oppression, raising
consciousness of the plight of women in a patriarchal world. Each allows for a
supplemental view of experience, an optic lens which, until now, has been

fogged by claims of male supremacy.

 

Chapter 1

THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

By rewriting and recontextualizing myths from a feminine/feminist
perspective in twentieth-century Spain, Montserrat Roig, Adelaida Garcia
Morales, Carmen Laforet and Esther Tusquets provide an alternative mythology
in which relationships among women are of primary importance.‘ Roig, in L’hora
violeta, and Garcia Morales, in El silencio de Ias sirenas, recast the myth of
Penelope, Ulysses and the Sirens; whereas Laforet in Nada, Tusquets in El
mismo mar, and Garcia Morales in El Sur, rewrite the Ariadne, Theseus, and
Minotaur myth. Both Ariadne and Penelope are mythic figures which originate in
a single archetype: the waiting woman. Ariadne has been jilted by Theseus;
Penelope faithfully waits for Ulysses to return. The implicit ideology in each myth
is that these characters’ existence depends solely on the husband or lover. In
part because they are female figures, they are secondary characters in
phallocentric myths. The feminist rewriting carried out by Roig, Garcia Morales,
Tusquets, and Laforet rejects the male as the focus of female existence. In the

recastings, non-hierarchical relationships among women replace the man-

 

‘ See Elizabeth Ordorlez’s article “lnscribing difference: ‘L'écriture

feminine’ and new narrative by women” (ALEC 12 (1987): 45-57) in which the
critic delineates certain trends in women’s literature such as an alternative
mythology, rewriting, and subversion among others. This issue of ALEC is a

special issue dedicated to women writers.

woman, hero-helper, focal point-secondary character dichotomy prevalent in
phallocentric myths and literature. The mythic recastings permit the traditionally
non-central (even marginal) characters to reveal their own stories as seen and
experienced by themselves, not as an omniscient male narrator would relate
them. Thus, these previously all-but—ignored mythological figures provide a
supplemental view of the myths’ plots and outcomes.

The adaptation of myths can be viewed as a feminist strategy to grasp a
universal phenomenon (mythology) to apply it to a particular historical time and
cultural space with a specific purpose: subversion of a dominant ideology. In
Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, Jo Labanyi dismisses
Northrop Frye’s belief that world literature is “a timeless, universal scheme of
symbolic archetypes located in the collective unconscious, dissociated from the
particularities of history” and purports that literature directly relates to the
historical period during which it was written (2). My hypothesis is that archetypes
are common to the collective unconscious, that human beings are familiar with
them (whether consciously or not), and that they recur, develop, and change
throughout history and culture; therefore, I attempt to analyze the myths—which
are archetypes elaborated into stories—in the works of Laforet, Tusquets, Roig,
and Garcia Morales, in direct relation to their cultural history in twentieth-century
Spain.

I propose that the incorporation of mythic elements in the works studied in
this thesis (Nada by Laforet, El mismo mar de todos los veranos by Tusquets, El
Sur and EI silencio de Ias sirenas by Garcia Morales, and L’hora violeta by Roig)
has a two-fold purpose: to present an alternative to male-based Western
ideology and to legitimize women’s writing. I define Western ideology as
phallocentric, hierarchical, patriarchal, and misogynist, as evidenced in the

master narratives of Greek mythology, the Catholic church, the F rancoist regime,

 

and its legacy—the common heritage of the writers studied within this work.
Reappropriation of (male) canonical texts is a strategy that gives women authors
authority to infiltrate the lines of male-centered, male-dominated literary canons.
By incorporating myths—accepted ancient works/stories that exemplify an
ideology—these four writers denounce the passivity and capitulation to society’s
expectations of women, as suggested by the allusions to Ariadne, Penelope, and
the Sirens. Both Laforet’s Andrea and Garcia Morales’ Adriana shatter the ideal
femenino—an Ariadne-esque ideology in which a woman lives exclusively for her
man; the new Ariadnes break with the unhealthy past and forge a new life.
Tusquets’ E, in the end, chooses a futile existence in which her husband will
repeatedly abandon her—just as Theseus abandoned Ariadne. The character’s
return attests to the destructive nature of subordination. Roig’s Agnes, the
Penelope figure, juxtaposed against Norma and Natalia, the Calypso and Circe
figures, underscores the psychological detriment of pining away. Garcia Morales’
hybrid Siren-Penelope figure, Elsa, through her suicide, imbues the term femme
fatale with new meaning, for Elsa is not fatal to the object of her desire—as were
the Sirens—but rather she is fatally self-destructive.

Although women writers have generally been excluded from the sanctity of
canonization, some female authors through the ages have been known to adopt
certain strategies in their works in order to achieve acceptability. Women writers
in the nineteenth century used male pseudonyms (the Brontés, George Eliot,
George Sand) and/or utilized “male narrators . . . to legitimize themselves with a
literary patrilineage that denied women full creative authority [. . .T'jhe male
mimicry functioned to signify their acquiescence in their own (female)
inferiority: by mimicking male precursors, they sought an influx in patriarchal
power” (Gilbert and Gubar 185). This is particularly true in modern Spanish

history; the best-known and more canonical Spanish women writers of the

nineteenth and early twentieth century used these strategies. Thus, Cecilia Bohl
de Faber assumed a male pseudonym, Fernan Caballero, and used male
narrators in her fiction. Emilia Pardo Bazan, writing at the turn of the century,
assumed male narrative voices. The Catalonian author Caterina Albert adopted
the male nom de plume Victor Catala. In the twentieth century, critics such as
Patricia O’Connor and Maria Salgado have questioned Maria de la 0 Lejarraga
Garcia’s artistic “collaboration” with her husband, Gregorio Martinez Sierra. In
Dramaturgas espaiiolas, O’Connor lists “Gregorio Martinez Sierra” as Maria
Lejarraga’s pseudonym (158). Similarly, the adoption of (male) myths can confer
authority and acceptance into literary canons. By transforming literary
patrilineage, writers like Tusquets intend to counter the widespread view that
women’s literature is “officially” considered inferior. In May 1997, when I
interviewed Tusquets, she advised: “Sigue imperando la cultura que es dirigida
por los hombres donde se valora menos y se considera una subliteratura, quiza,
lo escrito por mujeres [. . .I]nconscientemente se nos toma menos en serio.”2
Through the reappropriation and manipulation of canonical texts, the four authors
studied show their erudition, proclaim a common intellectual heritage with their
male counterparts, and modify patrilinear texts in order to create a literature that
does not exclude female figures or relegate them to an inferior or idolatrized
plane.

I propose that both myths and literary canons attest to what is acceptable
within society. The purpose of the canon is parallel to that of myths: to set the

standard for the past, present, and future. According to William Doty, Greco-

 

2 This interview has yet to be published.

 

Roman mythology is the collective work of androcentric Western culture. Mores
and taboos (personified in mythic gods and figures) are the projection of society’s
ideology onto identifiable figures (xviii)3. The mythological figures key to this
work—Ariadne and Penelope—personify the traditional female ideal in the
greater part of the twentieth century in Spanish society: la mujer hacendosa and
la mujer de su casa. Laforet, Tusquets, Roig and Garcia Morales, by shattering
the unidimensional view of women exemplified by Ariadne and Penelope, look to
create a more accurate portrayal of contemporary Spanish women.

The creation of a new mythology presents an alternative perspective to
the official story created by those in power, who control the suppression,
enhancement, elaboration, and perpetuation of information so as to constitute the
“official story” that has relegated women to secondary social status. Labanyi
states that the use of myth gives a novel relevance beyond “the society depicted
in it: by denying history, or by critically exposing the universal human tendency to
mythification” (53). These authors, however, do not deny history but rather
criticize the validity of the traditional role of Spanish women, demythifying the
feminine ideal and presenting an alternative view of women as autonomous
subjects. The official ideology relegates women to the margins; the writers we
study place women at the center, thereby subverting the dominant discourse.

Labanyi has studied the recourse to myth in twentieth-century Spanish

novels as a means of political expression within the historical context of Francoist

 

3 “Mythic figures provide projective mythic identities... providing
opportunities to play seriously at the various selves we may desire to explore or

become” (Doty 150).

 

ideology, which, like “German and Italian fascism . . . was heavily charged with
mythical resonances” (1-2). Although she has analyzed works other than those of
Laforet, Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia Morales, her theories on the relationship
between mythology, literature, and Francoist Spain apply to the novels of the
aforementioned women writers. The mythohistoriography of Spanish fascism was
reflected in the literary allusions to Ulysses, a mythical figure who personified
virility and regained the origins that were rightly his. Conversely, I contend that
Penelope, mythical incarnation of 9/ ideal femenino so vehemently
propagandized by the regime, is Ulysses” female counterpart: feminine, patient,
passive and chaste. By recontextualizing and subverting the Penelope and
Ariadne myths, these writers are striking out against the archetype on which
these mythic figures were based—the patient, virtuous woman who awaits
rescuing by a man through whom she has a vicarious identity—and are calling
for new models. Labanyi asserts that the “study of a society’s myths helps us
understand which aspects of its history it has chosen to define as problematic”
(3). The four authors’ choice of the Ariadne and Penelope myths indicates which
aspects of the female reality they define as problematic, Le. a vicarious identity
and secondary status within patriarchal society.

The alternative view of mythic figures evinces a different ideology that
topples hierarchical constructs, abolishes absolutism and destroys
unidimensionality. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, in Foucault and Feminism,
elucidate “the ways in which friendship provides a model for nonhierarchical,
reciprocal relations that run counter to the hierarchical modes that have
dominated Western society” (ix).The authors studied focus on human
relationships—mothers and daughters, friends and lovers—deflecting the center

from the exceptionality of an individual onto the value of human bonds.

10

 

 

According to Elaine Marks, in Western (patriarchal) theoretical discourse,
“Women have always been defined in relation to men . . .: women are inferior or
superior; or . . . equal [or. . .] different [or. . .] complementary” (4). In Spain, as
Margarita Ortega LOpez delineates, the idea of female identity as imperfect,
inferior and passive in relation to men has traversed the Middle Ages, the
Counter-Reformation and the Modern Age. Modernity transformed women into
the standard by which their husbands’ worth was measured (11-13). The
vestiges of this legacy are evident in Nada—Juan’s shame at having to condone
his wife working (himself not able to provide for his family) and in Pons’ mother’s
attitude toward Andrea. In El mismo mar, the protagonist is her husband's trophy.

Francoist Spain manifested a predilection for a traditional, epic male hero:
Ulysses. According to Bernard Lewis, history “is all too often invested with the
mythical function of providing a ‘foundation’ for those in authority” (Labanyi 33).
The Odyssey, “with its threefold pattern of loss of roots/usurpation by the suitor!
return to roots and slaying of the usurpers” has appealed to the promoters of
revolutions and invasions in order to disguise their illegitimacy “by spawning a
historiography that postulates their descent from—and return to—some lost
founding tradition [. .. . T]he mythohistoriography of the Franco regime is a
perfect example” (Labanyi 33). If (Spanish) fascism is the virile, aggressive,
phallic power identifiable with the mythic figure Ulysses, then the female
counterpart, exemplifying the “ideal femenino,” is Penelope, paragon of chastity,
patience, and passivity.

The fact that women writers adopt a male-patriarchal myth to rewrite it
does not signify a rejection of previous literature written by women (Gilbert and
Gubar 169); rather, it is an attempt to go back further to a culture shared by all—
crossing gender lines, class boundaries, and national frontiers. Laforet,

Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia Morales go back in time to the dawn of Western

11

 

civilization and our collective psychology. As Labanyi has noted, Freud reverts to
mythological nomenclature (Oedipus complex, Narcissism) and asserts that myth
expresses “a universal human nature.” Foucault has associated myth with the
search for origins. Mircea Eliade has stated that a linear concept of history
indicates a utopic desire to regain the “original paradise” (Labanyi 7-11). Thus,
mythography and mythohistoriography indicate a desire to return to origins. By
going to the point of inception of Western ideology, women authors strive to
present a convincing alternative worldview. By reappropriating canonical texts
and reconfiguring them, these authors evince a common patriarchal literary
legacy and recontextualize patrilinear texts to create a literature that does not
exclude female figures or pigeonhole them as superior or inferior objects.

The authors I study adopt these myths (Ariadne and Penelope) and adapt
them to the traditional female ideal within twentieth-century Spain. Francoism,
spanning over one third of the twentieth century, perpetuated and propagated el
ideal femenino. It was in full force during the creation of Nada (1945) and came
to an end fewer than ten years before the creation of the works by Tusquets
(1978), Roig (1981), and Garcia Morales (1985). Spain’s female population had
had political and social freedom during the brief stretch of the Segunda
Republica (1931-1936); but when the nacionales won the Civil War, their political
program propagated “el ideal de la ‘mujer de su casa’” (Scanlon 11).

The downfall of the Republica in 1939 ruined all hope of emancipation for
women. During the Republica women had gained the highest degree of
economic, legal, and sexual independence ever. The place of woman in “la
nueva Espana,” however, was the same as in “la vieja Espana”: the home. The
Fuero de Trabajo (1938) limited women in the workforce. The state awarded
subsidies to women with more than two children (Scanlon 320-21). Franco’s

regime vacated the progressive laws instituted by the Republica that had been a

12

benefit to women. The Seccibn Femenina propagated the new image of what the
modern woman should be: “feliz en la matemidad, educando a sus hijos,
demostrando un interés femenino por los asuntos de su marido y
proporcionandole un refugio contra los azares de la vida pdblica” (Scanlon 324).
Furthermore, the books and leaflets regarding women published during the
forties and fifties were almost undistinguishable from the anti-feminist literature
published at the turn of the century, portraying feminism as decadent (Scanlon
329)

What we see in Nada, published only five years after the end of the
Spanish Civil War, is a categorical rejection of the marital myth propagandized
and perpetuated by conservative Catholic right-wing “feminism.” In the end,
Andrea does not “become a man” by abandoning her familial mission. In fact, she
does not reject family or marriage; rather, Nada’s conclusion depicts a young
woman who has shattered the traditional ideal femenino—vicarious identity and
fulfillment through marriage and family—in order to place the focus on self-
edification, thereby evincing an alternative view of female potential as much
greater than only mother and wife. Conservative feminism created the equation
that marriage equals the fulfillment of female potential; Laforet, through the open
ending, negates this equation yet does not explicitly state what might be the
fulfillment of female potential. Her new equation would read: the fulfillment of
female potential equals the world of possibilities in the unknown. Nada combats

el ideal femenino which perpetuated the myth of the angel del hogar “ of the

 

4 The angel del hogar is the equivalent of the “angel of the hearth.” Both

terms are used throughout.

13

nineteenth century, the model of purity exemplified in the Virgin Mary, in the
patient and rescued woman of Greek myth (Ariadne) and the fairy tale Cinderella.

By the time Nada was published (1945), the Fascist movement of the
Falange Espailola was in full force. According to Labanyi the movement’s
ideology “was based on the mythical notion that the nation’s history was an
inauthentic deviation from origins. Fascism would ‘save’ the nation by returning
to its ‘essential nature’.” The Falangist Rafael Garcia Serrano stated that fascist
Spain needed to create a new mythology by undoing history and returning to its
origins (36). This is evident in the National Theatre company’s fusion of Greek
ideals with Catholic ritual, creating a “classical appeal to ‘unity’ and ‘order”’ as
seen in the nationalist writer José Maria Peman’s Antigona (1945), Electra
(1949) and Edipo (1953), in Torrente Ballester’s El retomo de Ulises (1949), and
in the Falangist writer Alvaro Cunqueiro’s Las mocedades de Ulises (1960) and
Un hombre que se parecia a Orestes (1969) (Labanyi 40-41).

On the other hand, myths can be used subversively. Labanyi argues that
“the presence of mythical characteristics in the work of . . . opposition writers
[Fernandez Santos, Sénchez Ferlosio, Juan and Luis Goytisolo] functions as a
covert criticism of prevailing Nationalist ideology” (42). Similarly, Laforet,
Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia Morales, through mythical allusions, combat the
Nationalistic expectations for women. Even though the latter three writers wrote
and published during democratization—that is, after Franco—each had lived
under the influence of his administration. Garcia Morales, the youngest, was a
young adult when he died. The authors who were in school in the 40’s and 50's
were indoctrinated with Nationalist ideology. “[Ejducation was synonymous with
indoctrination (only in 1956 would the Department of Propaganda be separated
from education)” (Labanyi 43). Indoctrination is the internalization of a belief

system. Once the ideology has been internalized, the external factor (the

14

Francoist regime) need not be present for the ideology or the vestiges of it to
persist. Paul llie has advocated the study of “‘the mythohistoriography arising
after history is absorbed into ideology’, pointing out that the obsession with
childhood and the treatment of father and mother figures in the postwar novel
can be related to Nationalist ideology” (Labanyi 43). The four authors studied
clearly manifest an obsession with childhood and/ or issues with parental figures.
Roig’s parental issue takes the form of a search for a matrilinear genealogy. The
recurrence of the themes of childhood or parental relationships points to the
inception of the assimilation of an ideology and constitutes an invitation to
“unlearn” the inherited ideology of Francoism and its legacy replete with
mythological underpinnings.

Myths are the elaborated stories based on the archetypes of the collective
unconscious.5 Given the fact that “Recurring images and symbols are ‘collective
representations’ [which come] from the universal substrate of humankind [and]
form the ‘collective unconscious’” (Doty 150), men and women are already
familiar with certain story lines which, in ancient times, were elaborated into
myths. The rewriting of a myth is an effort to go to the core of the subconscious
so that the outcome or the characters differ from the original version or versions.
In ancient times a female hero could not exist since a female character was
always secondary: the patient wife, the innocent maid, the femme fatale, the

helper, the object of desire.

 

5 “Jung defines archetypes as primordial forms in that they spring from the
preverbal realm of the consciousness, where they exist inchoate and

indescribable until given form in consciousness” (Pratt 3).

15

By opting to rewrite a myth, contemporary women writers go to the origin
of mainstream, patriarchal ideology, and behavioral standards. According to Tey
Diana Rebolledo, who has analyzed mythological elements in the writings of
Chicana and Latin American women, “Cultures use myths and stories of heroines
and heroes to create role models to differentiate correct behavior from
incorrect, transmit moral values, and identify those traits considered desirable by
a group or society” (49). Rebolledo further suggests that if women writers are not
satisfied with the role models that they are encouraged to follow, then they must
modify the mythic models accordingly (49). By rewriting mythic female figures
and empowering them as positive models, Laforet, Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia
Morales are deconstructing an ideological legacy; they are debunking Penelope
and Ariadne—the mythological incarnations of 9! ideal femenino—as appropriate
female role models.

Women’s writing allows a female character to be the central figure and to
go on a heroic quest, as we see in Nada, El Sur, El mismo mar, El silencio de Ias
sirenas, and L’hora via/eta. The female protagonist’s quest is to find a space in
which to grow, to break the fetters that keep her from achieving autonomy and
self-actualization. Each hurdle in her path is inextricably linked to phallocentric
thinking. According to Simone de Beauvoir, “[l]egislators, priests, philosophers,
writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of
woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions [and myths]
invented by men reflect this wish for domination” (49). Helene Cixous claims that
logocentrism organizes all thought according to “dual, hierarchized oppositions”
(superior/Inferior, man/woman) (“Sorties” 91). Feminism aspires to abolish the
hierarchy of opposition not only in relation to the sexes, but also in relation to all
thought. Feminist ideology does not make man the equivalent of woman, but

rather acknowledges both sexes in their full splendor without ascribing

16

better/worse, inferior/superior only to discern the differences. Therefore,
feminism while recognizing and denouncing the erroneous nature of
phaIIo/Iogocentrism, offers an alternative, non-hierarchical Weltenschaung.

The collective work La mujer espafiola, published by the Sociedad de
Estudios Sociologicos sobre la Mujer (SESM), has shown that the demise of
Franco and his administration coincided with the rebirth of feminism in Spain, a
fact that allowed greater freedom of expression for women writers, including
Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia Morales. Between 1960 and 1980, worldwide
changes took place, influencing both the evolution and the place of women in
society, transforming behavioral guidelines and female identity. In the 1960’s
international events that helped accelerate societal changes for women included
alternative societal models evident in communist Cuba and China as well as in
Israel; counter cultural movements, the power of young people such as the
“French Revolution in May of 68”; the American feminist movement after the
impact of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, and Greer’s
The Female Eunuch; and the II Vatican Council (“Introduction” 12). Despite this,
Geraldine Scanlon affirms that the change in women’s roles in Spain is not due
to the international Women’s Liberation Movement but rather to the country's
economic development (Scanlon 342). Upon close consideration, it becomes
evident that sex roles changed in Spain due to both external forces—the
liberalized international ideological climate which questioned the powers that
be—and internal practical realities—women working outside the home and
having fewer children due to medical advances and the decriminalization of
contraception in order to maintain a higher standard of living. In 1961 the Ley de
los derechos politicos, profesionales y de trabajo de la mujer modified women’s
legal working status (SESM, “Introduction” 12-13), allowing women to participate

in professions previously prohibited. In 1963 The Plan de Desamollo stipulated

17

the need to increase the female working population. Spain became a more
materialistic society, as the working woman’s salary increased the family’s
budget. In 1960 women constituted 18.2% of the work force and by 1966 24.1%
(Scanlon 349). Tourism and television exposed Spaniards to different customs.
In 1978 the dissemination of information and use of contraception, which had
previously been prohibited, became acceptable, modifying the sexual and family
life of women (SESM, “Introduction” 13). In the 1970's, the cultural and economic
crisis brought on by political and ecological movements and the new realities of
unemployment, drugs, and delinquency created an ideological atmosphere
critical of formerly untouchable institutions: Catholicism, family, and education
(SESM, “Introduction“ 12). By 1974 two feminist groups are born (SESM and
MDM) which cany out diverse functions: the translation of feminist texts, the
creation of “Plataforrna de organizaciones y grupos de mujeres de Madrid.”6 The
year 1975 was dubbed the International Year of the Woman. In December of that
year, the I Jomadas de la Liberacion de la Mujer, held in Madrid, defined a
common substrate among the conference participants: acknowledgement of
discrimination against women, the drive to assert just treatment, and an active
role in the vindication of women’s rights. The Constitution of 1978 implemented
the elements necessary to a democratic society—divorce, “patria potestad”,
“bienes gananciales”—which further contributed to women’s rights (SESM,
“Introduction” 14). Franco dies in 1975 and democracy is implemented by the

Constitution of 1978, allowing for an expansion of feminism: new groups,

 

6 SESM is the Sociedad de Estudios Sociologicos sobre la Mujer. MDM is

the Movimiento Democratico de la Mujer.

18

 

 

women’s meetings, radio shows, conferences and articles. Until this time,
feminism had been rooted in Madrid and Barcelona, yet it now extended to
Andalucia, Asturias, Galicia, Pais Valenciano and Pais Vasco (SESM,
“Movimiento” 29). The Catalonian feminist movement became very active and
created “un organo de difusién—la revista Vindicacidn” (SESM, “Movimiento”
38). Therefore, the development of women’s rights in Spain resulted from the
interplay among various factors: international ideological progress, legalization of
female working status in Spain, democratization, dissemination of feminist
beliefs, and the organization of feminist groups throughout the nation.

All the works studied (excluding Nada) were published within ten years
after the end of Franco’s regime. The clash between the Francoist ideal femenino
and the feminist explosion (1960-1980) set the ideological stage for the sexual
politics of Tusquets', Roig’s, and Garcia Morales’ works. According to SESM,
from a feminist perspective, the women who belonged to the new generation
(1960-1980), “expresan su visibn del mundo contando sus experiencias
personales de un modo que, aunque no siempre tenga un fin o intencién
feminista, su testimonio es un valioso alegato sobre la indefension, perplejidad,
aburrimiento y rebeldla ante la vida” (“Movimiento” 40). The inequality and
oppression of women, the secondary status and vicarious identity of wife and
mother, and the ideal of female chastity are all concepts against which the
authors contend. Tusquets’ and Roig’s works, published in the years following
Franco’s death, are riddled with criticism of the traditional role of “la mujer de su
casa.” Tusquets’ E, a bourgeois housewife, leads a pointless existence while
Roig’s Agnes, a neurotic housewife, fears being abandoned like her mother.

Tusquets, Roig and Garcia Morales wrote during a time when the female
condition was under scrutiny. By 1970, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Figes’

Patriarchal Attitudes, Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Millet’s Sexual Politics

19

had been translated into Spanish (Scanlon 341). Celia Amoros explains the
impact of Freidan’s feminist text in Spain: “La mistica de la feminidad podla ser
leida como una invitacion a que la mujer saliera del hogar sin mala conciencia,
demostrandole que con ello ganaria su salud mental y la de sus hijos” (“Algunos
aspectos” 43). Tusquets, Roig, and Garcia Morales are empowered to write as
women because the ideological climate in post-Franco Spain was ripe for
feminism. As the publication of the following texts indicates, Spain, during these
years, was recovering the feminism which had been stifled when Franco came to
power: Campo Alange’s La mujer en Espafia: cien afios de su historia (1860-
1960) (1964), Capmany’s El feminismo ibén’co (1970), Capel’s El sufragio
femenino en la II Republica (1975), Alcalde’s La mujer en la guerra civil espar‘iola
(1976), and Arenal’s La emancipacion de la mujer en Espar‘ia (reedited in 1974)

(Amorés, “Algunos aspectos” 44-45).7

 

7 Mauro Armifio’s edition of Concepcion Arenal’s Emancipacién de la
mujer en Espafia, published by Ediciones Jucar, reads “Primera edicion:
septiembre de 1974” (6). Arenal lived from 1820 to 1893 and is considered “la
primera mujer que Iucho por la emancipacion en Espar’la” (Annir‘io 22). Arrnifio
compiles five works by Arenal and titles the collection Emancipacién de la mujer
en Espafla. The five works are “La mujer del porvenir”, written in 1861 and
published seven years later, “La mujer de su casa”, written in 1881, “Estado
actual de la mujer en Espar‘ia”, published in 1895 in Boletin de la Institucién Libre
de Enser'ianza, “El trabajo de las mujeres”, published in 1891 in Boletin de la
Institucién Libre de Ensefianza, and “Educacion de la mujer”, a paper read at the

1892 Congreso pedagogico (Dlaz Castafion xcvii-cx).

20

Two currents stand out in contemporary Spanish feminism: el feminismo
de la diferencia (I’écn'ture feminine) and e] feminismo de la igualdad (equity
feminism). In el feminismo de la igualdad, according to Alicia Puleo, one sex is
not superior to the other (male courage, female kindness). Instead, there is the
aspiration to equality, denouncing a system that excludes women from
education, government and professions; it aspires to “la eclosién de las
individualidades una vez liberados, hombres y mujeres, de los estereotipos de
sexo [. . .y] pide una verdadera igualdad de oportunidades que se plasme en la
realidad concreta a través de una serie de politicas de accion positiva” (29-30).

On the other hand, Maria Milagros Rivera states that feminists of “la
diferencia” are “de-generadas”, i.e. “mujeres sin género.” “Han actuado como de-
generadas en la basqueda de mediaciones no masculinas, para intentar
estar en el mundo en femenino [. . .Es] un cambio radical de la naturaleza de la
relacién entre los sexos” (31). According to Amorés, “Es el varén quien ha
inventado nuestra diferencia. Lo unico que podriamos reivindicar es lo que
nosotras hemos hecho de ese invento . . . pero es lo Unico en lo que podemos
identificarnos como seres con capacidad de trascendencia que no han vivido . . .
pasivamente” (Hacia una critica 137). El feminismo de la diferencia originated
with Luce Irigaray who has “contribuido a elaborar una identidad subjetiva
sexuada, [. . .una] genealogia [. . .y un] futuro en un mundo en el cual la
sexualizacién sea civilizada” (Rivera 32). Rivera asserts that “es clave el recurso
a la mediacién de . . . otras mujeres . . .La relacion con la madre . . . es tan
importante que ha sido descrita como el ‘punto arquimedeo’ en que se apoya el
nacimiento de un orden simbélico nuevo” (Rivera 33). In a patriarchal society, the
father is viewed as the true author of life (Rivera 33), but el feminismo de la
diferencia regards the mother with new eyes, conferring on her the role of

originator of a new genealogy. Female genealogy and female authority, key to

21

the practice of la diferencia femenina, are not linked to traditional authority in that
they do not seek out social power within patriarchal order (Rivera 34).

Feminism of la diferencia bears parallels to the Foucauldian concept of
genealogy. Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach is subversive in that it
“looks below the dominant meanings of texts to consider meanings and
knowledge hidden or disqualified“ (Jones 121). Authority is associated with a
male voice, therefore “segregation of women and the feminine from authority is
internally connected to the concept of authority itself . . . Following the
genealogical method of Michel Foucault, . . . the dominant discourse on authority
silences those forms of expression linked metaphorically and symbolically to
‘female’ speech” (Jones 120). It is my hypothesis that through mythic rewriting,
the authors studied create an alternative mythological genealogy based on the
concept of difference proposed by Rivera and Foucault.

According to Geraldine Clearly Nichols, the protagonist-narrators of the
“boom espar‘iol" of women writers “se han negado a aceptar . . . Ias limitaciones
impuestas en ellas por su cultura: no se quieren callar, rompen a escribir
historias prohibidas en lenguas prohibidas; se confiesan, se buscan, se definen
no siendo, pasivamente, sino analizando, activamente duefias de la palabra
raptada” (Descifrar 37)°. Mythic rewriting is a return to the origins of Western
ideology, recapturing a matrilinear genealogy, and recovering “la palabra

raptada.” By reconstructing archetypes the woman author combats female

 

”This “boom” refers to the proliferation of female writers during the
transition and democratization such as Montero, Tusquets, Riera, Moix,

Puértolas, and Roig, to name a few.

22

stereotypes perpetuated by patriarchal rule. Laforet, Tusquets, and Garcia
Morales rewrite the Ariadne role respectively through Andrea, Clara, and
Adriana: these neo-mythic figures refuse to accept a passive existence in which
they await rescuing. Roig denounces the patience, “virtue”, and faithfulness of
Penelope as depicted in Agnes. Garcia Morales vindicates the role of Siren in
Elsa by portraying her as a hybrid between Penelope—patiently pining away for
her beloved Agustin—and a Siren—attempting to allure him with her letters.
Annis Pratt affirms that “we are the heirs of the Greeks and of the Judeo-
Christian tradition, which propounded a . . . split between men and women in all
aspects of culture, the effects of repressing half of the human personality [animal
and devaluating women as the containers of that half remain with us today”
(Pratt, Archetypal 9). During Francoism, women were persuaded to return to their
traditional roles through the glorification of the home and the exaltation of their

“misidn tradicional: ‘reinas del hogar (Scanlon 337). The image of the mujer
hacendosa was propagated, consisting of the lady of the house “inclinada sobre
su costura, tejiendo o haciendo encaje y atendiendo al mismo tiempo a sus
tareas domésticas” (Scanlon 338). This image of the mujer hacendosa is an
archetype that is elaborated into the Ariadne and Penelope myths. Through their
association with thread, patience, and reliance on a man, these mythic
personages exemplify the ideal femenino.
The mythic figures also function as literary mothers within patriarchal
tradition. Gilbert and Gubar state that:
Male literary history functions like a biological family, albeit a socially
constructed one: it is impossible for Wordsworth to evade Milton’s
paternity, just as it is impossible for Stevens to evade Wordsworth’s.

For women, however, female genealogy does not have an inexorable

logic because the literary matrilineage has been repeatedly erased,

23

obscured, or fragmented. Thus, when a woman writer ‘adopts’ a
‘mother’. . . she is creating a fictive family whose romance is sufficient.
(199)
As we analyze below, Laforet, Tusquets, and Garcia Morales (in El Sur) adopt
Ariadne as a literary mother just as Garcia Morales (in El silencio de Ias sirenas)

and Roig adopt Penelope and Calypso, thus creating a matrilineal genealogy.

24

Chapter 2

“A la recerca d’unes arrels en naufragi”:
THE SEXUAL AND LINGUISTIC POLITICS OF MONTSERRAT ROIG

Of all the authors studied in this dissertation, Roig is indisputably the most
explicitly feminist—both through her writing (fictional and political) and her
activism. Roig wrote during the resurgence of feminism in Spain which resulted
from the economic need for women in the work force, the liberal political climate
in much of the rest of the world, the translation into Spanish of key feminist texts,
the publication of Spanish feminist texts, and the creation of feminist
organizations.9 Roig’s conviction to feminist thinking is evident in both her fiction
and political writings like gTiempo de mujer?.

In On Our Own Behalf: Women’s Tales from Catalonia, Kathleen
McNerney ties the resurgence of catalanismo with the women’s movement:
“Literature by women and literature by Catalonians have been neglected
throughout history for different reasons, but one reason stands out in particular—
the oppressed status of the writers” (10). By 1979—that is after the Constitution
of 1978—Francoist suppression of the Catalan language came to an end and
evolved into a “renaissance of letters,” in which there came to be a proliferation
of literary production in Catalan. Concurrently with this new freedom of language

and literary expression, the women’s movement strengthened (McNerney 1). In

 

.9 For a more detailed account of the elements that led to the resurgence of

Spanish feminism, which span the 1960’s and 1970’s, see chapter one.

25

this respect, Christina Duplaa queries, “gPesa mas la realidad de ser catalana o
la realidad de ser mujer? (107), to which she answers:
El hecho de que [Roig y otras escritoras catalanas] escogieran su lengua
materna para dar voz a un silencio forzado y la circunstancia que esa
lengua materna también hubiera estado en silencio debido a los avatares
politicos del Estado espanol, demuestra . . . que es muy dificil, en ciertos
periodos historicos (Ia década de los setenta y parte de la de los ochenta)
hallar una unica definicién de identidad. gQué es mas decisivo en
aquellos aflos de transicién democratica en Espana, la identificacion con
la lucha por las libertades nacionales de Catalufia o la lucha por la
Iiberacion de las mujeres? Posiblemente son Iuchas que se plantean de
forma simultanea y que con los afios van ocupando un lugar especifico en
la identidad de cada una de estas escritoras. (109)
The reality of the situation is that both gender and nationality had a hand in
forging Roig’s identity. Both were conditions of alterity (otherness) in Franco’s
Spain. Montserrat Roig fought against the oppression of women and
Catalonians. She was a feminist and a catalanista, both reflecting ideologies that
vilify fascism, that refuse victimization, and that manifest inherent pride in being
female and Catalonian.
When interviewed by Geraldine Cleary Nichols in Escn'bir: espacio pmpio,
Roig explains her reasoning for writing in Catalan:
literariamente yo he buceado siempre en unas preocupaciones
lingiiisticas muy estrictas . . . he pertenecido a una familia muy catalana
en donde desde los cuatro aflos he leido en catalan. Esto es bastante
atipico en mi generacién, donde esa lengua no se aprendia. Para mi el
castellano es siempre una lengua impuesta . . . Era la lengua del poder,

del dominio, mientras que la lengua del amor 0 del afecto era Ia catalana

26

. a partir de la adolescencia siempre identificaba mi lengua y no la
castellana con la literature. . . . Empecé a bucear [en] mis propias raices
entre los libros de mi padre, y a través de mis propios novelistas, que son
los de finales del siglo diecinueve, los de principios del veinte y, sobre
todo, los grandes poetas catalanes. (147-48)

Roig adds that writing in Catalan “Para mi fue un hecho normal; escribir en
catalan era como respirar. lncluso no era casi ni un hecho politico, sino una
identificacibn muy fuerte con el entorno” (Nichols, Escribir 153). But, note must
be made that a declaration of authenticity in the face of oppression is a political
statement and a refusal to conform. The author goes on to say that her
generation:

fue muy antifranquista; estabamos influidos por el mayo francés, por

Berkeley . . .[por los] afios aqui en la universidad en lucha. . . [Pero] habia

una cosa muy clara: todos llevamos un Franco en el corazén, todos

hemos sido educados en el fascismo y esto note lo quitas nunca. Puedes
luchar contra ello si eres consciente, pero el Franco lo tienes dentro.

(Nichols 164-65)

Catalanismo constitutes more than the mere fact of communicating in
Catalan. Catalanismo is the equivalent of a political and ideological declaration
against an oppressive hegemony. By writing her works in Catalan, Montserrat
Roig denounces the Francoist worldview and its legacy—which endured beyond
Franco’s death by virtue of having been internalized by those who lived under his
lengthy dictatorship—which were manifested in sexism, the oppressive pressure

of the Castilian centralism upon Catalonia, and a hierarchical power structure.

27

The character Natalia from El temps de les cireres") (the same Natalia
who appears in L’hora violeta) is the key to the author’s catalanismo.11 El temps
de les cireres follows the psychological, sexual, and political development of a
young woman whose objectivity highlights the horrors—apparently innocuous at
times—of Francoism and post-Francoism. Meanwhile, the character, mimicking
Roig’s intent, attempts to recover her forgotten, marginalized, and suppressed
Catalonian roots.

Natalia’s first positive female role model is Harmonia Carreras, an
eccentric painter whose father was murdered by the Francoists. Upon her return
to Catalonia after her exile in Mexico, her art works, “figures esquincades i d’ulls
esborronats” (torn figures with smeared eyes), became famous (Temps 30).
Harmonia had reintroduced Natalia to Catalonian authors. Natalia herself had
been out of Spain for twelve years. Upon returning, she becomes reacquainted
with her homeland. Harmonia loves Catalonia (Ia madre patn'a) and Catalan
(lengua materna) and hates Franco (patriarchal/ paternal figure). The sexualized
division is clear. Natalia’s roots are feminine; and it is of precisely this that
Hannonla reminds her. The masculine politics and ideology are an imposition.
Every element of Harrnonia’s biography indicates marginal status and opposition
to the ruling class. Harmonia “odiava l’esperit ‘dominador i mesqui’ dels
messetaris, de la Castella que ‘desprecia cuanto ignora’ . . . que havia sotmes

[Mexico i Catalunya], los havia endinsat en una perplexitat permanent, sempre a

 

1° Published in Castilian translation as Tiempo de cerezas.
1‘ Roig’s trilogy consists of Ramona, adéu, published in 1972, El temps de

les cireres, published in 1977, and L’hora violeta, published in 1980.

28

la recerca d’unes arrels en naufragi" (Temps 31) (hated the dominating and
small-minded spirit of the “mesetarios”, of Castille that ‘scorns that which it does
not know’ . . . which had subjected [Mexico and Catalonia], it had submerged
them in permanent perplexity, always in search of shipwrecked roots). This is
precisely the task carried out by Roig: “la recerca d’unes arrels en naufragi”.
Roig’s quest is the search for authenticity in the face of oppression.

The shipwreck metaphor further elucidates the use of neo-mythic rewriting
to drive the point home. The myth that Roig recontextualizes is that of Ulysses. In
Homer’s original, Ulysses is shipwrecked. As Jo Labanyi pointed out, the Ulysses
myth was popularized during Franco’s rule to stress the pattern of usurpation of
power followed by the hero’s being rightfully restored to power. In other words,
the figure of Ulysses was instrumental in disseminating the belief that Francoist
fascism was a return to origins, an ontological restoration to power. But Roig
subverts the popularized use of the Ulysses myth to apply it to the vindication of
the rights of women and Catalonians.

On close scrutiny, it becomes clear that the quotations in Castilian in
Roig’s works, when juxtaposed with the remaining text in Catalan, simply do not
fit in. The quotes in Castilian stand out because, conceptually, they are
diametrically opposed to the corpus in Catalan. The use of the Catalonian
language is the index of freedom of expression, authenticity, and the right to

vindicate a suppressed culture, heritage, and identity.

29

In Ramona, adéu, Jordi, Mundetta Ill’s12 lover, is leading a student protest.
In the span of four pages, it is mentioned four times that Jordi, speaking in
Catalan, is responded to by students screaming “en castellano, en castellano”
(Ramona, adios 96-99). This incident indicates that the Catalonian students have
learned to prefer castellano in an intellectual forum. They have learned to
relegate their native language to a secondary status.

Also in Ramona, adéu, Mundeta I elaborates upon the use of the
Catalonian language. Her husband had always written poetry to her in Castilian,
but when a young admirer begins to write her love poetry in Catalan, she reflects
the following: “Els versos catalans em sonen millor que els castellans. Sbn més
purs, els sento més a prop . . . Ara m’adono que vol dir expressar-nos en la
nostra llengua. l jo, que feia temps que no escrivia el meu dietari en catala, i no
ho havia notat!” (Ramona, adéu 126-27) (Verses in Catalan sound better to me
than those in Castilian. They are more pure, they feel closer to me . . . Now I
realize what it means to express ourselves in our language. And I, who hadn’t
written my diary in Catalan in a long time, hadn’t noticed it).13

In El temps, Natalia recalls that when she was a child, her father, Joan,
stressed the importance of the Catalonian language and culture. At
Christmastime he would read stories in Catalan to his children and emphasize:

“Nosaltres som un petit pais, deia, l’heu d’estimar, encara que us costi molt”

 

‘2 l have used Mundeta I, Mundeta II and Mundeta III to respectively
denote Mundeta Jover, Mundeta Ventura and Mundeta Claret. The numeric
imposition further stresses Roig’s concept of a maternal genealogy.

‘3 All translations from Catalan to English are mine.

30

(Temps 156) (We are a small country, he used to say, we must love it, even at
great cost to us).

Yet many years later, the power of Francoism was greater than Joan’s
own. Joan spent several years in a concentration camp. This grueling experience
left its mark on him: he sold out to the victors, he betrayed his own culture and
beliefs. Joan, defeated both as an individual and a Catalonian, remembers the
dawn of the fascist rule:

Calia deixar ben endarrera els aires que els havien dut tantes desgracies.

Calia regirar el pensament, calia comencar a parlar d’una altra manera,

vestir-se corn ells volien, tancar-se a casa. dormir, fer-hi una llarga i

compacta dorrnida, calia no sortir al carrer, car el carrer era d’ells . . .

[Cjalia saludar com els deien, anar a I'església, ‘i tanmateix, és clar que hi

ha Déu’. Calia anar a combregar i no riure obertament . . ., cremar els

llibres que no els agradaven, calia suposar que la teva llengua no valia
per a res, . . . i anar al cinema i aixecar el brac . . . En Joan Miralpeix

havia tomat molt cansat d’aquella guerra tan bruta. (Temps 142-43)

(We had to leave far behind the customs that had caused so many

misfortunes. We had to change our way of thinking, we had to begin to

speak in a different way, to dress as they desired, to shut ourselves in the
house, to sleep, to sleep in the house long and hard, we couldn’t go
outside, because outside belonged to them . . . [Wje had to say hello as
they said to, to go to church, ’and of course, there is a God.’ We had to go
to communion and not laugh openly . . . burn the books that they disliked,
we had to pretend that our language was worthless . . . and go to the
movies and raise our arms [in a salute] . . . Joan Miralpeix had returned

home very tired from that dirty war).

31

In essence, Joan, a Catalonian and Republican, “dresses up,” donning the
accoutrements of fascism.

Joan literally cross-dressed as his wife Judit, making believe that he and
she were one, pretending that she was still alive. Roig cleverly portrays Joan’s
sexual transvestism, metaphorically alluding to his political and cultural
transvestism. In this ironic scene in which Joan tries on silk stockings, the reader
has the impression that the unnamed person who tries on the stockings and
caresses (him)herself is a woman; but the scene concludes with the following: “I
és aleshores quan creu, també, que no esta tan sol y que Judit, la seva Judit, és
a la vora” (Temps 225) (and it is now when he believes that he is not so alone
and that Judit, his Judit, is close by). Only when mention is made of Judit, does it
dawn on the reader that the subject is Joan and not a woman. The purpose of
this scene is to highlight the conflict between appearances and reality. Joan is
unauthentic; he is pure appearance, trying to believe that appearances are real.
He appears to side with the fascists; he appears to dress as his wife.
Transvestism is the lie which Catalunya was forced to live during Franco. The
conflict between appearances and authenticity went unresolved for Joan to the
point that he became insane and was committed. Through Joan, Roig implies
that it is absurd to try to live a lie.

El temps begins as Natalia returns to her madre patria, in search of her
origins. The plot clearly becomes an archeological dig for true identity—
Catalonian, female—buried under imposed ideologies and politics. The novel
concludes with Joan in an insane asylum, contemplating his defunct wife Judit’s
portrait. Judit is Natalia’s mother. By ending the novel with Joan staring at Judit’s
picture, the author draws attention to Natalia’s mother’s influence on the
Miralpeix family. Judit is the daughter of a Jewish Frenchman. She represents all

that is not Spanish, all that runs counter to Franco’s nationalist idea of Spain. By

32

contemplating her face, Joan underscores Roig’s purpose: the search for true
origins and the rejection of fraudulent, superimposed origins. Natalia’s family was
not of Castilian culture, but Catalonian. They were not Francoists. but
Republicans, perhaps communists. They were not staunchly Catholic: Judit was
of Jewish descent and Joan ironically reveals his agnosticism—if not atheism—
when he mocks the Nacionales devotion with “i tanmateix, és clar que hi ha Déu”
(Temps 143). Natalia’s family did not speak Spanish in the home, but Catalan.
Natalia reflects on her self-imposed exile:
A mi també [em] feia [fastic el pais], digué Ia Natalia, i he tomat. Jo no
hauria tomat . . . Pero és que jo vaig descobrir, aclaria la Natalia, un bon
dia, que no em feia fastic el pals, sino que em feien fastic els qui em
voltaven i també tenia fastic de mi mateixa. I saps per que? Perque, al
capdavall, tenia por que arribés el temps de les cireres. l per a voler el
temps de les cireres cal tenir fe que un dia arribara. (Temps 217)
(I, also, was upset with this country, said Natalia, and I returned. I would
not have returned . . . But I discovered, clarified Natalia, one day, that I
wasn’t upset with the country, but with those who surrounded me and I
was also upset with myself. Do you know why? Because, in the end, I was
afraid that the temps de les cireres would arrive. And for the temps de les

cireres to arrive, you must have faith that some day it will)14

 

‘4 The term “temps de les cireres” could be translated as “in cherry
season”; but such a term loses the poetic and ideological value it has in Catalan

or French.

33

The temps de les cireres (“le temps des cérises”) comes from a song sung by
Ives Montand; the expression refers to an idealized period when everything is
right and freedom is restored, but for this to occur one must work toward it.

The scene that most blatantly underscores the horrors of fascism—the
antithesis of the temps de les cireres—takes place in the police station following
a student protest. Natalia, Joan, his nameless female friend, and Emilio were
detained because of their participation in the student protest. In the police station,
there was a frame filled with photos that read in Castilian “red de anarquistas
peligrosos” next to a large portrait of Franco. Two policemen commented on the
girls in Castilian rather than in Catalan: “Ias mujeres estan mas bonitas con
faldas, con pantalones parecéis marimachos”; another responded “dejadla, que
es muy fea” (Tiempo 119). The police, partisans of Franco, adhered to a
patriarchalist and Castilian-centered worldview. According to Francoist ideology,
men are in charge and fit into a masculine hierarchy. Women have a defined role
(obviously sexual, whether they be pretty, feminine and attractive or ugly and
sexually useless), and any lack of conformity will be violently attacked. When the
police brutalized Joan’s short, thin, harmless, defenseless and nameless female
friend, Natalia asked herself “per que no vam fer res, per que vam deixar que
peguessin aquella noia?” (Why didn’t we do anything? Why did we let them beat
that girl?) (Temps 114). This revealing episode underscores the cruelty, sexism
and anti-Catalonianist environment of Francoism.

Roig’s catalanismo and feminism indirectly answer Natalia’s question, “per
que no vam fer res?”. The measure taken by Roig in order to fight against an
oppressive hegemony is to write in her mother tongue. Consequently, the author
sets out on a political, ideological, and literary adventure “a la recerca d’unes
arrels en naufragi.” As the author stated in her interview with Nichols, such an

adventure leads to “[una] busqueda de una tradicibn propia” (Escribir 172).

34

Just as Roig’s catalanismo is mythoclastic (debunking the Francoist
Castilian-centered ideals), so is her mythic rewriting of the Penelope myth. By
subverting the figure of Penelope, Montserrat Roig in L’hora violeta (1981)
combats the Francoist myth of el ideal femenino. Roig’s new mythohistoriography
is a rejection of phallogocentric ideology and a call for a symbolic order which
can provide positive models for women.

Through the recontextualization of mythic elements in L’hora violeta, Roig
confronts and combats the Francoist regime and its legacy, participating in what
Linda Hutcheon terms “historiographic metafiction.” As has been pointed out by
Akiko Tsuchiya, “This kind of fiction engages in intense literary self-reflection
[and] lays claim to political and historical realities through the mimetic
convention” (“Montserrat” 146). By incorporating myths, Roig denounces the
passivity and capitulation to society’s expectations of women as depicted by the
allusions to Penelope.

The mythological figure key to this work—Penelope—personifies the
female ideal in the greater part of the twentieth century in Spain: la mujer
hacendosa and la mujer de su case, a role which myriad women silently and
submissively assumed. According to Christina Duplaa, Roig’s writing attempts to
“dar voz a quienes . . . fueron relegados al silencio. Su critica al franquismo y al
patriarcado son verdaderos documentos para una Historia que quiera tener en
cuenta Ias voces marginales de una sociedad” (12).

J0 Labanyi in Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel
studies the recourse to myth in twentieth-century Spanish novels as a means of
political expression within the historical context of mythically resonant Francoist
ideology (1-2). Although she has analyzed works other than Roig’s, her theories
on the relationship between mythology, literature and Francoist Spain are

relevant to L’hora violeta. According to Labanyi, the mythohistoriography of

35

Spanish fascism was reflected in the literary allusiveness to Ulysses, “providing a
‘foundation’ for those in authority” (33).

The Ulysses myth became a recurring theme in Spanish drama after
Franco came to power.“ As the composition of these dramatic works (analyzed
by Jose Paolino) attests, the Ulysses theme proved to be emblematic of both
Franco’s regime and the reaction to it. Paulino characterizes the rewriting of the
Ulysses myth according to the following: “Ideolégicamente sirve tan bien para
realizar una critica a la ideologia del regimen franquista y su simbologia, como

para rechazar los valores de violencia militar y represion de la sociedad de

 

‘5 In “Ulises en el teatro espafiol contemporaneo: Una revision

panoramica”, José Paulino looks at nine plays written between 1939 and 1989
which deal with the Ulysses myth: Torrente Ballester‘s El retomo de Ulises
(1946), Buero Vallejo’s La tejedora de sueh’os (1949-1952), Monzo’s Ulises 0 el
retomo equivocado (1956), Morales’ La Odisea (1965), Miras’ Penelope (1971
inédita), Gala’s gPor qué cones, Ulises? (1975) Comamalas’ El retom d’Ulisses
(1978), Resino’s Ulises no vuelve (1983), and Savater’s Ultimo desembarco. Una
comedia homen'ca (1987). Not all of these plays were well-known and that Roig
completed writing L’hora in 1977, before the composition of some of these works,
but what this list indicates is that the Ulysses myth gained importance during the
year in which Franco officially came to power (1939) as part of the mythic
apparatus of self-justification employed by the regime and persisted into the early
post-Francoist years. Although for different reasons, Paulino asserts that the
durability of the myth stems from the fact that it is a cultural reference: i.e.

Francoism (328).

36

posguerra 0 para proponer una imagen desencantada de los héroes de esa
misma sociedad” (338-39).

Spanish fascism is a virile, aggressive, phallic power identifiable with the
mythic Ulysses. Penelope, then, must be viewed as the exemplary ideal
femenino so vehemently propagandized by the regime: a paragon of chastity,
patience, and passivity. By recontextualizing and subverting the Penelope myth,
Roig strikes out against the archetype on which this mythic figure is based—the
patient and virtuous woman who awaits rescue by a man through whom she has
a vicarious identity. The author shatters the Penelope-Ulysses ideal as a viable
dynamic. The patriarchal-Francoist view of sexual roles can be reduced to the
male—strong, aggressive, sexual paterfamilias—and the female—submissive,
virginal, vaginal, passive, enamored, maternal angel of the hearth. But Roig’s
gallery of characters (and the relationships between them) in L’hora violeta
reveals the Penelope-Ulysses ideal for what it is: a binary-oppositional
ideological construct that masks the real diversity of sexuality. The following
sexual episodes in Roig’s trilogy (consisting of Ramona, adeu, El temps de les
cireres, and L’hora violeta) are mythoclastic: Patricia’s husband Esteve is
homosexual; Joan Miralpeix is a transvestite; Judit is the initiator of sexual
relations; Kati and Judit’s relationship borders on lesbianism; Kati is a sexually
aggressive woman who nearly devours men; Lluis uses anal sex as
contraception; Silvia is an anal sexual receptacle rather than a vaginal one;
Natalia had an abortion; Marius is a virgin. Roig deconstructs an ideological
legacy, debunks Penelope as an appropriate female role model, and calls for

new models of female sexual identity.

37

In feminist thought, phallogocentric female models are considered
dichotomic (Ave-Eva).16 Roig’s feminism, while recognizing and denouncing the
erroneous nature of phalIo/logocentrism, offers an alternative, non-hierarchical
way of existing and regarding the world. As stated in the theoretical and historical
chapter, two currents stand out in contemporary Spanish feminism: feminism of
difference and feminism of equality. Feminism of equality, according to Alicia
Puleo, calls for politically mandated equal opportunities (29-30). On the other
hand, Maria Milagros Rivera states that feminism of difference propagates a
sexualized, subjective identity and a female genealogy (Rivera 32). Rivera
asserts that relationships between women are key to the feminism of difference,
especially maternal relationships (Rivera 33). In a patriarchal society, the father
is viewed as the true author of life (Rivera 33), but feminism of difference re-

views the mother, deeming her originator of a new genealogy.

 

‘5 Cixous characterizes phallogocentrism as dual hierarchized oppositions
applied to all thought. See introduction. Particularly in Spanish literature, Ave-Eva
denotes the biblical dichotomy between Eve (Eva in Spanish) and the Virgin
Mary (“Ave Maria” means “Hail Mary”). Genesis, in which Eve appears, is a
misogynistic myth which blames the first woman for the loss of paradise. Mary
has been considered the second Eve, in that she has regained paradise
(salvation) for humanity. This biblical dichotomy is evident in the Middle Ages
with the Marian tradition; but permutations of it have survived until today. Thus,
the dedichotomization carried out by Roig and Garcia Morales, in which they

integrate the whore-saintly wife polarities of Circe/CalypsolSirens-Penelope.

38

To the concept of feminism of difference, Roig adds the Foucauldian
concept of genealogy, supplementing dominant meanings with hidden or
disqualified meanings and knowledge (Jones 121). Duplaa asserts that Roig
attempts to create a female genealogy and construct a new paradigm: “El
pensamiento de la diferencia sexual [crea] un nuevo orden simbélico [para
poder] existir Iibremente en un mundo no neutro” (14). It is my hypothesis that,
through mythic rewriting, Roig creates an alternative mythological genealogy
based on the concept of difference proposed by Rivera, Foucault, and Duplaa.
Roig’s mythological matrilinear genealogy is supplementary to the genealogy of
the father. In other words, it fills in the gaps left by the patriarchal perspective.
Similarly, Roig’s use of Catalan is a conscious choice of mother tongue and a
rejection of imposed patriarchal (Francoist) Castilian.

It is precisely through Roig’s neo-mythic rewriting that she celebrates
female difference and posits a refusal to conform to dominant, masculinist
expectations of women. McNerney contends that “Roig fears that some
‘successful’ women have erred in imitating men. What is truly revolutionary . . .
and therefore threatening to people, is for people to live as women with women's
values, rejecting the structures and institutions that have been imposed upon us
by patriarchy” (On Our Own Behalf 14). In L’hora violeta, Montserrat Roig
establishes direct parallels between mythic female characters and her own neo-
mythic renditions. Roig weaves three genealogical strata of female characters.
The “present day” characters consist of Natalia, Norma, and Agnes. The
generation preceding the “present-day” are Judit, Kati, and Agnés’ mother. The
third stratum of characters—consisting of the mythological matriarchs Penelope,
Calypso, and Circe—belongs to The Odyssey that Natalia reads and compares
to her life and that of the other characters. L’hora violeta is the culmination of the

two previous works in the trilogy (Ramona, adéu, 1972; El temps de les cireres.

39

1977, L’hora violeta, 1980). The seeds of mythic rewriting are present in El temps
de les cireres and Ramona, adéu but come to fruition in L’hora violeta. Therefore,
I will carry out a thorough analysis of L’hora and will select passages of El temps
and Ramona, adéu to support my thesis of Roig’s feminist and mythoclastic
remythification in L’hora violeta.

A brief overview of the plots of the three works and how they interrelate
will provide a helpful basis for my discussion. Ramona, adeu clearly establishes
a female genealogy governed by the name of the mother, not by the name of the
father as is customary in patriarchal society. We come to know three generations
of Mundetas (diminutive of Ramona). The first Mundeta (to be indicated by
Mundeta I) represents the unquestioned patriarchal order of the turn of the
century; this Mundeta is an idealized angel del hogar who quickly becomes
disappointed in this lifestyle. The second Mundeta (Mundeta II) witnesses the
destruction of her native Barcelona in 1938. The novel circularly opens and
closes with Mundeta ll pregnant, searching for her husband Joan among the
rubble that resulted from the Francoist bombing of Barcelona. Her world has
literally come to pieces and has crumbled around her. Mundeta ll represents the
search for order and strength (her husband) among chaos. After the war,
Mundeta lI strictly adheres to patriarchal values, although she had come to
question them before marrying. Mundeta III, from a post-war generation,
represents a new order. She is a student activist, is sexually active, and leaves

the home of her father (with whom she never got along).17

 

‘7 I have designated each generation of Mundetas numerically. Not only is

this numbering system less confusing for the reader than the inclusion of the

40

El temps is a search for roots, for authenticity. In this work, more so than
in other Roig novels, we see a gallery of female characters of different
generations. Natalia, more of a guide than a narrator or a protagonist, leads the
reader into the lives of the other characters. She has returned from her twelve-
year self-imposed exile to her motherland (madre patria) and becomes
reacquainted with the significance of her mother tongue. Again, Roig emphasizes
the importance of a female genealogy and the relationships among women.

The final novel of the trilogy, L’hora violeta, again, is a stage for the
characters who appeared in the previous works. A female genealogy is indicated,
but in this work a mythological mother, Penelope, is the originator of female
tradition. Circe and Calypso also figure, but are certainly secondary when
compared to the importance of Penelope, a mythical mother who has been
emulated or rejected in some way by each of Roig’s female characters. The
conclusion to be drawn by the reader is that he/she must learn from the past,
abandon sinister, patriarchal beliefs (personified in Penelope), and glean a
knowledge that permits the establishment of a new symbolic order.

L’hora violeta begins with Natalia’s request that Norma compile Judit and
Kati’s papers in literary form. The history of the generation prior to Norma and
Natalia’s is intercalated with their own and that of the mythological female

figures. Immediately, a parallel is drawn, respectively, between Norma and Circe,

 

surnames (respectively Jover, Ventura and Claret), but it further emphasizes
Roig ’s feminist concept of a female genealogy, a gynocentric supplement to the

law- and name-of-the-father.

41

Natalia and Calypso, and Agnes and Penelope.18 Roig’s purpose is the same as
Nonna’s: to gather female voices which had been relegated to oblivion and
suppressed by the official (hi)story. Both Natalia and the author attempt to
recover the collective history of women by incorporating diaries, letters, and
known texts. Natalia’s letter reads “Després de rellegir els papers diverses
vegades, he arribat a confondre-les, com si totes dues fossin una sola persona,
o tu i jo, i també Agnes . . . Em semblava que calia salvar per les paraules tot
allo que la historia, la Histbria gran, o sigui la dels homes, havia fet imprecis,
havia condemnat o idealitzat” (L’hora 17) (After reading the papers several times,
I came to confuse both of them, as if they were one person, or you and l, and
also Agnes . . . I thought that it was necessary to save through words that which
history, History with a capital “H,” the history of men, had made imprecise, had
condemned or idealized). Duplaa contends that these letters and diaries “tienen
el valor de documento y que le perrniten reconstruir esa historia de mujeres, con
c6digos que funcionan totalmente al margen del mundo masculino-publico-
politico . . . No importa qué generacién de mujeres habla, ya que Ias
caracteristicas son siempre Ias mismas: la incomunicacion, el tedio y el

desamor” (15). Each subsequent generation of women experiences the same

 

‘8 Natalia narrates, “He hablado de Circe (0 de Norma)“ (34), “Circe,
furiosa y enamorada, los encantaba, igual que Norma” (33). Natalia directs her
inner monologue to Jordi: “Ya sé lo que piensas . . ., que soy Mitad Calipso” (31).
Natalia states “Pienso en ti , Jordi, y también en Penelope . . . Si, ya lo sé, tu no
tienes nada que ver con tu mujer" (33). Jordi’s wife is Agnes who, like Penelope,

waits for her husband until he finally returns to her.

42

plight. Roig reverts to Homeric characters to establish the archetypes which her
characters reprise. These archetypes fit into the hierarchical construct of
phallogocentric oppositions: Ave-Eva. Circe is Eva, while Penelope is Ave. Yet
Roig’s focus on the everyday experience of femaleness shatters the hierarchical
oppositions, vindicating Circe and debunking Penelope. By recovering the lost
voices, the author offers an alternative perspective to the circumstances of the
mythical characters. Natalia narrates, “Jordi, saps una cosa? M’agradaria sentir-
hi els plors de Circe, la bruixa, a qui els historiadors han titllat de dolenta perque
convertia els homes en animals. Potser el seu unic pecat ha estat d’estimar
Ulisses . . . Circe no volia ser una dona-victima. Jordi, a mi no m’agrada ser una
dona-victima” (L’hora 24) (Jordi, you know something? I’d like to hear the cries of
Circe, the sorceress, whom historians labeled as evil because she transformed
men into animals. Perhaps her only sin was that of loving Ulysses . . . Circe didn’t
want to be a female victim. Jordi, I don’t like being a female victim either). Natalia
is questioning the role of women in the Odyssey. The plot which follows is to be
viewed in juxtaposition to the ancient text in order to clearly discern the author’s
intent. Roig’s text reevaluates the options available to women and denounces the
premise that these roles provide happiness. The following conversation, in this
respect, proves quite revealing.
Natalia: Que et penses? Et penses que jo no he renunciat a res?
Que m’ha estat facil, aixo de renunciar al paper tradicional de la dona?
Norma: No, ja sé que no t’ha estat facil. Pero per combatre’l, ara
per ara, crec que has d’haver passat per aquest paper tradicional. Haver-
lo interioritzat, haver pensat que aquesta era l’unica rao de la teva vida.
Que aixo de fer felic un home i de perllongar—te en els fills era l’aspecte

mes meravellés de l’existencia. T’ho has d’haver cregut abans per poder-

43

lo trencar. Només aixi, em penso, podras entrendre les altres dones
(L ’hora 84)
(Natalia:What do you think? Do you think that I haven’t given up
anything? That giving up the traditional role of woman has been easy for
me?
Norma: No, I know it hasn't been easy for you. But to fight against
it, right now, I believe you must have experienced the traditional role.
Have internalized it, have thought that this was your only reason for living.
That making a man happy and living through your children was the most
marvelous aspect of your existence. You must have believed in it first to
be able to break with it. That’s, then, the only way you’ll be able to
understand other women.)
Duplaa contends that Roig’s “voz testimonial . . . se presenta con pretensiones
denunciadoras pero a la vez [. . . con] un objetivo reconciliador” (37). The author
denounces the role of women, but also provides an alternative: the search for
better models. In L’hora violeta, until the final scene, Agnes is Roig’s modernized
version of Penelope. She waits patiently, confident that her husband will return to
the home which he abandoned to go in search of his political dreams. The final
scene, in which Agnes refused to allow Jordi to return, would be meaningless
had the author not portrayed her as a paragon of patience and conjugal fidelity.
Agnes’ final act of autonomy cures her of what Catherine Bellver terms the
Penelope syndrome: “Like modern day Penelopes, they remain hidden within
their chambers weaving dreams that unravel and busying themselves in the
endless and often self-destructive activities, while [awaiting] the return of some
loving Ulysses” (“Penelope” 113).

As Bellver observes, Roig recasts the ancient figure of Penelope. The

feminist scholarship of Harrison, Keuls, Lerner, and Cantarella, as alluded to by

44

John Winkler in The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender
in Ancient Greece, has changed the perception of vase representations of
ancient Greece. The apotheosis (or glorification) of ancient Greece begun and
perpetuated in the nineteenth century by German scholars (Winckelmann and
Nietzsche, for example) has come under scrutiny. The vase depictions of satyrs
chasing nymphs—applauded by Nietzsche as hedonistic liberation for the
purpose of attacking Christian morality—can now be perceived as a “set of rules
and practices that enforced men’s sexual control over women [. The] ancient
Greek norms have been attacked as politically oppressive, one more chapter in
patriarchy’s ongoing war against women” (Winkler 2).

The phenomenon of the evolution of perception is precisely the substance
of what shall be termed feminist remythification. I will use this neologism to
denote the recreation of a myth without the element of apotheosis. This new term
reduces “Myth” (capitalized)—a lofty tale that explains origins or the
unexplainable and elevates the protagonist to the status of hero while debasing
his opponents to a villainous condition—to “myth” (lower case)——a story which
depicts a world view from which icons and epic heroes are absent and in which
the focus is on relationships among characters, not the characters themselves.
Feminist remythification attempts to capture the essence of human bonds and
embrace intrinsically human traits: love, fear, solitude, the need to feel complete.

Myths are based on archetypes. Feminist archetypal theory, readily
applicable to my theory of feminist remythification, modifies Jung’s original static
view of archetypes. Demaris Wehr argues that,

Jung ontologizes what is more accurately and more usefully seen as

socially constructed reality Thus Jungian theory can function as a

quasi-religious or scientific legitimation of the status quo in society,

reinforcing social roles, constricting growth and limiting options for women.

45

Seen for what they actually describe, however, in other words,

deontologized, Jung’s archetypes can be useful. (”Religious” 23)

Wehr claims that Jung believed archetypes to be prescriptive models of behavior.
It is the role of feminists to modify or respond to the unacceptability of the
models. Wehr, in Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes, “puts in the same
subtitle two usually antithetical ideas—liberation and archetypes. [Wehr chose]
this subtitle to [. .. bring] the light of liberation theory to bear on analytical
psychology, thus ‘Iiberating’ the archetypes from their static and eternal
associations” (xi).

Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht state that the archetype “may
be universal in the sense of being a tendency that is shared by great numbers of
women across time, space and human culture . . . Thus, the resulting images are
transpersonal; that is, they partake of the history of the image as well as the
individual’s subjective experience” (Lauter and Rupprecht 15). Then, what is
Roig’s archetype that repeats itself in every character in every novel? The
answer: the unsatisfied woman who waits, who expects (or has expected at
some point) a relationship to/with a man to fulfill her. This is what Bellver termed
the Penelope Syndrome. We will consider it to be the Penelope archetype.
Fulfillment, for Roig’s characters, stems from a search for self-sufficiency and
authenticity, by default, not subordinating one’s individual needs to another’s.

According to Jungian psychology, the most common archetypal images
are the “shadow, anima, animus, child, trickster, fool, wise old man, wise old
woman and the self. The self is the one archetypal image that specifically
transcends oppositions, uniting them all” (Wehr, Jung 55). Although Jung
adhered to the concept of polarities, that one could not exist without the other,
the self is an archetypal image which does not fit into that scheme. The self is not

the opposite of an antiself; rather, the self is. Feminist thought—i.e. non-dual

46

hierarchical thought—involves the same line of thinking. An entity need not be
polarized to exist. A personality can draw from many oppositional archetypal
images, yet the personality (the self) does not form part of a binary paradigm.
The self simply is. Roig’s mythologically hybrid characters weave elements of
various mythic figures, yet cannot be pigeonholed as whore, good wife, patient
woman, Amazon, because they are complex three-dimensional literary beings
who reflect a holistic feminist philosophy. As Wehr states, “grounded in their
social context, [archetypal] images can be freed from their ontological overtones
and religiously legitimating potential” (Jung 100). Roig’s characters are
“grounded in their social context,” and the Penelope archetype is freed from its
“ontological overtones,” thus demythifying the prescriptive angel del hogar ideal.
Roig liberates the Penelope archetype through a holistic approach which
integrates seemingly antithetical models: Calypso (whore), Penelope (chaste
wife), Circe (sorceress). Annis Pratt states that feminist thinkers
have been wary of either/or reasoning, positing instead a both/and mode
which comprehends phenomena holistically . . . The separation of
knowledge into discrete fields walled off from each other so that
interchange is discouraged has been an unfortunate intellectual
development in recent years. A delight in leaping from one field to another,
circling each one to gather the best fleece and then spinning out and
interweaving our gatherings into an interdisciplinary fabric, has been one
of the characteristics of women’s studies scholarship. (“Spinning” 94)
Pratt applied this spinning metaphor to the methodology of academic feminist
thinkers; but this methodology and result run parallel in women’s literature as
well. Roig clearly weaves a complex tapestry of characters. One character might
share traits of Penelope, Calypso, and an Amazon. This approach runs counter

to—yet is not the antithesis of—dual, hierarchical opposition. Pratt’s concept of

47

“Spinning Among Fields” discards compartmentalizing, judgmental rubrics,
requiring instead an analytic mentality not based on a priori assumptions. In other
words, a phallogocentric thinker can perceive the world only in hierarchical,
binary oppositions. Non-dualistic reality does not make sense to this thinker or is
perceived as non-existent. Pratt’s feminist approach does not expect thinkers to
view the world through a previously forged template, forcing all experience into
preexisting categories. “Spinning Among Fields” demands that each experience
and subject be regarded as fresh and requires powers of analysis—drawing on
many fields of knowledge—to determine exactly what is at hand.

This eclectic, feminist approach to knowledge and life experience is what
Roig’s gallery of female characters leads the reader to ponder. These characters
cannot be labeled or compartmentalized into preexisting categories, for they are
whole, complex characters who break away from stereotypes. In so doing, Roig’s
characters come up against patriarchy, patriarchal expectations of them, and the
dichotomic view of women.

The main patriarchal expectation of woman is that she leave her
parental/paternal home for the spousal home in which she will perform her duties
as wife, mother, and housekeeper. To inculcate the desire to follow this lifestyle,
society has idealized marriage as a storybook “happily ever after” ending. The
angel del hogar19 of the turn of the century—best exemplified by Mundeta I from
Ramona, adéu—is a recasting of the Penelope archetype, the devout and faithful

wife who has been applauded for her chastity, patience, and persistence. The

 

‘9 As stated in the theoretical and historical chapter, angel del hogar is the

equivalent of the “angel of the hearth.”

48

textual examples below follow the pattern of expectations of female conduct,
idealization, and disillusionment. Thus, Mundeta Ill expresses her grandmother’s
hopes for the ideal woman, which she rejects:
Has de seure amb les cames tancades i les puntes dels peus cap
endintre. . . . Saluda els coneguts amb elegancia, els somrius si s’acosten
pero no parlis massa, no riguis si no ve a tomb, t’has de mantenir distant.
No cal que exageris: una senyoreta s’ha de fer valer sense que ningu no
sospiti quines son les seves intencions. T’has de mostrar reservada.
(Ramona, adéu 121)
(You must sit with your legs together and your feet pointed inward . . .
Greet acquaintances with elegance, smile at them if they approach but
don’t talk too much, don’t laugh if it is uncalled for, you must keep your
distance. You shouldn’t exaggerate: a young lady brings attention to
herself without allowing anyone to know her intentions. You must appear
reserved).
Similarly, Mundeta II is indoctrinated with the rules of female conduct
during the afternoon men'endas:
Per a la Patricia 0 tieta Sixta, els amors apassionats no porten més que
desgracies, maldecaps, l’una repetia que més valia quedar—se per vestir
sants y no haver de fer un mal casement, I’altra que no n'hi havia prou
d’haver ballat un dia per saber el numero que l'home calca. Recitaven
passatges sencers de La perfecta casada, eI recuerdo para la novia, la

atencién para la esposa. Pueden sacarse del Iibro provechosas

49

enser‘ianzas, sobre todo para devolver a la mujer el puesto que Ie
corresponde de dentro [sic] del hogar. (Ramona, adéu 63)20
(For Patricia and Aunt Sixta, passionate loves brought nothing but
misfortunes, head aches; one repeated that you would be better off being
an old maid than having to marry badly, while the other one said that you
only had to dance with a man one day to know what size shoes he wore.
They used to recite entire passages from La perfecta casada,
remembrance for the betrothed, attention for the wife. Useful teachings
can be drawn from the book, especially to retum women to the place
where they belong: in the home).
The expression which could aptly be applied to Penelope is that of “més valia
quedar-se per vestir sants”2‘; Penelope “vestia sants”, believing herself possibly
widowed and, hence, not desiring marriage with one of the suitors. This idiomatic
expression directly refers to chastity, which can be viewed as the apotheosis of
sexual repression.
Like her daughter who intended to follow the teachings of San Juan de la
Cruz, Mundeta I also emulates Catholic figures, fantasizing about martyrdom

and, perhaps, mysticism: “Em veig a les catacumbes, preparant-me per al

 

2° The information which refers to Fray Luis de Leon’s La perfecta casada
is in Castilian in Roig’s original and is faithfully transcribed in the quote.

2‘ The idiomatic expression ”quedar-se per vestir sants” translates literally
as “to remain to dress saints,” yet signifies that a woman bears the stigma of
spinsterhood. Natalia’s aunts, though, convey that a woman might be better off

unmarried.

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martiri, entre les planys dels primers cristians . . . [J]o voldria ésser un angel
sense cos, pura com una congesta, blanca com els dos amorets de marbre”
(Ramona, adéu 71) (I see myself in the catacombs, preparing myself for
martyrdom, among the laments of the first Christians . . . I wanted to be an angel
without body, as pure as a snowbank, white like the two marble Cupids). This
example shows how unfulfilled intimacy needs find an outlet in fervent religious
expression.

Through Mundeta I’s writings and reflections in her diary as a newly-wed
in 1894, we come to see the idealization of marriage and subsequent
disillusionment which result from the dichotomic view of women. As a wife, she is
an angel of the hearth, the muse of her husband’s poetry: “M’he convertit, sense
adonar—me’n, en el ‘goig’, ’l’alegria’, Ia ‘reina’ d’en Francisco Ventura. I la sang
se’m regira quan algu m’anomena Ia ‘senyora Ventura’” (Ramona, adéu 43) (I
have become, without realizing it, the ’happiness,‘ the ‘joy,’ the ‘queen’ of
Francisco Ventura. And my heart soars when someone calls me ‘Mrs. Ventura’).
The term “Ventura” proves ironic given the fact that it signifies good fortune and
happiness, yet Mundeta’s marriage to Francisco has denied her any possibility of
personal fulfillment. Mundeta I continues:

No hi ha dia que no em trobi entre els plecs de la meva roba, al costat

dels coberts de plata, entre els sabons de perfum parisenc, una mostra

poetica del seu amor. Les seves tendreses em fan bategar el cor de

pressa i somio en escenes interrninables de passio, d’amor, de felicitat . . .

l em ve el pressentiment que una epoca bona de la meva vida se n’ha

anat. (Ramona, adéu 43)

(Not a day passes that I do not find in the folds of my clothes, next to the

silverware, among the perfumed Parisian soaps, poetic evidence of his

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love. His tokens of affection make my heart beat more quickly . . . and I
am filled with the premonition that a good period of my life is gone)
It begins to dawn on Mundeta I that she has become one more lovely object in
Francisco’s home. Francisco places emphasis on the esthetic, on superficiality.
His wife is just one more fine object with which he surrounds himself. The poetry
which he writes is part and parcel of his obsession with beauty. He also collects
butterflies. His penchant for fastidious detail with his butterfly collection also
manifests itself with his wife. As a collector of fine things—be they his dead
butterflies or his wife—he exerts power and dominion over them through the act
of naming. Upon naming the objects which surround him, he brands them as his
possessions which exist solely for his pleasure. Mundeta describes his butterfly
collection which is indirectly quite revealing of his attitude toward her:
Papallones de tota mida, menudes com una ungla i grosses com un
canell. Estan fermades amb agulletes de plata i amb el cap de perla.
Tenen les ales esteses. Cadascuna hi porta un nom, a sota, escrit en
Iletra anglesa, recargolada i am tinta xinesa de color vennell. Primer hi ha
el nom en llati i, al costat, un adjectiu, como ‘adorada’, ‘reina’, ‘alegria’,
‘criatura’, ‘amor’, ‘florecita’. Es estrany, pero en Francisco quan em fa
magarrufes i em busca el cos, em crida amb aquests motius (Ramona,
adéu 80).
(Butterflies of all sizes, as small as a finger nail and as large as a wrist.
They are impaled on silver pins with pearl heads. Their wings are
outstretched. Each one has its name below, written in English calligraphy,
with curly letters and in red Chinese ink. First, there is the name in Latin
and, next to it, an adjective, such as ’adored,’ ’queen,’ ‘joy,’ ‘Iittle one,’
‘love,’ “little flower.’ It’s strange, but when Francisco pampers me and

explores my body, he calls me by these names.)

52

This episode shows that for Francisco Ventura, Mundeta is not a being with
thoughts and dreams; she is but a lovely thing that pleases him.

Victor, 3 young student in love with Mundeta I, also transcribes his love for
her. But, again, she is but a muse and not regarded as a real being: “Voste,
Ramona, s’ha convertit en la certesa de I’ldeal, en la dona del Somni que porto
arrelat dintre meu. l com Ia podré abastar?, si tota voste se m’escapa, fugissera
enemiga, i as tan lluny de la meva pobra realitat d’home inexpert” (Ramona,
adéu 117) (You, Ramona, have become the certainty of an Ideal, the woman of
my Dreams that is rooted inside of me. How can I reach you, my fleeing enemy, if
all of you escapes me? You are so far from an inexpert man’s poor reality). Both
Francisco and Victor utilize the name “Ramona” in their poetry and love letters.
This term communicates a sense of formality; it captures the concept of the ideal
woman or ideal love (not real love or a real woman)—Iike Petrarch’s Laura; but
the real woman “Mundeta” is a more mundane, real figure than the beloved
“enemiga fugissera.” Upon close scrutiny, one observes that the term “enemiga”
was used frequently in the love sonnets of Petrarchan influence popularized
during the Spanish Renaissance. By having Francisco and Victor choose the
term “Ramona,” Roig alludes to an era of the idealization of femininity, of male
fantasy, which blatantly disregarded the reality of femaleness. The formal name
Ramona is the feminine version of Ramon, which if spelled in lower case
(“ramon”) signifies a cut or trimmed branch. This meaning proves revealing and
ironic. Victor and Francisco, by making Mundeta the object of their poetry, stymie
her possibilities for growth as a complex individual. Had they humanized her after
deifying her, she would have fallen from her pedestal of virtue. Her internalization
of their praise, encouraged her to continue allowing them to make of her a blank
screen (a person without a sense of individuality) onto which they projected their

unrealistic perceptions. By contrast, diminutives (such as Mundeta) are not used

53

in poetry. Poetry idealizes and makes its subject larger than life, distancing the
subject (the beloved) from the poet (the lover). In contrast to poetic terms,
diminutives familiarize, bridging the gap between the lover and the beloved,
revealing a sense of intimacy. Soon Mundeta I comes to realize the conflict
between reality and poetry: “[Francisco] avui m’ha dedicat un altre vers. Pero em
comencen a enfarfegar les seves floretes Iiriques. Hi ha un abisme entre el que
m’escriu i el que em dbna” (Today [Francisco] has dedicated another verse to
me. But his lyric bouquets are beginning to get on my nerves. There is an abyss
between what he writes to me and what he gives me) (Ramona, adéu 51).

Mundeta ll mythifies love, basing her ideas on the relationship between
her parents, which she viewed as perfect on a daily basis. She believed that her
romantic relationship with Ignasi (her lover, whom she did not marry) would be
like that of her parents. The third-person narrator portrays Mundeta’s dreams of
the future: “Campartirien la vida amb valsos i viatges. Ella . . . s’adonniria en aIs
bracos de l’lgnasi mentre la gasa de la finestra s’enlairaria . . . l tot de criatures
els voltarien, plens de felicitat, d’alegria . . . Intenta de recordar la imatge del seu
pare. l només veia Ia quotidiane'itat d’un home vell i trist” (Ramona, adéu 129-30)
(They would share a life of waltzes and travels. She . . . would fall asleep in
lgnasi’s arms while the sheer curtains billowed . . . They would be surrounded by
little ones, filled with happiness, joy . . . She tried to recall the image of her father.
She could only see the ordinariness of a sad, old man). Mundeta ll cannot seem
to integrate her idealized expectation and the disappointing reality.

Mundeta l reflects on the banality of her marital role:

No m’agraden les feines de la casa . . . No sé com collocar els mobles i

els quadres i em passo el dia canviant-los de lloc i de cambra. Tampoc no

em puc fiar de les revistes perqué m'arriben amb retard. Tot seria diferent

54

si visquéssim a Barcelona, pero aqui encofurnada en aquest cau de

xafarderia i de vulgaritat!

Pero jo, que no surto mai de casa . . . Dilluns, bugada, dimarts
rebre visites i escriure cartes, dijours, escudella i cam d’olla, dissabte,
neteja a fons, i, els dies que resten, treure la pols. (Ramona adéu 49 -50)
(I do not like house work . . . I do not know how to arrange the furniture
nor the paintings. I spend all day changing them from location and room. I
cannot trust the magazines because they arrive late. Everything would be
different if we lived in Barcelona, but here, pent up in this pit of gossip and
vulgarity!

But I never leave the house . . . Monday doing laundry, Tuesday
receiving visitors and writing letters, Thursday escudella i cam d’olla,
Saturday doing a serious cleaning, and the other days, dusting.

Roig clearly documents the daily boredom of an angel del hogar.

Mundeta Ill characterizes her mother, Mundeta II, who was a housewife
during Francoism: “vivia d'habitud aclaparada per la presencia del marit”
(Ramona, adéu 125) (she tended to live crushed by the presence of her
husband); “Quan la Mundeta [III] va créixer s’adona que la seva mare era un
animalet indefense i trencadis” (Ramona, adéu 124) (When Mundeta grew up
she realized that her mother was a defenseless, broken little animal). This
description of a housewife could be applied to several of Roig’s characters.
Characters like Silvia, from El temps de les cireres, Agnes, from L’hora violeta,
and Patricia, who appears in all three works, live subjugated to the will of others,
blurring all limits between themselves and others because their identity is
vicarious. This is the reality of the reincarnation of Penelope as the angel del

hogan

55

Natalia’s aunt Patricia married Esteve, a poor poet who set out to marry
the wealthiest woman he could. Once they were married, their sex life can only
be described as rape (Tiempo 77). Patricia is further victimized by her father
who, once he thought her barren, disinherited her. Before dying, he repented and
left her some land. Esteve, who never worked or had any money of his own, sold
Patricia’s inheritance, Ia masia de Gualba. Patricia was forced to pawn
everything she owned to be able to live because Esteve refused to work.
Furthermore, one day Patricia came upon Esteve and his male lover Goncal in a
compromising position. Patricia never complained once about her marriage; but
when Esteve died and was buried, Patricia returned home, took out a glass and
proceeded to drink champagne. Although she never protested when her cruel,
selfish husband was alive, she silently celebrated his demise. The following
passage reveals Natalia's view of her aunt’s transformation: “La Natalia quan
anava a veure la seva padrina s’avorria molt, car la Patricia sempre feia el posat
de victima . . . [Vivia] reclosa en un petit mr'Jn fet de Ilagrimes i de penes. l are se
la trobava amb els cabells tenyits, les ungles pintades i parlant pels descosits. La
tia Patricia havia canviat” (Temps 28) (When Natalia used to visit her godmother
she got very bored, because Patricia always acted as a victim. . . She lived
secluded in a small world made of tears and sorrows. And now she dyes her hair,
paints her nails and speaks freely. Patricia has changed).

Silvia is another character who allows herself to be guided by her
expectations of female conduct and loses her sense of self in the process. When
Silvia Claret met her husband Lluis she viewed their meeting as that between
Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the and (Tiempo 44). Here we see
the precrafted Hollywood lens which Silvia superimposes onto her life. She
renounced her own life to marry Lluis, Natalia’s selfish and demanding brother.

Lluis proposed: “si et cases amb mi . . . has de deixar eI ball: ella el deixa i aixo

56

que en Magrinya Ii havia dit que aviat seria solista del cos de dansa del Liceu . . .
’Ballar havia estat mitja vida fins que no vaig coneixer en Lluis’” (Temps 28) (if
you marry me . . . you will have to give up dancing: she gave it up even though
Magrinya had told her that soon she would be the soloist of the high school
dance troupe . . . Dancing had been half her life before meeting Lluis) (Temps
41).

These Penelope figures are oppressed by their internalization of “family
values,” but an instrumental part of this oppression is sexual repression. Juliet
Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism paraphrases Wilhelm Reich, dissenter
and critic of Freudian thought: “The family, the agent of sexual repression, is the
authoritarian state in miniature” (210). Mitchell further paraphrases Reich:

Patriarchy deprives women and children and adolescents of sexual

freedom, makes sexuality into a commodity and subordinates sexual

interests to economic ones. . . And fascism plays on this situation,
encouraging its practice while proposing to emulate a Platonic
homosexual state; women are needed for reproduction for the militaristic
build-up, hence the concept of ‘pure’ motherhood and further refusal of
female sexual expression. Hitler offered men the full dependence of

women: he returned the wife to the home. (212)

The Franco regime, as well, returned Spanish women to the home and forced
them to depend fully on men.

Mitchell analyzes Freud and Reich’s psychological theories in relation to
feminism. Reich critiques Freud’s psychoanalysis as rooted solely in patriarchy
and capitalism, viewing psychology through a Marxist lens, as Mitchell has
indicated. Applying Mitchell’s progressive analysis of Freud and Reich's theories
to Roig’s work, it seems beneficial to look at Natalia’s sexuality and her

relationships to patriarchal and non-patriarchal figures. Natalia dated Emilio, a

57

communist (non-patriarchal, not sexually repressed, not a paterfamilias) while
she rebelled against her own father (the patriarch), refusing to care for her ill
mother and be chaste. Upon becoming pregnant and having an abortion, Natalia
left Spain (ruled by Franco—supreme patriarch) to live in England (ruled in a
titular sense by Queen Elizabeth). Also, Natalia felt the opprobrium of her brother
when he Ieamed of her abortion. Scrutinizing Natalia's sexuality in light of her
relationships with patriarchal and non-patriarchal men, the reader sees that her
sexual expression, abortion, and move to another country to earn a living
economically liberate her from dependency on a man and spur on self-sufficiency
and a sense of autonomy.

Nonetheless, although Natalia was sexually expressive, she was sexually
ignorant; such ignorance is an element of repression. Chastity is part and parcel
of el ideal femenino; sexual relations are reserved for marriage and,
consequently, procreation. Closely linked to patriarchal politics, sexual ignorance
is a trait common to many of Roig’s characters. When Natalia Ieamed that she
was pregnant after having broken off with Emilio, she went to a gynecologist for
the first time in her life, accompanied by her friend Blanca. The doctor spoke to
the young women about contraceptive methods, but they had no idea that such
things existed. This is a clear example of ignorance propagated by Francoist
ideology to keep women chaste and reliant on men. To add insult to injury, not
only was Natalia pregnant, but Emilio had given her “tricomonas,” a fungal
infection.

The gynecologist considered himself progressive and felt it his duty to
change the Spanish mentality in terms of sexuality. As the following quote
reveals, the obsession with virginity and sexual ignorance are at the root of what
the physician believes to be the problem. The doctor informs Natalia and Blanca

thus:

58

ja ens arriben els diafragmes d’America i d’Anglaterra . .. i jo els puc
aconseguir. Jo tinc una amiga, va dir la Blanca, que es va quedar
prenyada amb el diafragma. El ginecbleg li Ilenca una mirada displicient,
estic segur, va fer, que la teva amiga no tenia ni idea de com se l’havia de
posar. Mireu, continua, aquest pals no anira mai bé. Sabeu que falta?
Donc, maduresa. La gent s’entossudeix a ser beneita, sobretot les dones.
Ara mateix, ha entrat una senyora—carregada de duros—amb Ia seva
filla. Doncs be: a ella, a la noia, I’he haguda d’explorar pel darrera per a
far veure que era verge. Ha estat cardant com una desesperada per
aquests mons de déu pero ara . . . es casa amb un industiral que té vint
anys més que ella. A la seva mare, le agafaria un atac si sabés que la
‘nena’ no és verge. l suposo que l’industrial també tindra un bon esglai
quan se n’adoni. (Temps 131)

(Now we can get diaphragms from America and England . . . and I can get
them. I have a friend, said Blanca, who got pregnant with the diaphragm.
The gynecologist gave her a disgusted look, I am sure, he said, that your
friend didn’t have the faintest idea how to use it. Look, he continued,
things are never going to go right in this country. Do you know what’s
missing? Well, maturity. People are set on being stupid, especially
women. Just now a woman—rolling in dough—came in with her daughter.
And so, the girl, I had to examine her from behind to pretend she was a
virgin. She’s been fucking like crazy, but now she’s marrying a
businessman who’s twenty years older than she is. Her mother would
have a fit if she knew that her ‘Iittle girl’ wasn’t a virgin and I suppose that

the businessman will also be unpleasantly surprised when he finds out.)

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As we have seen, four people partake of this “virginifying” farce: the gynecologist
and the “nena” who deceive, and the mother and the businessman who prefer to
be deceived rather than to accept reality.

After the visit with the gynecologist, Natalia went in search of someone to
perform the abortion. Abortion, of course, was considered a subversive and
criminal act during Franco’s rule. Abortions were performed clandestinely and
with great discretion. Natalia spoke to an informative gentleman in a bar who
cautioned her: “Vosaltres, les senyoretes decents, voleu que us ajudem, no? I,
despres, quien te ha visto no me acuerdo ” (Temps 135) (You decent young
ladies want us to help you, right? Afterwards, I never saw you before). From a
prostitute, she obtained the address of the location where the abortion could be
performed. A man—it is unknown if he is a doctor or not—performed the d & c
without anesthesia, and charged Natalia 4,000 ptas. (Tiempo 142). Upon going
home, Natalia had a high fever. When rushed to the gynecologist, he stated
“aquest bestia s’ha deixat la meitat adins” (Temps 137) (That butcher left half of it
in you).

The next example of sexual repression, involving Silvia and Lluis, is
riddled with hypocrisy, selfishness, and cruelty. After seeing The Last Tango in
Paris, Silvia reveals to her sister-in-law Natalia her method of birth control: anal
sexual intercourse. As decided by her husband Lluis, Silvia has only been having
anal sex for years so as not to conceive. In other words, Lluis uses his wife to
satisfy himself sexually without even thinking of her sexual needs. When Silvia
saw EI Ultimo tango, the “scene from behind” disgusted her.

In light of Lluis’ reaction to Natalia’s abortion, Lluis becomes more
repugnant. When she was in the clinic recovering, he stated to his sister “si vols
cardar, fes-ho, pero pensa les coses abans i usa el cervell” (Temps 9) (if you

want to fuck, then do it, but think first and use your head). This scene juxtaposes

60

Lluis to Natalia. He tells her to be sexually active only if she uses her head
because she had been sexually active, but had not given any thought to the
consequences. On the other hand, Lluis “uses his head” by sodomizing his wife
as a means of birth control.

The last two examples of sexual repression and ignorance involve
Mundeta I who, when she miscarried in 1898, writes in her diary that a great
sadness overcame her because she thought that children were born from the
navel; but instead they come from “below” (Ramona, adios 13). Not only is
repression linked to ignorance, but also to guilt. In 1901, Mundeta I was attacked,
perhaps raped, by a man on the street. She almost had a nervous breakdown
and dreamt about “[un monstre] vermellos, enonne, que duia pits i banyes i que
tenia cara de dona i de dimoni, aixi, tot berrejat. I els udols [sinistres] omplien la
cambra . . . [Els ulls del monstre] eren els ulls de I’ombra, ulls sortits, al costat
dels narius, esgratinyats y sangonosos. l les imatges dels meus morts, els
papas, el iaio, em cridaven que era una addltera” (Ramona, adéu 142) (a red,
enormous monster, that had breasts and horns and the face of a woman and of a
demon, mixed together. The sinister howls filled the room . . . The eyes of the
monster were shadowy, bulging eyes, right next to its nose, scratched and blood-
shot. The images of my dead ancestors, my parents, my grandfather, screamed
at me, calling me an adulteress). Mundeta has done nothing to warrant guilt, but,
as the diabolical female monster indicates, this sense of culpability stems from
Catholicism and misogyny. Mundeta has internalized these beliefs and castigates

herself for being the victim of sexual violence.

61

The internalization of misogyny has a possible psychoanalytic”
explanation rooted in pre-Oedipality. Mitchell manages to look at the main
psychological schools of thought since the inception of psychoanalysis in order to
extricate from them theories applicable to women. Mitchell states that,

It is no coincidence that psychoanalytic theory is . . . less adequate on

femininity and psychosis than it is on masculinity and neurosis. The

Oedipus complex is familiar territory compared with the shadowy realms of

pre-Oedipality which psychoses and femininity ‘inhabit.’ Freud considered

that after the trials and tribulations of self-discovery in the pre-Oedipal
period (recognition of ‘castration', for instance), the girl took rest in the

Oedipus complex. Her love for her father, so difficult to achieve, did not

have to be so thoroughly abandoned as did the little boy’s more culturally

disruptive love for his mother. Although it must never be seen as reducible
to this, on the level of present day social reality, the psychic resting in the

Oedipus complex would be expressed as remaining in the family—

something in our culture that women are certainly supposed to do. Laing’s

descriptions show us forcefully the difficulty the girl will encounter when

 

22 We take psychoanalysis to mean Freud’s school of thought or as
Mitchell paraphrases Freud: “it is a procedure for the investigation of mental
processes inaccessible in any other way (in other words, unconscious ones), a
method of treatment of neurotic disorders based on this, and a collection of
psychological information obtained there from which is gradually becoming a new

science” (Psychoanalysis 340-41).

62

she must leave the family. Likewise, because she did not have to shatter
the Oedipus complex so completely, Freud believed that the
internalization of the authority-figure (at whose threatening behest the boy
abandoned his incestuous desires) is much less effective. The girl having
thus a weaker superego remains more subject to the reprimands and the
love offered by external people—her parents. (Psychoanalysis 286)
Mitchell further that
[w]here the non-psychotic woman can rest in her family, as in her Oedipus
complex, or in other words can leave her childhood home to make another
family, the psychotic woman can neither leave nor stay. ‘Normal’ femininity
enables the transference of Oedipal father-love to husband-love; for this
woman, the ’family of origins’ neatly gives way to the ‘family of orientation’
and as the daughter becomes a mother, her ties with her own mother,
whose image she confirms, are usually strengthened.
(Psychoanalysis 288)
Of course, the Oedipus complex is a theory deeply rooted in patriarchy. Any
woman who does not want a husband and family, according to this theory, is not
“normal” and is, therefore, psychotic. Natalia’s “psychosis,” then, manifests itself
in her rejection of motherhood (the abortion), leaving her father’s home, and
abandoning Francoist Spain for twelve years. In a non-Freudian light, Natalia
appears fairly well-adjusted in not compromising her needs as an individual. By
contrast, Agnes, who, according to the Freudian school of thought, “rests” in her
Oedipus complex and “rests” in her “family of orientation” is “normal”. But, again,
in a non-patriarchal, non-Freudian light, Agnes is not well-adjusted—at least, not
until the conclusion of L’hora violeta. The ties with her mother (kneeling and
screaming while being abandoned by her husband, fixed in Agnés’s mind) are

quite strong while she clings to the hope of reestablishing her role as angel of

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Jordi’s hearth. As soon as she overcomes this patriarchal-Oedipal fantasy, she
moves on and, subsequently, exorcises the image of her abandoned mother, an
image which she had been emulating and would have continued to emulate ad
infinitum.

Throughout Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell summarizes and
analyzes psychoanalytic thought, first Freud’s theories, then Reich’s
interpretation (or misinterpretation), then Laing’s (also misunderstandings), only
to apply these summaries and analyses to the references to psychoanalysis in
feminist texts (Beauvoir, Frieden, Figes). The result is to vehemently criticize
feminist allusion to and denunciation of Freudian theories. The feminists, as a
whole, deem the Oedipus complex misogynistic. women, according to
psychoanalytic thought, never fully overcome the Oedipus complex as do men,
because women have weaker superegos and cannot sever themselves entirely
from the parental home. If they do, they are not “normal”; instead, they are
considered psychotic. Mitchell views the feminist denunciation of the Oedipal
theory (for being inherently misogynistic) as unequivocally wrong. Rather,
Mitchell upholds the greater portion of Freud’s thought as universal truths which
apply to all human beings throughout all times.

Mitchell has fallen into the patriarchal trap by upholding the notion that any
woman who does not want to abide by the law of the father is not quite right. The
Oedipal theory presupposes female inferiority, that a woman is incompetent and
should not desire to succeed outside the home. Although I agree with some of
Mitchell’s observations, the thesis of her text—which I consider to be an
apotheosis of Freud and a discrediting of any and all who wish to challenge his
findings—is an acceptance of the concept of female inferiority and an assertion
that women who reject “their inferiority” are not psychologically sound. Of course,

Mitchell claims that she does not believe in biological determinism, even though

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she proposes the notion that a normal (non-psychotic) woman should stay in the
home as a universalism. Mitchell does go on to claim that Freud, in his theories
on femininity, was describing, not prescribing, womanhood (Psychoanalysis 335).

Oedipal theory is clearly misogynistic, but it aptly explains the
internalization of misogyny. The Oedipus complex is the result of patriarchy.
Women learn to hate themselves and other women because they have no power.
In Freudian terms, when a woman sees that she is castrated (lacking a penis)
she disassociates herself from the mother, who is also castrated, and sides with
the powerful father. A woman, then, suffers penis envy, i.e., the desire to have
some control in her life. Penis envy is resolved when she has vicarious power by
competing with men, marrying a man or having a male child. Women who
internalize patriarchal ideals (like some of Roig’s characters: Silvia, Agnes,
Agnes’ mother, Mundeta l, Mundeta II, Patricia) aptly conform to Freud’s theories
on Oedipality because the Oedipus complex is deeply rooted in the context of
patriarchy.

Key to the Oedipus complex are the mother figure and a child’s
association or dissociation from her. But let us look at the mother from a different
perspective. In “Visual Images by Women: A Test Case for the Theory of
Archetypes,” Estella Lauter states that the mother archetype

is, presumably, nothing more than the tendency to form images in

response to recurrent or shared experiences of mothering or being

mothered. The pattern of [hundreds of visual art] images [analyzed by

Estella Lauter] enriches the human experience of the mother by differing

from previously articulated patterns. In fact, it suggests a whole new line of

historical inquiry into the mother’s own feelings of power and vulnerability.

(59)

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A common trait of mother images analyzed by Lauter is that the figures are all
“nurturant, inspirational, good and also terrible or frightening because of ways
that they are bound . . . or by their role in or relationship to society . . . The sense
of great power or strength without sufficient scope to exercise or realize it is the
dominant impression one gains from seeing the works together” (Lauter 61). The
double-edged sword (power/vulnerability) of motherhood (the mother archetype)
is a reality which nearly all of Roig’s female characters must confront. Agnes in
L’hora appears weak and uncertain; her life has been dedicated to her children
and husband—a world which collapses when Jordi abandons her, leaving her at
her most vulnerable (conjuring up the ever-ready phantom of her pleading,
kneeling mother). Yet, Agnes’ relationship with her children is enviable. The
scenes of her very young son deriving pleasure and reassurance from sucking
briefly at her milkless breasts prove to be sensually gratifying to both the mother
and the child. The breast symbolizes the nurturing and sustenance that a mother
provides, putting her in the intimate sphere, yet leaving her vulnerable to factors
outside of the sphere (for she is absorbed by motherhood). Interestingly enough,
a parallel can be drawn between Agnes’ son sucking at her breast and Agnes’
fellating Jordi. The description of his semen sliding down her throat implies that
she received a distorted simulacrum of nurturing from this act. The fellatio
provided her with a (false) sense of security, in that she believed that a fellated
husband would not abandon his wife. As the plot proves, she had been fooling
herself and regularly partook in a sexual act which brought her no pleasure.
Another character which shares many traits with Agnes is Silvia, Natalia’s
sister-in-law. Silvia is also a mother and a housewife who loves children and
wishes she could have more than her 17-year-old only son, Marius. Her viewing
of the anal penetration in The Last Tango in Paris prompts her to disclose the

fact that her sexual relationship with Lluis, her husband, is doubly repressive: a)

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anal sex impedes her from having another child—in fact, this is their form of birth
control—and b) she derives no physical pleasure from this act. As Lauter states,
the mother archetype represents the delicate relationship between vulnerability
and power, but in Silvia’s case, she has no power, for her husband (with her
complicity, of course) is in control of her ability to conceive and experience
pleasure.

Roig portrays the diverse existences of Penelope types in order to
denounce the internalization of patriarchal ideals. Just as mythic rewriting—that
is, the recovery from the Penelope Syndrome—clearly challenges traditional
patriarchal thought, so does Roig’s narrative technique of polyvocality (the
altmation of different narrative voices). All of Roig’s works are polyvocal, but one
section of L’hora violeta proves most revealing. In the section titled “L’hora
perduda” (L’hora 21-93), Roig intercalates a subjective female narrative voice
with a male implied reader (Jordi) and an objective, third-person, androgynous
narrator to recount the hackneyed tale of Agnes’ abandonment and patience, and
the return of her husband. Polyvocality reinforces the idea of “historical sources”
(conversations, letters, diaries) key to the archeological task of recovering
forgotten or ignored history (Duplaa 111). The female history which Roig
attempts to recover is the loneliness, tedium, and desamor of everyday life, the
forgotten history within “Ia gran Historia” (Duplaa 112). Upon close scrutiny, it can
be seen that Agnés’ figure is recurrent throughout traditional literature. We never
learn her side of the story, just as we never Ieamed Penelope’s. The
juxtaposition of the two narrative voices, as well as that of the two female
characters, highlights the shocking difference between traditional female traits
(patience, assent, acquiescence to a male will, and unhappiness) and the

exploration of new roles for women (a quest for something unknown, rejection of

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traditional roles, the search for matrilinear roots, and the underscoring of
relationships—especially among women).

The juxtaposition of Natalia’s narration with the narration in the third-
person of Agnes’ unhappiness initially revealed the differences between the two.
Natalia is highly independent, whereas Agnes is dependent. Natalia has been
told that she thinks like a man and, in fact, complimented for this alleged trait;
Agnes accepts the traditional female role of wife, mother, and helper in its
entirety. But what soon becomes evident is that both women fall in love with the
same man, Jordi, and look to come to terms with their love for him to be happy.
Each woman wants one thing out of life—to be happy—and yet neither is.
Neither Agnes, who followed the path of tradition, nor Natalia, a self-proclaimed
feminist and a Marxist, could be fulfilled in an amorous relationship.

Polyvocality (the intercalation of different narrative voices) serves as a
weapon against the absolute “truth” which is replaced by personal truth, intimacy,
and personal history (story) which form part of collective history. Through the
polyvocal narrative technique, the author topples Penelope from her pedestal as
paragon of virtue and vindicates figures like Calypso and Circe. Penelope is the
main mythic figure which Roig attempts to eradicate from the female psyche.
Every woman within Western culture has heard the praises of womanly patience
and virtue, which become passivity when compared to male activity. Upon
reading the Odyssey, Natalia narrates: “I a la fi va véncer Penelope . . . [que] era
una dona savia. Aquesta dona constru'ia la gabia més subtil amb el seu teixir i
desteixir al voltant del record de l’home que tomava. Una gabia per a Ulisses,
feta de gemecs, de sospirs, de plors noctums” (L’hora 24) (And Penelope, who
was a wise woman, won in the end . . . Through her weaving and unweaving, this
woman constructed the most subtle cage around the memory of the returning

man. A cage for Ulysses, made of wails, sighs, and nocturnal tears). Ulysses is

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the hero of the myth, of the epic, because he could wage war and govern well.
By default, the female characters are excluded for their inclination toward matters
of human interest: psychology, emotional bonds. In other words, phallocentric
thought has its focus firmly placed on the exceptional deeds of a noteworthy
individual: something almost empirical, easy to (re)count and measure. Roig’s
writing decentralizes the concrete, the absolute and highlights the importance of
human relationships rather than the exceptionality of an individual. Bellver
asserts that “Roig alters the peripheral role of women within the story of male
achievements by making women the central focus of her narrative and the
determinants of genealogy” (Bellver, “Montserrat Roig and the Creation of a
Gynocentric Reality” 220). She constructs women’s history through the
recounting of everyday events and the incorporation of “female” texts: diaries,
notes, monologues. “These nonofficial, nonliterary texts become archaeological
finds that bring to light a neglected culture [and...] give a voice to those who have
been obliged to keep silent” (Bellver, “Gynocentric” 221). Bellver defines the
interest in the everyday life of women as a gynocentric reality: a reality in which
the focus of history is shifted from public to private activities, from history’s
masculine participants to its female players, and which creates a sense of female
identity through repetition and parallelism (Bellver, “Gynocentric” 221). For this
reason, Roig persists in her allusions to Ulysses’ wife and not Ulysses himself:
Penelope sabia que, com més plorava més l’ajudarien els déus. Més
vencia. Tant se valia que s’escolessin els anys tot portant penes i
renuncies. Podien transcérrer els dies immutables, I’un igual a l’altre. Tant
se valia, estimat Jordi. Penelope, que no sabia mirar el mon amb altres
ulls que els d’Ulisses, acabaria per recuperar-lo. Ulisses tenia molta por i,
una vegada apagat el foc intern de la passio, tomaria a Itaca . . . Només a

Itaca trobaria la pau.

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Tu també, oi? (L’hora 25)

(Penelope knew that the more she cried, the more the gods would help

her. More would she conquer. lt mattered not that the passing years took

sorrows and sacrifices with them. The years could go by unchanging, one

the same as the others. It did not matter, dear Jordi. Penelope, who only

knew how to look at the world through Ulysses’ eyes, would get him back

in the end. Ulysses was very fearful and, once the internal fire of passion

had been extinguished, he would return to Ithaca . . . Only in Ithaca would

he find peace.

You, too, right?)

A key element in this passage is “Penelope, who only knew how to regard the
world through Ulysses’ eyes, would get him back in the end.” Penelope had
accepted the phallocentric world view. She played the game by the patriarchal
rules and, according to phallocentrism, had won. She got her man in the end.
But, according to feminist thought, as Roig points out, Penelope’s victory is
pathetic at best. She wasted myriad years of her life. For what purpose? Just to
say that she was not abandoned? Just to be able to boast a stronger resolve
than anyone else? The final query, which concludes the quote, prefigures Jordi’s
ultimate desire: he, too, like Ulysses, will return home to his wife, Agnes.

The following passage reveals both the maternal and cultural heritage that
perpetuates the Penelope ideal: “No, se deia [Agnes], es un engany, no és real,
ell tornara i em dira, Agnes meva, petita, n’estic segur, només t'estima a tu. La
mare Ii advertia, és un bon noi, tornara per que en tu ha trobat el que no trobara
en cap altra dona. Has de tenir paciencia” (L'hora 34) (No, Agnes said to herself,
it’s an illusion, it isn’t real, he’ll come back and he’ll say to me, my Agnes, little
one, I'm sure that I love only you. And her mother counseled, he's a good boy,

he’ll come back because he has found in you what he will not find in any other

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woman. You must be patient). Here we clearly see that Agnes is the new
Penelope: “[Agnés] en seria el redés, l’esperaria. No com ho va fer Ia mare, amb
aquell gemec discontinu i trencat, sino amb paciéncia. Teixiria al seu voltant el
somni de I’espera i estimaria fins 3 morir el simbol de la tornada: el necesser
damunt l’altar de la cambra de bany” (L’hora 53) ([Agnes] would be his refuge,
she would wait for him. Not like her mother did, with that uneven and broken
whimpering, but with patience. She would weave around him the dream of
waiting and would cherish until the end the symbol of his return: the overnight
case on the bathroom altar). Bellver states “[T]he first step toward liberation from
the partiality of tradition and the weight of male domination must be for women to
return to their origins and look at women in their actual everyday reality without
the distortion of idealism” (“Gynocentric” 229). The intercalation of epic passages
about Penelope is a return to origins, to a stereotype and also an archetype
which women are expected to emulate.

Roig forces the reader to face the modernization and internalization of
apparently innocuous, yet truly sinister, mythic figures. The following reveals
Natalia’s interior monologue as she reads the Odyssey on an island of the
Mediterranean:

Miro el mar com si, d’entre les aigiies escumejants, en sortis una nau

blanca que m’anés a cercar. 0 un cavalier damunt d’un cavall blanc . . .

Les escenes de tot [sic] de pel.licules que havia vist retornen ara

concretades en una fin de la Metro Goldwin Mayer: si, vindra un vaixell de

veles tremoloses, una nau que trencara les onades i, a dins, hi sera ell.

(L’hora 223)

(I look at the sea as if, from the sea foam, a white ship were to come forth,

looking for me. Or a knight on a white horse . . . The scenes from so many

movies that I’ve seen come back to me now in the form of a Metro Goldwin

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Mayer ending: yes, a vessel with billowing sails will come, a ship which will

break the waves and, he will be on it)

In this scene we see an implied critique of an ideology commodified by mass
media; it is Natalia’s Hollywoodesque modernization of mythology: the wait
(Penelope’s, Calypso’s, Circe’s) for the beloved Ulysses. She further elaborates
on the modernized myth: “I ens anirem juntsfjuntes fins a la mort. I no hi haura
factures per pagar, ni pixums de criatures per eixugar. Ni plats per rentar. . . Ni
tindré mai més Ia menstruacio, ni ens cauran els pits, ni ens veurem el ventre
flaccid, ple d’escletxes . . . l el somni es fara real” (L’hora 224) (And we will go off
together until death. And there won’t be any bills to pay, or children’s piss to
clean up. Or dishes to wash . . . I’ll never menstruate again, and our breasts
won’t sag, and we won’t see our bellies get flabby, full of stretch marks . . . And
the dream will become real). But this fantasy—rooted in Natalia’s subconscious,
instilled in her and in myriad women for millennia—is highly ironic due to its
juxtaposition with the previous 232 pages, which revealed the true story of
women: disappointment and the fruitless quest for happiness.

The last two pages, which depict a categorical rejection of the Penelope
myth, clearly provide an alternative mythology: they topple the mythical figure of
Penelope. In Roig’s work, the paragon of patience and conjugal fidelity is
debunked, given that the novel concludes with the scene between Jordi and
Agnes. Having waited for him to return to her after so many years, Agnes,
bravely, does not take Jordi back. She no longer wants him to be a part of her
life. In other words, taking him back would have been a capitulation, while the
rejection is the equivalent of independence and the implicit assertion that a
woman is whole without having to be associated with a man. Throughout her
marriage, she had been tormented by the fear of abandonment. She never

wanted to experience the same sense of abandonment that her mother did when

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her father left (La hora 40). To assuage her sense of desperation and combat the

possibility of abandonment, Agnes fellated her husband:
I s’arrapa al cos d’en Jordi com Ia mare s’havia abraonat damunt la porta
del rebedor . . . Jordi i la porta del rebedor es convertien en una sola cosa
i ara recorda la violencia que senti a les mans quan busca el sexe d’en
Jordi per a xuclar-lo fins a l’enteniment. Volgué empassar-se el seu penis,
succionar-lo fins a la darrera gota de liquid, que no en quedés res, com si
d’aguesta manera engolis per sempre la imatge de la mare egenollada
davant de la porta del rebedor. (L’hora 32)
(And she clung to Jordi as her mother had to the front door . . . Jordi and
the front door became one and now she recalls the violence she felt in her
hands when she sought out Jordi’s sex to suck it until understanding
came. She wanted to swallow his penis, suck the last drop of liquid out of
it, as if in this way she banished forever the image of her mother kneeling
before the front door)

Jordi does return to his estranged wife, beseeching her to take him back. In this

final scene, Jordi offers Agnes precisely the outcome she had patiently awaited

for so many years. Yet, she comes to realize that her personal fulfillment does

not entail being Jordi’s subservient and selfless wife. Jordi articulates:
m'ho pensat bé, Agnes, i crec que podriem refer-ho tot una altra vegada. l
I’Agnés tarda a contestar. AI cap d’una estona, només va dir, no . . . I no
sabia dir-Ii per que. No era per I’engany, ni perque havia deixat la carrera
per ell, ni perque Ii deia petitona . . . No era per aquestes coses . . . Era
corn si per fi travessés la porta del rebedor on la seva mare s’havia
arrapat tent aquell plany llarg i discontinu. Havia travessa la port i deia

que no . . . l I’Agnes només va somriure. (L’hora 231-32)

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(l have thought about it, Agnes, and I think we could start over. Agnes
didn’t answer right away. After a while, she only said, no . . . She didn’t
know what reason to give him. It wasn’t because of his cheating, or
because she quit school on account of him, or because he called her little
one . . . It wasn’t because of any of these things . . . It was because, at
last, she’d gone through the door onto which her mother clung, letting out

that long and uneven wail . . . Agnes only smiled)

By ending the novel with Agnes” assertiveness and act of independence,
the author subverts the Penelope archetype’s patience and silence. Penelope,
having waited for countless years, was considered “victorious” when Ulysses
returned home to her. Agnés’ mother indelibly etched in her daughter’s mind a
scene of hysteria and desperation in which, on her knees, she wailed
uncontrollably upon her husband’s leaving. By refusing to accept Jordi into her
life, Agnes, seemingly the weakest of all of Roig’s characters, manages to
exorcise the memory of her mother’s reaction to abandonment and to shatter the
“ideal” model of conjugal conduct that Penelope represents. In the conclusion to
L’hora violeta—that is, Agnes’ autonomy and her recovery from the Penelope
syndrome—Roig categorically rejects phallocentric expectations of female
conduct and calls for a new symbolic order that can provide appropriate female

role models.

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Chapter 3

INTERWOVEN WOMEN:
ADELAIDA GARCIA MORALES’ INTERTEXTUAL TAPESTRY OF PENELOPE
AND THE SIRENS IN EL SILENCIO DE LAS SIRENAS.

Garcia Morales, in her novel El silencio de Ias sirenas, intertextually
weaves the threads of Homer’s Odyssey and Kafka's “The Silence of the
Sirens.”23 Elsa, the protagonist of the tale, is a hybrid cross between a Siren—a
belle dame sans merci—and Penelope—the paragonof patience and conjugal
fidelity. Garcia Morales' text, to be viewed in juxtaposition to Homer and Kafl<a’s,
reevaluates the options available to women and denounces the premise that
these roles will provide happiness. The mythic hybridization presents a female
perspective on the dominant discourse. The juxtaposition of various intertextual
elements questions the phallogocentric dichotomic perception of women and
sheds light both on female experience and on a way of regarding the world “in
feminine.”

Garcia Morales denounces Elsa’s all-consuming obsession for a man
whom she barely knows: Agustin Valdés. The backdrop for the plot is a small sea
town in the Alpujarras nearly entirely populated by “viejas solitarias que

deambulaban por todas partes” (17), who compose a collective of lonely women.

 

23 The author also makes reference to Goethe’s “Afinidades colectivas”
(“Wahlverwandschaften”) which will not be analyzed in this study, given that the

focus is mythological references and not German romanticism.

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Garcia Morales set this neo-mythic tale in a feminine world riddled with
superstition, old wives’ tales and oral tradition. In fact, the narrator Maria comes
to know the protagonist when she participates in a sahumen‘o in which the
presence of three Marias and three Juanes is required. According to Matilde, the
expert in such matters, Elsa suffered from “mal de ojo” and would die; in other
words, the sahumen'o was unsuccessful. As Maria and Elsa become friends, the
reader comes to know (through Maria’s narration, Elsa’s diary, and the dialogue
between the two) the facts leading to Elsa’s obsession for Agustin Valdés, a man
whom she has met on only two occasions and to whom she dedicates sleepless
hours of thought, myriad letters, and countless entries in her diary.

El silencio documents the thinking patterns of women: in the narration of
Maria, in Elsa’s diary, and the traditional thinking of old wives’s tales. By
documenting, in fictional form, these thought processes and practices, Garcia
Morales standardizes and validates what is traditionally considered to be
women’s subculture. The setting of the novel is a primarily female world,
populated by lonely mountain women. Maria’s description of the timelessness of
the mountains, “como un paisaje anterior al tiempo de los hombres” (17),
suggests life before (patriarchal) civilization, before the structuring of society into
a hierarchy of binary oppositions. Clearly, Garcia Morales’ opting for the term
“hombres” commonly refers to human beings, but could also refer to men, not
women. This is striking terminology given that the Alpujarras depicted in the text

is a female world. Men are mentioned only in references to the three Juanes at

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the sahumen'o, Agustin, and the male figures of Elsa’s dreams and hypnotic
sessions.

The expression “anterior al tiempo de los hombres” recalls Eva Keuls’
commentary 0n amazonomachia, a charter myth of ancient Greece, which
establishes and perpetuates misogyny as integral to the collective
Weltanschauung, the vestiges of which persist today. The Amazons, like the
women of the Alpujarras, made their life without men. The Amazons came into
militaristic conflict with Theseus/ Heracles (depending on the adaptation of the
myth) and were defeated by the hero, resulting in one of ancient Greece’s
founding myths. Therefore, “anterior aI tiempo de los hombres” could be
interpreted as the time before women were considered less than men, before
there was an inherent mistrust of them, and before it was inculcated in them that
survival meant dependency on a man.

Keuls states that “Classical Athens is historically related to subsequent
Western culture, and similar enough to illuminate it, but it is also alien enough to
jolt our ordinary sense of reality . . . Classical Athens is a kind of concave mirror
in which we can see our own foibles and institutions magnified and distorted”
(12). Keuls terms ancient Greece a phallocracy: “a society dominated by men
who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in
reproduction, erect monuments to male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their
peers, sponsor public whore houses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in
rampant saber-rattling” (1-2). Phallocracy alludes to male dominance within the

sexual domain, but most importantly “denotes a successful claim by a male elite

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to general power, buttressed by a display of the phallus . . . as a kind of weapon:
a spear or war club, and a scepter of sovereignty”. Phallic rule is at the root of
Western civilization (Keuls 1-2). The strategy of incorporating mythic elements
defamiliarizes the phallocratic vestiges that persist in modern life, shocking the
reader into a state of objectivity where slhe can identify the problems of the
modern world.

Pertinent to one of the origins of misogyny is amazonomachia, the battle
between the Greeks and the Amazons, one of the charter myths of Athens,
ubiquitously depicted throughout ancient Athens in an effigy of a mythological
ancestor stabbing or clubbing an Amazon to death, clearly evincing sexual
antagonism. This mythological “history” intertwines “phallocratic motifs of
slaughter, aggression, and rape with patriotic themes” (Keuls 34). “The Greek
mythological obsession with monstrous women [or uncontrollable women such
as the Amazons] and with gynocracy (literally ‘women’s rule,’ but more
accurately, ‘women getting out of hand’) reflects man’s irrational fear of the
female and his feelings of guilt" (Keuls 66). Evidently, the Athenians “perceived
their wives and daughters as caged animals, temporarily subdued but ready to
strike out if given the slightest chance” (Keuls 321). Similarly, Agustin’s fear is
that Elsa might control him. Further evidence of gynocracy in myth is that “men
who kill are either heroes or the victims of an unkindly destiny, whereas women
who kill are monsters . . . No act of killing on the part of a woman is glorified by
[Greek] myth” (Keuls 323). Therefore, the myth of the Sirens, as that of the

Amazons, serves to mythologize the fear of gynocracy.

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The seeds of misogynistic] gynophobic Western thought can be traced to
Aristotle (the pupil of Plato, who had been the pupil of Socrates). Keuls considers
Socrates “a friend of women” because he “had cordial and respectful dealings
with priestesses and courtesans.” His “adoring disciple Plato developed into the
Western world’s first feminist [. . . advocating] that women be given the same
education as men, and access to all functions and professions” (Keuls 402).
Nonetheless, Plato’s disciple Aristotle was “one of the fiercest misogynists of all
times, obsessed with the need to prove that women play no genetic part in
reproduction. Aristotle’s misogyny was embraced by some of his more influential
students,“ the most renown being Alexander III (the Great), whose excavated
artifacts reveal motifs of “phallic nature”: “spearing, slashing, and clubbing to
death of defenseless animals was a favorite, although a scene of Amazon
slaughter has also been found” (Keuls 407). Given that amazonomachia is a
charter myth, it reflects the collective psychology, (believed) origins, and
worldview of a determined society. As Keuls has argued throughout The Reign of
the Phallus, in the case of the Ancient Greece, the hegemony created and
perpetuated its identity in male supremacy via violence against women,
gynocide, and the fear of gynocracy or female insurrection.

This gynophobia led to the notion of a split in the female psyche in which
women were deemed either whores or mother types. Before delineating the
Penelope-Siren dichotomy, let us turn to the misogynistic worldview that created

it and its manifestations in reality. In ancient Greek mythology, female functions

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were parceled out to various divinities. Most goddesses were desexualized,
except Aphrodite.

Thus these roles became distinct, as if they were incompatible within the

same person. Hera, Zeus’ sister and official consort, had her maternal role

undercut. . ., Demeter was all mother, but no longer wife. . .; Athena was
the man-goddess, sexless in birth and in life, wearing the Gorgon’s head,
the symbolic vagina dentata, on her breast. Artemis was also a virgin, and
at the same time the goddess of childbirth, thus propagating the notion
that mothers should be chaste. . .Through the cults of these various
goddesses, fragmentation was perpetuated. In contrast, male divinities
combined features of the father, the husband, and the lover. . . in one

personality. (205-06)

By fusing faithfulness, chastity, patience, and sexual/ romantic yearning evident
in the Sirens and Penelope, Garcia Morales integrates these mythological
characters into a complete female figure, a status which was the privilege of
mythical gods but not of the goddesses. Elsa, unlike her female mythic
predecessors, is whole.

In The Reign of the Phallus, Keuls goes to great lengths to depict the life
of Athenian women and reduces femaleness to three main categories: the wife,
the prostitute, and the concubine (who shared characteristics of the wife and the
prostitute). Keuls studies the funeral art of married women, whose life was far
from romantic or romanticized. The average marrying age of women was 14 or

15, while the mean age for a man was 30. Many women, in part because of the

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complications of early motherhood, died in childbirth. This fact is depicted on
funerary art. Married women were sequestered in women’s quarters of the home
(gykaikonitis, the section of the house most removed from the street or the
entrance from the street). Keuls masterfully studies architectural drawings of
ancient Greece, noting that women’s quarters were in the most central, secluded
section of the home, farthest from the outside world. The wife’s contact with the
husband was minimal, as indicated by the existence of a law stating that a
husband should copulate with his wife at least three times a month. The mere
existence of the law suggests that wives were neglected sexually even though a
wife’s sole purpose was to procreate. Keuls likens wives to slaves, denoting them
as “living property.”

The life of a prostitute, as depicted in the art analyzed by Keuls, was also
far from enviable. The prostitute was subjected, during symposia—drunken
parties in men’s quarters (andronitis)—to the sexual appetites of her clients
(fellatio, anal sex, dorsal penetration) and, oftentimes, violence. These hetaera
(prostitutes) entertained during the symposia both with sexual favors and musical
performances. The lower-end prostitutes were given the term “ground pounders”
for being reduced to nothing more than an orifice for male sexual release, an act
that took place on dirt beds or floors.

The actual life of prostitutes and wives can be mythified by the Penelope
and Siren archetypes. Penelope epitomizes patience, fidelity and, one might add,
neglect. She held the honorable status of wife but was, like Athenian wives, in

essence, living property. The prostitutes, like the Sirens, became the projection

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of sexual desire and fear/anger. The sexual acts of fellatio, anal sex, and dorsal
penetration, represented on kylixes (symposium cups or drinking bowls), portray
the humiliation and degradation of the prostitutes and the clear demarcation of
male supremacy. As Keuls affirms, the Athenian phallocracy feared a gynocracy
or female uprising. In other words, male anger was directed at the female
population to maintain the phallocracy. The feminization/ sexualization of the life-
threatening maritime force (the Sirens) reflects the desire to perpetuate
masculine power.

In classical Athens, there was a rift between the “notions of sex for
procreation and sex for pleasure and release.” The sexual conduct of married
women is limited, while that of the remaining female population exists in great
abundance, representing the “two antipodes of the feminine character . . . the
natural born mothers and the natural born whores. Note must be made that the
male population outnumbered the female due to the high mortality rate from
childbirth and the result of female infanticide” (Keuls 204-05).

Ideology, Weltanschauung, or symbolic order (or whatever label is placed
on the phenomenon) is an intangible that controls the behavior and expectations
of individuals and society] societies as a whole. The splitting of the female
psyche and resulting mysogynistic reality reflect an ideology which has done its
best to cripple women and to exclude them from power—including power over
their own lives.

As Keuls has elucidated, in ancient thought—whose vestiges survive

today—female existence was clearly polarized, as was that of Penelope and the

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Sirens. Reprising the Homeric theme, Elsa, like a Siren, attempts to allure her
belovedubut in her case, it is to love him, not to destroy him. Elsa also waits
patiently and indefinitely, as does Penelope, living with no other thought than the
hope that her lover would come to her. If Elsa is a neo-Siren, Agustin is a
Ulysses type, capable of “hearing" her seductive pleas, yet incapable of acting,
for the traditional hero was tied to the mast of his ship and, thus, guarded himself
against the melodic charms of the Sirens. Garcia Morales studies mythic
elements to denounce how, on internalizing the phallocentric worldview, a female
figure readily mythifies a lover.

The mythic recasting of Penelope and the Sirens occurs with Elsa, the
protagonist, in whose voice is placed the counterepic of these two secondary
figures in order to shatter the Ave-Eva dichotomy.“ Ulysses’ heroic feats
compose the epic poem The Odyssey, but the supplementary counterpart is
composed of the story of Penelope and the Sirens as told by themselves. The
counterepic is not about heroic prowess, but rather the prosaic tenacity
necessary to survive each day.

The critics Biruté Ciplijauskaité, Carmela Ferradans, Yvonne Jehenson,
Mercedes Mazquiaran de Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Ordbflez read the
intertextuality in El silencio as an example of feminist subversion. Ferradans

states that the author ”invierte canones y patrones de la tradicién Iiteraria” (477).

 

2" I have modified C.B. Cadenas’ term “countersaga” in order to use the

concept of a “counterepic.”

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Upon close scrutiny, it is clear that Garcia Morales carries out this feminist
project by presenting a vision that is alternative to both logocentrism and oral
tradition. The novel is an intricately intertextual work that draws upon and
subverts both the Weltanschauung and the style of an oral literary text, The
Odyssey. Ciplijauskaité observes that, in El silencio, the intertextuality gives way
to a commentary on authorship and its three-step process: “la voz inconsciente
que no cobra cuerpo . . ., la palabra oral y por fin la verdadera obra de arte, la
palabra escrita” (169-70). As we will soon see, the transition between orality and
the reasoning behind literary thought is the key to the feminism in this novel.

The polarization of the female psyche sprang from misogyny or fear of
gynocracy, as stated earlier by Keuls, but such binary thought is further
compounded by an oral mentality, that is, the oral thinking that created and
perpetuated Homer’s masterpiece. Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy, analyzes
the dynamic between the spoken word and the written word. Several concepts
fundamental to oral tradition reflect what I will call an “oral Weltanschauung.” The
thinking in an oral culture is organized according to repetition, formulas,
antitheses, and methods of combining and recombining classifiable information.
On the other hand, a literate culture, unlike oral logic, functions with abstractions
and analyses (5-10). Clearly, The Odyssey is an oral work. According to Robert
Wood, it is probable that Homer was illiterate and that he composed his poetry
from memory. Milman Parry deduced that The Odyssey was composed from
formulas, given that the oral poet had an abundant repertoire of epithets. The

poet improvised every performance even though he adhered to a strict structure

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of fixed patterns and formulae, essential elements in an oral culture (referred to
in Ong 19-20). Ong suggests that in:
a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and
retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in
mnemonic patterns shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must
come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or
antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other
formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the
meal, the duel, the hero’s ‘helper’ . . .) . . . or other mnemonic forms. (34)
Oral mentality totalizes and is incapable of “dismantling formulary, crystallized
expressions or epithets (i.e. ‘clever Odysseus', “beautiful princess’, ’brave
soldier’), for that would require the powers of analysis” (Ong 39). But the written
word forces the mind into “a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to
interfere with and recognize its more normal, redundant processes” (Ong 40). For
this reason, the repetitive nature of an oral culture results in a “highly
traditionalistic or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits

intellectual experimentation” (Ong 41).25 Oral concepts remain situational, rooted

 

25 Ong has cited Luria’s anthropological study of literate vs. illiterate
people to conclude that orality or literacy changes the way in which the world is
viewed. An oral mind reduces everything to the realm of concrete elements of
experience. Luria observed that literates and illiterates responded differently

when asked to identify geometric figures. When shown a geometric figure, such

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in operational frames of reference, tied to the human “lifeworld” (Ong 49), which
is mentally divided oppositionally and agonistically (Ong 43-44).

Concurrent with Ong’s ideas on the symbolic order of orality, G.S. Kirk
affirms that the world of mythology—and that of The Odyssey in particular—is
divided binarily: palace/country, man/woman, human/divine or human/monstrous
(“Introduction” ix). The French feminist Hélene Cixous considers this
Weltanschauung to be phallogocentric, stating that phallogocentrism consists of
a hierarchy of binary oppositions and that “I’écriture feminine” combats this world
view in order to provide an alternative perspective. The objective of literary
feminism is to abolish the hierarchies of opposition, both in how the world is
perceived and how the sexes interrelate (91). Garcia Morales’ mythic recasting
allows silenced female figures to speak for themselves and shed the dichotomic
images which have been forced onto them. If mythology is divided
logocentrically, as Kirk states, into human/divine and human/monstrous, then,
respectively applied to The Odyssey, the division is as follows: Ulysses/Penelope
(idealized) and Ulysses/Sirens (monstrous). Paul llie affirms that every human
being—and every writer in particular—“creates his own truth, becoming a

mythoclast in his own right in order to confront and destroy imposed versions of

 

as a circle, illiterates identified the circle as a plate, a sieve, a moon, relying on
their knowledge and experience to identify the figure. On the other hand,
moderately literate people gave “school room answers”, not “real life responses”,

that is, they abstractly identified the forms (Ong 51 ).

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reality. His new mythography conjures distortions of history, but myth is the
vehicle of last resort by which to escape into a consciousness hobbled by
dogmatic realities” (254). The new mythographic consciousness which Garcia
Morales creates is one in which a female figure does not fit into the Ave-Eva or
Penelope-Siren paradigm, but instead is a complex character incapable of being
oversimplified.

By gathering the intertextual threads of The Odyssey—that is, oral
tradition—and Kafka's short story—i.e. literate tradition—to create a hybrid
Penelope-Siren, Garcia Morales undermines the possibility of pigeonholing these
two mythic figures and labeling them in accordance with phallogocentrism. A
complexly literary work, adhering to the abstract and analytical reasoning
delineated by Ong, El silencio de les sirenas demands that the reader analyze
who Elsa is. Because Homer’s work was an oral text, sung and performed by the
oral poet for an audience, its rigid structure consisted of binary oppositions, a
one-dimensional perspective, and the focus on one central figure with a few
secondary characters. Ong claims that

Primary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more

communal and extemalized, and less introspective than those among

literates. Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading

are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. . .

. . . Oral memory works effectively with ‘heavy’ characters, persons
whose deeds are monumental, memorable and commonly public. Thus

the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic

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figures, not for romantic reasons or reflectively didactic reasons but for
much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of
permanently memorable form. Colorless personalities cannot survive oral
mnemonics. To assure weight and memorability, heroic figures tend to be
type figures: wise Nestor, furious Achilles, clever Odysseus. . .
. . . Non-human figures acquire heroic dimensions. Bizarre figures
. . . add another mnemonic aid: it is easier to remember the Cyclops than
a two-eyed monster, or Cerberus than an ordinary one-headed dog. (Ong
69-70)
Orality exacted such a structure so that the poem could be performed,
disseminated and memorized by new poets. Garcia Morales’ highly inter/textual
work, on the other hand, has no stereotyped or easily classifiable characters,
storyline, or outcome. This work engages the individual reader’s powers of
analysis and abstract thinking.
Currie Thompson, in an article entitled “Adelaida Garcia Morales’ Revision

of the Feminine ‘Seescape, does not study the auditory allusions within the

work—as would be expected of a work entitled El silencio de Ias sirenas which is

 

based on an oral text; instead, Thompson looks at the visual references. The
intertexuality between El silencio de Ias sirenas, The Odyssey, and Kafl<a’s “The
Silence of the Sirens” transfers the sensorial focus from the ear (orality) to the
eye (the written word). Sight distances the reader from the text and becomes a
dissecting sense, while sound is a unifying, harmonizing sense (Ong 72). In the

epic—the oral work—, Ulysses covers his sailors’ ears with wax, has himself tied

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to the mast and hears the song of the sirens. As they embark upon their journey,

Circe warns the hero and his men about the trials that await them.
You will come to the Sirens first of all; they bewitch any mortal who
approaches them. If a man in ignorance draws too close and catches their
music, he will never return to find his wife and little children near him and
to see their joy at his homecoming; the high clear tones of the Sirens will
bewitch him. They sit in a meadow; men’s corpses lie heaped up all
around them, mouldering upon the bones as the skin decays. You must
row past there; you must stop the ears of all your crew with sweet wax that
you have kneaded, so that none of the rest may hear the song. But if you
yourself are bent on hearing, then give them orders to bind you both hand
and foot as you stand upright against the mast-stay, with the rope-end tied
to the mast itself; thus you may hear the two Sirens’ voices and be
enraptured. (143-44)

Odysseus and his crew heeded Circe’s warning regarding the Sirens, the

encounter with whom unfolded as the goddess had predicted.
When the hero and his men approached the Sirens, the monstrous

enchantresses crooned the following:
Come hither, renowned Odysseus, hither, you pride and glory of all
Achaeal Pause with your ship; listen to our song. Never has any man
passed this way in his dark vessel and left unheard the honey-sweet
music from our lips; first he has taken his delight, then gone on his way a

wiser man. We know of all the sorrows in the wide land of Troy that

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Argives and Trojans bore because the gods would needs [sic] have it so;

we know of all things that come to pass on the fruitful earth. (147)

But because of their precautions, the hero and his men were spared an untimely
demise.

In Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens”—a written work—, modifying the
original, Ulysses covers his own ears with wax and has himself bound to the
mast. Below is the entirety of Kafka’s short story.

Proof that inadequate, even childish measures may serve to rescue
one from peril:

To protect himself from the Sirens Ulysses stopped his ears with
wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship. Naturally any and
every traveler before him could have done the same, except those whom
the Sirens allured even from a great distance; but it was known to all the
world that such things were of no help whatever. The song of the Sirens
could pierce through everything, and the longing of those they seduced
would have broken far stronger bonds than chains and masts. But Ulysses
did not think of that, although he had probably heard of it. He trusted
absolutely to his handful of wax and his fathom of chain, and in innocent
elation over his little stratagem sailed out to meet the Sirens.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song,
namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never
happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have

escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Against

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the feeling of having triumphed over them by one’s own strength, and the
consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it, no earthly
powers can resist.

And when Ulysses approached them the potent songstresses
actually did not sing, whether because they thought that this enemy could
be vanquished only by their silence, or because the look of bliss on the
face of Ulysses, who was thinking of nothing but his wax and his chains,
made them forget their singing.

But Ulysses, if one may so express it, did not hear their silence; he
thought they were singing and that he alone did not hear them. For a
fleeting moment he saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting,
their eyes filled with tears, their lips half-parted, but believed that these
were accompaniments to the airs which died unheard around him. Soon,
however, all this faded from his sight as he fixed his gaze on the distance,
the Sirens literally vanished before his resolution, and at the very moment
when they were nearest to him he knew of them no longer.

But they—lovelier than ever—stretched their necks and turned, let
their awesome hair flutter free in the wind, and freely stretched their claws
on the rocks. They no longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted
was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulysses’ great

eyes.

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If the Sirens had possessed consciousness they would have been
annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that
had happened was that Ulysses had escaped them.
A codicil to the foregoing has also been handed down. Ulysses, it is
said, was so full of guile, was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate
could pierce his armor. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the
human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent,
and held up to them and to the gods the aforementioned pretense merely
as a sort of shield. (430-432)
Kafl(a’s Ulysses convinced himself that he would not be affected by the Sirens’
seductive melody. In fact, none of the three—neither Homer’s hero, nor Kafka’s
Ulysses, nor Garcia Morales’ Agustin—is touched by the Sirens. The irony with
which Kaflta imbues the text is that his Sirens do not sing, rather they are
enthralled by the “radiance that fell from Ulysses’ great eyes” and remain silent
(Kaflta 431). Nonetheless, he is unaware of their silence.

Kafka’s Sirens, unlike Homer’s, are bewitched by Ulysses, not the inverse.
For the first time in Western literature, as Piero Boitani observes, we come to
know the Sirens’ point of view (185). It is because of the written word (Kafi<a’s
written adaptation of an oral text) that this perspective becomes possible,
because literacy allows for analysis and alternative points of view. Garcia
Morales takes up Kaflta’s innovative intertextual thread to present the complete
story of Elsa, the hybrid Siren who was bewitched by Agustin Valdés. This new

Siren draws upon the distinctive traits of Penelope—patience and fidelity—to

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nurture her obsession. As Coro Malaxecheverria observes, the Siren is linked to
death, but Elsa—who evinces Penelope’s tenacity and the Sirens’ tie to
mortality—cultivates her implacable love until her death (48).

When it comes to intertextuality and metafiction, one author interprets and
recontextualizes a previous author’s work. In the case of Garcia Morales’
Silencio, Homer’s work has been filtered and retextualized through Kafl<a’s
consciousness; subsequently, Kafka’s creation has been reinterpreted and
manipulated by Garcia Morales’ creative genius. Her literary product is, thus,—
allowing for neologisms—ultraliterary or metatextual. A reader could minimally
follow her work without any knowledge of mythology or Homer, but could not
possibly penetrate the richness and complexity of the work. For an unschooled
reader, the text might seem an unlikely account of a woman who dies as a result
of not overcoming her obsessive, unrequited love.

Literacy fosters complexity. Writing provides distance, which heightens
consciousness and enables one to better understand a matter at hand (Ong 82).
Orality produces flat characters, those that delight the reader “by fulfilling
expectations copiously,” whereas literate culture produces round characters, that
surprise the reader.

As discourse moves from primary orality to greater and greater

chirographic and typographic control, the flat, ‘heavy’ or type character

yields to characters that grow more and more ’round’, that is they perform
in ways at first blush unpredictable but ultimately consistent in terms of the

complex character structure and complex motivation with which the round

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character is endowed. Complexity of motivation and internal psychological

growth with the passage of time makes the round character like a ‘real

person’. (Ong 151-52)

Interestingly enough, Garcia Morales’ Elsa demonstrates that within patriarchy,
women are viewed as flat, dichotomic images. By dedichotomizing the Penelope-
Siren paradigm—in essence, by integrating these perceptions— the author
breathes life into and “rounds out” a character which would be otherwise
flattened by the male gaze.

The rounding of characters evolved from the Old Testament and
Christianity, Greek drama, Ovidian and Augustinian introspections, and the
medieval courtly love tradition. Further development took place in
Shakespearean drama and romanticism (Scholes and Kellogg 165-77). But it is
only many years later that truly round female characters appear. Even in mid- to
late twentieth-century Spanish literature, flat, one-dimensional female characters
persist (Martin-Santos’ Tiempo de silencio, Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte,
Marsé’s Las altimas horas con Teresa, vazquez Montalban’s Los mares del sur).
Garcia Morales, along with other twentieth-century Spanish female authors, has
attempted to bridge the gap in the dichotomization of the female psyche by male
authors, but in El silencio Garcia Morales has most cleverly integrated the
polarities attributed to the female sex, through the manipulation of known texts,
the shift in sensory focus, and the Penelope-Siren fusion in the figure of Elsa.

As a modern Siren, Elsa plays music to vitalize her amorous fantasy. The

narrator Maria explains how Elsa is further seduced by song: “para ella la musica

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era fundamentalmente el espacio imprescindible para dar vida a su ensofiacibn
amorosa . . Poco a poco, segun decia [Elsa], hasta su percepcibn iba
cambiando. Descubria una belleza extraordinaria en todo cuanto Ia rodeaba . . .
Su cuerpo se hacia Iigero como una nube y hasta el aire parecia que brillaba”
(Garcia Morales 42-43). The author subverts the traditional dynamic in which the
song of the Sirens enamored the sailors and drove them to an untimely demise.
In this version of the tale, it is the neo-Siren who suffers and subsequently dies.
Her own music intensifies the love that she already feels. The description of
Elsa"s demeanor evinces parallels with the state of the mythic sailors upon
experiencing the music of the Sirens. They became entranced, as does Garcia
Morales’ Siren.

Nonetheless, Elsa is the only Siren of the three works who does not stand
out because of her song. Rather, her salient feature is her writing: her love
letters, her diary, and the copy in her own handwriting of Kafka’s story. Here
again, we see the change of sensorial focus in Garcia Morales’ text. The
possibility of Ulysses covering his ears with wax is the equivalent of temporary
deafness to the seductive song of the sirens. But, in the novel, Agustin refuses to
see Elsa or read any more of her letters. When the protagonist calls Agustin to
inform him that she is going to visit him, he categorically refuses to see her: “El
se negaba abiertamente a verla, asi lo dijo, sin paliar su crueldad con ninguna
excusa. Afiadio que, en realidad, no la conocia de nada y que no queria seguir

alentando involuntariamente aquel disparate que ella llamaba amor. Tampoco

deseaba que continuara escribiéndole. La prohibicibn fue implacable” (Garcia

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Morales 152). Carefully examined, Ulysses’ deafness, intertextually transformed,
becomes Agustln’s “blindness,” a fact that reinforces the importance of the
written word in Garcia Morales’ text.

Having seen the impact of literacy, and the logical alternative to
logocentrism that it entails, let us analyze how the author “dedichotomizes” and
fuses the figure of Penelope with that of the Sirens. Nancy Felson-Rubin in
Regarding Penelope likens the two dichotomic figures, indicating that the suitors
of Ulysses’ wife misinterpret female power, deeming Penelope to be “a powerful
menace, a siren so to speak, who threatens their survival” (109), “an ensnarer,
an entrapper, a siren who mysteriously lures them to their disastrous end” (123).
Of course, this perception of Penelope shifts the blame: it was Ulysses who killed
the suitors to vindicate his own honor. Similarly, the legend of the Sirens
highlights and becomes a projection of sailors’ fears onto an identifiable female
figure. I suggest that, rather than assent to the senselessness of a maritime
demise, sailors imagined a monstrous, seductive, and fatal entity and blamed it
for their fellows’ death. In both cases—that of Penelope and that of the Sirens—
phallogocentrism has divided experience—and the perception of women—into
binary oppositions to make events meaningful.

Elsa and Penelope both expect their desire for a man to be realized. In her
world, Penelope awaits the fulfillment of her desire: the presence of Ulysses
(Boitani 174). She remains faithful, patiently and indefinitely. As a paragon of
conjugal virtue, she never loses faith in her husband’s return. Her wish

(fulfillment) and teleological imagination feed her hope of Ulysses’ return. During

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his absence, Penelope rejects the suitors who belong to the reality that
surrounds her. Likewise, Elsa feeds off the desire that Agustin might love her and
refuses to accept the banal reality that she does not exist for the object of her
desire:

como un vigia en su atalaya, aguardaba en la terraza hasta que descubria

al cartero bajando por la calle y pasando de largo por su puerta o hasta

que se cansaba de esperarle, porque ni siquiera bajaba . . . Pero, a pesar
de su repentino desaliento, desplegaba en seguida, ansiosamente, toda

su vitalidad para enredarse en una multitud de acciones cotidianas . . .

Gracias a su actividad, Iograba que el tiempo corriera lo mas deprisa

posible, para Ilegar asi al dia siguiente y, con él, comenzar a vivir de

nuevo Ia desmesurada esperanza. (97)

Penelope’s fame and virtue are seen, upon close scrutiny, to be the
product of a misogynous Weltanschauung. Penelope’s role cannot be analyzed
out of context. Her chastity and fidelity can be meaningful only when compared to
the behavior of all other female characters within the Odyssey. The clearest
evidence of misogyny within the Odyssey is the vengeance taken upon
Penelope’s maidservants who had sex with some of the suitors who had plagued
Ulysses’ home during his absence. As Keuls has indicated, women and slaves
practically had the same status: living property. As property, the maidservants
most likely did not give consent, nor could they refuse the advances of their

mistress’ guests. Their slaughter at Ulysses’ hand was senseless but quite

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revealing of the Weltanschauung of ancient Greece: male supremacy and
misogyny.

In fact, the maidservants” death was preceded by a sadistic act. Ulysses
ordered the women to help clean up after the suitors’ ambiguous slaughter. “First
they carried out of the house all the bodies of the dead suitors and laid them
under the courtyard portico . . . Then they washed and sponged the seats and
tables. Meanwhile Telemachus and the cowherd and the swineherd scraped the
floor of the hall with shovels, and the maidservants took the scrapings away
outside” (Homer 275). The scrapings probably consisted of body parts that
Odysseus, Telemachus, the swineherd, and the cowherd had severed from the
suitors in their assault against them.

Then, Telemachus, on his father’s behalf, punished the maidservants in
the following fashion: he

stretched a ship’s cable between a tall pillar and round-house, fastening it
high up so that no woman’s feet could touch the ground. Just as long-
winged thrushes or just as doves, on their way to roost, strike against a
snare set in a thicket and find their death in what should have been their
sleeping-place, so with their heads in a single line the women’s necks
were all caught and noosed, to make them die the most piteous death.
For a little while their feet kept writhing, but not for long. (Homer 275-76)

When Penelope first sets eyes on Ulysses after his twenty-year
absence—and, unknowingly to his wife, after butchering/avenging the suitors and

maidservants—she is hesitant to react. Her son says to her, “But you have

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always been stony-hearted" (Homer 279). Ulysses, in the same line of thinking,
says to his wife:
Wayward woman, surely the dwellers in Olympus have given you a heart
more hard to melt than any among all woman kind. No other wife would be
heartless enough to keep aloof from her husband so, when after much trial
and tribulation she had him again in the twentieth year in his own country.
Nurse, come now and make me a bed where I can lie alone; plainly, the
queen has a heart of iron. (Homer 280)
Finally, when Penelope believes this man to be her long-absent husband, “Her
knees failed her, her heart melted then . . . Then in tears she ran across to him,
and throwing her arms about his neck she kissed his ear” (Homer 281-82).
Penelope, clearly, is a creation of both the dichotomic male gaze and oral
thinking. In this one scene we see that she is first unwaveringly frigid and
subsequently limitlessly warm and accepting. There are no gradual nuances in
her change of heart. Such a dichotomy, as Orig has stated, is a necessary
aspect of an oral culture. Felson-Rubin further elucidates the reunion in the
following fashion:
Odysseus’s varied relations to Kalypso, Kirke, the Sirens in his
Adventures and in Homer’s narrations, all foreshadow his eventual
courtship of Penelope. Each female offers him something, and at little
cost. Willing to embrace the . . . three, he gains what he needs without
irrevocably endangering himself by becoming stuck, trapped, eclipsed, or

frozen. Something in Penelope’s relationship to him offers him the

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freedom to explore this female world without jeopardizing their ultimate
reunion. Odysseus’s adventures with Kalypso, Kirke, and the Sirens seem
to satisfy his desire and need to rove. (49)
Female characters in the Odyssey are compartmentalized into two groups: a) the
chaste, patient wife who tolerates indiscretions and b) the sexual seductresses
whose allure is but ephemeral. This division of the female population
corresponds to the need to separate sex from a quasi-maternal relationship.
Penelope shares a certain quality with the Virgin Mary; she is immutably patient
and maternal. Her sexuality, when reunited with Ulysses, almost seems more of
a literary artifice which brings closure than the likely result of twenty years of
chastity.
Agamemnon’s monologue from Hades also sheds light on the masculinist
perception of Ulysses’ faithful wife:
how virtuous was the wife you won? How single-hearted was your
incomparable Penelope, how faithfully did she keep remembrance of the
husband she had wedded? And therefore the fame of her virtue will never
die, and the Deathless Ones will see to it that men on earth have a lovely
song in honour of chaste Penelope. Not so will it be with the daughter of
Tyndareos. She plotted evil, she slew her wedded husband, and the song
of her among mankind will be one of loathing; she will bring ill fame on all

her sex, even on the virtuous. (Homer 290)

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Agamemnon articulates the female paradigm within ancient Greece: women are
divided into chaste and evil, but all are viewed as evil, “even the virtuous.”
Felson-Rubin has demonstrated that,

Homer uses Agamemnon’s shade to articulate a flagrantly negative

attitude toward womankind. In the shade’s world view, the woman who

strays from the established social norm is a menace to her family and
society and is to blame for the misfortunes that befall men after her
transgression. Whether the cuckholded husband or the intruder or both
finally perish, the woman is at fault. By this ideology she is responsible,
collectively or individually, for the Trojan War, the murders in Argos, the

massacre of the suitors. (94)

A clear case of displaced blame is Agamemnon’s rant, in which he “shifts the
blame for his murder from Aigisthos to Klytaimestra . . . for fashioning his death
and destruction . . . [He] attributes the deed to Klytaimestra alone . . . [knowing
that] her lover committed the crime” (Felson-Rubin 100). Agamemnon’s
harangue foreshadows the possibility that Penelope’s actions might mimic
Klytaimestra’s and similarly and subsequently harm Ulysses.

Nonetheless, Agamemnon vicariously relishes knowing that Odysseus
and Penelope, triumphed over the suitors: “To enjoy this vicarious vindication
fully. . . Agamemnon needs an unequivocally virtuous Penelope . . . The more
Agamemnon cleanses the name of Penelope, and at the same time sullies that of
Klytaimestra, . . . the greater the dichotomy between the virtuous woman and the

adulteress” (Felson-Rubin 106). Throughout the work, Penelope is juxtaposed

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with a series of women or female figures: Circe, Sirens, Calypso, the
maidservants, Clytamnestra. This comparison clearly illustrates the view of
women (within the Odyssey, ancient Greece, and as communicated and
perpetuated in the modern Western world).

Felson-Rubin’s interpretation of Penelope’s guile and manipulation of the
course her life takes is one with which I strongly disagree. The critic suggests
that Homer mitigates the culpability of the suitors and increases Penelope’s
responsibility in their demise:

The suitors are no match for Penelope. They are her inferiors in age and

insight and, as such, they naturally and inevitably become her victims. . .

This is the dominant view of Homer and of most characters in the text

[that] . . . Penelope had a strong hand in their destruction. First, she never

intended to marry one of them; she devised the ruse of the shroud to

thwart their suit. Second, she helped contrive their slaughter. (110-11)
Clearly, this misplaced blame simply amounts to scapegoatism. If Odysseus is to
be viewed as a hero, he must be irreproachable, and, therefore, if his actions are
in the least bit suspect, the blame must be deflected from him onto someone
whose status is already liminal: a woman, namely, his wife.

The figure of Penelope is but a blank screen onto which is projected the
ancient view of women. She represents absence, silence, patience, lack of
action. Penelope is an ideal. Odysseus, while away, “envisioned Penelope as a
fixed point, a . . . goal, a telos or ‘fulfillment’”; but once he has returned home to

Ithaca, she becomes for him an enigma (Felson-Rubin 44). What is known of

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Penelope is minimal. She is renowned for waiting for twenty years, for not
marrying one of the suitors, for not having a lover, for staying secluded (not
showing herself) in her own house. She is known for inactivity; in essence,
Penelope is known for nothing.

In El silencio de Ias sirenas, Agustin’s perception of Elsa is similar to the
perception of Penelope. Elsa’s salient trait is her undying love. Agustin knows
nothing other than that. She has given him no concrete reason to fear her.
Nonetheless, he does fear her and keeps her at bay. Having assimilated the
misogynistic, perhaps better stated gynophobic, mentality passed on from
generation to generation since the ancient Greeks (starting with Aristotle), he
chose to keep his distance from a woman; for we can speculate that he regards
women, and especially this woman, with mistrust. Even the truly intimate
relationship that he has is with a married woman, revealing a breach of marital
vows and commitment. On the other hand, perhaps his phobia is loosely based
in reality. Elsa has exaggerated Penelope’s patience and virtue to an exponential
degree. Through such an exaggeration, Garcia Morales has further subverted
the idealization of unthwarted faithfulness exemplified by the mythical Penelope.
This trait, magnified in Elsa, can be labeled only as an obsession, a reality from
which Agustin clearly distances himself.

Let us now briefly elucidate the patent parallels between Elsa and a Siren.
Garcia Morales utilizes the Siren references to allude to Elsa throughout the
novel. Maria comments: “no comprendia que Agustin Valdés no estuviera ya

fascinado, que las cartas, la voz, el amor de Elsa, no hubieran sido para él como

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un canto de sirena en cuyo hechizo ya tenia que haber sucumbido. Por el
contrario a Elsa ni siquiera le habia prestado atencién. Se habia tapado los
oidos con cera, igual que Ulises” (Garcia Morales 143). Furthermore,
Malaxecheverria thoroughly analyzes the evolution of the portrayal of Sirens in
the plastic arts and literature through the ages, reducing the Siren essence to
three characteristics: “a) la seduccibn, b) la destruccibn que deriva del poder de
seduccibn y c) una sexualidad inexistente, 0 al menos frustrada” (47), adding
that the fusion between the Siren “la prostituta devoradora de hombres y
representante del maligno no surge hasta la aparicion del cristianismo” (44).
Malaxecheverria applies her findings to El silencio de Ias sirenas, concluding that
Elsa is a modern Siren.

By drawing upon characteristics from both Penelope and the Sirens, Elsa
subverts the possibility of the binary logic that underlays phallogocentrism. The
protagonist is neither good nor bad, neither a saint nor a femme fatale. Elsa is a
complex, round character whom no prefabricated labels fit. Garcia Morales’
mythical fusion mitigates the siren-like seductive aspect, just as it denounces the
traditionally applauded, unwavering patience and faithfulness exuded by
Penelope.

The hybridization of Penelope and the Sirens subverts absolute, binary
reality, replacing it with a multidimensional point of view. The polyvocal
narrative—consisting of the juxtaposition of dreams, letters, Elsa’s subjective
diary, Matilde’s beliefs, the atmosphere of superstition, and Maria’s third-person

narration—presents facets of the same reality (Jehenson 213; Ciplijauskaité

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170), refuting the possibility of an absolute, one-dimensional reality. In other
words, the polyvocality in El silencio de Ias sirenas represents a collection of
supplementary voices. Similarly, the recasting of Penelope and the Sirens in Elsa
constitutes a supplement to the original myth, in which Ulysses and his deeds
were the focus while Penelope’s likely reaction to his absence was ignored, as
was the reasoning behind the Sirens’ fatal sexuality.

Garcia Morales’ recasting of Elsa in the role of a Siren is more of a
Kafl<aesque rendition than a Homeric one. While Kafka’s Sirens yearn for
Ulysses, evidencing their own perspective, Homer’s Sirens are viewed as
seductive monsters, demonstrating the male (Ulysses’, the sailors’) point of view.
Elsa, like her Kafl<aesque predecessors, resigns herself to an unmitigable
situation. The acceptance of unconditional negative regard is precisely what
pushes Elsa over the edge. If she cannot be seen with a non-skewed judgment,
she removes herself from a world (symbolized by Agustin) which thinks ill of her
or undauntingly regards her negatively. The protagonist articulates this view in
writing the following to her implicit interlocutor, Agustin:

Estoy aceptando ya que nunca me vas a escribir, que quiza nunca te vea.

Algo asi como si no existieras, como si jamas hubieras existido. Quiero

creer que yo no soy esta que te ama, esta que piensa en ti de manera

obsesiva, esta que me destruye y me domina para conducinne a la
desesperacion. Yo no soy esta que te espera, que suefia contigo y que ya

casi no es otra cosa que tu. No soy esta que me trae el deseo de morir y

que siente que todo cuanto no sea vivir contigo este amor que ensuefio

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es destruccibn, condena, oscuridad. Por eso necesito negarte dentro y
fuera de mi, ser mas fuerte incluso que esos suefios de amor que me
traicionan tantas noches . . . Huyo de ti pero tu estas en todas partes . . .

Una vez mas compruebo, con desesperanza, que a mi amor no se le

perrnite otra via de realizacibn que la de ser escrito para ti . . . si yo

pudiera no pretender nada . . . no desear nada. (116-17)

In Elsa’s case, Garcia Morales inverts the traditional Siren’s destructive
sexuality that annihilates her victims. Elsa’s love, or obsession, for Agustin
Valdés had appeared more powerful than she. After a sahumen'o (a ceremony
intended to cure the effects of the evil eye), several hypnosis sessions with
Maria, and myriad letters that did not alleviate Elsa’s malaise, the protagonist
took hold of her own future in an alternative fashion. Maria, worried about her
friend’s disappearance, drove to the summit of the mountain in search of the neo-
Siren. Maria narrates:

AI fin, en una llanura de un blanco inmaculado, descubri su figura, su

cabello oscuro, su rostro casi cristalizado. Estaba rigida, inmovil, adherida

a la tierra y formando parte de la montafia, igual que sus plantas, sus

arboles, sus rocas, sus piedras Todo se cubria por igual con la

blancura de la nieve . . . Aquel grandioso y gélido espectaculo se apodero
de mi . . . Al fin me dejé caer junto a Elsa, sobrecogida por el poderoso
silencio de las montar‘ias y de la muerte. Y me parecio que ella vibraba
ahora con la misma pulsacibn de la tierra. Deseé dejarla alli para siempre,

en aquel espacio, tan ajeno al mundo de los hombres, que ella misma

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habia elegido para confundirse con él, para pertenecerle, como si por fin

hubiera encontrado su sitio. (165)

Elsa had committed suicide and left for her friend, as a testament of her
love, a collection of objects that included a letter addressed to Agustin Valdés.
Having copied it in her own hand, she was also sending him Kafka’s story “The
Silence of the Sirens.” She had underlined the following: “‘Ulises . . . no pensaba
sino en cera y cadenas’ . . . ‘de haber tenido conciencia, Ias sirenas habrian sido
destruidas aquel dia’” (167). But Elsa, unlike the Sirens, did have consciousness;
she realized that the patriarchal world had no room for her. As Maria narrates,
Elsa’s suicide—her return to maternal/natural origins—is as if “por fin hubiera
encontrado su sitio”.

Elsa’s obsession seemingly ends tragically. According to Annis Pratt, in
women’s love fiction in which the green-world archetype is present, the hero,

“about to be conquered by ‘human’ society, may turn into “something ’inhuman’”
(Archetypal 17). The final description of Elsa, when she is found dead by Maria,
epitomizes Elsa’s convergence with, and conversion to, nature. She becomes an
integral part of the breathtaking, frigid white beauty of the mountains. “The
natural universe as a whole is ‘her kingdom’. Taking possession of nature, she
possesses herself’ (Pratt, Archetypal 17). Pratt avers that “Embodying the
natural cycles of fertility and draught, this masculine archetype seems to be a

direct inversion of the creative and destructive feminine, the ‘Belle Dame Sans

Merci,’ who both attracts and destroys men and who is at the center of so much

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male literature” (24). Elsa’s “natural” suicide subverts the femme fatale archetype
and provides an alternative conclusion to traditional hero-centered literature.

Garcia Morales’ female hero, Elsa, is what I will term an “alter-hero.” I use
the term hero as opposed to heroine due to the fact that “heroine“ connotes a
helper, a character of secondary status, or the love interest of the hero. The term
“alter-hero” also denotes a status alternative to that of the traditional hero, i.e. the
hero of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory. Campbell’s reduction of all
legends, myths, fairy tales, and literature to the monomyth formula is an all-
encompassing theory which I do not accept in its entirety; but I do recognize the
validity of many elements of his theory and have, thus, applied them to El
silencio. Throughout The Hem with a Thousand Faces, Campbell delineates the
path of “the hero” which entails the call to adventure, the journey, the quest for
the boon, the rebellion against his origins (the father), the obtaining of the boon,
the return home, the contribution to his society, and the perpetuation of the
system that created him (patemaI/patriarchal order).

Garcia Morales’ alter-hero shares some of Campbell’s hero’s traits yet is
quite dissimilar (albeit not antithetical) in other respects. Elsa’s enamorrnent can
be construed as a call to adventure. Her journey is not physical, but rather
psychological, a hypnotic and oneiric exploration of her psyche. The desired
boon appears to be Agustin’s reciprocal affection. At this point Elsa’s path
diverges from that of Campbell’s hero. By falling in love and living for love, Elsa
follows the patriarchally prescribed path for women. Once she resigns herself to

the futility of her obsession, she acknowledges the inexistence of the boon and,

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therefore, the quest becomes meaningless. The monomyth becomes
meaningless, even though Elsa’s journey does bear a bitter fruit. Her ambiguous
failure has exposed a certain reality: patriarchy expects women to live for love—
not for themselves—consequently, such an existence leads to self-
destructiveness. Elsa does not return home (the patriarchal hearth) with her boon
to better and perpetuate the society that created her. Instead, Elsa becomes one
with nature. Nature is a feminine archetype. It is raw, unruly, untouched by the
masculinist social order. Through her union with nature—and death—and unlike
the traditional hero, Garcia Morales’ alter-hero strikes out against the society that
created her and denounces its norms and expectations as fraudulent for her
needs.

Campbell states that the “hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal
man—perfected, unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn . . . to return
then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has Ieamed of life renewed”
(Hero 22). Elsa’s death immortalizes her in the minds of readers because of the
battle that she lost against the dominant discourse. In this sense, she ceases to
exist as a living character in order to transcend as a sacrificial model.

For Campbell, the monomyth consists of a separation-initiation-return
sequence in which “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a
region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a
decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with
the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Hero 30). Through Elsa, Garcia

Morales clearly subverts the monomyth. Elsa does venture forth into a region of

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supernatural wonder, but her trajectory could also be viewed as a retreat to a
microcosm of superstition and femaleness. She certainly encounters forces,
perhaps not fabulous, but fictionalized psychic forces: the conflict between reality
and her desire. Unlike the decisive victory of Campbell’s hero, Elsa’s outcome is
ambiguous. ls her death a triumph over patriarchal discourse or is it unequivocal
resignation? Of course, unlike the monohero, Elsa does not return, but she does
bestow upon her peers (I reject Campbell’s term “fellow man”), such as Maria,
the women of the town, and her readers, the boon of resistance and the struggle
for authenticity. Garcia Morales’ conclusion is not a happy one, for had it been, it
would have implied that all is right in the world. Instead, the protagonist’s demise
strongly states that something is amiss in the world that produced her. Taking
Campbell’s’ description of the monomyth and its hero, an argument can certainly
be made in support of Elsa’s heroism.

The first stage of the mythological journey, according to Campbell, is the
“call to adventure,” in which “destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his
spiritual center of gravity form within the pale of his society to an zone unknown
[. . . in which] both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a
distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the
sky, 3 secret land, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state” (Hero 58). Elsa’s
stay in the Alpujarras forms part of her “call to adventure”.

Campbell’s hero receives the assistance of a “supernatural aid,” an old
person—usually female—“who provides the adventurer with amulets against the

dragon forces he is about to pass” (Hero 69). This description of the supernatural

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aid fits Matilde’s role in Elsa’s amorous journey. The reader encounters the older
woman performing the sahumen'o on the bewitched protagonist. Matilde stays by
her bedside throughout the following weeks of illness/dementia/obsession.

Maria could be viewed as a “threshold guardian,” “standing for the limits of
the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the
unknown, and danger” (77). The hypnosis sessions that Maria performs transport
the protagonist to a different plane of consciousness involving Agustin-Eduardo,
Bismarck and Goethe’s “Afinidades colectivas.” Campbell further states that

the mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the

feminine attributes of the first, nourishing presence. . . There exists a close

and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child
toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material
world. But . . . [this archetypal image has been utilized] for the purpose of
purging, balancing, and initiation of the mind into the nature of the visible

world. (Hero 113)

In other words, Campbell observes the strong link between nature and the
Universal Mother. Nature becomes a refuge. By finding/seeking her death in
Nature, Elsa returns to her feminine origins and categorically rejects the
masculine social order.

Campbell observes the importance of the father in mythology and legend.
The father of Campbell’s hero is ubiquitous (like God the father in Christianity
and Judaism). The hero must rebel against, confront and atone with the father.

Only through this process can the hero understand his existence. (Hero 146-47).

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Although sharing some traits with Campbell’s hero, Elsa is female and therefore
excluded from the patriarchal world. The traditional hero escapes patriarchal
control only to be reintegrated with the intention of perpetuating it. Garcia
Morales’ protagonist’s final act of self-destruction in a female world is an
unambiguous and permanent escape from the dominant discourse. She cannot
be reintegrated. Her journey has become tragic, not triumphant. Like Campbell’s,
her conclusion becomes a commentary on the world that created her. The
traditional hero’s triumph affirms the hegemony of the powers that be whereas
Elsa’s death denounces the rigid structure of patriarchy.

On dying, Elsa transcends the mundane and moves on to a different
sphere. She no longer belongs to the realm of patriarchy. The “elixir for the
restoration of society” (Campbell, Hero 197) which Elsa posthumously leaves
behind is symbolized by the objects that attest to the foolishness of love games
and to the absurdity of trying to adhere to socially prescribed models (seductress,
paragon of patience and fidelity).

Garcia Morales, by portraying Elsa as a hybrid Siren-Penelope figure,
deconstructs the misogynistic concept of the Siren who attracts and destroys
men, for Elsa does not attract Agustin in the very least, nor does she destroy
him. Rather, because he is impervious to her allure, she destroys herself.
Through Elsa’s self-destructiveness—a way of taking possession of herself—
Garcia Morales recounts the story of the Siren from an innovative perspective, a
neo-mythic rendition which not only mitigates the desire to attract, but also

demythifies the malice in her intention to forge a relationship. Homer’s Sirens

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were deemed seductive, deadly entities, but Garcia Morales imbues the term
femme fatale with new meaning. Elsa is indeed fatal, but to herself.

Garcia Morales’ gynocentric perspective and feminist intent reveal
themselves through the Penelope-Siren hybridization which shatters the good-
bad / whore-saint dichotomy with which phallogocentrism had contrasted these
two mythological female characters. The patriarchal world allenates women—be
it through idealization or repudiation. By choosing death over life, Elsa
categorically refused to be a part of a mysogynistic world that labels women at
whim. Instead, she found her niche in the feminine world of nature, a world
“anterior al tiempo de los hombres” (Garcia Morales 17), a world prior to

patriarchal social norms which robbed women of authenticity.

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Chapter 4

HAPPILY EVER AFTER7:
FAIRY TALE, BILDUNG, AND MYTHOLOGICAL MOTIFS
IN NADA BY CARMEN LAFORET

In Nada, published in 1944, Carmen Laforet recontextualizes mythological
and fairy tale motifs, creating a female Bildungsroman.26 Through Andrea's story,
Laforet relates an endemically female experience and contributes to the
proliferation of works by women in the last twenty years, which has established
the female voice within Peninsular letters. Throughout this study, I will analyze
the close relationship between mythic rewriting and women’s narrative, for it is
the mythic metaphors adopted and further elaborated by subsequent writers
which led to a much more patent literary feminism than that evident in Nada.

According to Ordbflez, the current tendency in Spanish women’s narrative
rewrites myths, history, and legends, providing an alternative matrilinear
mythology.27 By subverting and reexamining ancient myths and patriarchal

attitudes, Laforet cultivated the terrain for contemporary Spanish women writers.

 

2‘5 Bildung and myth are closely related in that the quest of the hero leads
him! her to a higher stage of maturity.

27 This new wave consists of Riera, Moix, Roig, Ortiz, G6mez Ojea,
Tusquets, Albs, Montero, and Portal. In her article “lnscribing Difference,” E.
Ordéflez analyzes several works by the aforementioned authors, applying the

concept of “I’écriture feminine.”

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Before retrospectively analyzing the relationship between the mythical elements
in Nada and the chronologically subsequent works that occupy the other
chapters of this dissertation, we must first gain a historical perspective of the time
during which Laforet wrote and in which her protagonist moved. In this light,
Andrea is an indisputably intrepid, extraordinary literary figure. If Nada is to be
regarded as Bildung, then we must not lose sight of the forces with which she
contended.

Laforet wrote Nada during the early Francoist years of postwar Spain, a
time setback feminism in the Peninsula. Primo de Rivera, whose coup placed
him in power in 1923, showed a paternalistic interest in women’s rights and made
certain concessions, allowing for women in the workplace, the university, and
local government. Nonetheless, according to Scanlon, this government “dejaba
basicamente inalterarda [la] posicibn [de la mujer] (Scanlon 261). The Republic,
proclaimed in 1931, legally modified women’s status. The Republican constitution
conferred to men the same electoral privileges as to women above the age of 23.
Article 46 protected work and maternity. In 1932, divorce was legalized (Scanlon
264-65). In 1931 the Republic granted Spanish women the right to vote. There
were two female diputadas, Clara Campoamor and Victoria Kent, among 465
other diputados (Scanlon 274-76).

During the II Republica, the views of the relatively liberal political leaders

clashed with the conservative view of women and their role in society held by the

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Asociacion Nacional de Mujeres Espai‘iolas (ANME), given the two functions’
disparate views on class, religion, and political inclination.28 In 1934, a new
group, Accibn Polltica Femenina lndependiente, was formed; as its name
indicates, it sought to intervene l politics, and sympathized with a more
conservative agenda than did ANME (Scanlon 209-10). The Falangista right wing
condemned coeducation, divorce, free love, denounced communism, atheism,
materialism, positivism, and protestantism for standing in the way of the true
“elevacion de la mujer” (Scanlon 213). Feminism was viewed as contrary to the
Catholic Church and tradition (Cabrera Bosch 31); as a result, a conservative
feminism was created, one which kept the demands of women within
“reasonable” limits (Scanlon 215), advocating marriage and motherhood.
Conservative “feminism” was synonymous with indoctrinating in women the

fervent desire to be selfless wives and mothers.

 

28The Asociacion Nacional de Mujeres Espafiolas (ANME) was formed in
1918 and would become the most important feminist organization in Spain
(Scanlon 203). Although it claimed to be centrist, its members sympathized with
the right (Scanlon 204). Even though it proclaimed an interest in the working
class woman, the ANME arose from the middle class and focused on bettering
middle-class working conditions (Scanlon 206). Nonetheless, ANME created day
care centers for the working class woman, where the children were fed and
clothed. It also was in favor of the right to vote. Yet, neither divorce, nor free love,

nor abortion, nor birth control formed part of ANME’s agenda (Scanlon 207).

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According to Geraldine Scanlon, the Civil War (1936-1939) promised to
produce favorable conditions for women on the Republican side (had the
republicans won the Civil War, that is):

La mujer trabajadora no era simplemente un ideal, sino una necesidad

practica Las mujeres tenian que comprender la importancia de la

lucha contra el fascismo y habia que evitar que ejercieran una infiuencia
inhibidora sobre sus maridos .. . Las aspiraciones a la igualdad de la
mujer fueron identificadas con el triunfo de la Republica, y se le advirtio de
la esclavitud que le esperaba en caso de que triunfase el fascismo: en
ltalia y Alemania, el L'inico papel de la mujer era producir un gran numero

de hijos, que sirvieran de came de cahbn para las guerras. (291-92)

In contrast to those who embraced the tenets of fascism, the women of
Republican Spain represented “Ia avanzada del movimiento femenino” for many
participated in military action in the retaguardia (292).29

The anarchist leader, Federica Montseny, minister of Sanidad y Asistencia
Social, legalized abortion in 1936, favored free love, attempted to abolish
prostitution, and ran a campaign against social disease (Scanlon 308-09).
Montseny is a clear example of how her home region of Catalonia was always a
step ahead in Spanish feminism. In contrast, the Seccion Femenina represented

“el esfuerzo bélico de la mujer no como medio de ganarse el derecho a la

 

29 For a more detailed account of women’s military participation see

Scanlon pp. 292-96.

117

independencia y a la igualdad en la nueva Espana, sino como una desviacibn
temporal de su verdadera misibn [el hogar]. En mayo de 1939 diez mil miembros
se reunieron en Medina del Campo para celebrar la Victoria de Franco” (Scanlon
318). The downfall of the Republica in 1939 ruined all hope of emancipation. The
RepL'iblica had been a time during which women had gained the highest degree
of economic, legal, and sexual independence ever. The place of woman in la
nueva Espafia was the same as in la vieja Espafia: the home, to the point that,
according to the Fuero de Trabajo (1938), all women were forbidden from
working at night and married women were prohibited from working in factories
(Scanlon 320). Women who had more than two children received a government
subsidy for each additional child. The State stipulated that women must abandon
their work upon marrying. Many lucrative and prestigious positions were closed
to women. The only white-collar job—a poorly paid one—open to women was
teaching (Scanlon 321).

Franco’s regime voided the progressive laws instituted by the Republica
that had been a benefit to women. The Seccibn Femenina propagated the new
image of what the modern woman should be: “feliz en la matemidad, educando a
sus hijos, demostrando un interés femenino por los asuntos de su marido y
proporcionandole un refugio contra los azares de la vida publica” (Scanlon 324).
Furthermore, the books and leaflets regarding women published during the
forties and fifties were almost undistinguishable from those published at the turn

of the century (Scanlon 329).

118

During Francoism, women were persuaded to return to their traditional
role through the glorification of the home and the exaltation of their “misidn
tradicional: el mundo podia progresar sin mujeres cientlficas . . . , pero no sin
‘madres que sean reinas del hogar, sacerdotisas en ese templo que alumbren el
espiritu familiar con la luz de Ias celestiales ensefianzas’” (Scanlon 337). The
image of the mujer hacendosa was propagated consisting of the lady of the
house “inclinada sobre su costura, tejiendo o haciendo encaje y atendiendo al
mismo tiempo a sus tareas domésticas” (Scanlon 338). This image of the mujer
hacendosa could be considered an archetype that is elaborated into the Ariadne
and Penelope myths. Both mythic figures are associated with thread, patience,
and reliance on a man, that is to say that these mythic personages exemplify the
ideal femenino, a modernization of an ancient and antiquated view of the role of
women in society.

In Usos amomsos de la postguena espaiiola, Carmen Martin Gaite cites
the official, repressive rhetoric of the Franco regime’s postwar propaganda, in
which the dominant discourse takes pride, manifesting a triumphal attitude, in the
poverty and social “backwardness”:

No queremos el progreso, el romantico y liberal, capitalista y burgués,

judio, protestante, ateo y masbn progreso yanqui. Preferimos el atraso de

Espafla . . . que nos lleva a considerar que ante unos valores

fundamentales deben sacrificarse los intereses materiales Bendito

nuestro atraso que nos hace considerar el Matrimonio como sacramento

que no es cosa de juego; . . . que nos lleva a considerar la familia como

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una sociedad jerarquizada en que los padres tienen el deber de educar a

sus hijos al servicio de Dios y de la Patria, y los hijos no tienen derecho a

vivir su vida, sino a que su vida sirva para algo. (29)30
This triumphalist rhetoric was inculcated in the citizens of postwar Spain to gloss
over the reality of abject poverty, the lack of personal freedom, and the forced
submission to the higher power of God-Franco-Country. Nationalist ideology
consisted of lofty, self-serving concepts that did nothing to counteract the hunger,
cold, and filth that resulted from the rationing of food, coal, and water. The reality
of postwar Spain negates the axiom “To the victor belong the spoils.” There were
no spoils in the sense of reduced physical needs and greater comforts. Had the
Spanish Civil War and postwar been a purely fictional creation in a novel (as in
George Onivell’s 1984), the disparity between the triumphalist propaganda and
the miserable living conditions would have been ironic; but given the fact that
such disparity is historical), it is an example of hypocrisy—a hypocrisy which
Laforet denounces in Nada.

The triumphalist attitude was validated by emphasizing a remote past,
perhaps in an attempt to detract from the reality of the present. Martin Gaite
states

Enterrar el pasado reciente y exaltar el pasado remoto fue una de las mas

inquebrantables consignas de la Espafia de Franco. No habia estudiante

 

3° The source quoted by Martin Gaite is Antonio Castro Villacafias in La

Hora (14 May, 1948).

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de bachillerato, por escasa que fuera su aplicacion, que no conociera Ias

efigies y gestos de don Pelayo, Isabel Ia Catolica o Felipe II, pero de

Jovellanos, Campomanes y la generacion del 98 podia no tener ni idea.

(Usos amorosos 23)
In Canciones populares de la guena civil in a section titled “La mitologia: los
heroes y las hazai‘las”, Luis Diaz Viana states that “Poetas de ‘derechas’ . . .
cantarian los ’Héroes’ y las ‘Hazanas’ de la causa nacional” (156). They also
praised their martyrs in a “nuevo martilogio” (155). Diaz Viana claims that Franco
was considered “nuestro capitan”, a messianic figure who heroically saved
Spain: “Nuestro guia y capitan insiste en la capitania indispensable de Franco,
no solo en la guerra, sino también en la paz. Era la consolidacibn del mito; el
general experto, el estratega habil, pasa a convertirse, de jefe provisional de una
junta militar, en ‘Jefe de Estado’ por ‘derecho casi divino’” (160). Diaz Viana
illustrates this with a Nationalist song:

Nuestro guia y Capitan

unidos en la guerra

hermanados en la paz

tan solo a ti juramos

como guia y Capitan

te prometemos seguir

conleaflad.

Tenemos un caudillo

forjador de nueva historia

121

es iFranco! iFranco! iFranco!

nuestro guia y Capitan. (160)

Of course, the captain motif seems reminiscent of the myth of Ulysses,
who restored order and returned to Ithaca. The female counterpart to the
Ulysses-Franco archetype is, of course, the waiting, busy Penelope, who lives for
her hero. Ariadne also awaits rescue from her captain. What is clear is that
Francoism took on mythological overtones in order to forge (and one might say
inculcate) an ideology.

Regarding Falangist women, Diaz Viana collected the following song:

Ha de ser la mujer

de la Espana Imperial

un sol de amanecer

con calor de ideal.

Forjadora de hogar,

santuario de amor,

herolna sin par

de su honor.

Espar‘iola y mujer

de la patria calor

y mi vida ha de ser

mitigar el penar

dondequiera que esté;

cumplidora leal

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del sagrado deber

de virtud sin igual

”Ante todo mujerll

Agustina en valor,

Isabel en la paz. (166)

As this song indicates, once the Nacionales defeated the Republic in 1939, the
social progress that had continued in the Republican zones through the war
years came to a complete halt, and a traditional lifestyle was imposed on
Spaniards. According to Maria del Carmen Riddel,

Para la mujer esto significo una pérdida de status. El interés del regimen

por mantener un orden jerarquico y patriarcal en todos los niveles de la

sociedad espafiola relego a la mujer a un plano fuertemente secundario.

En ese momento los papeles que se Ie asignan son pasivos, se desea

para ella la dependencia social y econbmica y la actividad femenina que

se tolera es casi exclusivamente de apoyo a intereses masculinos. Se
valora a la mujer y se la exalta siempre y cuando ésta permanezca en su
lugar y consienta en dirigir su actividad a la reproduccién del orden social

tradicional. (3)

Therefore, the plot of Nada must be read within the context of Spanish
postwar societal expectations of women and a return to pre-modem ideals.
According to Pratt, the “supreme goal of . . . novels of [female] development [in
the late nineteenth century] is to groom the young hero for marriage” (Archetypal

1). Pratt does not prescribe but rather describes this pattern. Nada breaks from

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this tradition, for Laforet clearly steers Andrea away from the socially-prescribed
marital bliss and tosses her into the abyss of an unknown future. Certainly,
Andrea’s traditional expectations of female conduct are crushed. Pratt asserts
that the ironic inversion of the novel of development within women’s fiction
reverses “gender norms that society expects of people in general [. . . T]he
double bind underlying the structure of the Bildungsroman [is] derived from the
contrary forces of a girl’s desire for authenticity and her society’s deSire for her
femininity” (Archetypal 34-35). Pratt’s assertion aptly explains Nada’s apparently
ambiguous conclusion, at times interpreted by critics as success for the
protagonist and other times as failure.31 What is certain is that Laforet’s treatment
of the path that Andrea might or might not forge for herself is groundbreaking as
Scanlon elucidates in her study of the evolution of women’s schooling in the early
twentieth century.

Andrea’s higher education is as innovative as is her potential working
status. Throughout the novel, Andrea is a student. In the conclusion, it is
projected that she will work and study in Madrid. Regarding the workplace, both
attitudes of women and toward women were crippling, since the ideal state was
marriage and motherhood, a position which Scanlon categorizes as slavery: ”la
esclavitud se hallaba atractivamente disfrazada; la captura de un marido rico

suponia una vida de Iujos y de holganza” (60). This clearly explains Angustias’

 

3‘ Mary Rice, Roberta Johnson, Emilie Bergmann, and Juan Villegas view

the conclusion to be a success while Barry Jordan regards it as failure.

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shame for being unmarried and her relentless hounding of Andrea for her
wandering throughout the city. Angustias has internalized the ideal of the idle,
married woman and projects this onto her niece, since all hope of matrimony is
lost for her. Andrea’s wandering indicates independence, a trait suppressed in
women to foster reliance on a man. Being a working, married woman would be
more of a dishonor than being single and having no other recourse: “pues no
solo se humillaba ella, sino también su marido” (Scanlon 60-61). An idle wife
indicated her husband’s pecuniary strength. In Nada, Juan is utterly humiliated to
know that his wife Gloria supports him and, in so doing, proves his impotence as
a provider for his family.

The female standard during Nada’s time of publication was that
propagated by the Seccibn Femenina of the Falange, whose crusade, as
delineated by Maria Teresa Gallego Menéndez throughout Mujer, falange y
franquismo, was to mold women ideologically, instilling in them cultural, social
and religious values consistent with Francoism. They were being prepared for a
life of submission patterned after the “angel of the hearth” paradigm: submission
to the patriarchal hierarchy consisting of husband, homeland, and God.
According to Maria Teresa Gonzalez Calbet, the Seccibn Femenina propagated
the concept of woman as “un ser sumiso y dbcil en cuerpo y alma al nuevo
regimen franquista” (57). Because the working woman was not an accepted
model, “la mujer se veia impulsada a contraer matrimonio para establecer su
seguridad econbmica” (Gonzalez Calbet 67). Given the expectations of female

conduct, Andrea’s choice to work and study in the hopes of gaining

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L32 Andrea neither conforms

independence is feasible but by no means traditiona
to societal expectations of female behavior nor mimics the pattern of the male
hero. Andrea’s year in Barcelona and departure for Madrid, for Villegas mimic the
rites of initiation and, consequently, the mythical structure of the hero’s
adventure.
En la Primera parte Andrea lucha para reconquistar su libertad, que creia
haber ganado con el viaje desde su tierra. La Segunda parte corresponde
[a] . . . la etapa de las puebas y de la iniciacion. Por Ultimo, Ia Tercera
parte nos presenta a la protagonista que . . . afirma su yo, reconoce sus
limitaciones, comprende mejor el mundo y los adultos y se prepara
psicologicamente para la nueva aventura que ha de transcurrir en Madrid.
(178-79)
The pattern described by Villegas is that of the traditional male mythic hero.
Although Villegas presents a convincing argument in discerning this pattern in

Nada, viewed in a feminist light, Andrea may appear to follow this pattern yet

does not attain the mythical conclusion of the hero: the integration into the

 

32 Although, within the narrative of Nada, Andrea does not work, Ena’s
letter to her depicts her future in Madrid as such: “Hay trabajo para ti en el
despacho de mi padre, Andrea. Te permitira vivir independiente y ademas asistir
a Ias clases de la Universidad. Por el momento viviras en casa, pero luego
podras escoger a tu gusto tu domicilio” (293-94). Clearly, Andrea’s new life will

consist of studying and working.

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hegemony. Andrea defies patriarchal expectations. She cannot act as Villegas
would have us believe she should because she is a woman. She defies the
dominant discourse and patriarchal expectations by not buying into the concept
that a woman’s place is in the home to serve her husband and children. For not
adhering to traditional female conduct and not the path of the male hero, Nada is
a singular work in Peninsular letters: it sets the stage for subsequent works by
women.33

Not unlike Laforet, today’s Spanish women writers subvert and reexamine
old taboos, ancient myths, and antiquated patriarchal attitudes toward sex roles
and sexuality since the advent of feminism. A current tendency in women’s
narrative is to demythify patriarchal or phallic myths. The new wave rewrites
myths, history, and legends, providing an alternative mythology in which maternal
relationships are underscored (Ordonez, “Inscribing” 49).“4 Laforet, anticipating

the women’s narrative of the last twenty years, reinvents the myth of Ariadne to

 

33 By no means do I claim that Laforet is solely responsible for
encouraging the production of works by women in the last twenty years. The
political climate of Transition and Democratization made freedom of expression
feasible for women writers. What I do claim is that Laforet constitutes a literary
foremother whom subsequent women writers emulate, consciously or not.

3‘ As stated in an earlier footnote, Ordonez refers to Tusquets, Riera,

Moix, Roig, Ortiz, Gbmez Ojea, AIbs, Montero, and Portal.

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find a new female maturation. By subverting and reexamining the ancient myth
and patriarchal attitudes, Laforet cultivated the terrain for today’s women writers.

When regarding the contribution of Spanish women writers to literature,
Nada’s date of publication (1944) is significant, marking the onset of further
contributions by other women writers. Brown (13-14), Ordbnez (Voices 34), and
Riddel (1) concur in their assessment that Nada inititates a new era in Spanish
letters, one which no longer excluded women from literary history. What
concerns us here is what subsequent women writers took up: the “muted voice”
that challenges patriarchal law. Laforet’s narrative, as a prototype, opened up “
latent wellsprings of female creativity,” encouraging other women to write
(Ordbfiez, Voices 34-35). The prototypical qualities in Nada, emulated by
subsequent writers, are feminist strategies. Laforet gives Andrea, a young female
character, a voice with which to express herself and recount her own experience.
In the section titled “La mujer como sujeto del discurso” in her article
“Cartografias del silencio: Ia teoria Iiteraria feminista”, Antbnia Cabanilles states
that feminist literary theory has provided female writers and protagonists a
literary space, from which female alterity is vindicated through the reappropriation
of the female body and articulation of a first-person female voice (19). It is
precisely the literary space, “la voz para hablar” (Cabanilles 19), that Laforet
reappropriates for subsequent female authors. Laforet also creates a female
subject who does not abide by patriarchal law, thus forging a new, supplemental
niche in preexisting order. Celita Lamar Morris characterizes Andrea as “a social

heretic” for combating ‘the myth of female inferiority and selfinsufficiency [sic], the

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myth that a woman alone is an incomplete being who must be protected and
shielded from the world and from her own aloneness” (41). Carmen Laforet
prophesied personal freedom for women, not only in Spain in 1944 but today,
proving that the right to self-determination “need not conform to social pressures
or to a mythically oriented concept of herself” (C.L. Morris 46).

In the article “Women Novelists In Democratic Spain: Freedom to Express
the Female Perspective”, Phyllis Zatlin proposes that by the end of the 1970s, as
Montero and Tusquets published their first novels (1979 and 1978 respectively)
and Roig gained recognition outside Catalonia, their works were thematically
linked by “their open treatment of the female experience.” In the early 19803,
much of women’s narrative displayed a penchant for the metafictional mode.
Metafiction can be a literary artifice that subverts a previous text. The tendency
toward subversion is the unifying thread that connects these works by women in
democratic Spain. The literature by these new women writers of democratic
Spain—such as Tusquets, Roig, Montero, Amat, Diaz-Mas, Fernandez Cubas,
Riera, Mayoral—reexamines and undermines “the old taboos and myths, the
time-worn patriarchal attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. On occasion, it
supplants the old myths with new ones, only in turn to destroy them as well.”
Women’s narrative also reevaluates literary genres and conventions (Zatlin 30).

The characteristics which Zatlin discerned in women’s novels of
democratic Spain (portrayal of female experience, metafiction, subversion, and
reexamination) are all evident in Nada. Although not as overtly as the women

writers of the 19705 and 19805, Laforet recounts female experience, uses

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metafiction (myths, fairy tales)—albeit sparingly—, subverts dominant discourse,
and reexamines patriarchal attitudes. Laforet’s Spanish literary foremothers,
including Maria de Zayas, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Cecilia Bohl de
Faber, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Rosa Chacel, and Mercé Rodoreda among others,
also recounted female experience and reexamined aspects of patriarchy,
perhaps even hinting at a subversion of dominant attitudes; but it is Laforet’s use
of internal reduplication and explicitly intertextual metafiction, emulated by
subsequent writers, which becomes the focus of this chapter. Through the
subversion and rewriting of known texts—we will consider myths “oral” texts—
that Laforet challenged the hegemonic ideology, blazing the trail for subsequent
women authors.
Metafiction is a subversive literary strategy that challenges a set view of
reality. It calls into question
the artifice of its own construction, [suggesting] that the external world,
too, is a construct. If the characters in the novel may create for themselves
a fiction within the fiction or respond in their lives to the influence of
popular culture, then people in the world external to the novel may also
entrap themselves in the myths that they or society have created for them.
Metafiction calls into question the view of reality found in the traditional
realistic novel and underscores the fictional aspect of . . . history. (Zatlin
37)
As we will analyze in a later section, Laforet shatters the Cinderella and

Penelopesque mujer hacendosa ideal propagated by the Francoist regime and

130

indoctrinated in women—as Martin Gaite extensively cites throughout Usos
amorosos de la postguena espafiola, especially in the chapter on the Falange,
“El legado de José Antonio”.

In “Reading Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Women,” Elizabeth
Ordofiez, like Zatlin, discerns elements fundamental to contemporary Spanish
womens writing. She states that twentieth-century Spanish women’s literary texts

share a common theoretical impulse: a move toward the demythification of

patriarchal myths that bind or deprive women of being and autonomy, a

tendency to engage in an alternate mythopoeic process in which woman

can become her own hero. In many texts, one encounters an exhilarating
recurrence of female heroes embarking upon heroic quests for matrilinear

identity and the elusive boon of androgyny. (248)

Key elements from this passage, present in Nada and further cultivated in the
other four works, are the demythification of patriarchal myths, an alternate
mythopoeic process, and a quest for matrilinear identity. In Nada, Laforet
demythifies Cinderella, Ariadne, la mujer hacendosa (Penelope type), highlights
the importance of maternal guidance and establishes a new mythology which
does not posit women as subordinate helpers in relation to Prince Charrning-
Theseus-rescuer-lover-hero male types; rather, this new mythology consists of
lateral bonds of difference (i.e. non-hierarchized, non-oppositional bonds).

As the preceding and subsequent chapters show, these elements in Nada
have become more complex and highly evolved in the works of Roig, Tusquets,

and Garcia Morales. Feminist remythification creates a new female

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interdependency and highlights foremothers, be they human, literary or
mythological. For subsequent women writers, Laforet constitutes an authority
(respect based on knowledge) and authorial (literary) female figure to emulate.
According to Gascbn Vera, women writers must consciously develop a
style of writing uniquely and intrinsically their own. Any female literary discourse
not intrinsically one’s own, original and innovative, would necessarily repeat the
masculine discourse which has perpetuated Western, historical phallocentrism
and excluded the female voice (64). According to Bergmann, “[o]ne literary
response to the exacerbated confusion of finding a female sense of self is in an
intertextual dynamic between mythic models and a female protagonist’s
problems of development” (142). Bergmann clearly recognized the connection
between mythic models and female development. I maintain that Laforet avails
herself of myth and fairy tales to portray a new pattern of female development, a
true female Bildungsroman. Ordor'iez contends that Nada is “not explicitly nor
blatantly a self-conscious novel; its references to texts and their function are still
oblique and infrequent” (Voices 36). Nonetheless, Laforet’s mythic allusiveness
and recontextualization are further developed by subsequent female authors.
Laforet reinvents the Ariadne myth to find a new pattern of female development
that does not follow the traditional path leading to marriage. But before achieving
autonomy, the female character must confront the preeminent maternal figures.
The assessment and rejection of female role models available to Andrea lead her

to independence.

132

The female role models which Andrea must evaluate and debunk are both
“real” (within the context of the novel) and (meta)fictional. She must face her
grandmother and her two aunts as well as mythic (Ariadne) and fairy tale
(Cinderella) figures. We know the Francoist regime’s expectations of female
conduct in theory. Let us now examine textual examples that we might consider
more “real". These characters are Andrea’s grandmother and her aunts,
Angustias and Gloria.

The scene witnessed by Andrea upon her arrival to the house on Aribau
Street provides a glimplse int the dynamic and inner-working of the household.
The first words uttered by the grandmother, upon opening the door to Andrea
reveal that Gloria, whom we do not know yet, stays out late routinely, that
Angustias is a person to be feared for her wrath, and that the grandmother is an
enabler who implicitly complies with both Gloria and Angustias’ inappropriate
behavior under the guise of keeping the peace. Yet we clearly see, through her
excuse-making, silences, willed blindness and deafness, that the grandmother’s
role is to perpetuate patriarchal tyranny. She and society have raised two
(dys)functional men; Juan and Roman could be considered functional within
patriarchy,35 yet entirely dysfunctional when judged by a reasonable standard.

According to Nichols, the grandmother in Nada is the model of the “santa madre

 

35 Given that Juan and Roman work, are independent, and are the focus
of all goings-on in the home, their situation is acceptable by patriarchal

standards.

133

espanola”. Yet this madonna’s actions are at the root of all that plagues the
Aribau home. Nichols likens the grandmother to Biblical Eve, “Eva revieja”,
whose original sin led to the degeneration of the world. The sin of Laforet’s Eve is
not disobedience; instead, it is the favoritism—preferential treatment of males
over females—that spurred on the factionalism that destroyed her home,
metaphorizing the destruction of the nation. Nichols analyzes Laforet’s revision of
Genesis: “no fue Dios Padre quien prefirio un sexo sobre otro, ni luego a un
hermano sobre otro, sino Eva, primera entre todas las pecadoras” (Descifrar 32).
The grandmother herself states that she favored her boys, Juan and Roman,
over her daughters: “Yo he tenido seis hijos. . . Yo siempre he defendido a mis
hijos [varones]” (44-45). But the grandmother certainly did not behave similarly
with her daughters. Such a disparity fostered resentment on the part of her
daughters, to the point that after Roman’s death, two of Andrea’s unnamed aunts
reprimand their mother for gender bias and blame her for Roman’s suicide (283).

When Gloria recounts to Andrea her fear of Juan’s killing her, the
grandmother, completely enabling, verbally castigates them: “iMalas! iMaIasl . . .
(,Qué estais tramando ahi, pequefias malvadas? iEl manicomiol . . . iPara un
hombre bueno, que viste y da de comer a su nir’to y que por Ias noches le pasea
para que su mujer duerma tranquila! . . . iLocas! [A vosotras, a vosotras dos y a
mi nos encerrarian juntas antes de que tocaran un pelo de su cabeza” (291). Not
only does the grandmother fiercely show were her loyalties lie (with the male),
but she also phallocentrically rewrites the family’s reality, applauding Juan’s

“tender” fathering as a sacrifice so that his wife might sleep. In fact, the only

134

reason Juan holds the crying baby at night is because Gloria is out supporting
him, since he cannot support himself or his family.

Angustias, like the grandmother, also perpetuates a sexual double
standard in terms of her expectations of female conduct. Angustias’ rigid and
dominant nature make her a stern spokesperson for patriarchal social norms.
Angustias’ guidance becomes for Andrea a means of oppression via hegemonic
expectations, stifling what she valued most: her freedom. Aunt Angustias says to
her niece, “Te advierto que comprendo que es neceSario que vayas y vengas de
la Universidad . . ., pero de eso a andar por ahi suelta como un perro vagabundo
. . . Cuando estés sola en el mundo haz lo que quieras. Pero ahora tienes una
familia, un hogar y un nombre” (58). Angustias’ statement, “Cuando estés sola
en el mundo haz lo que quieras”, in retrospect, seems prophetic. When Andrea
does reject hegemonic values and is “orphaned,” she does do as she pleases.
The freedom to choose allows her the chance to actualize her potential instead of
repressing it. Angustias’ tirade links lack of freedom (oppression, repression) with
family name (patriarchy), reinforcing the law-of-the-fatherl name-of-the-father
paradigm.

Andrea’s inner monologue reveals her thoughts on Angustias’ controlling
nature; she could tolerate anything other than her aunt’s authority over her: “Era
aquello lo que me habia ahogado al llegar a Barcelona, lo que me habia hecho
caer en la abulia, lo que mataba mis iniciativas. Aquella mano que me apretaba
los movimientos y la curiosidad de la vida nueva” (99). Key terms articulated by

Andrea are “ahogado”, “caer”, “mataba”, and “apretaba”. Each of these

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communicates the oppression and repression which Andrea suffers at the hand
of Angustias, who, as stated earlier, is a spokesperson for patriarchal values.

Angustias attempts to instill in her niece appropriate patterns of female
conduct, stating that there are only two paths for women: marriage and the
convent. Angustias boasts her pride in choosing the convent, claiming that she
has behaved as “una hija de familia debia hacer” (101). Ironically, she has not
comported herself as such. “Una hija de familia” does all to abide by the law of
the father and respect the name of the father. For a woman, this is the equivalent
of silent obedience, unobtrusiveness, and, above all, chastity. Her twenty-year
affair with don Jerbnimo clearly violates the law of the father and sullies the name
of the father.

In Angustias’ view of Gloria, we see the whore/saint dichotomy
established by misogynistic phallocentric thought and the portrayal of Gloria as
the evil serpent of Genesis who corrupted the paradise of Eden:

antes [esta casa] era como un paraiso y ahora . . . con [Gloria] ha entrado

la serpiente maligna. Ella lo ha emponzofiado todo. Ella, t'inicamente ella,

ha vuelto loca a mi madre . . ., porque tu abuela esta loca, hija mia, y lo
peor es que la veo precipitarse a los abismos del infierno si no se corrige
antes de morir. Tu abuela ha sido una santa . . . Y luego esa mujer . . . Ie

ha acabado de trastomar la conciencia. (102-03)

Angustias’ Biblical rhetoric further reinforces her phallogocentric ideology: a
hierarchy of binary oppositions ruled by a patriarch. In Catholicism, God is the

supreme patriarch; the universe in divided into good and evil; women are either

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whores or saints. But Angustias’ saintly facade wears increasingly thin until she
joins a convent. For whatever reason, most likely Roman’s spreading the news of
her date with don Jerbnimo on Christmas Eve, she terminates her inappropriate
relationship to become a nun. Juan vociferously summarizes her liaison as her
train leaves the station:

Note casaste con él porque a tu padre se le ocurrio decirte que era poco

el hijo de un tendero para ti . . . Y cuando volvio casado y rico de América

lo has estado entreteniendo, se lo has robado a su mujer durante veinte
ahos . . . y ahora note atreves a irte con él porque crees que toda la calle

de Aribau y toda Barcelona estan pendientes de ti . . . . iY desprecias a mi

mujer! iMalvada! iY te vas con tu aureola de santa! (110)

Only after Juan’s summary does the reader fully understand the extent of
Angustias’ hypocrisy. Over the course of a twenty-year affair, she consistently
violated the norms that she staunchly attempted to indoctrinate in Andrea.

Martin Gaite comments on the unofficial stand on marital infidelities during
the postwar period. Confessors asked their “penitentes femeninas” to keep silent
about their conjugal problems for the sake of maintaining appearances: “para no
dar al traste con la estabilidad de las instituciones intocables. Si el marido
engar’iaba a la mujer, con tal de que lo hiciera sin demasiado escandalo y de
tapadillo, lo mejor era hacer como si nada” (Usos 21). Hence, it was acceptable
that Angustias have an affair with a married man as long as she did so discreetly.
From her aunt, Andrea leams many valuable lessons, all by negative example.

Nada is the denunciation and rejection of various models: hypocritical, false self-

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sacrifice and abnegation; the virginity ideal, exemplified by Angustias as the
“fallen” virgin because of her affair with don Jerbnimo; false pride of coming from
“a good family” (26); false generosity as stated by Angustias “gracias a nuestra
caridad Iograras tus aspiraciones” (26); misogyny by a woman '(Angustias’
scapegoating of Gloria) (27); denunciation of friendship between women (“si. . .
supiera que tu eras amiga de [Gloria] . . . me darias un gran disgusto”) (27).

Gloria is instrumental in demythifying the concept of paterfamilias and that
of the patriarchal home as an extension of a “happily ever after” fairy tale or
Hollywood ending. After 250 pages of Juan’s beating and verbally abusing
Gloria, Andrea tacitly responds to Gloria’s story of how she and Juan fell in love:
“Pensaba yo en unas palabras que me dijo Gloria mucho tiempo atras,
refiriéndose a su historia con Juan . . . ‘Era como el final de una pelicula. Era
como el final de todas Ias tristezas. Ibamos a ser felices ya’” (250). The irony is
that her marriage was the beginning of a lifetime of escalating abuse. Yet Gloria
lives in denial, refusing to admit that her marriage is not the happy ending of a
movie.

Throughout the novel, she gambles in secret to support her husband and
child, allowing “her husband his illusion of economic importance” (Ordbfiez,
Voices 39). Gloria’s sister reveals to Juan the truth which defies patriarchal
standards of acceptability: “Y puedes dar gracias a Dios, Joanet, de que tu mujer
te quiera. Con el cuerpo que tiene podria ponerte buenos cuemos y sin pasar
tantos sustos como pasa la pobreta para poder venir a jugar a las cartas. Todo

para que el senoron se crea que es un pintor famoso” (181). Gloria fully upholds

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the farce that Juan is a “senoron”, a gentleman respected for fulfilling all of his
duties according to patriarchal standards.

With her grandmother, Angustias, and Gloria as role models, Andrea is
reluctant to accept societal expectations of her. She doubts that marriage or the
convent are the only appropiate paths for her. Her reluctance becomes evident in
a conversation with Pons, onto whom she later attempts to project her
Cinderella-Prince Charming fantasy. Pons asks Andrea what she would like to do
upon graduating from the university. The following dialogue ensues.

— No sé . . . Daré clases, supongo.

[Aunque] comprendia con claridad que nunca podria ser yo una buena

profesora.

— (No te gustaria casarte?

Yo no le contesté.

Habia salido aquella tarde a la calle . . . y vagaba sin ninguna direccibn

deterrninada. (187)

Andrea’s wandering through the streets is a metaphorical expression of
wandering through life, exploring her possibilities. She does not answer Pons’
query about marriage, neither ruling it out nor validating it as a worthy option.
What is certain is that by not having the predetermined expectation of marriage,
she strays from the traditional model.

The dynamic between Andrea’s models also seems a metaphor for Spain.
By evaluating and rejecting her models, Andrea can extrapolate her identity and

her teleology. The constant fratricidal threat, between Juan and Roman, in the

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house on Aribau street clearly mimics the Spanish Civil war which ended only
five years before the publication of Nada. Juan’s violent treatment of Gloria
further recalls the senseless violence of the war. The unnamed baby’s
whimpering and helplessness attest to the loss of innocence, the eradication of a
sense that all is well in the world. Angustias’ authoritarian demeanor recalls
fascist absolutism. The interplay between Pons and his mother highlights the
absurdity of idealistic, supposedly progressive, bohemian youths who, in the end,
conform to hegemonic pressures. Therefore, by assessing her models, Andrea is
equipped with the knowledge to forge her own identity as a woman and a
Spaniard.

Having analyzed Andrea's “real” role models, let us now consider the
textual models she must face and discard. The protagonist’s expectations of
living her Cinderella fantasy are engaged and, subsequently, shattered at the
thought of attending Pons’ party. The anticipation evokes her “primera lectura de
la Cenicienta” (202): something fantastic, grand, and traditional. At the end of the
evening, Laforet provides a second reading of the Cinderella story, for Andrea
leaves the party disappointed by Pons, too weak to stand up to his mother—
unlike Cinderella’s prince—, and feeling inferior due to her old shoes—while
Cinderella’s glass slippers transform her into a princess. No such thing happens
to Andrea. Both her loneliness and poverty are confirmed with this episode.

The thought of the party evokes Andrea's fantasies: “para mi Ia palabra

baile evocaba un emocionante suefio de trajes de noche y suelos brillantes, que

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me habia dejado la primera lectura de la Cenicienta” (202). She ponders on the
possibility of falling in love with Pons, transforming him into a romantic figure.

Senti [con Pons...] un anhelo y un deseo rabioso de despreccupacibn. De

poder libertarrne. De aceptar su invitacion y poder tumbarrne en Ias

playas que él me ofrecia sintiendo pasar Ias horas como en un cuento de
nifios, fugada de aquel mundo abrumador que me rodeaba. Pero aun
estaba detenida por la sensacibn molesta que el enamoramiento de Pons
me producla. Creia yo que una contestacibn afirmativa a su ofrecimiento
me ligaba a él por otros lazos que me inquietaban, porque me parecian
falsos [. . . Djeseé con todas mis fuerzas poder Ilegar a enamorarrne de

él. (202)

Andrea is torn between fairy-tale expectations and her authentic desires. She
does not love him, nor does she truly want him to rescue her from her miserable
existence.

On the St. John’s Eve, Andrea reminisces “Yo recordé las canciones
campesinas de la noche de San Juan, la noche buena para enamorarse
cogiendo el trébol magico de los campos caldeados” (203). Given that Pons’
soiree is held on St. John’s Eve, this fact further contributes to the magical, story
book quality of Andrea’s misguided hopes.

Laforet juxtaposes and intercalates Andrea’s romantic musing about Pons
and the escalating dysfunction at Aribau. The connection lies in the fact that the
sordidness at home fostered her desire to be rescued from it. But her “prince

charming” is none but the inadequate Pons, who caves in to societal and

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maternal pressure. Pons is bound by both his mother’s apron strings and purse
strings. Andrea witnessed that the situation at home was worsening. Roman tried
to seduce Gloria, then, bit a dog, and finally locked himself in his room. In
response to this domestic chaos, Andrea narrates : “Casi me parecia querer a mi
amigo [Pons] al pensar que él me iba a ayudar a realizar este anhelo
desesperado” (211). But what is her unstated desire? Perhaps to escape her
miserable home life? To be rescued by Prince Charming?

When Pons calls Andrea the morning of the party, she muses:

su voz me lleno de temura por él. El sentimiento de ser esperada y

querida me hacia despertar mil instintos de mujer; una emocion como de

triunfo, un deseo de ser alabada, admirada, de sentinne como la

Cenicienta del cuento, princesa por unas horas, después de un largo

incognfio...

Esta fabula [de Cenicienta], tan repetida en mis noches infantiles,
me hacia sonreir, cuando con Ias manos un poco temblorosas [hacia] que
apareciera bonito mi traje menos viejo, cuidadosamente planchado para
la fiesta.

‘Tal vez—pensaba yo un poco ruborizada—ha Ilegado ese dia.’

‘. . .Tal vez el sentido de la vida para una mujer consiste
Unicamente en ser descubierta asi, mirada de manera que ella misma se
sienta irradiante de qu.’ No en mirar, no en escuchar venenos y torpezas
de los sentimientos y las sensaciones, la propia desesperacibn y alegria.

La propia maldad o bondad. (214-15)

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The narrator herself, while dreaming about being like Cinderella, articulates that
this storybook romance of being swept away is an alternative to “venenos y
torpezas“, “desesperacion”, y “maldad”. In other words, if Pons plays his role of
Prince Charming, she is magically rescued from the unhealthy, evil environment
of Aribau. At the party, Andrea’s fairy-tale fantasies come into direct conflict with
another reality: Pons’ mother, an imposing figure in whose eyes Andrea’s shame
is reflected. Andrea describes her first and only encounter with the woman whose
disapproving gaze forces the protagonist to accept that she is not and will never
be like Cinderella, whose glass slipper prompted Prince Charming to whisk her
away from a miserable existence:

Del olor a ser‘iora con demasiadas joyas que me vino al estrechar la mano

de la madre de Pons y de la mirada suya, indefinible, dirigida a mis viejos

zapatos, cruzandose con otra anhelante de Pons, que la observaba . . .

Aquella sefiora, como si la sonrisa se le hubiera parado—ya para

siempre—en los labios. (218)
As will be seen in El Sur, Adriana fears her mother’s gaze, for she sees in
Adriana the monster within. Pons’ mother also scrutinizes condemningly. It is the
gaze of another woman, one who should, or could, be a role model, that sees
right through these young women on their journey to adulthood. It is precisely this
gaze which forces them to look to other possible role models to emulate, to help
them feel on track toward self-fulfillment.

Upon leaving Pons’ home, crushed, Andrea reveals “[a]lgo que me hacia

sentirrne pequefia y apretada entre fuerzas césmicas como el héroe de una

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tragedia griega” (223-24). After the demythification of the Cinderella fairy tale,
Andrea compares herself to the hero of a Greek tragedy, perhaps prefiguring a
quest for an entirely different ideology in which she, as a woman, should not
await rescue by a heroic, romantic male figure.

As Ordor‘lez has pointed out, at Pons’ party, Andrea wore the stigma of
her family on her person in the form of “old and inappropriate shoes.” Unlike the
storybook Cinderella, who receives the magical glass slipper “enabling her to
transcend her class”; Andrea’s shoes are worn “material manifestations of the
gap between the world of childish fantasy and the cruel realities of social
divisions” (Ordonez, Voices 42). Martin Gaite has contrasted Cinderella
expectations and self-abnegating mujer hacendosa reality in postwar Spain. She
studies myriad postwar magazines and periodicals to arrive at a clear view of
male-female relations in the postwar period. What seems clear is that there was
a great disparity between expectations and reality. Young women were
indoctrinated in the “happily ever after” myth of the life of a good little wife. A
woman aspired to become a self-abnegating superwoman who had a perfect
house and children, made her husband feel like a king in his palace, supported
his endeavors, reveled in his successes—which she enabled—and was a well-
groomed picture of perfection and subtle elegance; but the most stunning aspect
of such a life of constant activity was the ability to do it seamlessly and invisibly.
The flurry of activity required to do the work of a maid, a nanny, a seamstress,

and hostess was the grand self-sacrificing lie, boasting a life of passive repose.

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Yet this was the ideal inculcated by the Seccibn Femenina to which women were
taught to enthusiastically aspire.

The life of wifedom was portrayed as dazzling in the popular post-war
magazines studied by Martin Gaite; spinsterhood as a total failure. Therefore, a
woman’s early adulthood was spent in quiet pursuit of a husband. Images of
romantic figures ubiquitously and insidiously permeated songs, movies,
magazines and novels, yet courtship etiquette forbade any true physical or
emotional intimacy. The result was that young wOmen heroized and idealized
men they did not know—just as Andrea wanted Pons to be her Prince Charming.
In essence, these male strangers become blank screens onto which was
projected the romantic hero of popular culture. Yet, as Martin Gaite portrays,
young women often felt cheated due to the disparity of expectations and reality:

La chica recién puesta de largo, aunque hubiera bailado mucho y dijera

que se habia divertido, al Ilegar a casa y al colgar el traje de noche en el

armario casi siempre tenia que reconocer que la habian defraudado en
sus expectativas. Ningun hombre habia venido a hablarle de las penas de
su corazbn.

Y era un requisito casi indispensable dentro de la nocibn confusa y
exaltada del amor que la mujer elaboraba, apoyandose en modelos
Iiterarios y del cine. La represion de la sexualidad femenina desaguaba en
el ansia de confidencia, de lagrimas compartidas. Por eso se idealizaba al

hombre ‘atonnentado’. Enamorarse era, en cierto modo, tener acceso a la

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naturaleza de esos presuntos tormentos varoniles, rodeados siempre de
cierto misterio. (Usos 143)
The “atorrnentado” frequently was the male hero of romance novels, creating the
“chica novelera” phenomenon which pervaded and flourished in all social
classes. The “chica novelera” was, of course, a young or not-so-young woman
who fantasized about romance plots which she dreamed would extend
themselves into the reality of her unmarried existence. These “noveleras”
eran fervientes consumidoras de aquella droga que semanal o
mensualmente les iba a deparar su encuentro en el papel con un hombre
‘distinto’, o que Ias hiciera creer que ellas podian ser distintas. Cuanto
mas desgraciadas se sintieran en realidad, mas necesitaban de aquella
identificacibn con Ias heroinas . . . a las que menos lo esperaban les llovia
del cielo una ilusién que las hacia sentirse transfiguradas, distintas. El
mago de esta alquimia, por supuesto, era siempre un hombre. . .Aquellas
novelitas aparecidas en publicaciones femeninas [explotaban eI concepto
de la magia transfonnadora] cuando eligian a sus protagonistas entre
chicas de clase social inferior, dependientas, costureras o secretarias,
ansiosas de vivir el mito de Cenicienta (Usos 143-44)
The phenomenon described by Martin Gaite constitutes the Cinderella Syndrome
which Andrea had internalized, projecting her Cinderella expectations onto Pons
when she attended his party. But her old shoes—unlike glass slippers—were the

banal reality which broke the spell.

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The shoe episode at Pons’ house also seems reminiscent of Hans
Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” The plot is as follows. A very poor young
girl fashions red fabric into shoes to wear to her mother’s funeral. She is then
adopted by a nearly blind older woman who offers to buy her shoes. Karen, the
young girl, chooses a pair of bright red shoes, neglecting to tell her adoptive
mother their color. At church, the members of the congregation show their
opprobrium and inform the old woman of Karen’s scandalous shoes. She, in turn,
reprimands the young girl. When the old woman is on her death bed, Karen dons
her shoes and attends a ball rather than tend to the dying woman. The shoes
take over. Karen cannot remove them, nor can she stop dancing until she arrives
at the executioner’s house and begs him to cut off her feet with the shoes still on.
Only when he has done so can she stop dancing. Karen then repents, works for
the Pastor’s family, and is visited by an angel. The fairy tale concludes with “Her
soul traveled along the shaft of sunlight to heaven, where no one questioned her
about the red shoes” (241).

The moral of the tale might be that lack of conformity to social norms has
a heavy price. In Karen’s case, she lost her feet, but regained her soul. Andrea’s
situation at Pons’ party bears a certain similarity in that her old shoes—an
indication of who she is: a poor girl—do not fit in with the elegance at his soiree.
Furthermore, because of them, Andrea must accept the scorn and rejection of
Pons’ mother. She is subsequently ostracized. But, like Karen, she cannot help
herself. Karen cannot repress her joy and sensuality, while Andrea as of yet can

do nothing to transform the reality of her life of poverty.

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Villegas likens the atmosphere of the house on Aribau Street to that of
Grimm and Andersen fairy-tale literature (182), noting the fairy-tale-Iike antithesis
of darkness-light, dark-blond in Nada, remarking that Ena and her family are all
blond. He queries, “aSeré exageracibn recordar que en los cuentos infantiles Ias
hadas protectoras son siempre rubias y luminosas? Tanto significa Ena para
Andrea que se angustia por el solo temor de perderla” (191). Therefore, the
shattering of her fairy-tale hopes at Pons’ party become for Andrea a turning
point. Through the emotional release of crying in the isolated street, she
describes, “asi me parecio que lentamente mi alma quedaba lavada” (224). Her
tears cleansed her of her story-book dreams.

Laforet’s rewriting of the Cinderella tale makes possible the
recontextualization of the Ariadne myth and new, non-cliche ending. Mythic
rewriting introduces an innovation not only in fiction (reading) but also in thinking
(reasoning). Unlike Pratt’s finding that the traditional female character in the
female Bildung is a helper and remains at home in the end, Andrea breaks the
stereotype to forge her own destiny. The traditional fairy tale ending is that she
would have found comfort at home, or that some romantic prince would have
swept her off her feet to live happily ever after. In the traditional mythic ending,
Ariadne waits to no avail for her beloved Theseus, only to settle on Dionysus,
whom she does not love. In Andrea’s case, these possibilities are not actualized.
Rather, Laforet constructs an alternative, ambiguous ending in which Andrea
leaves the toxicity of the Aribau Street apartment through the emotional bond

with her friend Ena and surrogate mother, Margarita. As Villegas indicates, the

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disappointment from Pons’ party alters Andrea’s perception of Margarita.
Previously, the protagonist had viewed her as a fairy godmother; now that Ena’s
mother has “fallen,” she is humanized (198). Once Andrea learns of Margarita’s
sordid past with Roman, she can no longer view her friend’s mother as a
luminescent, enchanted being who magically bestows happiness upon those
around her. Unlike the fairy-tale ending in which Cinderella will live happily ever
after, with the fairy godmother’s magical assistance, by virtue of having the
prince in her life, such a generalization cannot be applied to Andrea. Once she
has shed hegemonic hopes and a fantastic view of her future, Andrea’s
(perspective on the) world changes drastically. She sees life for what it is. There
are no heroes, fairy godmothers, and princesses who live happily ever after.
What remains is reality, with its joys and disappointments. It is implied that
Laforet’s protagonist leaves for Madrid to study, to work, and to do her part to
gain independence. A happy life is not handed to her on a silver platter, but,
rather self-independence is presented to her as an option, as a result of diligent
self-application. Also, the affection that she receives from Ena’s family
constitutes a relationship of interdependence and not unilateral dependence, as
is the case with Cinderella. For, if we scrutinize the fairy tale, what does the
prince ever gain from saving Cinderella? On the other hand, what Andrea and
Ena have is a sense of sisterhood, camaraderie, and support. Ordbflez has
stated that instead of simply reenacting the Cinderella myth, Nada highlights
“friendship as a more positive and self-affirrning ending to the narrative of

feminine development” than amorous coupling (Voices 51).

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Upon leaving Pons’ party with her Cinderella fantasies shattered, Andrea
comes upon Ena’s mother, Margarita, who represents another type of “textual"
role model: Ariadne. This encounter also presents a female possibility which
Andrea comes to reject. Cinderella and Ariadne are role models which society
believes feasible for women. The fairy tale represents the dream that has been
inculcated into women: being swept away by a prince to live happily ever after.
The myth portrays the all-too-painful reality of alienation and desperation that
results from believing that one can be whisked away to happiness in this manner.

Margarita’s past relationship with Roman clearly parallels the Ariadne-
Theseus myth. She recounts her relationship with him to Andrea:

Roman se daba cuenta de algo de aquella extatica adoracibn que yo

sentia por él y jugaba conmigo con la curiosidad clnica con que un gato

juega con el ratbn que acaba de cazar. Entonces fue cuando me pidio mi

trenza . . .Yo no habia soflado siquiera una felicidad mayor que la de que

él me pidiera algo. La magnitud del sacrificio era tan grande, sin embargo,

que me estremecia. Mi cabello, cuando yo tenia dieciséis afios, era mi

i’inica belleza. Aun Ilevaba una trenza suelta, una unica, gordisima trenza

que me resbalaba sobre el pecho hasta la cintura. Era mi orgullo. Roman

la miraba dla tras dia con su sonrisa intolerable Nadie queria a

Roman como yo . . . Le envié mi trenza con la misma ansiedad un poco

febril, que frlamente parece tan cursi, de la herolna de una novela

romantica. No recibl ni una Ilnea suya en contestacibn. En mi casa la

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ocurrencia fue como si hubiera caldo una verdadera desgracia sobre la

familia. En castigo me encerraron un mes sin salir a la calle. (234)
Margarita’s braid, like Ariadne’s thread, is a sacrifice of love, which provides the
beloved with what he desires: for Roman, control over Margarita; for Theseus,
exit from the labyrinth. Roman reacted to Margarita’s sacrifice in the following
fashion: “Tengo lo mejor de ti en casa. Te he robado tu encanto . . . ¢Por qué
eres como un perro para mi?” (235). Margarita’s illness and confinement after
Roman’s rejection parallel Ariandne’s sleep on NaXos (235). His cruelty is similar
to that of Theseus. Ena’s mother, subsequent to her abandonment by Roman,
marries Luis just as Ariadne married Dionysus on the rebound.

Ena’s mother further mimics the mythic Ariadne. Theseus requested of her
an enormous sacrifice: to give herself entirely to him. Once he was certain of her
devotion, he abandoned her forever. Ariadne’s sacrifice was to definitely
relinquish her labyrinth. A place she wished to leave, yet also, a place she
cherished. Roman, once he was certain of Margarita’s devotion and had her
sacrifice in his hands—her braid—, disappeared from her life. The punishment
imposed upon her was isolation, just as in Ariadne’s case. Andrea, who had been
following the path of Ariadne, is confronted with a repn'sal of the myth: the
occurrence between Margarita and Roman. This same evening, Andrea had
been forced to face the absurdity of believing that the Cinderella fairy tale could
come true for her. The young woman comes face-to-face with more than cliche,
ancient stories. These stories provided models for female behavior. In essence,

Cinderella and Ariadne are role models that form part of the collective Western

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psyche. At the conclusion of the second part of Nada, Laforet weaves a clear
tapestry, with mythic and fairy tale threads, of what society believes feasible for
women.

Andrea’s conversation with Margarita, compels her to realize that mythic
and fairy-tale models are not acceptable. In fact, this shattering of (society’s and
her own) expectations foreshadows the alternative ending of the novel. Laforet
makes use of images which recur in both fairy tales and myths: the princess, the
hero, the monster, the confining space, marginality, and the hope that good will
triumph. In the myth there are three figures of importance: Ariadne, Theseus and
the Minotaur. Of course, there is also one significant space: the labyrinth.
According to Villegas, Laforet “recurrio a [la] estructura [mitical—consciente o
inconscientemente—sobre la base de recuerdos de cuentos infantiles que,
posiblemente, le proporcionaron parte del esquema y, ademas, una serie de
imagenes” (173). The mythic figure of Theseus is recast, yet subverted, in
Roman. Theseus was a hero and a warrior. Roman fought in the Civil War, on
the side of the defeated Republicans. The hero arrived in Crete to offer himself
as a sacrifice to the Minotaur or to try to kill him within the labyrinth (Larousse
176). His victory over his enemies is absolute: “Theseus put an end to the
criminal career of the giant Polypemon . . . who forced his victims to be on a bed
too short for them and then cut off whatever overlapped . . . Theseus made him
undergo the same treatment” (Larousse 176). Upon close scrutiny, Theseus’
violence is viewed as heroic, whereas Roman’s is viewed as sadistic. Both are

cruel, but Roman displays unmitigated sadism. He reveled when Margarita

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sacrificed her braid to him and he gloats upon provoking Juan. Both Theseus and
Roman seek out opportunities to defy death: Roman by playing with his gun and
his subsequent suicide; Theseus with his fearlessness toward the Minotaur.

Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him a thread so that, upon
killing the Minotaur, he could find his way out of the labyrinth. When he exited the
maze, he abandoned Ariadne on the Island of Naxos. Theseus then married
Phaedra, Ariadne’s sister, and he voluntarily descended into hell, risking never
returning. Roman, in a similar fashion, forms a bond with Andrea, who with her
affection guides him through the labyrinth of his loneliness. Finally, Roman pays
back her affection with total abandonment; his suicide is similar to Theseus’
voluntary descent into hell. Similarly, Roman courts Ena—a friend of Andrea’s
with whom she truly feels a sense of sisterhood. However, Ena leaves him,
rewriting the myth by reversing the gender roles. Gloria could also be seen as a
Phaedra figure, given the amorous relationship she had with Roman during the
war and his sexual pursuit of her on St. John’s Eve.

According to one version of the Ariadne myth, one day, on the Island of
Naxos, Dionysus perceived a young woman asleep on the shore: Ariadne just
abandoned by Theseus. When she realized what had happened, she cried
uncontrollably. Soon, however, she married Dionysus. The Homeric tradition
develops another version, in which Ariadne was killed by Artemis and, once
dead, married Dionysus. In Naxos, two feasts celebrate her honor: one of
mourning and one of rejoicing (Larousse 159). It is precisely this conclusion of

the myth, as will be seen, that Laforet rewrites. But, if we consider the myth

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closely, several parallels with Nada become clear. Ariadne, after the
abandonment, sleeps alone and isolated on Naxos. Andrea, after Roman’s
suicide, spends two full days asleep, alone and isolated in her room. Upon
awakening, Ariadne latched onto whomever could remedy her loneliness.
Andrea, in the mythic style, on awakening from her depressed stupor
strengthened her bond with Ena (and her family), who provided her with
companionship and affection.

The figure of the Minotaur is to be interpreted symbolically. According to
the myth, Minos married Pasiphae who had sex with a bull; the result was the
birth of the Minotaur. Minos isolated the monster in the labyrinth, a palace almost
impossible to exit. The only sustenance ever given to the incarcerated beast was
human flesh (Larousse 198). The Minotaur is a ferocious beast who destroys any
human being into whom it can sink its fangs and claws. The Minotaur is the
equivalent of the ugliness, the violence, and the latent desires contained in the
house on Aribau Street.

In Nada, Andrea, playing the role of Ariadne, finds herself in the labyrinth
of her loneliness. Laforet places her Ariadne in a triply labyrinthine environment;
that is, the labyrinths are her own loneliness, the house on Aribau Street, and the
streets of Barcelona. Her tramping through the city of Barcelona bears a strong
parallel to the mythic labyrinth: Andrea explores the city, becomes lost and, in the
end, finds the exit. Juan Villegas likens Pons’ bohemian hang-out house to a
labyrinth as part of Andrea’s call to adventure, adding that the mytheme of the

labyrinth also acquires the negative sense of “descenso a los infiemos y

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aventura de la noche de los infiemos”, a grotesque, nightmarish, horrific,
threatening world in which Andrea follows Juan through the Barcelonese
neighborhoods (193-94). Angustias had forbidden Andrea from going to e! barrio
chino, inhabited by “[pjerdidas, ladrones y el brillo del demonic”, which for her
was, if not hell, the path leading to it. The prohibition intrigued Andrea, who
suddenly viewed “el barrio chino iluminado por una chispa de gran belleza” (58-
59). The barrio chino, with its dark and forbidden allure, bears parallels to the
labyrinth.

Clearly, Nada is a recasting of the myth of Ariadne, but it is through the
mythic rewriting that Laforet presents a female Bildungsroman. The parallels
between Nada and the underlying myth invite the psychological analysis of the
protagonist, whose efforts to mature are fruitful. According to Susana Cavallo,
the work which we analyze follows

el patrbn de la Bildungsroman, mas adaptandola al modelo e itinerario

femeninos . . . [Eln comparacibn con la novela de formacibn masculina,

que traza un camino lineal desde Ia juventud del héroe, su salida al

mundo en busqueda de aventuras, hasta su retomo triunfante al hogar y a

la felicidad doméstica, la Bildungsroman femenina no traza ‘. .. una

progresibn autodeterrninada hacia la madurez sino una regresibn de la

plena participacibn en la vida adulta’. (171)

According to Pratt, female maturation is essentially a choice between a
secondary or helper state, sacrificial victimization, madness or death (Archetypal

36), a perspective which reflects the traditional view of female Bildungsmman.

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Ferguson asserts that the female coming of age novel carries with it a circular
structure in which, unlike her male hero counterpart who sees the world, the
female character remains at home (Cavallo 171). Nada fits into the “coming-of-
age” genre, although it does not conform to Pratt’s analysis of 300 years” worth of
writings by women. Disproving both Pratt’s and Ferguson’s theory, Andrea
comes to terms with her past in order to be able to pass to a stage of adulthood.
Laforet further subverts the traditional conclusion (a clear, closed end) by relating
an open-ended story, for where Andrea will end up is unknown. Laforet is intrepid
enough to portray a naive young woman who refuses to succumb to the
preexistent female stereotypes; but in order to leave the door open to the idea of
a continuation, of a voyage of self-actualization begun but not concluded, of the
initial stage of a process, the author simply could not further elaborate the
ending.

In fact, if there does not exist a female epic hero in the traditional literary
canon, Andrea has no one to emulate (Molinaro 26). Additionally, female coming
of age becomes difficult due to the patriarchal concept of the male figure as hero
and the female figure as helper (Ordonez, “Reading” 247). In other words, whom
can a woman or a female character emulate if the surrounding culture and the
literary canons lack exemplary or, at least, adequate role models? The female
being must reinvent herself through the quest for her matrilinear roots (“Reading”
248) or for someone whom she may emulate. But what is essential is that she

liberate herself from the unhealthy elements which interfere with her maturation.

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In Laforet’s rewriting of the Ariadne myth, Andrea does precisely that. As
we saw earlier, the mythical Ariadne married Dionysus who saved her from
loneliness. Laforet, as a female author, provides a key element which shatters
the cliched mythic plot. Instead of marrying, Andrea gains independence through
her friendship with another woman. The ending constitutes a subversion of the
original myth by not allowing Andrea to remain at home. The protagonist does
not conform to the traditional role, but rather she establishes another type of
affective bond. Through her friendship with Ena, Andrea comes to form part of a
surrogate family who provides her with a sense of matrilineage. Ena’s mother
welcomes the orphaned Andrea as if she were her own child and an integral part
of the family. By choosing Margarita and Ena as a surrogate family, Andrea
indicates a rejection of her own family. Margarita is a figure who is diametrically
opposed to Angustias (a religious hypocrite), the grandmother (an Old, apparently
sweet, woman who pretends not to witness the tremendista violence in her
house), and Gloria (a dim-witted flirt who resigns herself to her husband‘s
physical and verbal aggression).

In other words, Andrea goes through her maturation process without a
single worthy female role model. She is an existential orphan who experiences
“rites of passage. . . utterly unprepared and alone" (Ordoflez, “Reading” 247).
The orphanhood, in Andrea’s case, stems from the death of her parents, but she
also suffers from an affective orphanhood. She is surrounded by family but none
of her own family members truly attempts to establish any emotional bond with

her. Angustias, Gloria, and her grandmother are three emotionally absent female

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figures whom Andrea must assess and subsequently dismiss. To mature it is
imperative that she acknowledge that they lack psychological and emotional
traits worthy of emulation. Laforet’s protagonist seeks a matrilinear identity and
female interdependence. Andrea, by rejecting Gloria, her grandmother, and
Angustias as adequate role models, comes to identify herself with Ena’s mother,
Margarita, for she has Ieamed from her past. Andrea can, therefore, glean from
the mistakes of another woman and modify her life choices accordingly.

Andrea gives great importance to a nontraditional bond: friendship with
another woman. This element becomes key in literary feminism (or feminist
literature). In fact, it is invaluable in the development of Roig’s, Tusquets,’ and
Garcia Morales’ plots. Andrea attempts to reciprocate Ena’s generosity by
bestowing onto her a delicate, lace handkerchief from her grandmother at her
first communion, a gesture which, states Andrea, “me compensaba de toda la
mezquinidad de mi vida” (70). In other words, friendship becomes the redeeming
thread, the port of salvation for Andrea. The lack of it leads to Elia’s capitulation
in Tusquets’ El mismo mar and fosters Adriana’s crisis in Garcia Morales’ El Sur.

Angustias, the mouthpiece of the dominant discourse, conceives of
women only in relation to men, precluding the possibility of a relationship
between women. Angustias accuses Gloria of having stolen Andrea’s
handkerchief. Andrea’s exculpation of Gloria prompts Angustias to ask Andrea
whether she gave it to a boyfriend, which Andrea denies. Angustias believes this
to be a lie in Gloria’s defense. On close scrutiny, a gesture of friendship between

women exceeds Angustias’ expectations of possibilities. Following Angustias

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phallocentric thinking, if Andrea did not give the lace to a man, then, she must
not have given it away. But Laforet’s creation of friendship between these two
young women becomes a key factor in successive works by female authors. So
here, the relationships between women are fundamental.

Although Andrea characterizes her relationship with Ena’s family as “me
agarraba a la patriarcal familia” (120), the portrayal of the household is more
matriarchal than patriarchal. Firstly, we never learn the family’s surname,
negating the name of the father] law of the father paradigm. The mother chooses
when to move, evincing a new concept: law of the mother or law of the mother’s
whims. Margarita, Ena’s mother, is the affluent, privileged one when they
married. She was not and is not financially dependent on her husband. All in all,
Margarita’s role and presence far outweigh Luis’, thus making Ena’s household
matriarchal and not patriarchal. The strongest bond in her home is the mother-
daughter bond. Margarita describes her personal transformation upon giving birth
to Ena:

Cuando me dijeron que era una nina, a mi desgana se unio una extrana

congoja. No la queria ver . . . Yo sentia remordimiento por haberla hecho

nacer de mi, por haberla condenado a llevar mi herencia. Asi empecé a

llorar con una debilitada tristeza de que por mi culpa aquella cosa

gimiente pudiese Ilegar a ser una mujer algt'in dia . . . [Pero] dejé que para
alimentarse chupara de mi y asi me devorara y venciera . . . Fue ella

[Ena], la nina quien me descubrio la fina urdimbre de la vida, Ias mil

dulzuras del renunciamiento y del amor, que no es sclo pasibn y egolsmo

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ciego entre un cuerpo y alma de hombre y un cuerpo y alma de mujer,
sino que reviste nombres de comprensibn, amistad y temura. Fue Ena la
que me hizo querer a su padre, la que me hizo . . . desprendenne de mis
morbosidades enfennizas y mis cerrados egolsmos. (239-40)
Ordoriez describes Margarita as “a privileged and seemingly definitive model of
womanhood—the sacrificial mother of patriarchal discourse” (Voices 42-43). But
Ordbflez disregards the importance of the mother-daughter bonds which
Margarita recounts to Andrea. In a patriarchal world, the mother is all but absent,
exerting no power of her own. But the relationship which Margarita recounts is
one of privilege between two women. It establishes a matrilinear genealogy
rather than a patrilinear genealogy as is the case with patriarchalism. Therefore,
Margarita should not be seen as the “sacrificial mother of patriarchal discourse”
but as the female figure who provides a supplemental view of the patriarchal
dominant discourse. The relationship between Ena and Margarita is not seen in
light of Margarita‘s relationship to Luis. Rather it is the mother-daughter
relationship which affects all other relationships, changing the focus of a
patriarchal, phallocentric world in which all is viewed in relation to the father.
Laforet’s protagonist bonds with Ena and Margarita by default. Andrea
seeks out tenderness in the characters who are most similar to her. According to
Martin Gaite’s description in Desde la ventana, she is “una chica rara”, that is,
Andrea’s personality is one of “hermetismo, . . . ausencia total de coqueteria, esa
marginalidad de personaje casi inexistente que enciende en algunos

curiosidad” (99). The protagonist is odd and looks for a similar likeness in those

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close to her to be able to carry out a desdoblamiento and dialogue with herself.
Before identifying with her new matriarchal family, Andrea first identifies with her
uncle due both to his artistic creativity and his oddness. She saw in Roman traits
she shares with him; this projection of self led to the introspection necessary for
psychological development. Andrea needed to experience, then reject, the
emotional seduction of Roman and all that he represents as part of her journey.
Dialoguing with oneself reaffirms the inner search, metaphorically the
descent to the labyrinth to confront the Minotaur. The mythic Ariadne was raised
in the labyrinth with her own brother. Ariadne is the legitimate daughter of King
Minos and Queen Pasifae, while the Minotaur is a monstrous bastard. The image
of the Minotaur unites both Ariadne’s noble and monstrous nature that reside
within her, a double-faceted nature that is also an integral part of Andrea. The
protagonist confronts her personal Minotaur in order to be able to choose the
path which will allow her to forge the rest of her existence. The figure of the
Minotaur metaphorized the not entirely latent incestuous desires between Andrea
and her uncle. Had Andrea succumbed to his seduction, she would have
perpetuated her family’s and her own dysfunction. By dissociating herself from
Roman and establishing a relationship with someone outside of the toxic family
hearth, she slays the beast and exits from the labyrinth to go toward. The
Minotaur and his labyrinth can serve as a metaphor for post Civil War Francoist
isolationist politics, which separated Spain from the rest of Europe and allowed
Franco to govern with absolute power within national borders. Through the

literary metaphor, Laforet critiques the oppressive fascist rule.

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Nada’s conclusion is open-ended. The protagonist obtains independence
even though Laforet does not explain what takes place once Andrea moves to
Madrid. To preserve verisimilitude, Laforet could not write an utterly happy
ending. It would not be feasible to conclude with “And she lived happily ever
after.” Andrea is the new Ariadne whose quest carries an element of hope.
Laforet rewrites the ancient myth; the rewriting applies to both the thematics and
the form. The original myth has a closed ending (in each of its multiple
variations), whereas the recast version provides an openness which suggests the
range of possibilities for the protagonist, as well as for future women authors.

The new Ariadne that is Andrea avails herself of a crisis to divine the road
to independence. The tangible crisis, although painful and problematic, serves as
a catalyst that allows her to fulfill something intangible: her dreams. Her crisis
drove her to autonomy. For Andrea, the turning point consists of her uncle
Roman’s suicide, a crisis which presents two options to the protagonist: succumb
to the labyrinthine unhealthy family dynamic or liberate herself and leave the dark
world of the house on Aribau Street. Her willfulness allows Andrea to free herself
from the dark labyrinth, abandoning the memory of Roman and Aribau Street
forever. The knowledge that Roman exerted his power over the family like a
puppeteer forced Andrea to become aware of the deep-seeded malaise,
compelling her to consider the alternative. Without Roman’s sadism and suicide,
Andrea never would have established an intimate bond with Ena; therefore, she

never would have gained independence at that stage of her life.

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According to Rice, Andrea “es una mujer timida y marginal al principio,
pero la amistad con Ena le da el valor que necesita para enfrentarse con su
familia y forjar su propio destino. Al final . . . Ia independencia parece ser Ia
realizacién que buscaba” (9). On close scrutiny, it reveals that Rice observes
only part of the dynamic in Andrea’s life. The dynamic between Ena’s positive
influence and Roman’s negative influence drives Andrea to take control of her
destiny.

From a feminist perspective, Shyfter highlights the friendship between
women from which Andrea obtains ”‘un sentido claro de direccién y
autosuficiencia, un estado mental que ha alcanzado por si sola y no a través de
la relacibn con un hombre’” (Jordan 105). Any association with Roman (and the
entire family from Aribau Street) leads to the realization that her family is capable
of contributing nothing—nada, as the title suggests—to Andrea’s personal growth
and development. The Aribau residents, and particularly Roman, “teach” Andrea
through the via negative; thus, they unwittingly contribute substantially to
Andrea’s maturation. While leaving Barcelona, the protagonist-narrator
comments: “Me marchaba ahora sin haber conocido nada de lo que
confusamente esperaba: la vida en su plenitud, Ia alegria. el interés profundo, el
amor. De la casa de la calle de Aribau no me Ilevaba nada. Al menos, asi creia
yo entonces” (Laforet 294). The values upheld by Andrea’s family would have
hindered her development. If their values represent dysfunction and pain, she
must search for what is unlike them. Once she left Aribau and matured, she

could understand how her family influenced her development. It is the mature

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narrating self of Andrea who recounts (with knowledge and experience) the
coming of age and final growth of the younger, naive narrated self.
Bany Jordan mistakenly affirms that “if this is Bildung, then it is Bildung by
negative example” (115), and, again in error, adds that,
Neda is the story of nonfulfillment of Andrea’s dreams; it is a cautionary
tale of how not to behave and how not to trust in childish notions of
romance. Moreover, Andrea’s escape from Aribau and her independence
are achieved through absolutely no effort on her part. Her salvation is the
product of a deus ex machine, an external agent, a providential fairy
godmother played by Ena and is triggered by her letter of invitation to
Madrid. (108)
Like Jordan, Bergmann also finds fairy tale motifs instrumental in the conclusion;
yet, unlike Jordan, Bergmann views Andrea’s as a success story, not a magical,
“happily ever after" ending. Bergmann notes Laforet’s mention of Cinderella (218
in Nada) and the Ugly Ducking (215 in Neda) (143) and comments on the
recontextualized motifs:
Instead of attempting the impossible task of becoming [Pons’] fairy tale
novie in an alien palace, [Andrea] chooses later to be the knight in her
own book of chivalry . . .: she confronts the monster in the tower, her
uncle, and she rescues her friend Ena from his attempted rape . . . The
‘monster’ is conveniently destroyed by his own evil when he commits
suicide. (143-44)

For Villegas, Laforet’s conclusion is a hopeful, mythologically structured victory:

164

Es de nuevo el cruce del umbral. Es el amanecer, y la casa aparece
iluminada por los rayos matinales del sol . . . Es el comienzo de un nuevo
viaje . . . aureolado de buenos augurios . . .Andrea ha recorrido el camino
de las pruebas, ha llevado a cabo el proceso de la iniciacién y ahora esta
en condiciones de integrarse al mundo de los adultos y de les
responsabilidades. La aventura juvenil ha concluido. (199)
Jordan, Bergmann, and Villegas all agree on Neda’s fairy-tale and mythological
allusiveness. Jordan myopically views Andrea’s ”escape” and “salvation” as fairy-
tale magic exerted by Ena, the fairy godmother. Bergmann, accurately, discerns
Laforet’s feminist manipulation of fairy-tale motifs, resulting in the portrayal of
self-sufficiency and female interdependency. But Villegas, who also views Neda
as a success story, does not perceive Laforet’s rewriting of myth. Laforet’s
innovation lies in the fact that Andrea cannot “integrarse a la vida de los adultos y
de las responsabilidades” as a male hero would, nor can she return to the family
hearth (as Pratt observed in the female coming-of-age genre). Andrea’s
uncertain road will be difficult; but what is certain is that her rejection of the
traditional female path forces her to blaze a trail that others can follow.

The negative forces of the house on Aribau Street drove Andrea to choose
the positive influence associated with her new matrilinear heritage, with Ena and
her mother, who when young was also a “chica rara” like Andrea. Although the
novel concludes with the apparently naive assertion that Andrea’s year in

Barcelona yielded nothing, Andrea matured on various levels having witnessed

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anguish, death, love, and the artistic enterprise which would contribute to her
mature worldview in the future.

Laforet reappropriates the fairy-tale and mythic motifs, transforming them
to communicate the problematic experience of female identity in patriarchal
society (Ordbl'lez, “Reading” 242). The protagonist confronts a critical moment in
her life and takes the first step toward maturation and independence. Andrea’s
victory over her family’s dysfunction mimics Theseus’ victory over the Minotaur.
Finally, leaving Barcelona is the mythic equivalent of exiting the labyrinth, with
the hope of conquering the world. By choosing to hold on to the sisterhood and
matrilineage offered by Ena and her family, Andrea subverts and rewrites the
Ariadne myth. Neda recontextualizes myth and fairy tales through which Laforet
creates a true female Bildungsroman. Laforet subverts the traditional female
Bildung as analyzed by Pratt—in which the hero is torn between autonomy and
society’s expectations (34-35)—and institutes a ground-breaking feminist
Bildungsroman.

Adhering to Carolyn Heilbrun’s view of feminist literary strategies, Andrea
embodies “the female use of male logic against itself” (293). By presenting a
revision of archetypal female fairy-tale and mythological characters, Laforet
“turns male logic against itself.” The woman who awaits rescue by her Prince
(whether Prince Charming, Theseus, or Ulysses) is an archetype that has existed
since time immemorial, but which was fervently indoctrinated during pre-
Francoist and Francoist Spain, es la mujer hacendosa, a twentieth-century

revisio n of the nineteenth-century angel of the hearth. This rewriting of the

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archetype, evident in Andrea, has been emulated by subsequent female authors:
Nada can be seen as a seminal work in twentieth-century Spanish women’s
narrative. The mythical allusions in Neda are certainly not as explicit in
subsequent works, but Laforet’s manipulation of the waiting woman archetype
provides the seed that subsequent writers have developed into bold feminist
remythification.

In Nada, as in the subsequent works, mythic rewriting exposes and
denounces the sinister, mysogynistic ideology of myth and fairy tales and offers
an alternative worldview. Unlike Cinderella at the ball or Ariadne before realizing
her abandonment, Laforet’s Andrea has forever dispelled the fantastic notion that

through selfinsufficiency a woman can expect to live “happily ever after.”

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Chapter 5

ARIADNE UNRAVELED: ESTHER TUSQUETS’ ROAD TO CANONIZATION
AND MYTHICAL RECONFIGURATION OF ARIADNE IN
EL MISMO MAR DE TODOS LOS VERANOS

The incorporation of mythic elements in Esther Tusquets’ El mismo mar
de todos los veranos has a two-fold purpose: to present an alternative view to
Western ideology and to legitimize a literary work by a woman. Reappropriation
of (male) canonical texts is a strategy to legitimize women’s writing and infiltrate
the lines of male-centered, male-dominated literary canons.

A literary canon constitutes the official list of “good” or “valid” works, those
that deserve to be taught, studied, read by present and succeeding generations
and, hence, perpetuated. It is, almost by definition, a list engendered by those in
power. Those in control have manipulated which works are suppressed or
included in the canon. Although women writers have generally been excluded
from the sanctity of canonization, some female authors through the ages have
been known to adopt strategies and adapt their works to achieve acceptability.36
Women authors have identified with and mimicked literary patrilineage, seeking
an influx in the patriarchal power that has denied them literary authority (Gilbert
and Gubar, No Men’s 185). Tusquets herself has stated that she does not

believe that women’s literature has been taken seriously.” The recent surge of

 

35 See introduction for a more detailed account.
37 In an interview I conducted with Tusquets in May 1997, she expressed

the following opinion: “Sigue imperando la cultura que es dirigida por los

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scholarship on works by women bears witness to the effort at prove women’s
literature to be “serious” literature and an attempt to raise it to canonical status.
Mary Ellen Bieder in the forward to the Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures
special issue on women writers, Writing Against the Current, claims that this
“anthology sketches the outlines of an emerging ‘other’ canon of Spanish
literature that includes Rosalia de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Esther Tusquets,
Carmen deez-Ojea, Paloma Diaz-Mas, and Ana Rossetti.” This compilation of
essays puts into question the exclusion of women authors from “the canon” (6).
Kathleen McNerney, in On Our Own Behalf notes that the lifting of Francoist
suppression of the Catalan (by the Constitution of 1978) coincided with a

Catalonian literary renaissance and feminism (1).38 Regardless of whatever

 

hombres donde se valora menos y se considera una subliteratura, quiza, Io
escrito por mujeres, inconscientemente. No creo que conscientemente. Pero que
inconscientemente se nos toma menos en serio”.

3" Although Tusquets is bilingual, her fiction is entirely in Castillian. She
gives her reasons in an interview with Nichols: “En la familia, se hablaba todo en
catalan hasta después de la guerra. Después de la guerra, cuando nacio mi
hermano, la gente de la burguesia que habia ganado Ia guerra hablaba a los

nifios en castellano. Pero ya no se modifico el trato conmigo, 0 sea que en mi
casa toda la vida yo con mis padres he hablado catalan, y con mi hermano
castellano. Aqui en Barcelona es un bilingtiismo total . . . Escribir en castellano,

en la gente de mi generacibn, era Io espontaneo todos escribiamos en
castellano. Despues algunos hicieron Ia reflexibn y la decisibn politica de

iasarse al catalan, y a todos les supuso un gran esfuerzo . . . yo hice lo que se

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oppressed or marginal label critics wish to hang on Tusquets, Servodidio
contends “despite the recentness of her fiction, Esther Tusquets has already
carved out a prominent niche in the pantheon of Spanish letters” (“Esther
Tusquets” in Spanish Women Writers 502). The vast amount of criticism
generated on Tusquets attests to Servodidio’s assertion. As Geraldine Cleary
Nichols indicates, within the decade spanning 1983 (the first appearance of an

article on Tusquets, written by Mary vasquez) and 1993, critics produced 18

 

journal articles, 10 more in vasquez’s Sea of Becoming, 24 conference papers,
two M.A. theses, three doctoral dissertations, four long interviews and one book
(“Minding her P’s and 0’s” 160). The coup de grace of Tusquets’ canonization
process is the fact that the author recently reedited and published El mismo mar
with Castalia, a publisher whose holdings represent the literary treasures—
whether “canonized” or not—of Spanish letters.

The technique of rewriting and retextualizing existing patriarchal texts is
not only a strategy which confers Tusquets the authority to infiltrate the male-
dominated canon, but is also a literary weapon which combats the thinking which
has excluded women from history and literature since the begining of Western
civilization. Kirk states that the transmission of myths “by a non-literate or oral
society presupposes acceptance by the whole group (or at least the prominent
part of it such as the adult males), the important aspect of life to which the tale

refers is a communal or social one” (Nature 28). In other words, classic myths in

 

me daba como normal. Las razones que tuvieron algunos para pasar al catalan

eran pcliticas y nacionalistas y yo no Ias tengo, ni Ias tenia entonces” (Escribir

espacio propia 75-76).

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their time appealed to the hegemonic class and by default excluded women who
were not expected to identify with the myth because it did not portray the female
experience. Therefore, Ordbfiez states, “women’s writing of myth and archetype
thus engages in a process of Derridean ‘supplementarity’ through which the now
relativized patriarcal or paternal source of myth and archetype is shifted,
displaced, and replaced with a gender-specific alternative” (Voices 103).

Through feminist remythification, Tusquets presents the possibility of a
world view not exactly contrary to, but rather altogether different from, traditional
male-centered history, literature, and thought, highlighting the importance of
relationships in which the participants do not figure in a vertical hierarchy of
inferiority-superiority, but rather, share a horizontal or lateral link of difference
among equals. Myths reflect patriarchal thought. They are an elaborate network
of binary oppositions (Kirk, Nature 82-83) that are indicative of phallogocentric
ideology. In contrast, Tusquets’ writing would be considered “feminine” by
Cixous: “For Cixous, ‘feminine‘ texts (not necessarily equated with texts by
women) must . . . disrupt the closure of traditional systems of classification (i.e.
systems of oppositions and hierarchies), deconstruct the phallogocentric notion
of the origin, affirm difference and ‘articulate the profusion of meanings”
(T suchiya 183).The allusiveness to Ariadne in El mismo mar denounces female
subordination within patriarchy and vindicates active role models for women.

Biruté Ciplijauskaité claims that “Hoy se esta creando toda una mitologia
nueva desde el punto de vista de la mujer: 0 sea re-interpretando los mitos viejos

. ., sea adaptandolos al mundo modemo Se este intentando crear una
nueva base mitica para poder apoyar en ella Ia narrative especificamente
femenina” (218). Barbara lchiishi in The Apple of Earthly Love observes that
“Modem-day woman [let us include Tusquets in particular] has set sail on a

voyage of self-discovery.” That, unlike “countless Ulysses [who] embarked on

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sea journeys loyal Penelopes remained in the darkness But at last

woman’s time has come, and her stories are ripe to be told. Her journey . . . will

first take her on a floating underwater pilgrimage to fathom the mysterious depth

of her inner world” (6). Tusquets’ mythic journey takes on various forms. In the

novel we see the patent parallels with the Ariadne myth, this myth’s

reinterpretation in E’s life as well as in that of her predecessors, and the

homoerotic twist to the heterosexual myth.

The protagonist’s quest in El mismo mar is to understand her relationships

with others in order to understand herself. E, the narrator-protagonist, is a

complex figure distraught by the conflict between the woman that patriarchal

society expects her to be and the one she would have liked to have been. The
narrator states her need to find herself despite the falsification and fraud of all the
roles assigned and assumed by her: “y aquella nina triste, que no tuvo otra
compatila que la de sus fantasmas, acaso he venido a reencontrar mis viejos
fantasmas, o a encontrarrne a mi misma en aquella nifla, que, aun triste y
solitaria, si existia, anterior a la falsificacibn y al fraude de todos los papeles
asignados y asumidos” (30). These roles defraud her needs as an individual. By
accepting socially prescribed heterosexual female roles, the narrator-protagonist
betrays her own need for self-fulfillment. The roles that she has accepted can
easily be portrayed by the Ariadne myth: passivity, the patient and faithful wife,
abandonment, loneliness, and resignation to futility in life. The resonances
between the myth and Tusquets’ work implicitly juxtapose Ariadne’s development
and the path E must take to avoid becoming like her mythic model.

Anthony Storr in Jung delineates two types of myths: expository and

explanatory. Expository hero myths “give shape, form and often expression to
emotional experience.” Explanatory myths “account for the facts of the world as

they appear to pre-scientific man . . . Both forms of myth tend to order experience

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to make it more coherent” (37). If E were to emancipate herself from herparents,
face life and its challenges, her life’s trajectory could be viewed as an expository
hero myth. By reenacting the perpetual role of Ariadne, her story is, then,
explanatory, giving meaning to her discontent. “One of Jung’s central ideas was
that modern man had become alienated from his mythopoeic substratum of his
being, and that therefore his life lacked meaning and significance” (Storr 42).
Myths give meaning to existence. E’s existence is berefl of meaning. Therefore,
she, as narrator, resorts to myths and fairy tales to imbue her life with
significance. Only through myth can a person “overcome his sense of his own
futility” (Storr 45).

E identifies with the texts of which she avails herself to piece together her
disorderly life. She exteriorizes and displaces onto mythic and literary figures the
sadness she cannot acknowledge in her own life: “Io t'inico que irremisiblemente
habra de hacemie llorar no son . . . los abandonos de Julio ni mi propia soledad,
ni este vaclo sin fondo en que ha naufragado mi vida, sino los tontos cuentos
para nifios con princesas infelices y muchachas abandonadas” (T usquets 133).
E articulates her loneliness by means of known texts, wearing “literature as a
shield, reading life rather than living it” (Servodidio, “Pre-Oedipal” 167).

The narrator sees herself as reliving the cliched literary patterns to which
she alludes. E is a product of the literature she assimilated and the ideology that
created it. She has internalized and fulfilled the roles of Ariadne stranded, the
little mermaid abandoned and the patient, faithful, silent woman who awaits
rescue. Yet the rereading of these texts implies the possibility that the protagonist
may perhaps rewrite the ending and adapt it to her life. According to Servodidio,

By casting the female protagonists as members of an intellectual elite and

therefore as readers and assimilators of texts, Tusquets succeeds in

highlighting the influence of literary codes on the psychosocial

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development of women. The question of texts, reading, and interpretation

. . . reveal[s] the manner in which fiction and reality intersect, mime each

other, and reinforce cultural patterns. (“Esther Tusquets's Fiction” 161)

According to Linda Gould Levine, upon feminist scrutiny, Tusquets obliges

“her characters to read themselves in or out of the patriarchal tradition
[Ljiterature itself is the true protagonist of these tales and the formidable enemy
that the characters must confront to achieve a level of personal freedom” (203-
04). Therefore, intertextuality, rereading, and rewriting are to be interpreted as
feminist acts:

Recent feminist literary criticism has added that reading is a ‘Ieamed’

experience and that we are not condemned to become what we read but

are also empowered to “resist”, subvert and revise the literary canon.

Reading for women thus becomes rewriting, an act of ‘literary warfare’

designed at changing [sic] not just one text, but ‘the whole system of texts’

it is immersed in, a powerful exorcism of ‘the male mind implanted in us’

. . . Tusquets” protagonist possesses the ability to become a ‘resisting’

reader. As such she is capable of discerning the ways in which she has

been forced into complicity with a male tradition antagonistic to her
individuality as women. She takes a leap into the looking glass of herself
and literary history and recognizes that she must first ‘shatter' the
reflection created by the male voice if she is ever to find a mode of self-

expression. (Levine 204)

By portraying a protagonist who has capitulated to society’s expectations
of her and has betrayed her own personal needs, Tusquets highlights the need
for change. The protagonist's opportunity for change stems from several
elements—all alternative to phallocentric reality—: the chance to rewrite the

literary roles she has assumed and the opportunity to love in a relationship

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devoid of power struggles—a relationship in which her beloved is another
woman. By creating a protagonist whose life is ripe for change, Tusquets
appears to follow the feminist thought of Cixous:

[Woman] must write her self [sic], because this is the invention of a new

 

insurgent writing which . . . will allow her to carry out the indispensable
ruptures and transformations in her history, first at two levels that cannot
be separated.

a) Individually. By writing her self, woman will return to the body

 

which has been more than confiscated from her . . . Censor the body and
you censor breath and speech at the same time . . .

b) An act that will also be marked by a woman’s seizing the
occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has
always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge herself

the antilogos weapon. (250)

 

Tusquets, then, applying Cixous’ criteria, transforms women’s history by writing
about the female body (that is, female physicality told from a female perspective)
and by opting to break the silence of suppression. Therefore, E’s final
capitulation to patriarchy, a clearly non-feminist act, does not negate the feminist
intent of Tusquets’ work, but rather highlights it dialectically.

Nichols has an opposing view. According to the critic, Tusquets’ work is
neither feminist nor progressive, encouraging “the reader to assent to the status
quo, particulariy with regard to the inequitable lot of women in the contemporary
social order” (“P’s and Q’s” 159-60). Nichols further states that having read Para
no volver, Tusquets’ last novel when the article was published, the author’s

fiction could no longer pass for feminist, [nor] be seen as committed to

bettering the lot of women. Indeed, her works seem to go beyond

. neutrality on the gender issue to verge on being masculinist, inasmuch as

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they serve to rationalize and render aesthetically pleasing a social system
based on gender asymmetry and disadvantaging women. (“P’s and Q’s”
162)
The critic goes on to claim that Tusquets’ style—“hennetic closure”—is
“symptomatic of an attitude, tragic essentialism, that accepts things as they are.
L. The female characters] will remain in unhappy relationships with their voice
and talents submerged for convention’s sake. Feminist readers, committed to
change the social order, must resist assenting to such values” (“P’s and Q’s”
170-71). What escapes Nichols is that Tusquets depicts her protagonists’
capitulation to patriarchy to denounce a social order which breeds in women a
sense of worthlessness and Ieamed helplessness. Tusquets’ protagonists’
failures incite a feminist call to arms. They are not models to emulate, rather they
are negative examples.
According to Virginia Woolf, whose proto-feminist A Room of One’s Own
was published by Esther Tusquets’ publishing house Lumen, a novel is “a
creation owing a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with
simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure leaving a
shape on the mind’s eye” (123). Tusquets, as editor of Lumen, by publishing A
Room of One’s Own indicated her appreciation of the work and the desire to
disseminate it to Lumen’s readers.39 This fact refutes Nichols’ assertion that
Tusquets accepts and perpetuates patriarchal thought. Rather, like Woolf who

believes that fiction has a “looking-glass likeness to life,” Tusquets reflects the

 

39 Given that Tusquets published Woolf, Woolt’s protofeminist’s views and

influence—however slight—cannot be disregarded in Tusquets prose.

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reality of patriarchy and its injustice in her works. Rather than prescribe
hierarchical and oppositional thought (inferior/ superior), Tusquets describes it
and its repercussions on characters who subscribe to and/ or are victimized by it.
The protagonist’s desires (to love Clara) and her final action (acquiescing
to her patriarchal role) are at odds. Through this opposition, the reader is forced
to ponder, to evaluate, and to pass judgment on the protagonist’s vital choice.
The reader becomes engaged. Clearly, E has only two options, to fit into the
patriarchal scheme or to be true to herself and, therefore, alienate herself from
acceptability. In other words, the quest for self-fulfillment renders a woman
entirely alone: “For every aspect in women’s quest (called matrilineal by Pratt),
there is a strong counteraspect (patriarchal)” (Ordbflez, “A Quest for Matrilinear
Roots” 38). According to Tusquets, the common denominator in women’s writing
is a sense of protest and perhaps a shared worldview by virtue of being on the
side of disadvantage. Tusquets so stated in the May 1997 unpublished interview
with me: “mientras la mujer tenga una forrna especial de estar en el mundo . . .
que muchas mujeres en algunas cosas coincidimos y tenemos una visibn del
mundo . . . algo similar. Aunque sblo sea por el hecho de estar en desventaja.
Entonces Ia vision del mundo se traduce en lo que escribes.” E’s narrative, then,
embodies a quest for identity, for a niche within or without male-dominated
culture. Her tendency to self-expression and assertion runs contrary to
patriarchal expectations and guidelines and manifests itself in the desire to be
heard. Servodidio has shown that,
Tusquets’s heroines . . . make an explicit or implicit claim on the attention
of an interlocutor or addressee that is crucial in the finding and making of
meaning. While the impulse to tell is prompted by a full array of

motivations ranging from the erotic to the altruistic, it is almost always

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driven by the desire to be heard, recognized, and understood—to

enunciate a significant version of the story of life. ( “Pre-Oedipal” 170)

Mythic rewriting provides an alternative to phallocentric, patriarchal
thought. If patriarchy suppresses female expression and fulfillment, relegating
women to unimportant roles (patience, silence), then neo-mythic women’s writing
creates a fictional space where female characters, created by women writers,
have the possibility to grow through self-expression. The authors’ literary
allusions, according to Bellver, serve “to create new images for women . . . to
reforge century-old fairy tales writing her own feminist tales” (“Language of
Eroticism” 22). By availing herself of texts known to the reader, Tusquets draws
implicit parallels between the known characters’ development and the steps
necessary for E to avoid becoming like her mythic and literary models.

The intertextuality in El mismo mar starts with the epigraph. Although the
epigraph alludes to a children’s story, on closer scrutiny it bears a striking
resemblance to the central myth of Ariadne and Theseus. The epigraph “Y
Wendy crecib” (”and Wendy grew up”) is taken from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
The idea implicit in the quoted fragment of a children’s story is that Wendy
traveled to NeverNeverland only to discover that her maturation, unlike that of the
inhabitants of NeverNeverland, could not be stifled forever. “And Wendy grew up”
reveals that the characters take a temporary, childlike refuge, which only delays
the inevitable: the return to the adult world replete with the responsibilities and
the expectations of others.

The epigraph evinces a certain parallel between Peter Pan and the myth
of Ariadne. In Peter Pan, Wendy travels to NeverNeverland. In the myth,
Theseus descends to the depths of the labyrinth to face the-ugly reality of the
Minotaur. Theseus slays his fears, epitomized by the Minotaur, whereas Wendy

confronts her fantasies of perpetual childhood. Both characters resurface,

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abandoning those who helped them make the journey. Theseus abandons
Ariadne, just as Wendy abandons Peter Pan.

The first overt parallel to the Ariadne myth, evident at E’s family’s
shorefront home, is the protagonist’s fear of abandonment: “y que Julio partiria
una vez mas con rumbo desconocido, grotesco capitan de algun yate fantasma”
(T usquets 16). In this passage, although E refers to her own abandonment, the
description could aptly be applied to Ariadne. Tusquets’ text modemizes the myth
and applies it to E’s life: “Julio . . . con rumbo desconocido . . .junto a una rubia
de celuloide, sclo que en esta ocasibn . . . todo iba a parecenne demasiado
tonto, excesivamente banal, una chata historia incansablemente repetida que
era preciso cortar antes de llegar a la nausea insoportable de su infinito”
(T usquets 16). The term “historia incansablemente repetida” is heavily laden with
meaning, for it refers not only to Julio’s multiple affairs but also to each time Julio
leaves E, he relives the role of Theseus in that he “partiria una vez mas con
rumbo desconocido“ just as his mythic precursor did. And each time she
acquiesces to this behavior, she reenacts her own corresponding mythic role.

Before further delineating the mythic parallels in Tusquets’ work, let us first
examine a poeticized version of the Ariadne myth. Catullus’ poem 64 is a mini-
epic, an epyllian, which “combines the economy of shorter poems with the
spaciousness of Homeric epic” (Garrison 132). The poem, the longest known by
Catullus, tells of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. The story of Ariadne and

Theseus’ betrayal, comprising more than half of the poem, is ironically
embroidered on the nuptial coverlet. The narrative technique, ecphrasis, is “a
pictorial digression describing a work of art within the framework of a larger
narrative. Here the sad picture of a seduced and abandoned Ariadne contrasts

with the wedding story that frames it” (Garrison 134). Tusquets, similarly, weaves

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the tale of Ariadne into the story line of the budding love affair between E and
Clara .

Frye’s “seasonal” analysis proves applicable to both Catallus’ and
Tusquets’ texts.“0 The title El mismo mar de todos los veranos, given Frye’s
phases, suggests triumph, marriage, the zenith. The “romantic union” between
Clara and E, parallel to Catullus’ framing narrative of the wedding between Thetis

and Peleus, indicates the possibility of triumph in love. Under closer scrutiny, the

 

4° Frye synthesizes and systematizes the mythical phases of literary
criticism and applies them to particular genres:

“1. The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of birth of the hero, a
revival and resurrection, of creation and (because the four phases are a cycle) of
the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death. Subordinate characters:
the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of most . . . rhapsodic
poetry.

“2. The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of
apotheosis, of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate
characters: the companion and the bride. The archetype of comedy, pastoral and
idyll.

“3. The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying
god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate
characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of the tragedy and the elegy.

“4. The darkness [and] winter . . . phase . . . subordinate
characters: the ogre and the witch. The archetype of satire” (Frye , “Archetypes”

94).

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title, like the interpolated Ariadne plot in El mismo mar—Catallus’ embedded
narrative does not foreshadow doom—prefigures the following phase: fall, which
Frye classifies as the myth of “violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of
the hero” (94). The rape] sex scene between E and Julio is certainly a sacrifice, a
metaphorical death and a rite of the protagonist’s reintegration into a life of
alienation. The autumnal phase clearly coincides with Ariadne’s isolation on
Naxos.

Catullus’ Ariadne, half-naked on the shore—indicating her vulnerability-
laments being jilted by Theseus:

So you’ve deserted me upon this shore,

False, faithless wretch, forgetting what you swore

What might have turned your mind from cruelty?

Was there no mercy in your soul to move

Your cruel heart to pity ......

l snatched you from the jaws of death; what’s more

For you I let my brother die; you bore

Me off, abandoned me to be the prey

Of birds and beasts when death will come my way. (105)

Ariadne subsequently refers to Theseus as “My lover, my dear brother’s
murderer” (107).

Following Ariadne’s lament, the gods are moved by her pleas of
vengence. The gods punish Theseus by having his father hurl “himself headlong
from the highest rock,l Believing Theseus had died. The shock! Of overwhelming
grief to that degree/ That Ariadne felt was now to be! The love of Theseus

foreverrnore” (Meyers and Orrnsby 111). Interestingly, Tusquets’ Ariadnes are

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jilted, but unlike the mythic model, the neo-Ariadnean types do not seek
vengence for their misery nor are they “saved" and immortalized by being wed to
Dionysus. Poetic justice befalls the mythic Theseus, but Tusquets’ neo-
Theseuses never experience the repercussions of their actions. Yet, as we will
analyze in the “Clara” section, Clara takes hold of the reigns of her life and offers
not poetic justice but a glimmer of hope for the future.

In El mismo mar, E exposes her “prehistory” in which she always played
the role of Ariadne to several other characters’ Theseus. As stated earlier, Julio’s
maritime escapade on the boat with the celluloid blonde and his countless other
affairs define him as a Theseus figure who repeatedly abandons his wife. A key
element in the Theseus archetype“1 is the promise of hope, of assuaging
Ariadne’s sense of alienation, only to confirm and perpetuate her sense of being
an outsider, celebrating the death of her only true friend, the Minotaur. Integral to
Tusquets’ writing is the concept of exclusion, of forsaking one’s own inner needs
and individuality to be able to “fit in.” Julio reinforces these aspects of the Ariadne
myth and, therefore, represents patriarchal rule. Julio’s very name is reminiscent
of Roman and patrician culture, with all that it entails: phallocentrism and female
oppression. He is the key to perpetuating the Ariadne role to which E has been
relegated] has relegated herself.

E like Ariadne, feels foreign in her own world:

[Elntre un marido fatuo que escape siempre hacia islas posibles y

conocidas, de les que regresa también siempre, una madre remotisima

 

‘1 We will use the term “archetype” for it connotes a figure of the collective

unconscious which can take on many forms.

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viajera que manda abrazos en postales, y una hija grandota y sabihonda
que nunca ha entendido ni podra entender, porque nacio incapacitada,
nada de nada, un marido una madre y una hija [sic] que me lanzan su
amor al abismo, un amor benévolo que no me encuentra nunca en mis
subterraneos, como echarian a tientas alimentos a las fieras que vagan
errabundas y heridas por los fosos oscuros—, en este soledad sin
esperanzas, emerge de otro mundo, de otro tiempo, de otros planetas,
una muchacha que trae consigo toda la magia de las noches insomnes.
(T usquets 122-23)
Until meeting Clara, E feels Ariadne-like alienation from everyone in her present
life and especially from Jorge from her past. The name Jorge clearly ties into
Catholic mythology. Mention is made of Saint George (Sari Jorge) (T usquets 83),
the namesake of Jorge, prompting us to delineate the parallels between the two
and tie that connection into the Ariadne myth. Saint George slew the dragon;
Theseus killed the Minotaur. Both the dragon and the Minotaur are monsters.
Jorge killed what E believes to be her dragon or Minotaur, the shadowy legacy of
childhood fears and dreams, her authentic self, her sense of individuality.
Subsequently, the narrator related the Minotaur to the Beast of Beauty and the
Beast (Tusquets 84). Jorge, then, is the figure who robbed E of her
individuality—the dark, ugly recesses of her soul represented by the Minotaur.
Through her relationship with Clara—a key element in understanding the
alternative ideology within the text to be fully analyzed at a later point—E openly
reveals her past. The protagonist discloses her life story to her beloved only
when she feels safe within the sanctuary of her childhood home (a labyrinthine
parallel), far removed from the world that molded her into the roles that she took
on as an adult. Various days pass during which the two lovers are isolated,

intertwined in an intimate embrace, delighting in the intimate moments that will

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soon be merely fleeting glimpses of happiness. E reveals to Clara her intimate
experiences which had the greatest impact on her life and world view. The last
revelation deals with Jorge, the love of her life.

The narrator recounts her youth as if it were a hybrid between a fairy tale
and a myth. E tells Clara her life story, weaving the tale of her life with the
strands of the Ariadne myth. Her parents become Hellenic gods and she an
abhorrent creature, spawned by them, who sought refuge from the world of
immortals:

Ariadne construyb Iaberintos. Si, Ariadne, desde muy pequefia, desde

que Ieyo los primeros cuentos refugiada entre las patas de la mesa del

despacho de su padre, sobre la alfombra blanda de un verde oscuro—o
antes quizas incluso—comenzo a excavar en secreto sus Iaberintos.

Ariadne se buscb desde siempre oscuros aliados—tal vez porque habia

sido engendrada una noche sabatica de algun aflo bisiesto—, seres que,

como ella, no pudieran subsistir en aquel orden acerado, en aquel mundo
aséptico y resplandeciente, seres que supieran orientarla por lo mismo en
su vuelo hacia Ias tierras de Nunca James, para encontrar juntos alli una
casita subterranea, un verdadero hogar para niflos perdidos, un refugio
calido y cerrado, donde no pudiera penetrar la qu excesiva del sol ni Ias
terribles miradas de los ojos azules. Y alli surgio, companero de juegos
nacido de la terrible soledad de Ariadne, el Minotauro, y crecieron los dos
juntos en Ias profundidades humedas, donde brotaban extrat'ias flores
camivoras y purpi'ireas, y habia ciénagas insondables de arenas calidas,
habia reptiles de un verde herrnosisimo, de cuerpos escamosos y colas
inten'ninables, reptiles que no habian subido jamas a la superficie. Alli
jugaron y crecieron y se amaron durante afios Ariadne y el Minotauro.

Haste que un die llego Teseo. Si, entonces llego Jorge, Clara. Porque

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Jorge—como Teseo—no pertenecia al mundo de mis padres, no hubiera
querido sentarse jamas—no quiso de hecho sentarse jamas—a este
grotesca asamblea de los hombres dioses, no quiso asimilarse a este
raza infonne de niflos prematuramente envejecidos: Jorge no tenia los
ojos azules y luminosos, ni la piel blanca, y estoy casi segura de que no
poseia un herrnoso esqueleto, pero Jorge venia de muy Iejos y no
pertenecia tampoco a la raza proterva de los siervos, no pertenecia al
grupo intorrne que se inclinaba y se arrastraba en tomo a unos pocos
elegidos: Jorge llegaba de muy Iejos, de otros continentes, y se burlaba
de nuestro ridiculo montaje. (T usquets 193-94)
The traditional myth of Ariadne serves as a metaphor for love within patriarchy.
Tusquets analyzes the dynamic of an erotic relationship through the myth of
Ariadne:
en los ojos de Ariadna al despertar abandonada en la isla de Naxos y
descubrir que también habia huido aquel Teseo que parecia invulnerable,
porque hasta los heroes en marcha, hasta aquellos que son capaces de
afrontar en el Iimite de su audacia al mismo Minotauro—tan tiemo el
Minotauro en sus secretos traicionados Iaberintos—, hasta los principes
mas encantadores y valientes, hasta los viajeros que han sobrevivido a
mil naufragios, sienten miedo al encontrar en su camino lo nunca
imaginado: la mirada terrible del amor total (huye Teseo, no de las peores
tempestades ni de les amenazas airadas de los dioses, huye Teseo del
amor de Ariadne, terrible y peligroso como un ejército en marcha).
(Tusquets 171)
Traditionally, upon loving, the Ariadne figure reveals her vulnerabilities
and secrets. She guides her lover, exposing him not only to her fears but also to

her .dreams and ugliness as symbolized by the Minotaur which resides at the

185

core of the labyrinth. After this intimate revelation, the lover (Ariadne) runs the
risk of being abandoned. Such was the case between Ariadne and Theseus, E
and Jorge, and this is precisely what will happen between Clara and E; but this
time E will not allow herself to be abandoned. Rather, it is she who abandons
Clara. Yet, Clara, though abandoned, is in the stronger position, for she has been
capable of a genuine love without betrayal. The traditional myth plays on the
archetype of fear of commitment, of fear of sharing oneself with another human
being as indicated by the Theseus archetype.

But the Ariadne archetype cannot be separated from her male
counterpart. The dynamic between the two is not unilateral. Ariadne’s tale is
pathetic because she allowed herself to be condemned to the role of the
abandoned beloved who patiently, expectantly awaited the return of her lover. It
was Ariadne’s total sacrifice of self, of what was hers, of leading Theseus to the
core of her labyrinth, and slaying her sense of self that prohibited her ever
recovering from abandonment. Because of such self-sacrifice, the traditional
Ariadne never overcame her crisis. For Gilbert and Gubar, madwomen and
monsters within nineteenth-century literature represent the indomitable,
rebellious side of the writer herself (Nichols, Descifiar 8). Similarly, the Minotaur
symbolizes E’s sense of self and individuality.

The central theme of the Ariadne myth takes various forms within El
mismo mar. The repetition of abandonment is evident in all of E’s relationships as
well as those of her family members. E has three pasts, each characterized by a
central figure who causes her to feel abandoned. During E’s childhood, her
mother was cold and distant. E’s university years were plagued by the traumatic
suicide of her first love Jorge. Her very recent past involves her husband, Julio,
and yet another one of his escapades. Her present will now develop with Clara. E

integrates the stories of antiquity, the old fairy tales, to relive and recount the

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stories that have plagued her family for three generations. Each story of love and
abandonment is merely a recontextualization of the Ariadne myth; it is the same
story retold, reenacting the archetypes elaborated in the Ariadne myth. E
narrates how her grandmother had various affairs—a situation almost accepted
in her social milieu—yet it never would have been acceptable to leave her
husband (T usquets 147-50). This vicious family cycle repeats itself with E’s
parents and E herself. The protagonist enjoys her amorous dalliance with Clara,
a permissible fact that became the gossipy buzz within her circle of
acquaintances. An affair is an accepted form of behavior, whereas breaking the
social bond of matrimony is clearly not. Therefore, E, following in the familiar
footsteps of her grandmother, her father, and her husband, relinquishes her

affection for her beloved,"2 betraying not only Clara but also herself.

 

42“The story of Theseus and Ariadne, for example, constitues a central
mythological paradigm according to which the narrator recreates the various
episodes of love and betrayal that she has seen in her life. Her account of her
former lover’s suicide is a rewriting of this myth, and she likens her own despair
to that of Ariadne after Theseus abandons her on the Isle of Naxos . . . Her
father’s betrayal of Sofia, another episode that the narrator draws from the
repertoire of her memories, also follows the same pattern as the Theseus-
Ariadne myth. Years later, a fear of repeating this same act of betrayal with
“Clara Ariadna’ haunts the narrator in her search for a union with the Other. [Yet
she feels a] sense of inevitable fate...Her premonitions are fulfilled at the end of

the novel: she betrays Clara by allowing herself to be seduced by her estranged

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The protagonist-narrator tells what took place between Sofia, her nanny,
and her father. Her father, like E herself, upheld his bourgeois duty by leaving his
lover to preserve the appearance of family unity. The patriarch of E’s family
abandoned his lover, Sofla, after having abused his position of power, for he was
the employer and she the employee. E also abuses her position of authority, for
she violates the sanctity of the professor-student relationship by embarking upon
the romantic interlude with Clara. E relives and recounts the past which she
cannot or will not change, a past which she perpetuates into the present and
future:

me inspire [miedo] a mi hoy la mirada de Clara, que intento vanamente

desvanecer entre besos, porque no quiero correr el riesgo extremo de

tener que destruirla finalmente como destruyo cordialmente mi padre

aquella mafiana con su silencio Ia mirada de Sofia, traicionandola a ella y

perdiéndose e si mismo para siempre . . . , renunciando de modo

irrevocable a la posibilidad, no ya de recuperar a la mujer, sino de

reencontrarse. (T usquets 173)

Sofia appears to be Clara’s closest Ariadnian predecessor. One summer while
E’s family was vacationing, exorbitantly expensive wax roses that were being
sold at the summer ball. The purpose of the rose sale was to raise enough funds
to construct a new side altar for one of the chapels within the church. E’s father,
in front of all of bourgeois friends at the ball, bought the entire basket of

exorbitantly priced wax roses for Sofia and placed them in her lap, humiliating

 

husband Julio, thus threatening the feminine union that she has achieved with

her love” (T suchiya 191 -92).

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both his wife and his lover with the gesture. Paradoxically, this act was the
equivalent of both a promise of love and a farewell. In a similar fashion, Theseus
promises Ariadne that they will marry upon his return, but by isolating her on the
island of Naxos, he alienates and abandons her forever. E, in a similar fashion,
joins Julio for dinner, promising to return to Clara, which she, of course, never
does.

E recounts a repertoire of stories which she renews, resucitates, and
repeats (T usquets 179). The narrator tells the same story of loving and being
abandoned through various characters (Jorge and her, her father and Sofia, Julio
and her, her grandparents, and, finally, Clara and her); yet it remains the same
story. For precisely this reason, opting for a myth as a story told and retold
becomes key. The known myth personifies—or rather exemplifies with
personages—a universal phenomenon: in this case, unilateral fear of intimacy in
a relationship of reciprocated, requited love that subsequently leads to
abandonment. As Navajas claims, in El mismo mar,

repetition is actualized in the semantic core of the novel, assuming the

configuration of an unchanging—and thus repetitive . . . cultural system.

The female narrator . . . tries to introduce difference in that system in order

to subvert its rigid structure of sameness. That subversion takes place

through her disqualification of a rhetorical view of love (composed of
immutable norms), as well as through her attempt to replace it with a new
conception of love that would be nonrhetorical (free of restrictive norms).

(113-14)

The rewriting which Tusquets renders is composed of various elements
which stem from one central twist: the lovers are women. As the central figure
and first-person narrator, E repeatedly recounts the Ariadne myth: in love,

Ariadne guides Theseus through the labyrinth so that he might slay her brother,

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the Minotaur. Theseus promises her marriage only to abandon her. In each
recounting of love and abandonment, the Ariadne figure (the abandoned one) is
reprised by a woman (E [with Jorge and Julio], her grandmother, Sofia and finally
Clara). The innovation E brings to the texts lies in the fact that a female figure, E
herself, ultimately plays the role of Theseus. The fact that she herself took part in
an act which her narrative persona had been denouncing from the first recital of
the Ariadne repertoire intensifies the denunciation of the betrayal of the loved
one and of one’s own inner needs.

A key element in Tusquets’ rewriting of the Ariadne myth is the homoerotic
nature of the relationship between the protagonist and Clara, for lesbianism is
non-phallic, non-phallocentric, non-phallogocentric. It is a reaction to the
problematics of man-woman relationships. According to vasquez, “love is the
unifying aspect of female experience and its central metaphor. The man-woman
love relationships portrayed are problematical at best. If Tusquets’ women are
outwardly confident and seemingly the dominant member in the relationship, they
prove to be frightened, unsure and even lost inside, like the adult E.” ( “Tusquets,
Fitzgerald...” 18). Yet once E removes herself from the male-centered world, she
becomes more assertive, as is evinced in the scene of the boat where she (both
metaphorically and literally) is at the helm, i.e., in charge of the direction in which
she is going.

Certainly, the fact that the object of Clara’s devotion in . . . El mismo mar

. . . . is a woman is . . . a clear marker of differentness. The love between

two women may be seen as a metaphor for a different way of loving and

being, free from the entrapment of man and woman alike in self-
serving, . . . self-defeating, power plays . . . The metaphor is perhaps an

insistence on a new mode in which women and man can love from a

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fullness of self, their love untainted by a need to use or cripple. (Vasquez,

“Tusquets, Fitzgerald”19)

Yet in El mismo mar, the affair between Clara and E begins as a
traditional and cliched power play: the wealthy, worldly, older (wo)man enthralls
the innocent, young girl. The one in power is seducer, a catalystic force which
helps fulfill the latent desires of the Other.43 Seduction entails an abuse of power
which crosses the boundaries of acceptable, ethical behavior. Pratt avers that “In
women’s love fiction, remarkably, the world of abhorrence is not so much the
world of the seducer as society itself. Visions of hell are not needed here . . . : the
iron hand of the patriarchy constitutes the evil force against which the heroes
struggle in vain” (76-77). In El mismo mar, E is clearly the seducer. She brings
Clara into her den of sexual iniquity. Their love is a forbidden fruit, in society’s
eyes, in those of the haute bourgoisie of Barcelona to which the protagonist
belongs, because of its homoeroticism, the disparity in ages, the difference in
classes and, clearly, the violation of the sacred professor-student relationship.
On all levels, E abuses her position of superiority and power to draw Clara closer
and taste the fruit of her love. Notwithstanding E’s clear role as seducer, the tone
of Tusquets’ narrative is far from condemning her. In accordance with Pratt’s
findings, E is absolved of abusing her position and the society that created her is
portrayed as villainous. As Pratt affirms,

The lesbian novel . . . does not always create new worlds for its

protagonists since they face the same battle with gender norms as those

 

‘3 This description of the seducer is from a class on don Juan with Prof.

George Mansour (Michigan SU).

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of other novels . . . The genre reflects a radical polarity of experience: the

intensity of the hero’s anxieties and punishments, on the one hand, and on

the other, a great sense of regeneration, of freshness, when lovers

successfully break through into their unique ‘new spaces.’ (95)

Female homoeroticism, although sharing some similarities with man-
woman relationships, is a metaphor for relationships in which the struggle for
power is not the essence of the relationship. According to Gilbert and Gubar, by
the middle of the twentieth-century, within literary works such as Snodgrass’
Heart’s Needle, a man’s ability to “give” a woman an orgasm became a point of
pride. Yet

such a construction of female desire ultimately implies female dependency

. . . [This] intensified a widespread cultural assumption of female

passivity. . .The penis as a therapeutic instrument in the domestication of

desire, therefore, was always on the verge of turning into a penis as pistol,
an instrument of rape and revenge, and oddly enough, the raped woman
seems to have been fetishized and sanctified as the woman who was

eased into easily coming. (No Men’s 48)

In twentieth-century women’s writing, when the phallus is depicted, “it commonly
becomes a symbol of male domination . . . The phallus as weapon is a basic
archetype dating back to one of the very oldest systems of signs—cave
paintings” (Bellver, “Language of Eroticism” 17). Therefore, Tusquets’ characters’
explicit acts of sexuality prove quite revealing. With Julio, the protagonist is
clearly inferior, both physically for being in the female inferior sexual position, and
psychologically, for he has the upper hand in the power relationship. Yet, with
Clara, E shares the passion. Their relationship (sexual, at least) is not a
hierarchical construct. Initially the protagonist took the lead; yet once her

grandmother died, leaving E vulnerable, the homoerotic relation was divested of

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the struggle for power. Only at the conclusion when patriarchy, symbolized by
Julio, is reintroduced to the plot does E revert to her role of man/ Theseus within
her relationship with Clara, foreshadowing her ultimate abandonment of her
lover.

In a relationship of equality, i.e. a homoerotic relationship, E’s passive role
ceases. Lesbianism becomes a metaphor for the refuge taken from the literally
phallocentric world. If the penis symbolizes power, a lesbian relationship—
including that between E and Clara—can clearly be viewed as a relationship
without a struggle for power. In Tusquets’ vision of the ideal relationship, each
partner does not attempt to control the other. Of course, because of her fatalistic
view, the author does not believe that a happy relationship can last. When
interviewed by me, Tusquets affirrned

creo muy poco en la posibilidad de un amor por ambas partes

correspondido y que dure hasta el final correspondido. 0 sea, creo mas

bien que vamos de algiZin modo decepcionandonos unos a otros . . . [Els

importante el amor. Que casi nunca, casi nunca es feliz en duracién y

nunca creo que se puedan las personas Ilegar a compenetrar de verdad y

que no sea una relacibn de poder de uno sobre el otro . . . [C]asi siempre

es una relacion de poder. '
Therefore, although Clara and E give us a glimpse of utopian love, this love can
only be ephemeral, destined to end once power (symbolized by Julio) is
reintroduced into the story line.

The lesbian aspect of Tusquets’ work is not only a metaphor for rejecting
the power struggle in traditional heterosexual relationships but is also a search
for self, a quest for matrilineal roots. According to Ordofiez, ”In the interim of the
quest . . . as the female hero searches for her matrilineal roots, the elixir of

androgyny is glimpsed and the potential for female mythopoesis emerges, even if

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the individual quester is forcibly reintegrated into the patriarchy” (“A Quest for
Matrilinear Roots” 38). Yet E certainly never achieves mythopoesis. Briefly with
Clara, she lives androgynously, not managing to make the change within herself.
The narrator of El mismo mar is “an unmothered and unmothering woman,
irrevocably separated from her own mother and daughter, . . . [toward] whom she
bears a silent, repressed rage . . . [Yet, with Clara] she attempts to reforge the
broken link between mother and daughter” (Ordbfiez, “A Quest for Matrilinear
Roots” 38).
Only if the mother could free herself from patriarchal manipulation or
identity, could the daughter achieve atonement, as an equal, with her
parent of the same sex. The women would have to choose their own
roles, do their own naming; in short, they would have to create their own
myths. Tragically, this never becomes possible between the narrator and
her mother. Eventually reclaimed by the patriarch, by her husband, Julio,
the narrator never achieves atonement with her mother, the inalterably
male-identified Athena figure, the mother incapable of becoming
symbolically associated with Demeter and saving her daughter from
‘rape.’ In fact, the narrator’s mother remains still too willing to comply with
the patriarchal backlash, to cooperate in ending her daughter’s brief flight
to matrilineal freedom. (Ordoflez, “A Quest for Matrilinear Roots” 41)
The lesbian elements in El mismo mar might be interpreted as a quest for
matrilineal roots, the desire to feel the welcoming comfort of origin, of
establishing a link with a female predecessor, a role model who comforts,
protects, and instills unconditional positive regard. E’s story flows as a pre-
Oedipal narrative rooted in “the conflict in the figure of a mother who encodes
absence and rejection and who drives the child to a compensatory reliance on

the myths and fairy tales of her childhood books” (Servodidio, “Esther Tusquets”

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498). According to the psychologist Rogers, to function within society and be
well-adjusted, an individual must first receive unconditional positive regard. As a
direct result, the individual will, then, experience unwavering, unconditional
positive self-regard. In women’s literature, as Ordbfiez so clearly indicates, the
search for the mother—or her love—is prevalent. Yet, within patriarchal culture,
where “male” is applauded and “female” belittled and disdained, women who
internalize the patriarchal disdain associate with those in power, hate
themselves, and denigrate other women. This dynamic becomes ever so painful
when it takes place between a mother and daughter.

Victoria Sau’s comprehensive analysis of the mother-daughter relationship
is quite apt for this study. As Sau points out, Patriarchy! Paternity force the split
between “Naturaleza” (maternity) and “culture” (socialization within paternal
culture). To fit in the social scheme, women must associate with the father figure
(21-22). E who is drawn to her mother and maternal substitutes is a misfit within
this culture. “[Las mujeres-hijas] saben que algo no esta bien pero que no han
caldo en la cuenta de que la madre no es la Madre sino una funcibn del Padre
. . . No hay Matemidad” (Sau 23). Mothers transmit to their daughters what Freud
termed “feminidad secundaria.” “Y Ias hijas odian doblemente a su supuesta
madre: por rechazo del modelo de mujer que ella representa, y por el
autoritarismo con el que les es impuesta” (Sau 24-25). Martin Sogrera, in El mito
de la matemided en la lucha contra el patriarcado, cited by Sau, states that
patriarchal order put man at the head of not only society but also at the head of
the family. As a result, the children are considered belonging to the father and
not the mother (31-32). E’s lesbianism is a search for the mother that she could
not have, for the mother of which patriarchal society deprived her. Following
Sogrera’s reasoning, E was expected to identify with her father, not her mother.

Conversely, E’s mother, having assimilated this belief, dissociated herself from

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her daughter. By doing so, E’s mother is performing a type of ventriloquy of
language not her own (Francoise Collin cited in Sau 32); she becomes the
mouthpiece for patriarchal thought which puts women at a grave disadvantage.

Applicable to the matemal-filiel dynamic within El mismo mer, Sau studies
how both language and patriarchal genealogy exclude women. Hebrew culture
(along with Greek reasoning) which forms the basis for contemporary Western
thought, relies upon a patrilinear geneaology (Seu 51). The evangelist Luke,
diseminator of Christianity, avails himself of the genealogies in Genesis to claim
Jesus Christ as a descendant of Abraham, Noah, Adam and ultimately the
patriarch par excellence God the father. These genealogies exclude women
except to claim them as daughters of a father, never as mothers, creators of the
next generation. “El individuo masculino esta totalmente inseita en un
organismo, un sistema de relaciones graduadas en el que ocupa un lugar muy
fijo y no intercambiable en el seno de une totalidad . . . [en la ] ‘casa del padre’”
(Sau 57). Motherhood had no alternative but to colaborate with the Father “de
grado a veces y otras a reganadientes, como todo grupo vencido en tanto que
no se sacude el yugo” (Sau 57).

Similarly exclusive to women, as Sau observes, language equates the
feminine with the “other.” Language reflects society itself, manifesting the
hierarchized differences between the sexes: “No hay mas que apelar a la voz
‘hombre’, que tantas veces subsume a la voz ‘mujer‘, pare darse cuenta de la
voracidad masculine se ha comido, literalmente, lo femenino” (Seu 41). Seu,
comparing the three most prestigious and conservative Spanish dictionaries
(Real Academia, Marie Moliner; Ideologico de la Lengue Espafiola), contrasted
the terms “mother” and “father" in each. The result is that “father” in each case
ocupies more space than “mother”; “father" has no pejorative connotation,

whereas “mother" does, communicating the female who gave birth (“hembra que

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ha parido”), womb where the fetus develops, sewer, in essence reducing
motherhood to a biological function. On the other hand, “father“ bears the status
of founder and protector of descent, family or people, i.e. Abraham (Sau 41-46).

In language, Seu asserts, “man” is overreprested. Especially in languages
whose grammar distinguishes between feminine and masculine gender,
masculine is the standard, representing both male and female (“nitlos’ can mean
either boys only or boys and girls together); but “nines” refers exclusively to girls.
Feminine is not the norm because the world is viewed as masculine. Sau
includes an excerpt from Anne Piussi’s study of gender in pedagogy. The
following is a conversation between a student and a teacher.

—Sefiora maestra, gcomo se tonne el femenino?

—Partiendo del masculino: la 0 final se sustituye por una a.

—Sefiora maestra, y el masculino c6mo se tonne?

—EI masculino no se forrna, existe. (46)
Sau concludes that “Al quedar fagocitada la Madre, este quedo enmudecide en
el seno del Padre; en todo caso, patético partavoz suyo, de su orden patriarcal,
porteadora de los bienes cultureles de aquel, ante los cuales esta el de que ella
ha dejado de existir” (49). Applying Sau’s findings to the case of E, the
protagonists mother becomes the father’s mouthpiece and lives vicariously
through him. She is nothing in and of herself. She chooses to dissociate from her
daughter, because E, as a woman, has no intrinsic value either. The result is that
the protagonist is an unmothered orphan who is expected to associate herself
with a man and see the world “in masculine,” as Piussi’s linguistic example
elucidated, in order to fit, albeit marginally, into the patriarchal world.

Ultimately it is the mother’s lack of self-acceptance as a woman that leads
to the rejection of the daughter and the daughter’s psychological crippling. Such

is clearly the case with E in El mismo mar. E is a passive figure who displaces

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onto Clara what she feels toward her mother in an attempt to reestablish the
maternal bond and ultimately find her mother’s acceptance and her own
acceptance of herself. In fact, the scenes in the nursery, when both women are
dressed in children’s pajamas, discussing children’s stories, is a reenactment of
mother-daughter roles. Yet, between the two, the homoerotic love does not cast
one into a determined role of mother and the other, that of daughter; rather,
homoeroticism (bearing its adjectival prefix “homo”) connotes a relationship of
equals, each equally capable of playing the role of nurturer and nurtured.
According to Servodidio, “In El mismo mar,the narrator’s full recovery of
the past awaits the arrival of a sympathetic interlocutor. Clara’s silent presence
suffices to activate a transferential process that effects a crossover with her
childhood” (“Esther Tusquets’s Fiction” 170). Being heard is a form of
acceptance. Clara is receptive to E’s recounting of her own life in fairy tale and
mythic form. By doing so, Clara, surrogate of E’s mother, is offering her lover the
affirrnation that she always sought as a child. Brooks contends that the Freudian
concept of transference
succeeds in making the past and its scenarios of desire live again through
signs with such vivid reality that the reconstruction proposed by analytic
work achieve the effect of the real. They do not change past history—they
are powerless to do that—but they rewrite its present discourse.
Disciplined and mastered, the transference ushers us forth into a changed
reality. And such is no doubt the intention of any literary text (345).
Except the final line articulated by Clare “y Wendy crecib” the entirety of
Tusquets’ novel is E’s narration! monologue (approximately a third of which is
directed at Clara). Both the narration and the monologue to Clara bear a striking
similarity to the free flow of a psychoanalytic session. The narrator E, then, would

be engaging in transference with Claral the reader; such transference, as Brooks

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claims, makes the “scenarios of [past] desire live again”. Although unable to
change the past, the transference helps the analysand “rewrite the present
discourse” (345). With Clara as her “analyst” or interlocutor, E is enabled to
change her present discourse and, in a sense, to rectify the past. Clara and E’s
affair is a reenactment—a simulacrum—of several relationships: E-Julio, E-
Jorge, and the first relationship: E-her mother. By loving Clara, E invests in her
the past fear of rejection; remaining with her would have accomplished the
resolution of the pain. But by allowing herself to return to the cycle of perpetual
abandonment, E refuses fully to avail herself of the positive possibilities of the
transference onto Clare. Instead of breaking the Theseus-Ariande cycle, E
perpetuates it, recasting Clara in her usual role.

Tusquets’ conclusion concurs with Brooks’ belief that both transference
and literature “usher us forth into a changed reality” (345). E was incapable of
entering a new reality; a hopeful future still awaits Clara or, as vasquez claims,
she is still early enough in her linear progression toward defeat that hope is not
out of the question: “Clara’s total giving, her immense capacity for feeling, place
her at the opposite pole from . . . full, irrevocable defeat” (“Linear” 313).

But, the reader is also ushered forth into a “changed reality” by being
convinced to pass judgment on the all too common lot of women. In Dolgin’s
interview, Tusquets comments on the harsh reality of successful women who,
having considered themselves secondary to their husbands for years, were
crushed when they were left:

un caso de mujer, de la cual la pareja se desinteresa, porque encuentra a

una chica joven es un tema central de mis novelas es una

experiencia que me parece aterradora, 0 sea, mujeres que tienen un buen
trabajo, tienen personalidad, el dinero Io ganan ellas, tienen ideas sobre

casi todo, tienen amigos, y de repente porque un pelma de marido al que

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vienen soportando desde hace veinte afios . . . Ias deja de repente por

una nifia de diecisiete aflos. Y las mujeres se derrumban . . . Lo cual es

tremendo; es un fracaso de amor . . . Creo que el amor es una historia

que te montas tu. . . un cuento que te inventas a ti mismo (Dolgin 401-02).
In other words, E’s final capitulation to mediocrity and secondary status is
Tusquets’ feminist wake-up call to her readers. In essence, the protagonists
failure constitutes a caveat: “Readers, do not expect an all-consuming love to
complete you. Self-imposed subordination to the object of one’s adoration is the
equivalent of emotional crippling.”

The homoeroticism in El mismo mar is a utopian attempt to depict the
possibility of a relationship between equals and, at the same time, a warning
about the pain of love. The lesbianism within Tusquets’ works is an exploration of
female space, as Servodido indicates, but also an exploration of physical space.
The allusions to female sexuality parallel Ariadne’s investigation within the
labyrinth. The labyrinth becomes a metaphor for female space, and lesbianism is
an exploration of the female space represented by the labyrinth. Bellver denotes
Tusquets’ erotic images to be “closed spaces, water, sea creatures, princesses,
the cat, spring, flowers and fruit” which contrast with the phallus (“Language” 15).
Tusquets’ characters retreat from the hostility of the phallic world “ to those
places where they feel secure,” not unlike Ariadne in her labyrinth (Bellver,
“Language” 15). Bellver goes on to say that the “mythical journey of the
protagonist back to her past is repeatedly equated with a ”submergence into
unknown hidden passages: an entry into the Minotaur’s labyrinth these
closed spaces exceed their metonymic value as backdrops for erotic scenes to
become symbols of female sexuality” (“Language” 15). In other words, Bellver
clearly draws parallels between hidden spaces, the mythical labyrinth and female

sexuality. They constitute the female space within which the protagonist finds

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refuge and the freedom to express herself. Freud equates rooms, cases, boxes,
caskets, and stoves-in essence, closed spaces—with the symbolization of
woman (Jastrow 71-72). As Bellver observes, “The correlation between rooms
and female genitalia is confirmed by the identical adjectives the author uses for
them— ‘cerrado’, ‘pequel'io’, ‘oscuro’, “humedo’” (“Language“ 15-16).

Female sexuality—doubled when homoerotic—and labyrinthine allusions
are inextricably linked to psychological exploration. Jung, cited by Ciplijauskaité
equates the ego with the masculine and the subconscious with the feminine,
further affirming the labyrinth as female space (24). E leaves the objective,
Iogocentric masculine world to explore the femenine world: maternal home,
grandmother’s home, lesbianism, dream-like subjectivity, and intertextual
fantasy. For Jung, “the negative aspects of the maternal archetype are
expressed in such symbols as witches, dragons, devouring and entwining
animals and situations, and even the grave or the sea” (Storr 47, emphasis mine
to indicate those applicable to El mismo mar. respectively, the legend of St.
George, the minotaur, the labyrinth, the grandmother’s funeral, the title/ seaside
home). Essencially, all these images, linked to unresolved issues with the
mother, further reinforce the concept of E’s narration as the creation of female
physical, psychological, sexual, and mythical space. Ciplijauskaité observes that
“Le investigacibn psicolbgica trata de ir mas alla del ‘yo’ social, de lo que Jung
llama persona o careta que pertenece, segt'in él, al fondo colectivo. Para Ilegar a
existir auténticamente como individuo es imprescindible, dice, despojarse de la
mascara. A la concienciacibn . .. se llega a través de la sensacibn de ser
diferente” (87). The Jungian persona-shadow poles coincide with the Ariadne-
Minotaur dynamic. Viewing Ariadne and the Minotaur as a bifaceted entity, the
parallel becomes evident. The persona is the acceptable mask the individual

presents to society, whereas the shadow is the dark side, the desires, the fears

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which lie hidden from the public eye. E’s crisis emerges because when Jorge
committed suicide, she renounced her shadow just as Ariadne asked Theseus to
slay the Minotaur. E’s existence, from that point on, was inauthentic because she
was not a complete person, that is, she did not attempt to integrate (or
depolarize) the persona-shadow polarities. The protagonist believed she could
become her persona; in other words, she tried to be the mask that society
expected her to wear. Ciplijauskaité elaborates: “se ha empezado a hablar de la
locura como una posible cura y de la necesidad de conocer y asimilar ‘Ias
fuerzas oscuras’ que corresponderian a lo que Jung llama ‘la sombra’: Ia parte
negative del ‘yo’ que lo complementa y hace posible su progresibn si no es
reprimida” (87).

From the juxtaposition of the two central Ariadne figures, E and Clara, a
dialectic ensues. E fulfills the role of the traditional Ariadne type, a role whose
principal trait is a self-imposed passivity that condemns her to eternal misfortune.
The protagonist capitulated to society’s demands and buckled in her struggle for
authenticity. On the other hand, Clara represents the new Ariadne archetype, a
figure who breaks the traditional mold of passivity and offers the hope of taking
the future into her own hands.

Passivity and resignation to abandonment constitute an internalization of
the hackneyed view of women within myth and life. Resignation, assent, and
passivity represent a lack of will to change the injustice of the present, to learn
from the past and to take the reins of one’s own future. E’s own life is a
testimonial of abandonment resulting from a sense of Ieamed helplessness:

pues los ”principes encantadores que pueblan la tierra no suelen entender

nunca nada, ignoran Ias sirenas romanticas y locas, puestos los ojos

desde un principio en princesas bobaliconas—, Ia misme mirada que

ingenuas muchachas campesinas dedican al amante engal'loso y

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disfrazado, que habra de abandonarlas siempre, siempre, siempre en la

noche de sus bodes. (T usquets 163)

In other words, E herself admits that abandonment has plagued half the human
population without discriminating between fictional and real figures, or between
the social élite (“princesas”) and the humble women (“campesinas”).

In her chapter “Of Mermaids, Minotaurs, and Undenivorlds of Desire,”
lchiishi looks at Tusquets’ poem “Andersen (La Sirena)” and interprets the
significance the oceanic underworld, parallel to the labyrinth, has for Tusquets.
According to lchiishi, Tusquets” poetic mermaid holds the underwater beauty in
low esteem, yearns for the “glittering world of men she has glimpsed above the
see”; “For Tusquets, then, it is the gift of feeling, the capacity for love, which
separates humanity from the lower forms of life” (30).

The tale of the Little Mermaid strikingly resembles the Ariadne myth. The
Little Mermaid, “overcome with love for the young man, . . . sacrifices all: her
home, her beautiful voice, the glimering tail, and endures great physical pain, to
gain legs . . . [in order to] win . . . the love of the prince and a human soul . . . The
prince turns away form her to blithely marry another” (lchiishi 30). Ariadne,
similarly, yearns to leave the comfort of the labyrinth and join her love Theseus in
the outside world. She also helps her beloved—by extending to him the guiding
thread—, and sacrifices the life she had had. Theseus, like the prince, turns
away from her to marry another.

E resigns herself to this fatalistic worldview of inevitable abandonment for
women and suppresses the will to fight against it. By acquiescing to the mythic
role, E betrays herself and relinquishes forever any hope for autonomy. The
narrator admits her own responsibility in Jorge’s abandonment: “[Dlejé morir al
Minotauro—que no murio en la lucha a manos de Teseo, murio poquito a poco,

en sucesivas muertes diminutas, por la tristeza de mi ausencia, o porque Jorge

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lo fue anulando en mi y fui yo, si fui yo tal vez la que le di definitive muerte en lo
mas hondo de mi misme” (T usquets 196, emphasis mine). Such an admission is
but a brief glimpse of the self-knowledge necessary to establish autonomy and
happiness; but in E’s case, the voyage of self-discovery and autonomy stops
here, for she soon yields to the demands of the world from which she briefly took
flight. lchiishi wrongly believes that for Tusquets, “Love is the most noble and
uplifting human emotion” (31). Tusquets’ treatment of the self-abnegating,
sacrifical view of love denounces this phenomenon that pervades literature and
life.

Although the narrator-protagonist appears to grow—by shouldering a bit of
the blame for not recovering from abandonment—she cannot! does not break
away from the ties that bind her to the life that makes her so miserable. She
vacillates in what she wants. The older woman is torn between who she wants to
be and who she has become. For this reason, E accedes to Julio’s request that
he see her, promising Clara that she will return by dinnertime; instead, E allows
Julio to seduce her and convince her to return home with him. The narrator, while
unhappy in her perpetual role of Ariadne, cannot bring herself to break away from
what society expects of her: passivity and futility. Given that she has led a life of
passivity, she has been groomed to allow decisions to be made for her and,
subsequently, to not fully accept the responsibility for her choices. In the
following passage, E deflects onto Jorge the blame for her life choices, choosing
to believe that since her affair with him she has been doomed to repeated
abandonment:

Julio ha sido para mi unicamente esto: representacibn constante y casi

siempre dolorosa y presente de la vida y de la muerte que eligio para mi

Jorge . . . no voy a escapar jamas . . . al abandonarrne irremisiblemente

en la isle de Naxos, al abandonarrne sin posible reencuentro a mitad de

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camino entre mis ya imposibles Iaberintos. que habia sido mi unico

refugio. (T usquets 208)

Pratt states “Authorial ambivalence in combination with the necessity for drawing
out the nature of her hero’s true feelings creates a twisting of attitudes . . ., most
often manifest in the author’s encoding of self-doubt and blame into the hero’s
consciousness” (75). E is truly ambivalent; she wishes to remain with Clara, but
her internalization of society’s norms forbid her fulfillment of her dreams of
requited love with another woman. E punishes herself, by returning to Julio, for
having given in to her true desires. She must return to a world in which she has
relinquished herself to the demands of others, for she has no say in the world to
which she is returning. Julio will continue to cheat on her, and she will pretend
not to notice. Her silence mimics society’s own, a silence which condones Julio’s
affairs and his denigration of E, his silently consenting wife.

By returning to her old life, the protagonist accepts the patriarchal optic
and her role as secondary to the grandeur of her male counterpart. According to
Woolf,

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the

magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its

natural size . . . Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors
are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and

Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if

they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge (60-61).

Male power is the axis of the patriarchal world. Both E and Ariandne depend on
the heroic/ professional acts of their mates to have a sense of who they are and
whose they are. Julio is a movie director; he controls images and who plays

which roles. Not once did he ever believe that E would not return nor that he

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could not recast her in her role of wife. E is a vital player in the masquerade of
her husband‘s greatness.

Once Julio reintroduces himself into E’s life, she returns to her traditional
role evoked by Tusquets” allusions to Ariadne and the little mermaid. After the
sexual act with her husband, the protagonist-narrator monologues the following:

Jorge que me arrastro a esta muerte [0 sea, muerte en vida], que eligio a

Julio—sin conocerle—para que perpetuara en forma de muerte lo que

pudo haber sido para siempre vida . . . sblo acierto en pensar

confusamente, tan dolorosamente, en todas las sirenas que recorreran
para siempre Ias playas en int'itil persecucibn de un alma de mujer, en
cierta ondina tan tontamente burlade, en las muchachas abandonadas

. . ., en Ariadne abandonada en la isle de Naxos. (T usquets 216)

Navajas, retering to masculinist literature whose protagonist is a male hero,
suggests that E! mismo mar runs counter to classical literature in which

the exemplary trajectory of the classical fictional figure concludes with the

achievement of everlasting life with death: he lives eternally through the

immortality of fiction. That is, the classical hero erases the effects of the
only force (death) that . . . could bring the end of his attempts at
differentiation. The narrator of Tusquets’ novel suberts that orientation.

She dies for herself when she begins to live for others upon relinquishing

difference and adapting again to the family world (123).

Julio the patriarch punishes his wife for having strayed. Pratt avers that “In
women’s fiction the hero herself is more likely to become a ‘dying god’ of
feminine eroticism, punished by madness, death or ostracism, or to fall victim
sexually to his opposite, the gothic rapist, righteous husband, or unsuitable
suitor" (Archetypal 173). This is precisely what takes place after E’s affair with

Clara. She is punished by both patriarchal society and her husband when she

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copulates with him—lying passively, accepting his physically and socially
superior position—knowing that this moment marks the termination of her tryst
with Clara and the end to her quest for authenticity. Return to the bourgeois life
after having loved a forbidden love (forbidden because E is a women, because
she is married, because her soul mate is of the same sex, and because she
delighted in carnal pleasures) is her punishment; she can compare the stifling
everyday life to the fleeting freedom and love shared with Clara. ‘

The protagonist dooms herself to unhappiness because she does not
believe that she has the right, the strength, or the will to break away from
patriarchal rule. Instead of creating her own niche in the world with another
woman, excluded from the phallocentric cosmos, the protagonist gives in to what
has been indoctrinated into her: that she, as a woman, is weak and must
associate with the strong and powerful, i.e., the male. As Beauvoir asserts,

If women seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential,

it is because she herself fails to bring about this change . . . Women do

not say ‘We’ . . . They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude

. . . They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have

taken nothing, they have only received. (46).

Such is clearly the case in El mismo mar in which Tusquets exposes several
repetitive situations which degrade women, relegating them to an inferior status
(Sofie, E’s mother, her grandmother, E’s married life); yet not once do these
women unite to form a front of solidarity in order to combat their oppression.
Rather, each woman feels alienated—both from other women, toward whom she
harbors antagonism, and the men! men who denigrate(s) her. The survival tactic
employed by each of these alienated beings in El mismo mar is to associate with
the figure who represents the hegemonic class. In other words, each humiliated

woman takes the side of her humiliater. E’s grandmother stays with her

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grandfather. The protagonists mother does likewise and resents Sofia. E’s
mother also sides with Julio, expecting her daughter to return to him. E herself
returns to Julio, the author of her present discontent and divorces herself from
any future happiness with Clara.

Since the homoerotic central love affair in El mismo mar highlights the
possibility of solidarity between women serving to defy the oppressed role in the
hierarchical structure of patriarchy, E’s sabotaging her possible happiness with
another woman exacerbates the sting of the blow to feminism and the fight
against female oppression. Servodidio views E’s relationship with clara as a
possible “reconciliation with “self [suggesting] the successful completion of a
mid-life rebirth journey. But the last portal of transformation is never crossed”
(“Pre-Oedipal” 165). The protagonist betrays herself, a woman, and her lover,
another woman. By concluding the novel with a double betrayal, Tusquets
underlines the injustice of the situation and imbues it with a painful element of
verisimilitude. For, had the author concluded with a happily-ever-after storybook
ending, she would have shattered the credibility of the work for a two-fold reason.
The fairy-tale and mythic allusions prefigure the final abandonment and, in
addition, a traditional, closed, homoerotic ending would be entirely oxymoronic.
vasquez suggests that Tusquets’ “counterpointed images suggest the binary
opposition of sabato’s rosa-faugo and madre-cloaca . . . each thing embraces
the potential for its opposite” and “comfort is made from the stuff of
enveloping threat” (“Linear’ 308-09). In other words, E’s homoerotic happiness
can be seen as prefiguring E’s return to patriarchal discontent. Therefore, the
reader fully anticipated Tusquets’, yet had hoped against.

Tusquets weaves a realistic tale of a woman who has internalized
phallocentric ideology in apparently innocuous myths and fairy tales. By doing so,

the author makes evident the sinister nature of Western culture and its crippling

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effect on women: for women, as Tusquets’ characters prove, have a hand in their
own debilitation. Beauvoir avers that
When man makes of woman the Other, [sic] he may, then, expect her to
manifest deep-seated tendencies toward complicity. Thus, woman may fail
to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources,
because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of
reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased [emphasis mine]
with her role as the Other. (48)
This explains E’s mother siding with Julio, wanting her daughter to return to him,
just as it explains E’s final decision to return to him and the world of patriarchy.
The relationship with Clara, however, reveals a glimpse of hope. The
juxtaposition of these two Ariadne figures (E being a traditional Ariadne and
Clara a neo-mythic type) highlights the tragedy of the older woman’s assent to
mediocrity and underscores the younger woman’s drive to break the oppressive
fetters of patriarchy. While removed from the phallic world, taking refuge at the
grandmother’s home, E and Clara break out of the traditional roles. The narrator
states, “no sé cual de les dos va a ser definitivamente Teseo y Ariadne”
(T usquets 116). This uncertainty of roles allows for the freedom to behave
outside of the patriarchal parameters of expected behavior. Only when male
power is present within the plot, does E capitulate, reverting to a rigid mythic role,
here as Theseus the abandoner.
[T]he paths of the two women ultimately bifurcate: the quest of the older
woman becomes truncated by her accommodation to the patriarchal
backlash (her abrupt return to Julio, a deadening marriage, bourgeois
enclosure). Significantly, she comes to view herself as a manipulated
mannequin and a butterfly immobilized and crucified by sexual brutality

. . . The future of the younger woman, however, becomes pregnant with

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possibility, in spite of her lover’s abandonment. The younger companion

becomes her own hero as the mature female becomes antihero.

(Ordonez, “Quest for Matrilinear" 44)

With Jorge, E played the role of Ariadne, and similarly so with Julio, but not with
Clara. Upon opting to return to Julio, E becomes the Theseus and Clara the new,
yet evolved, Ariadne. E relegates Clara to the same role of abandonment that
she had repeatedly suffered. E has played both mythic roles as part of the
patriarchal scheme. With her husband, she has lived as Ariadne. By assuming
the role of Theseus with Clara, E forces her either to accept the traditional
corresponding role or to modify it. The younger woman opts for the latter.
According to Nichols, “Clara representa Ia esperanza este preparada
para actuar en su vida, dejando de ser victima de la historia una vez para
siempre” (Descifrar 39).

Clara does not accept abandonment; rather she, in an action perhaps
representative of a new generation, strikes out by seducing el emperador.
Although this is, of course, far from being optimal behavior, it does clearly prove
that, unlike the traditional Ariadne, Clara will grow after her crisis. She does not
relegate herself to a life of passivity. She recognizes that her brief time with E in
the labyrinth was merely a fleeting episode and that she must leave the
sanctuary of love forever. The novel concludes circularly with Clara uttering the
epigraph; “Y Wendy crecié”, is the only direct speech that the ingenue articulates,
the only articulation not contained in E’s interior monologue. These three words
signify that Clara cannot return to NeverNeverland; she can no longer take
refuge in the mythical labyrinth. The romantic interlude between the two of them
nearly killed her Minotaur, her fears, her desires. As was Ariadne, Clara is
entirely alone. Tusquets, notwithstanding the unhappy conclusion, offers a

positive element: the maturation of Clara. The affair with E constitutes for Clara a

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rite of passage, after which, she finds her voice in order to articulate her destiny:
“Y Wendy crecié”. Clara throughout the work has been compared to various
literary characters, one of which is the little mermaid who lost her voice. By
speaking, Clara, unlike the little mermaid, finds her voice. Through the highly
intertextual overlapping of characters (Clara = the little mermaid, Ariadne,
Wendy), Tusquets manages to offer hope for Clara’s future when the young
woman gains her voice (unlike the little mermaid), refuses to be abandoned
(unlike Ariadne), and accepts her loss of innocence (like Wendy). Tusquets,
hence, transforms Clara’s abandonment into a Ieaming experience, something
which the narrator-protagonist never experienced. Yet Clara’s Minotaur has not
been slain. For the Minotaur, although symbolizing the dark side, the latent
desires, the base instincts, also represents a sense of individuality. In her
narration, E has often begrudged Jorge his slaying of her Minotaur, for she lost
her sense of self upon loving him.

On the other hand, although Clara shared herself with E, she never
renounced her authenticity symbolized by the Minotaur. The cavernous allusions
to lesbian eroticism communicated exploration, not destruction. The descent to
the labyrinth, rather than having slain Clara’s sense of individuality, simply
revealed it. For this reason Clara, unlike her predecessor, does not become
emotionally crippled. She loved and was abandonned, yet she Ieamed about
herself, realizing that she would not take the abandonment lying down—apt
terminology for female passivity in sex roles. E’s betrayal of Clara with Julio was
paid in kind when the young woman took it upon herself to seduce someone
parallel to and perhaps even more powerful than Julio: eI emperador. Once
phallocentrism—the power symbolized by the penis—is reintroduced into Clara
and E’s world, we come to learn a great deal about these two characters. E

passively acquiesces to Julio’s repel lovemaking! sexual conquest and is

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manipulated by Julio’s penis! power. She becomes subordinate to him because
of sex. Whereas, in Clara’s case, Clara manipulates eI emperador (his penis, his
power) clearly to demonstrate that if she is to be reintegrated into phallocentric
society, after her brief respite with E, she will not be subordinate to male power,
but rather will manipulate it for her own ends.

The relationship each character has to male power makes a statement
about her stand on phallocentric ideology as represented by the Ariadne myth. E
acquiesces to the role to which her society has relegated her: the perpetual role
of consensual abandonment, of wife of an adulterer. The protagonists future is
sealed; she will perpetually relive the plight of Ariadne, of her grandmother, and
her mother. E relegates herself to passivity and subordination, as does the
traditional Ariadne.Yet, the gamut of possibilities awaits Clara. Clara breaks the
typecast mold of the traditional Ariadne by refusing to accept abandonment as a
perpetual condition of femaleness. The new Ariadne does not continue to wait
passively on the island of Naxos; instead, she leaves. The new Ariadne does not
suffer from the same ebulia that her predecessor did; rather her pain and
suffering will yield the fruit of change.

Through the creation of a neo-mythic Ariadne figure (Clara), Tusquets,
thus, rewrites the patrilinear past; yet in her new version of the Ariadne myth,
there is a bifurcation of the traditional outcome. E ultimately plays the role of
Theseus with Clara and assents to a perpetual role of Ariadne with Julio, while
Clara imbues her role as Ariadne with hope for the future. She refuses to remain
passive. Through her interlude with “el emperador,” she refuses to accept that
what she has to offer is unwanted. Unlike the traditional Ariadne, she approaches
her next suitor, knowing that the possibilities of that relationship are limited to a
very brief camel affair without the possibility of a “happily ever after” ending. It is

through Clara that Tusquets disrupts and subverts the patriarchal history and

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patrilinear literary heritage which she and all other (women) writers have
inherited“.
[Clara] is able to point toward a utopian break from these textual bonds
and even further beyond toward the creation of new myths for women:
matrilineal mythopoesis . . . Clara promises to emerge from her end of the
adventure prepared for change . . . If she is called—as are all heroes—to
reintegrate herself into the larger context of existence, she will return
capacitated for heroic action, her integrity, autonomy, and spiritual purity
intact. (Ordonez, “A Quest for Matrilinear Roots” 38-44)
Tusquets has woven her characters out of the mythic threads of the Ariadne
myth, just as E avails herself of the same threads to narrate her past. The
rewritten mythic narrative employs phallogocentric ideology—evident in the
mythic elements—in order to subvert it. The subversion of the ideology is two-
fold. The creation of Clara as a neo-Ariadnean archetype constitutes a
categorical rejection of female complicity in her own relegation to secondary
status. Our culture has traditionally excluded women from literary legitimacy;
Tusquets’ recontextualization of Ariadne’s plight is a strategy to legitimize the
work and infiltrate the lines of male-dominated literary canons. As Servodidio
affirms,
the impact of canonical texts on female readers has been amply

demonstrated in [T usquets’] fiction. An open question, however, turns on

 

“ Gilbert and Gubar express a similar sentiment in reference to Bernard,
who disrupts and subverts patriarchal history, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. (No

Man’s Land 193).

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the accessibility to male interpretation of the meaning encoded in texts by
and about women. [And so], Tusquets’s fiction awaits the final judgment of
history, her place in the pantheon of Spanish letters. (“Esther Tusquets’s
Fiction” 176)
Although incorporation and subversion of traditional “texts” may be an attempt at
canonization, the full inclusion of women’s works into the literary canon is yet to
be seen. Optimistically, El mismo mar has been reedited and has recently been
published by Castalia, one of Spain’s more academic and canonical publishing

houses.

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Chapter 6

ADRIANA’S LABYRINTH OF OEDIPAL DESIRE:
FROM CASTRATION, MUTILATION, AND HORROR
TO A FEMINIST MANIPULATION OF PENIS ENVY
IN EL SUR BY GARCIA MORALES‘”

In this chapter, I ask the readers to allow me to guide them as Ariadne
guided Theseus. For this chapter, like the labyrinth, is a sinuous and, at times,
unexpected journey, which leads to the core of the matter: Adriana’s Oedipal
fixation with her father; but to reach and to explore the psychological
underpinnings we must first embark on the necessarily circuitous path
investigating the nature of myth, Greek heroine cults, the symbology of thread in
feminist writing, and irony as the narrative filter that guides the reader to the heart
of Adriana’s labyrinth of Oedipal desires. Garcia Morales’ crafty adaptation of the
Ariadne myth is a literary tool that reveals the dynamics of Freud’s Oedipus
theory to be a patriarchal state in miniature—and by extension, F rancoist Spain;

the result is to denounce the internalization of female inferiority. The author flatly

 

”5 Although this chapter does not explore the relationship between Garcia
Morales’ novella and Victor Erice’s filmic rendition of El Sur, various critics have
done so and much more is yet to be written on the subject. For more about
Erice’s El Sur, consult Alborg, Ancet, Besas, Cobos, Compitello, Evans and

Fiddian, Glenn, Hopewell, Morgan, Nimmo, Rubio, and Stanley.

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rejects Freud’s idea that the female psyche is unmitigably plagued by the “horror”
of the female condition, that is, “castration” and “mutilation.”"6

Garcia Morales’ El sur occupies merely fifty-two pages. Its brevity is not to
be mistaken for lack of complexity. This concise but dense work has multiple
layers Of meaning and suggests various readings. Before embarking on a
mythological and psychoanalytic feminist approach to the text, let us first take a
literal look at the plot that can be summarized as follows.

Adriana recounts the events of her childhood and early adolescence from
an adult perspective or at least a later adolescent perspective. She establishes a
tone of solitude and abandonment. The primary catalyst for the sadness that
pervades the text and prompts the narrator’s compulsion to narrate the text is the
death of Adriana’s father Rafael when she was fifteen years Old. Adriana recalls
enigmatic intimacy with her father and coldness from her mother. The intimacy
between father and daughter occurs through the pendulum, a divining instrument
that further intensifies Rafael’s mystique. Rafael is an anti-social man who
alienates his family with his silence. He teaches French at the university,
chooses to live in an isolated location, keeps his daughter from attending school,
and scoms any possibility of outside contact.

Adriana recounts her father’s influence in her life. Certain elements
pervade the narrative: her father’s silence and oddness. and her fascination with
every aspect of his persona. From the onset, we learn that the text is Adriana’s

interior monologue directed at her father in his absence. During her childhood,

 

“5 In this opening paragraph I have clearly used others' ideas (Kirk,

Larson, Mitchell, Freud) which will be documented and elaborated upon.

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Adriana felt a strange attraction for her father’s study, a forbidden place, which
becomes the locus of her instruction in the magical art of the pendulum, days
before her seventh birthday.

Rafael fostered loneliness so much, both in his own life and his family’s,
that his refusal to allow Adriana to attend school prohibited her from having any
friends whatsoever. He was especially adverse to the idea of having nuns teach
his daughter and inculcate religious doctrine. Both Rafael’s wife and daughter are
victims of his isolationist tactics, which mimic the isolationist sociO-political
doctrine of Francoism. Teresa, Adriana’s mother, is a scorned wife, a teacher by
profession who was stripped of her degree by fascist law, whose friendships are
disdained by her husband. Teresa’s relationship with Adriana is strained due to
the mother's insecurities, unhealthy marriage, and the misogynistic social and
domestic climate.

Nonetheless, Teresa proves through her actions that she does not wish
her daughter to be as lonely as she. To remedy Adriana’s alienation, her mother
has a friend of hers bring her daughter, Mari-Nieves, to play with Adriana. The
mother’s good intentions go awry when, after a dispute as to who would play the
role of Joan of Arc, Adriana decides to truly burn Mari-Nieves at the stake. When
both mothers smell smoke and see flames at the feet of a bound Mari-Nieves,
Adriana’s mother begins to disdain her daughter more than ever before. Mari-
Nieves is a secondary character who reveals Adriana’s aggression. She is
brutalized by the protagonist on two occasions, indicating Adriana’s
internalization and projection of misogynistic values. III at ease with her own
femaleness, Adriana turns to her father for solace.

It is time for Adriana to make her first communion. In preparation, the
housekeeper Josefa assists her in canying out an examination of conscience.

Like Mari-Nieves, Josefa is a key secondary character for what she represents

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and reveals about Adriana and her parents. Josefa always dressed entirely in
black, her demeanor and worldview being as morose as her appearance. She
was taken in by Teresa to serve as help staff and as a friend. Josefa had been
abused by her alcoholic husband, who pimped for her and beat her senseless
when she showed reluctance to prostitute herself. Her lifestyle took a complete
turn when she became a devout “believer” whose interpretation of Catholicism
focuses on “hellfire and brimstone.” Perhaps Teresa, emotionally abused by her
husband, identified with Josefa’s much more flagrantly abusive situation. A
friendship ensued between the two women. Teresa asks her friend to instruct
Adriana in catechism so she might make her first communion. Because of
Rafael’s disdain of this macabre character, Adriana also shows a distaste for her.
Her father’s aversion to religion makes Adriana uncertain whether he will attend
her first communion; but he does so, remaining at the back of the church and
gazing on the ceremony from afar. After the first communion, Mari-Nieves calls
Adriana’s father an atheist. To retaliate, Adriana throws Mari-Nieves into a bush.

When Adriana was nine years old, her grandmother, who lived in Seville,
was dying. Adriana’s parents went south and returned, never to be the same
again. This is precisely when Adriana Ieams of her father’s love for Gloria Valle,
an ex-lover who had his illegitimate son. Rafael becomes noticeably depressed.
He becomes so uninterested in life that he does not do anything to impede
Adriana from attending a Catholic school, even though previously he had
staunchly opposed any association with religion.

Aunt Delia comes to spend her vacation with the family. Adriana bonds
with her aunt. When she Ieams that her father forced Delia to leave the house,
the protagonist begins to resent her father. The significance Of this event lies in
Rafael’s attitude to his own sister, a woman. Rafael is the only male in an

isolated location, a place where his whims govern the order of things. Again, his

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attitude reveals disdain toward and control over a woman. The antagonism
between siblings also recalls the Spanish Civil War which, metaphorically, and in
some cases literally, pitted brother against brother (or sister). Rafael’s absolute
dominance over the household also mimics Franco’s total power over the
(previously) divided nation.

When Adriana reaches puberty, her father begins to become considerably
more watchful of her now that she has become popular with the town’s teenage
boys. When Rafael sees her talking to a young man, Fernando, he slaps her,
something that he had never done before. ’

Just before his suicide, Adriana and her father chat in the garden, another
space in which they used to play with the pendulum during her childhood. She
brings up the subject of how he has changed since his return from Seville and his
mother’s funeral. She inquires whether that change had anything to do with
Gloria Valle. They return to the house together (leaving their place Of childhood
refuge). That night, he commits suicide, shooting himself in the head.

Adriana has a moment of enlightenment. She chooses to look for him “en
un espacio otro y nuevo” (39). The protagonist travels to her father's hometown
of Seville. She explores his room there and comes upon letters addressed to him
from Gloria Valle. Adriana reads her father’s letters from Gloria and Ieams that
they had had a relationship for ten years. Gloria had left for a year. When she
returned, Rafael had married. Gloria has a son. Adriana suspects that Rafael had
wanted to abandon his family. The young girl decides to go meet Gloria Valle,
who lived with her son. When Adriana meets Miguel-one year her senior—, she
suspects that he might be her father’s son. This is later confirmed.

Adriana steals her brother's diary, reading his account of their (Adriana
and Miguel’s) relationship: how he shows her Seville, but how it is she who

guides him. She Ieams that he is in love with her. Adriana writes in his diary that

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she also loves him and subsequently commits to never seeing him again. With
this action the protagonist has accepted the love of her father's surrogate and
has overcome the feelings of abandonment that she felt with her father’s suicide.

Garcia Morales’ novella bears several immediate parallels to the Ariadne
myth. The name of the protagonist, Adriana, is linked to Ariadne (Ariadne in
Spanish). Adriana guides her father, Rafael, with the pendulum, just as Ariadne
guided Theseus. Rafael’s promises of love assuage her sense of loneliness. His
suicide, subsequently, exacerbates her feelings of alienation and mimics
Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. According to
Adriana’s narration her mother views her as a monster, like the mythological
Minotaur. Miguel’s love for her resembles Dionysus’ love for Ariadne. But Garcia
Morales rewrites the myth by having Adriana reject Miguel’s love. The dynamic
between Adriana and Miguel might also be viewed as recasting and reversing
mythical roles: Miguel as Ariadne and Adriana as Theseus. Notwithstanding this
mythical interpretation to which we might adhere, Garcia Morales’ rewriting
proves that Adriana overcomes Ariadne’s plight of abandonment and loneliness.

The “mundo especial” (16) between the father and daughter can be seen
as the labyrinth (representative of the dark recesses of the psyche) where
Ariadne feels “hermandad”—a fraternal bond—with her father. This “hermandad”
is key to the mythic interpretation, for Ariadne and the Minotaur were siblings
who resided in a special world. The fact that Ariadne believes they have evil (“el
mal”) in common suggests that their world is that of the dark hidden recesses of
their psyches, where latent desires subsist.

In the three works studied which rewrite the Ariadne myth (El mismo mar,
El Sur, and Nada), the character who reprises the role of Theseus abandons his
beloved by committing suicide; this abandonment is in no way ambiguous. It is a

definitive, final act of separation which places a void, symbolized by death,

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between Theseus and Ariadne. Another element of this definitive act is that the
suicide robs the survivor of the possibility of ever confronting the suicide victim to
ascertain his motives. The survivor, then, concludes that she was to blame for his
suicide, that her love did not suffice, and that death was preferable to life with
her.

Given that Tusquets, Garcia Morales, and Laforet recast the Ariadne
myth, let us turn to Kirk’s explanation of the applicability Of a myth. G.S. Kirk in
The Nature Of Greek Myths accepts a “basic and general definition of myth to be
a “‘traditional tale’”. He elaborates:

Further examination of that apparently banal phrase is rewarding. First, it

emphasizes that a myth is a story, a narrative with a dramatic structure

and a climax . . . Myth-making is a form of story-telling. Second,

‘traditional’ is significant because it implies, not only that myths are stories

that are told especially in traditional types of society (which means above

all in non-literate societies), but also that have succeeded in becoming
traditional [and are] . . . found attractive enough to be passed from
generation to generation. A tale must have some special characteristic for
this to happen, some enduring quality that separates it from the general
run of transient stories. (27-28)
The question the reader need ask him/herself is “What ‘special characteristic. . .
separates [the Ariadne myth] from the general run of stories’?” But we see a
repetition of the Ariadne myth in several of El Sur’s characters. It pervades, at
least, three generations: the original myth, Gloria-Teresa and Adriana-Miguel.
Key to Garcia Morales’ work—to invert Kirk’s text—is that the role is unattractive
enough to not be passed from generation to generation. Hopelessness, isolation,
and abandonment by a central male figure are the elements rewritten by the

author. Kirk explains:

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myths are on the one hand good stories, on the other hand bearers of

important messages about life in general and life-within-society in

particular. In a non-literate and highly traditional culture, tales are a

primary form not only of entertainment but also of communication and

instruction Myths are not uniform, logical and internally consistent;
they are multiforrn, imaginative and loose in their details. Moreover, their
emphases can change from one year, or generation, to the next. (Nature

28-29)

The Ariadne myth possesses such versatility; its festivals commemorated
bipolarized outcomes: tragic (her death) and joyous (her marriage to Dionysus).
Applying the Ariadne myth to El Sur, we see the variations of the myth as well as
Garcia Morales’ transmutations of it. Both Gloria Valle and Adriana’s mother can
be seen as Ariadne figures. Gloria was left and Teresa married Rafael. Both
women were victims of the solitude which resulted from his affections. But Garcia
Morales subverts the dual outcome Of the original myth; Gloria, abandoned, finds
happiness, whereas Teresa, married, does not. Adriana must, then, draw on the
experience of her foremothers to determine the path that she will follow. In a
sense, Adriana emulates Gloria by choosing to overcome her love for Rafael.
Adriana’s search, unlike Ariadne’s, is a search for wholeness, for assurance that
she is not lacking or incomplete.

But let us look more closely at elements of the original myth. As Kirk has
stated, Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus and subsequently married the god
Dionysus who “represents the irrational element in man, and his myths the
conflict between reason and social convention on the one side, emotion on the
other. . . Homer. . . refers briefly to [Dionysus’] birth from Semele and his
arranging to have Ariadne killed by Artemis in Naxos once he had finished with

her” (Nature 128-29). But in Garcia Morales’ rendition, if Miguel is to perhaps be

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viewed as a new Dionysus, it is Adriana who distances herself from him.The
tyrant Peisistratus in the sixth century 8.0. made Theseus into “a great national
hero . . . by associating him as closely as possible with Heracles, the beau ideal,
and by ascribing to him various political and benevolent acts that were held to be
the beginning Of Athenian democracy” (Nature 152). Theseus is a hero in the
classical sense, a brave warrior who triumphs over evil; yet by rewriting the
Ariadne myth, Garcia Morales supplements male heroism with female suffering."

Kirk explains the variations on how “at Naxos, somehow . . . [Theseus’]
mistress Ariadne is left behind. Either he abandons her for another girl, or he is
divinely made to forget her, or the god Dionysus desires her and takes her over,
or Artemis slays her at his behest” (Nature 154). By Homer‘s era, Greek myths
“had assumed a function that already had elements Of both the particular and the
general: they were treated as example, familiar and typical instances of certain
kinds Of situations and ways of reacting to them.” Fifth-century B.C. Greeks
“knew that the heroic age had utterly disappeared, yet they continued to take the
reaction of [heroes and heroic characters] . . . as a guide to proper demeanor in
analogous situations” (Nature 289-90).

Questions that arise and will not be answered, but merely pondered, are
“What exemplum is derived from the myth of Ariadne”? and, subsequently "Why

is it alluded to implicitly in El Sur and explicitly in Tusquets’ El mismo mar?” and

 

‘7 Theseus is also known for his battling and defeating the Amazons
(Nature 154). See the chapter on El silencio for the importance of
amazonomachia as a Greek charter myth and its application to the work of

Garcia Morales.

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’What importance might it have had 2,500 years ago and how is it applicable to
literature and feminism today?“ Could Athenian Greeks have believed that the
Ariadne myth explained female suffering and abandonment? Through Ariadne’s
marriage to Dionysus, did the myth communicate that patience in women is to be
rewarded with the ever sought after boon of marriage? Does Artemis’ slaying of
Ariadne call out for total resignation on the part of women? This chapter does not
aspire to solve all these dilemmas, but an understanding of Greek heroine cults
provides some insight into Garcia Morales’ rendition Of the Ariadne myth, a myth
that also developed into a cult.

Jennifer Larson in Greek Heroine Cults studies the cults from the time Of
Homer to the third century BC. The terms hero and heroine arose in third
century BC. Heroine cults were, not surprisingly, “secondary or parallel to cults
of male figures” (Larson 4). Larson states, “heroines clearly had a place in cult,
but their status was often mediated through a male figure. Their position is
liminal: not every hero has a female companion, but many do.” Where cult
heroines receive offerings, they are explicitly less than those made to a male
hero. “So the heroine is a second-class hero, a figure important enough to be
included in the cult, but only rarely on an independent basis” (46). Sometimes a
heroine

simply completes the hero’s biography, since the hero must be born of

woman. Her story may illustrate a particular crisis in a woman’s life, such

as the transition to adulthood, marriage, or the desire to avoid marriage.
Most Greek heroines are identified by their relationship to a hero

. . . Penelope is the wife of Odysseus . . . Greek women’s identities were

similarly defined by their relationships to husband and father. SO the

mythology of heroes and heroines, not surprisingly, reflects Greeks’

expectation about relationships between men and women. (Larson 58)

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Heroine cults portray a simplified, idealized conception of women within the
confines of family structure. The anomalies, such as young virgins whose lives
end before reaching their “telos (‘end’ or ‘goal’) as brides and mothers, women
stripped Of familial ties through disaster and exclusion from the community, or
aliens . . . seemed to grip the imagination of the Greeks, for [such a virgin] could
be either the savior Of the community, like the sacrificial virgin, or its potential
destroyer, like the Amazon” (Larson 25).

Ariadne is a heroine who has multiple cults. These types of heroines “may
play a heroic role in one locale and a divine role in another” (Larson 8). Ariadne’s
grave at Argos is associated with Dionysus. She has a grave and cult at Cypriot
Amathous and a cult at Naxos. The Ariadneia festival was at Oinoe (Larson
149).“3 Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos. She is also linked romantically to
two male figures, Dionysus, a god, and Theseus, a hero. Her association with
them popularizes her as a mythological character and a cult figure. Applied to El
Sur, Rafael is clearly a recast Theseus who abandons his beloved after she
guides him. Adriana’s brother Miguel, it could be said, reprises the role of
Dionysus. According to the heroine cult, all is set right (Ariadne is redeemed)
when Dionysus marries her. It is Miguel’s love that allows Adriana to get on with
her life. Miguel’s love is a substitute for Rafael’s, as Dionysus' love is a

replacement for (and betterment of) Theseus’. But Garcia Morales’ rewriting of

 

‘8 Larson’s Heroine glossary cites the sources from which were extracted
the grave and cult locations: “Ariadne. Grave at Argos associated with Dionysus,
Paus. 2.23.8; grave and cult at Cypriot Amathous and cult at Naxos, Plut. Thes.
20. Ariadneia festival at Oinoe in Lokris” (149).

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the myth does not permit Adriana to accept Miguel’s love. Her rejection of it truly
liberates her.

Not surprisingly, heroines were associated with a man. The only heroines
outside a familial context (no ties to a husband or son) are virgins, heroines “torn
from familial contest by disaster,” Amazons “who overtly reject Greek-style family
ties,” and heroines who “exist only in cult oetiologies and are not part of a
genealogical system, such as Charilla at Delphi” (Larson 8). Mother-daughter
relationships are nearly nonexistent, reflecting Greek societal values as a whole:
“strong bonds between mother and daughter were a threat to Greek marriage
customs, which required the removal of the daughter from her home at an early
age. The Amazons epitomized the strong mother-daughter bond, since they
rejected marriage and never left their mothers’ households” (Larson 6). Larson
further explains the phenomenon

by the fact that men, as myth- and cult-makers, were excluded from and

therefore uninterested in this relationship. However, the society also had

an interest in limiting the bonds between mother and daughter, since too
strong a bond might vitiate the daughter’s ties to her new household, that
other husband and sons. The mythical society of the Amazons inverted all
the patriarchal norms, and among the Amazons, the daughter avoided
marriage and retained her ties with her mother. In the logic of myth,
patriarchal marriage and strong mother-daughter bonds are incompatible.
(99-100)
This either-or mentality can clearly by applied to Adriana’s relationship to her
parents. A close relationship with her mother would preclude Adriana from
developing a Iatently incestuous relationship with her father. Adriana’s home is
patriarchal and centered around her father. His moods affect all. His decisions

have governed the family. Furthermore, the plot takes place during the Franco

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regime, which robbed women of all power, as Adriana’s mother’s nullified
teaching degree attests. The ideological climate of the work is the discrediting of
femaleness and the emphasis that female worth can be established only through
the relationship with a man or male figure. Adriana’s mother is psychologically
scarred by the failure of her marriage. Josefa allies herself with God (supreme
patriarch). Adriana chooses to identify entirely with her father, notwithstanding his
obvious dysfunctions. The only “amazon-type” character of the novella is Gloria
Valle, who remained unmarried by choice and forged a life without a man. Her
child is a male, yet her identity is not through him. Gloria is a clearly demarcated
individual. In essence, she provides Adriana with a strong (Amazonian) female
model. Adriana, then, dissociates herself from Miguel (father/lover substitute) and
returns to be with her mother. It can be inferred that Adriana’s ties to her mother
will now strengthen, because she has severed the bonds to her father.

In Garcia Morales’ recasting of the Ariadne myth, the mother-daughter
bonds are vital to understanding the protagonists actions, choices, and outcome.
The name and the law of the father govern mythology (a patriarchal reflection).
Relationships and genealogies are determined by an association with a man; but
in El Sur it is Adriana's relationships to women which truly determine her identity.
Adriana must confront her Ariadnean precursors: her mother and Gloria Valle.

In order to understand the male-female dynamic, we must closely
scrutinize Freud’s theories on the Oedipus complex, the driving force behind
Adriana’s narration. But first, let us look at the importance of (Ariadne’s) thread in
feminist thought before we can analyze the irony with which the adult Adriana
narrates her childhood and adolescent experiences, experiences recounted as
having been distorted by an Oedipal fixation.

According to Yvonne Jehenson, Garcia Morales’ works “incorporate a

wide variety of signs from other texts in order to create new networks Of meaning.

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Her use Of intertextuality is primarily polemical and subversive. lntertextuality
becomes a feminist strategy in her works, a counterreply that highlights or
negates the previous text and leads to a new statement and new meaning” (212).
The author’s use of intertextuality is a common thread that links her works to
earlier known works in order to subvert them. Nancy Miller in Poetics of Gender
employs the term “arachnology” to refer to a female/feminist intertextual
reweaving of known threads (thinking, history, literature) with a subversive
purpose. Ari “arachnology” is, then,
a critical positioning which reads against the weave of indifferentiation to
discover the embodiment in writing Of a gendered subjectivity; to recover
within representation the emblems of its construction. [From this
perspective Miller reads] Arachne’s story: both as a figuration of woman’s
relation of production to the dominant culture, and as a possible parable
(or critical modeling) of a feminist poetics. Arachnologies, thus, involve
more broadly the interpretation and reappropriation of a story, like many in
the history of Western literature that deploys their intenNoven structures of
power, gender, and identity inherent in the production of mimetic art. (272)
Janet and Genaro Perez, in their introduction to Experimental Fiction by Hispanic
Women Writers, assert that the works of the writers included in the twenty-two
essays in this edition of Monographic Review are
subversive, undercutting phallocentric discourse and/or traditional models.
Demythologizing thrust fantasy, satire, parody, irony, silence and
alternative forms and multiplicity of language inform these text, creating
significant plurivocity of subtexts . . . Appropriation of patriarchally-
sanctioned modes or genres does not equate to internalization of

phallocentric values or imitation of masculine authorial methodologies and

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goals. The unreliable author of autobiography, like the unreliable narrator
of fiction, modifies its function and subverts ‘realistic’ content. (18)
On the surface, El Sur appears to be a straightfonrvard 52-page account of
a young girl’s close relationship with her father, but in accordance with the
Pérezes’ line of thinking, the text subverts the Freudian/patriarchal Oedipus
paradigm by demythologizing the Ariadne myth. The aspect that links “penis
envy” to the Iabyrinthian myth is the pendulum: an artifact that Adriana
manipulates and desires. The pendulum motif operates on various levels and is
multifaceted. It is literally a pendulum with which father and daughter divine the
source of water or lost or hidden objects. Mythologically, it is Ariadne’s thread,
recasting father and daughter in the role of Theseus and Ariadne, with all that the
result entails of solitude and abandonment. Symbolically, it represents the
father’s penis (discussed at length in the psychoanalytic section of this chapter).
The pendulum as thread carries the weight of a feminist literary tradition,
which unweaves the fibers of patriarchy in order to reweave them into the rich
tapestry of subjective female experience. According to Elaine Showalter in
“Piecing and Writing,”
metaphors of pen and needle have been pervasive in feminist poetics . . .
[ln feminist] theoretical writing metaphors of text and textile, thread and
theme, weaver and web, abound. The Spinster who spins stories, Ariadne
and her Iabyrinthian thread, Penelope who weaves and unweaves her
theoretical tapestry . . . are the feminist culture heroines of the critical age.
Furthermore, metaphors of the female web of relationship have taken on
positive association with feminist psychology. (224-25)
The symbol of thread is part of a new symbolic order. Adelaida L6pez de

Martinez sustains that

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nada que carezca de nombre existe en la cultura occidental hasta que lo
tiene. Vale decir, entonces, que la experiencia misma de la realidad
consciente depende de la existencia de un sistema de simbolos capaz de
abstraerla y clasificarla. Ese sistema es la lengua. Reconociendo el
enorrne poder que la lengua tiene de transformer eI orden socio-cultural
establecido, el feminismo le esta obligando a de-construir y re-evaluar sus

cedigos. (6)

The manipulation of mythological concepts calls out for a new symbolic order,
that is, a new way of looking at the world, just as Adriana does when she sees
“aquel mundo que Gloria Valle habia tejido para vuestro hijo” (51). It is at that
moment that she fully realizes that there is a world beyond the horizon of her
patriarchal world. But it is the concept of Ariadne’s thread which allows for a
reweaving of phallocentric symbolic order. Gloria, a jilted Ariadne-type wove
(“tejid”) a new world order for her son. She created a new symbolic order which
was not governed by the law of the father.

In El Sur, the equation thread = pendulum = penis becomes clear. It is an
instrument which guides Adriana (physically, emotionally, ideologically) and links
her to her father (also physically, emotionally, ideologically). Adriana narrates,
“Me sumergl entonces en aquel rito que ya conocia, siguiendo Ias direcciones
que el péndulo me seilalaba, deteniéndome de vez en cuando, segun sus
indicaciones” (18). Kathleen Glenn describes Adriana’s initiation with the
pendulum: Adriana is

admitted into the sanctum sanctorum and initiated into her father’s

secrets. . . In his study . . . she receives her first instruction in the use of

the pendulum with which he divines the location of that which is

hidden. The sexual connotations of the closed door behind which lies

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forbidden knowledge and of the child’s fascination with the phallic
pendulum and the power it represents are evident. (242)
Clare Nimmo interprets the interplay between Adriana and her father:

The underlying eroticism of this scene (the daughter’s initiation to the

pendulum suggesting a sexual initiation) is reinforced by descriptions of

physical sensation: ‘rozar‘, ‘envolver’, ‘susurro’, ‘murrnullo suave’, ‘mi

corazén latia con violencia’, ‘mi respiracion se agitaba’, and ‘empezaba a

temblar’. Moreover, this sensuous language is typically juxtaposed with

suggestions of the supernatural. . . referring not only to Rafael’s
extraordinary powers but also underlying the unnaturalness of the bond

. . . an incestuous tie between Adriana and Rafael. (43)

Therefore, Garcia Morales avails herself of the pendulum as a multifaceted,
complex instrument. It is because of the pendulum that the narrating Adriana can
conjure up her past, which parallels Ariadne’s plight. Adriana guides her father
with the pendulum, as Ariadne guided Theseus with the thread. But the
pendulum-thread has a much deeper meaning; it symbolizes the father's penis in
a patriarchal and phallocentric world. Society, since the ancient Greeks, has
viewed the world through the importance of male supremacy over the “weaker”
(“castrated”) sex. Garcia Morales’ pendulum is key to the reweaving of Ariadne’s
thread. The author manipulates the mythical layer of her work as an invitation to
a deeper psychoanalytic reading of the plot.

Kirk applies Freud’s purpose for dreaming to myth, “in which the mind
rearranges experiences and emotions to repress potential anxiety.” The
unconscious functions by “condensing the material of daytime experience,
displacing its elements, and representing it in symbols and images . . . Many
myths are symbolic in that they represent a hidden attitude or preoccupation

[and] . . . their fantastic quality often depends on their dislocation of everyday

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connections, [like] what Freud called ‘displacement” (Nature 72). Adult-Adriana-
narrator dislocates and displaces the entirety of her unhappiness and hope for
resolution onto her dead father, mythifying and apotheosizing him. It is the crisis
(of Rafael’s suicide, which runs parallel to Theseus’ abandonment) that prompts
the exorcising of paternal ghosts (i.e. the 52-page novella whose purpose is that
Adriana come to terms with the present suicide and unresolved feelings from the
past).

Adriana comes to terms with her childhood through her first-person
narration directed to her deceased father. Adriana’s age when recounting the
events and speaking to her defunct paternal interlocutor is unspecified. What is
certain is that Adriana as a young adult (or mature adolescent) recalls the
significant elements in a chain of events that led to her overcoming her fixation
on her father and her coming to accept his death. In essence, El Sur is a success
story. The incestuous implications cannot be excised from the remainder of the
plot, yet the unhealthy relationship between father and daughter is merely one
element in the narrator’s present. The reader cannot lose sight that, as Scholes
and Kellogg have indicated, “the narrative situation is thus ineluctably ironical”
(240). Adriana-narrator is removed from Adriana-child-protagonist and Adriana-
adolescent-protagonist in terms of time (age), space (now in her dilapidated
childhood home, just before going to Santander), and psychological

development.”9 Adriana-narrator has sifted through her life’s events and her

 

‘9 It is most likely years after her father’s death when Adriana narrates
from her childhood home. Glenn notes that on page 11 of El Sur, seventh page

of the narration, a reference is make to “‘este largo pasillo, el mismo por el que

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parents’ involvement in order to identify the conflictive elements in the
development of her identity and intimacy needs. The Oedipal attraction appears
central to the crisis that is overcome, but let us analyze the situation in its
entirety. Key factors are the isolation, the mother‘s aloofness, Adriana’s odd
relationship with her father, his death, the guilt associated with the death of a
loved one, the subsequent apotheosis of the decedent (perhaps a reconstructed
Oedipal fixation) and final overcoming of the resurfaced Oedipal desire.

Adriana is isolated for several reasons. She and her family live removed,
in. a remote area. The house is two kilometers from the city, “perdida en el
campo, sin vecino alguno” (Garcia Morales 5). She has no friends, no sibling, not
even a pet. She is schooled at home. She is surrounded by silence (lack of noise
made by any living creature). Glenn notes forty-three times in which “silencio” or
“silencioso” appear in the text (248). Her father jealously protects his solitude,
while her mother is distant.

Such isolation highlights Adriana’s primordial need to bond. Before the
narrative focuses on her relationship and apotheosis of her father, it centers on
her relationship with her mother, who does her best to assuage Adriana’s
feelings of alienation. Adriana projects onto her mother her own self-hatred (in
Teresa’s eyes, she believes, she is a monster) for her inexcusable acts of

aggression against Mari Nieves. The mother’s coldness, in essence, pushes

 

ahora circulan corrientes de aire’” (240). As Adriana closes the narration she
makes reference to her surroundings: lack of electricity, empty corners, closed
shutters, fissures (desconchados) in the wall (52). Clearly, the house is in

disrepair, a condition which probably took years to reach.

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Adriana into the arms of her father. It is not that Rafael is particularly warm to his
daughter; but rather, her affinity for him stems from his not rejecting her. The
young child seeks affirrnation but accepts all she is offered: lack of rejection.
Here the narrator clearly highlights the Oedian incestuous relationship.

The father’s suicide is indisputably a crisis in the life of the adolescent
Adriana. What the reader, student, or critic cannot lose sight of is the fact that the
suicide is the catalyst for the narrative. It is the suicide which prompts the
narrator to idealize a far from ideal father, drawing on and enhancing the Oedipal
feelings. Let us keep in mind that a first-person narrator is a highly unreliable
one. Furthermore, a first-person narrative to an interlocutor about events
regarding the interlocutor is even less reliable. A speaker must always modify
discourse according to the public to whom it is directed. In other words, the adult
narrating Adriana is coming to terms with her feelings about her father’s suicide.
As she faces her issues, speaking to her dead father, she palliates, enhances,
selects, and suppresses facts regarding her life, his involvement, and her
feelings. Death results in a curious phenomenon: the idealization and idolatry of
the dead. This is precisely what Adriana does in her narration in order to
conclude that her father loved her so that she may feel free from the past. Had
she concluded that he was an egotistical failure of a husband and father with
pedophilic tendencies, she could not have as easily forged her identity and set
her intimacy boundaries.

Although she witnessed and experienced the events recounted, her point
of view is highly ironic and untrustworthy. An eye-witness narrator reflecting on
his or her childhood/youth skews the narrative, therefore rendering his/her claims
to objectivity highly untrustworthy (Scholes and Kellogg 263). Such is the case
with the young adult Adriana’s narration of her childhood and adolescence. Every

element of the plot must be scrutinized as being a partial truth.

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According to Glenn, “Adriana’s dead father [is] her narratee. He is the
Other she was unable to understand in life and to whom she now addresses her
words, as if he could hear her. Her discourse is an attempt to begin anew a
dialogue with him, to fathom the enigmas of his life and the reasons for his death,
and to bridge the gulf that separates her from him” (239-40). Crucial to this
chapter is the point that Adriana wishes to resolve and overcome her patemal-
filial issues, not to reestablish a closer link to her father. He is dead and the aim
of the narrative is to come to terms with the past in order to go forward in the
present. But to do so, Adriana must face and overcome her Oedipus complex.

Freud’s theory departs from the premise that male sexuality is the
standard. He describes the Oedipus complex in “Some Physical Consequences
of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925). The boy:

regards his father as a disturbing rival and would like to get rid of him and

take his place. [This] is a straightforward consequence of the actual state

of affairs . . . [The] Oedipus attitude in little boys belongs to the phallic

phase, and . . . its destruction is brought about by a fear of castration . . .

[Yet] the Oedipus complex has a double orientation, active and passive, in

accordance with . . . bisexual constitution; a boy also wants to take his

mother's place as the love-object of his father (18)

In women, Freud adds, the Oedipus complex

has a long prehistory and is in some respects a secondary formation . . .

[The] momentous discovery which little girls are destined to make [is that

they] notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of

large proportions, at once recognizing it as the superior counterpart of

their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a

victim to envy for the penis. (20)

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Freud contends that, upon his noticing a little girl’s castrated state, the boy’s
relations to women are then determined: “horror of the mutilated creature or
triumphant contempt for her”. Penis envy leads to a sense of inferiority. The lack
of a penis is self-explained (by women) “as being a punishment personal to
herself . . . [This] sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the
contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect, and,
at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man”. A consequence of
penis envy “seems to be a loosening of the girl’s relation with her mother as love-
object [In] the end, the girl’s mother, who sent her into the world so
inefficiently equipped, is almost always held responsible for her lack of penis.” To
resolve penis-envy, the girl “gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a
wish for a child: and with that purpose in view she takes her father as love-object.
Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy” (Freud, “Some Physical” 21-23).

Mitchell contends that psychoanalytic theories postulated by Freud are

about sexism; that he himself propagated certain sexist views and that his

work has been the bulwark of the ideological oppression of women . . . But
we [must] first realize that it was precisely the psychological formations
produced within patriarchal societies that he was revealing and analyzing

. . . [Under] patriarchy women are oppressed—a claim that Freud’s

analysis alone can help us understand. (“On Freud” 32)

Without attaching a specific nomenclature, Freud recognizes that boys
and girls do not develop in parallel fashion; rather, the “pre-Oedipal phase (for
boys and girls) was [as argued in Freud’s 1925 essay “Some Physical'] an
unexplored region in psychoanalysis” (Mitchell, “On Freud” 33). The Oedipal
stage is crucial for boys, but the pre-Oedipal proves to be more significant to
female psychological development. This is “why [psychoanalysis] tells us more

about the sexual development of men than of women. However, here, in pointing

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out the territory . . . , Freud does the groundwork for an analysis of femininity”
(Mitchell, “On Freud“ 33).
The resolution of the Oedipal phase is as follows:
In the ‘ideal’ case the boy Ieams to accept his inferior phallic power (thus
resolving his castration complex) but on the understanding that he will later
have the same patriarchal rights and a woman of his own; the girl Ieams
that she has no phallic powers and thus will not now or ever possess her
mother or her later substitute (a wife)—-indeed that she is like her mother,
without the phallus: she recognizes her castration, envies the phallic
power, and has to do her best to overcome this envy . . . In the ‘ideal’ case
she . . . wants to take [the mother's] place with the father. (Mitchell, “On
Freud” 34 -35)
Mitchell adds, ”T he girl’s positive Oedipus complex (love of the father) is entered
into only by default.” The acquisition of the Oedipus complex is the “first triumph
of her feminine destiny under patriarchy . . . [while the] boy’s resolution and
abandonment of his Oedipus complex is his entry into his cultural heritage, the
girl, on the contrary, finds her cultural place in patriarchal society when she finally
manages to achieve her Oedipal love for her father” (”On Freud” 35). By
overcoming her Oedipal complex, Adriana overcomes her reliance on patriarchal
culture, breaking away from a worldview that stifles her individual development.
Mitchell states firmly, “The Oedipus complex, then, expresses in miniature
the power of the father or that of the name-of-the-father, but father it is . . . [It] is
quite specifically the importance of the father that patriarchy signifies. Freud’s
1925 essay is a key to understanding the oppression of women under patriarchy“
(“On Freud” 36). This idea of Mitchell’s is key to understanding Adriana’s
behavior and the dynamic between her parents. Patriarchy is the invisible force

that runs society. Adriana’s home can be viewed as a microcosm of Francoist

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Spain in which women were truly rendered powerless by law. As Barbara Morris
states, ”Adriana’s mother is the victim of the sociopolitical authority of the
franquista patriarchy . . . [The father’s] obsessive need to seclude himself and
women of the family from outside contact functions as a metaphor for the
isolationist policies of franquismo” (560). Women under Franco’s patriarchy were
social castrates.

Freud names the pre-Oedipus phase in his 1931 essay “Female Sexuality”
(printed in Strouse). Elizabeth Janeway in “On ‘Female Sexuality” considers the
“penis” in Freud’s ideas on penis-envy. The “penis” is symbolic: women have

been deprived of something else that men enjoy: namely, autonomy,

freedom, and the power to control her destiny . . . ln Freud's time . ..
women were evident social castrates. and the mutilation of their
potentiality as achieving human creatures was quite analogous to the

physical wound, . . . in Freud’s 1925 and 1931 papers. (58)

In a little girl’s development, she must, according to psychoanalysis, make “the
passage from the pre-Oedipal phase of attachment to the mother to the more
adult, more realistic, positive attachment to the father. Her realization that she
and her mother are alike has two effects. It convinces her that she is inferior, and
it causes her to reject her formerly adored mother” (Janeway 61). Janeway
highlights the anonymity and impotence of women. The daughter’s realization of
female powerlessness originates in acknowledgement of the mother‘s inferiority
and subsequent dissociation from her. As Freud claims in “Female Sexuality“:
recognition of femaleness has a “catastrophic effect on the child who discovers
that she is a girl” (Janeway 61).

This is why Adriana’s trip to Andalucia assists her in overcoming her
fixation on her father. There, she witnesses the life that Gloria Valle established

for herself: a life of self-sufficiency. Adriana Ieams that she must no longer cling

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to her Oedipal ties, for she need not rest in her Oedipus complex as is the “ideal”
within patriarchal culture. She has seen a situation where the law-of-the-father
and the name-of-the-father are non-existent. This world that “Gloria Valle habia
tejido” proves to her that she also can free herself from the socially oppressive
structure that had threatened to stifle her personal growth. Gloria Valle’s
autonomy proves that femaleness need not be catastrophic.

According to Freud, every girl wishes for a penis

which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her

father. The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a

penis is replaced by one for a baby . . . Not until the emergence of the

wish for a penis does the doll-baby become a baby from the girl’s father

. . . Her happiness is great if later on this wish for a baby finds fulfillment in

reality, and quite especially so if the baby is a little boy who brings the

longed-for penis with him. (“Femininity” 87)
In this respect, Miguel helps resolve Adriana’s Oedipal complex for he can be
viewed as both her father's substitute and his “baby.”

In her 1926 essay, Karen Horney, elaborating on Freud’s theory of “penis
envy” and Georg Simmel’s philosophy, contends that “Our whole civilization is a
masculine civilization. The State, the laws, morality, religion, and the sciences
are the creation of men” (172). Homey reiterates Simmel’s idea that the world
view of civilization posits the equation “objective = masculine” (172). I add that
anyone who cannot or does not regard the world “in masculine” feels alienation.
To fit in, one naturally attempts an association with someone who forms part of
the hegemony. Thus, Adriana attempts to establish a link with her father in order
to acquire a sense of belonging. Barbara Morris aptly discerns that El Sur

could be read as the psychopolitical infrahistoria of franquismo [in which]

the isolation of the family from society, the tensions between father and

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mother, and the child who lives in a discursively enigmatic world would all

be representative of Spain’s isolation from Europe, the continually

smoldering conflicts and resentments between the political right and left,

the silence that a generation of Spaniards suffered. (560)

Adriana has internalized the conflict between Francoist, patriarchal power—
symbolized by the father—and leftist egalitarian defeat—represented by the
mother. The young protagonist opted to side with her father to diminish her sense
of worthlessness in a (both domestic and national) fascist climate.

As Homey has shown, “Women have adapted themselves to the wishes of
men and felt as if their adaptation were their true nature. That is, they see or saw
themselves in the way that their men’s wishes demanded of them; unconsciously
they yielded to the suggestion of masculine thought” (173). Adriana has
assimilated the idea that femaleness is viewed as inferior. Even though she has
been isolated from society, the sinister nature of phallocentrism has already
governed her world. Francoism nullified her mother’s teaching certificate on the
basis that women are mandated to stay at home. Josefa was the victim of her
husband’s beating and pimping. Adriana witnesses her father's disdain for her
mother daily, and his moods set the tone for everything in the household.
Therefore, at an early age, Adriana has already gleaned that womanhood is a
status of disadvantage. Freud’s “penis envy“ theory is clearly applicable. The
young girl disassociates herself from her mother (who, as a woman, is
powerless, just as Adriana is) and associates with a representative of the
hegemony.

Erikson, most famous for his theory of psychosocial stages, in his 1968
essay “Womanhood and the Inner Space” stipulates that “the stage of life crucial
for emergence of an integrated female identity is the step from youth to maturity,

the state when the young woman, whatever her work career, relinquished the

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care received from the parental family in order to commit herself to the love of a
stranger and to the care to be given to his and her offspring” (294-95). He clearly
refers to the passage from identity to intimacy.

Erikson claims to take a “post-Freudian“ stance: “the complexes and
conflicts unearthed by psychoanalysis in its first breakthrough to human nature
are recognized as existing; they do threaten to dominate the developmental and
accidental crises of life. But the freshness and wholeness of experience and the
opportunities arising with a resolved crisis can transcend trauma and
defense” (304). Erikson continues that a girl turns to her father when “she is quite
a different person from the one she was when primarily dependent on the
mother“ (304). In other words, Erikson rectifles Freud’s penis envy theory by
positing that the girl does not view herself as mutilated nor does she resent the
mother for the mutilation. Rather, she has received the necessary love from the
mother and cultivates a developmentally subsequent and different relationship
with the father. In this chapter on El Sur, I take the middle ground between Freud
and Erikson. If viewed as a patriarchal state in miniature, as stated by Mitchell,
Freud’s Oedipal theory is clearly applicable to El Sur: Adriana witnesses her
mother's powerlessness in a male-dominated world and associates with the
representative of the ruling class. Barbara Morris in “Father Death and the
Feminine” qualifies Adriana’s mother Teresa as a “casualty of Nationalist
reprisals, . . . a teacher in Republican Santander, whose degree was invalidated
after the Civil War . . . In effect, [she] is a victim of the . . franquista patriarchy“
(560).

But, of course, the explanation is not that simple. Adriana’s Oedipus
complex cannot be explained away as the powerless daughter’s dissociating
from the powerless mother and associating with the powerful father. The

narrative voice must also be considered. Adult-Adriana-narrator is recounting to

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her father-interlocutor precisely how she overcame the crisis of his suicide by
resuscitating her Oedipal feelings. The untrustworthy narrator distorts, enhances,
and suppresses the plot to provide an ironic tale. l postulate that the father’s
apotheosis and the mother’s vilification are the result. Yet these are necessary
tactics on the part of the narrator to follow the trajectory of her present—let us
conjecture—relatively well-adjusted state. In this, I fully agree with Erikson that
the “freshness and wholeness of experience and the opportunities arising with a
resolved crisis can . . . transcend trauma and defense” (304). Upon the
conclusion of the work, the reader Ieams that Adriana has put her father‘s death
and enigmatic existence behind her to turn to the living and her future with her
mother.

Throughout the work, though, Adriana’s narration describes a profound
sense of alienation. According to Adriana’s first-person narration, she was a
beast in her mother's eyes. Let us now take a closer look at this matemal-filial
relationship. Nancy Chodorow in her essay “Family Structure and the Feminine
Personality” in Woman, Culture and Society states that, according to
psychoanalysis, personality results from “a boy’s or girl’s social-relational
experiences from earliest infancy. Personality development is not the result of a
conscious parental intention. The nature and quality of the social relationships
that the child experiences are appropriated, internalized and organized by
her/him and come to constitute the personality” (45). Chodorow stipulates that
mothers tend not to push their daughters to differentiate as they would their sons.
According to a study by Fleiss cited by Chodorow “The mothers Fleiss describes
did not allow their daughters to perceive themselves as separate people, but
simply acted as if their daughters were narcissistic doubles of themselves” (48).

In El Sur, Teresa must contend with her own feelings of self-hatred and

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powerlessness during Francoism and the microcosm of her world with Rafael.
Teresa felt isolated and did not want her daughter to suffer the same plight.

According to Peter Evans and Robin Fiddian, in Victor Erice’s film El Sur,
Estrella (the cinematographic adaptation of Adriana) becomes “the best possible
vehicle for a whole nation’s quest for its own past. What better way of
investigating the nation's stolen patrimonio than through the eyes of someone
whose very status as a woman is . . . linked with dispossession” (128). Evans
and Fiddian analyze Erice’s film in light of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism.
The novella is not nearly as explicitly denunciatory as the film. Estrella’s family
history is that of “antagonism and hardship set against the familiar backdrop of
the Spanish Civil War” (Evans and Fiddian 128). Agustin (Rafael in the novella),
a “demonic,” is at odds with his father, “un santo” (Evans and Fiddian 128).
Evans and Fiddian state that “the separation of the family into two nuclei living at
opposite ends of a divided nation, and the conflict between the first and second
generation . . . constitute a paradigm of Spain’s domestic disintegration in the
1940’s” (129). This division can be applied not only to Adriana’s parents but also
to Rafael and his sister Delia whom he forces to leave when she came to visit.
Evans and Fiddian conclude that the underlying message of Erice’s El Sur is that
the “health of a nation is at risk as long as the ideological values remain
uncontested” (134). Garcia Morales, through Adriana’s domestic situation,
metaphorizes the search for identity under hegemonic (patriarchal, fascist,
Francoist) pressures.

In Tiempo de mujeres, Pilar Hidalgo finds that the familial relationship that
especially takes center stage in women’s writing and greatly affects female
identity is the maternal/filial bond. This relationship often leads to matriphobia,
which Hidalgo defines as: “no sclo odio a la madre, sino también el temor de la

protagonista a tenninar pareciéndose a ella, a repetir sus esquemas vitales,

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temor que va acompaflado de la oposicidn de la madre a cualquier aspiracién de
la hija, ya sea profesional, artistica o politica, que sobrepase los estrechos
limites de la vida doméstica” (99):"o Matriphobia is a mutually antagonistic
relationship; but in El Sur, the ironic narrative clouds the relationship. When
Adriana states that her mother considered her “una nifia casi salvaje” (13), the
reader must ask him/herself how Adriana’s antagonism toward her mother affects
her memory and subsequent recounting. The narrator adds “mama hablaba
como si, en realidad, ya anidara en mi interior el gennen de ese espanto que a
ella parecia perturbarla. En mas de una ocasién Ia Odie abiertamente, aunque al
mismo tiempo, la admiraba y sentia una gran dicha cuando a ella se Ie
ocurria darrne un beso” (13).

Clearly, Adriana is alienated from Teresa. Adriana wants her mother’s

positive regard and yet, when she feels disdained, she inverts her desire for love

 

5° Hidalgo finds that the depiction of matemitylmotherhood in women’s
novels (in English since the ‘70’s) adheres to the following categories:

“1. Representacién del acto mismo del parto; 2. Relaciones madre/hija
desde el punto de vista de la hija adolescente o joven; 3. Relaciones madre/hija
desde el punto de vista de la madre; 4. La maternidad como punto de partida en
visiones utépicas/distépicas; 5. Nuevos arquetipos matemos; 6. Papel de la
maternidad en el desarrollo de la personalidad de la mujer desde una
perspectiva de “object-relations theory”; 7. La madre preedipica en diversas
corrientes psico-analiticas” (67-68). El Sur seems to incorporate items 2, 5, and

7.

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and transforms it into hate toward the object of her desire. Adriana’s only
alternative, therefore, to cure her of her solitude is to turn to the other parental
figure who does not reject her. Adriana is not attracted to him for his effusive
words of praise and adoration, for there are none; rather, the young child feels an
affinity for the absence of reprobation and scorn. Therefore, Adriana’s fascination
with her father result directly from the coldness emitted by her mother, whose
own self-hatred is projected onto her daughter. Although Teresa tries to find
friends for her daughter, both mother and daughter silently acknowledge that a
powerless mother cannot be a strong role model in a patriarchal society. Adriana,
thus, turns to Joan of Arc.

Juana de Arco. Como me impresiono aquella mujer. Enseguida deseé ser

ella. Durante dias y dias no hablé de otra cosa. Jugaba yo sola,

protagonizando en mi imaginacién las mismas experiencias que habia
vivido la santa.

Quizés por eso, aquella tarde que mama me encerro y me miro
como a un monstruo, yo no habia podido soportar que Mari-Nieves se
apropiara...[de] mi papel . . . [L]lego con su madre . . . [Mjama . . . estaba
tan preocupada por mi aislamiento que se propuso encontrarrne alguna
amiga. (14)

Mari-Nieves wanted to be Joan of Arc, but Adriana refused. The first
chance that she had, “Ia amarré bien sujeta al tronco de un arbol, rodeé sus pies
con hierbas y ramas secas y, después de colocar entre ellas una buena cantidad
de papeles, me dispuse a encender una cerilla . . . ¢No querias ser Juana de
Arco?—le grité—iPues ahora vas a ser la santa, pero de verdad!’” (14-15).

The significance of this incident is that Adriana was yearning for a positive
female role model, something which she saw in the figure of Joan of Arc, a

martyr who fought for something in which she believed. When Mari-Nieves

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deprived Adriana of her chance to be a heroine, Adriana sought vengeance on
the young girl who prevented her from acting out her dream.

Teresa’s reaction to Mari-Nieves’ burning at the stake was disbelief and
dissociation from her daughter, which resulted in Adriana’s further alienation. As
the young child turned to her father for solace: “Sblo tu presencia me ayudaba a
reconcilianne con aquel monstruo que ya veia yo aparecer en mi interior ante la
mirada de mama. Ella era como un espejo donde unicamente podia reflejarse
aquella imagen espantosa en la que yo empezaba a creer y de la que tu tenias
el poder de rescatarme” (15-16). This passage contains a very strong allusion to
Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur. It also explains the transition from the pre-
Oedipal to the Oedipal stage. Adriana adds “De pronto comprendi que existla un
mundo especial sclo para nosotros dos y no sclo me sentia herrnanada
contigo en aquella actividad [el péndulo] que se me aparecia, paradéjicamente,
familiar y magica a un tiempo, sino también en aquello otro que tenlamos en
cornun: el mal” (16).

Adriana and her father did not necessarily have evil in common, but rather
a great difference between them and the “normal” world. By default, if the
‘normal’ world is desirable and good, Adriana and her father, according to this
reasoning, are bad. Yet, let us not lose sight of the fact that the narrative is a
young adult’s recounting of her experiences and beliefs as a child. Adriana
thought that she was bad or evil because she did not feel worthy of her mother's
love (17). The monster can be seen as a metaphor for female self-hatred in the
face of a repressive fascist climate. It can also be viewed as a denunciation of
the isolationist politics of Spain during Franco’s patriarchal rule. Let us not forget
that the Minotaur was condemned to live a life of solitude and, at times, had the
companionship of his half-sister Ariadne. Anyone who entered his realm—

defying his control of the Iabyrinthian space—was slaughtered. Franco’s regime

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was similarly as intolerant of those who questioned it. Rafael, like the Minotaur,
guarded his mysterious space, refusing entry into it.

As a result, the protagonist was fascinated by her father. He symbolized
power within the home and did not look at Adriana with disdain as did his wife.
The extreme coldness, indifference and animosity of Teresa toward her
daughter, I contend, are exaggerations of the process of memory. Attempting to
more objectively see through the subjective narrative filter, Teresa was perhaps
somewhat detached, yet did her best to make her daughter's surroundings as
“normal” as possible given what little power she had. Teresa insisted that Adriana
receive the sacrament of First Communion. Etymologically, communion refers to
a sense of community, of communing with others, of establishing a sense of
belonging and shared beliefs. Teresa insisted that Adriana attend school, a
desire emphatically rejected by Rafael. She also made an effort to find a friend
for her daughter, yet her efforts proved futile. At the time, Adriana had
internalized the patriarchal! paternal symbolic order so that she was incapable of
allowing her mother to establish a healthier environment for her. Adriana’s
choices were to her detriment, strengthening the toxic bonds to her father and
further alienating her from Teresa.

The first communion and the events surrounding it prove quite revealing.
Because of Josefa’s perpetual religious commentary, Adriana believed that her
father's soul was doomed. “Entonces, cansada ya de tantos padrenuestros
inutiles como habia rezado por ti, se me ocurrio hacer un trato con Dios. Le
ofrecl mi vida a cambio de tu salvacion. Yo moriria antes de cumplir los diez
anos . . . [Después de la primera communion tu] me abrazaste . . . Quise decirte:
‘He dado mi vida por ti. Ya estas salvado’” (22). Similarly, the Ariadne of ancient
myth attempts to save Theseus’ life and does so with her guiding thread.

Adriana, similarly, offers God her own life in order to spare her father's.

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Adriana’s first communion mimics the wedding ceremony. She is, of
course, dressed in white, wearing a veil, as if she were a bride. In El Sur, this
religious sacrament also proves reminiscent of the cliche of the bride left waiting
at the altar. Adriana fears that her father (the groom) will not appear. He keeps
her waiting. Again we see a parallel with Ariadne. Both female characters wish to
give their lives for the men they love. Later Adriana has a dream in which she
clearly desires to marry her father.

After the first communion, Mari-Nieves calls Adriana's father an atheist. To
retaliate, Adriana throws Mari-Nieves into the chumbera. Again, as in the first
incident with Mari-Nieves, Adriana feels threatened by the young girl for her
attack on Adriana’s idols. In the first occasion, Mari-Nieves wanted to deprive the
protagonist of starring in her own version of the Joan of Arc reenactment. This
time, Mari-Nieves calls attention to the fact that Rafael is indifferent to the belief
system that gives credence to this ceremony, which, for Adriana, mimics a
wedding—and, going a step further, a wedding to her father.

Mari-Nieves is a thorn in Adriana’s side. Adriana’s failed attempt at
befriending the girl is a reminder of her perpetually friendless isolation.
Furthermore, by refusing to allow Adriana to act out her Joan of Arc fantasies,
Mari-Nieves sullies the concept of the female martyr as a model, further
cultivating Teresa’s scorn at Adriana’s unacceptable behavior. Adriana is soon
introduced to a new female model who holds for her the hope of escaping her
childhood pain. Upon her parents’ return from her grandmother’s funeral in
Seville, Adriana Ieams of Gloria Valle. After returning from the south, Rafael was
never the same again, retreating further from his family. The narrating Adriana
states that “For primera vez me senti que me habias abandonado” (27).

. Her mother reveals to her “‘Papa me ha dicho que si no fuera por ti, se

pegaria un tiro.’ Entonces empecé a notar aquel tedio que arrastrabas de

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manera cotidiana a tu trabajo...El sacrificio me parecio excesivo” (27). This is
clearly a turning point for Adriana. She is alienated from her mother, now from
her father—because of his oddness and his suicidal threat—, and is left to turn to
the idea of yet another role model. Yet she does not seek Gloria Valle until after
she has been indisputably abandoned by her father.

Nonetheless, Adriana attempts partially to sever the bond between her
father and her before he categorically abandons her forever. She began to make
friends, to be invited to parties and the movies. Although she had made contact
with the outside world, Rafael forbade her from accepting the invitations. He
wanted her for himself, he wanted to limit her to a loneliness similar to his own.
Just as Ariadne wanted to escape the labyrinth—although it brought her
comfort—, Adriana seeks a way out of the confining world of her father's
oppressive love. Theseus marooned Ariadne on the Island of Naxos. He did not
want to consummate his relationship with her, nor did he want anyone else to do
so. Likewise, Rafael, does not wish to fulfill his incestuous desire, nor does he
want anyone else to delight in his daughter’s sexuality.

At fourteen, the protagonist comes to realize that she has “suitors” others
than her father: “A tus espaldas nacla en mi una vida diferente y adverti que me
amaban por las calles mas que en casa” (32). Adriana Ieamed she need not
depend solely on her father. Coinciding with Adriana’s establishing contacts with
the outside, Rafael further alienates himself and thus foreshadows his
subsequent suicide and abandonment. Adriana begins to establish outside
bonds; she no longer takes refuge in her perfect silences that echo Ariadne’s
labyrinth. '

Although she is establishing bonds with the outside world, her forbidden

desires are unsuppressible. At age fifteen, Adriana narrates,

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Sofie que todo el planeta se habia inundado. El agua como poderoso
instrumento de destruccién cubria toda la superficie de la tierra. En ella
flotaban a la deriva fragmentos de cuanto habia existido hasta entonces.
Era eI fin. De pronto aparecio a lo Iejos una barca. Era muy pequefla y tu
venias en ella remando lentamente hacia mi. Cuando me ayudaste a subir
a tu lado continuaste remando perdido en aquel mar sin limites. No me
decias nada. Era como si aquella catastrofe no tuviera Ia menor
importancia para ti. Entonces yo tuve un deseo: casarrne contigo. (33-34)
Adriana’s dream is doubly intertextual. It refers to her childhood when she would
wait for Rafael; off in the distance would see an almost invisible dot which grew
larger as her father drew nearer. This dream also reveals Ariadne’s desire.
Surrounded by water, Ariadne awaits the moment when she can discern her
beloved in the distance. She hopes he will come, save her from the watery
isolation and marry her. Adriana’s wish is Oedipal, projecting onto her father her
pubescent desires.
Yet her father’s desires become evident in the episode with Fernando:
Aquella tarde me detuvo al cruzarse conmigo y me dijo que queria
acompafiarme. Deseaba despedirse de mi, pues su familia se marchaba
a vivir a otra ciudad. Estaba muy triste, porque creia que ya no nos
veriamos nunca mas. De pronto te descubri a lo Iejos. Tu ya me habias
visto y te acercabas con paso rapido hacia nosotros. Le pedi asustada
que se marchara enseguida. No pude comprender tu crueldad. Fue Ia
(mica vez que me pegaste en la vida. Yo no esperaba tanta violencia. (35)
When Theseus abandoned Ariadne, he made sure that no mortal could have
access to her. Who finally married her was the god Dionysus. Obviously,
Adriana’s father feels sexual attraction (Oedipal feelings), yet it is an impossible

relationship. Since he must keep his latent desires in check, he imposes the

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same fate on all men who desire his daughter's love. Adriana states “Desde
aquel dia yo te esquivaba y til, en cambio, iniciabas timidos intentos de
acercamiento a ml” (35). Adriana pushed her father away until one night they
chatted in the garden. What followed was truly catastrophic: “Horas mas tarde
me desperté con los gritos de mama llamandote. Decia haber oldo un disparo.
Sblo uno. Yo supe enseguida que habias muerto. Salieron a buscarte varias
veces. Pero la Iluvia, la oscuridad y el miedo les impidieron encontrarte” (37).
Rain is frequently evoked in El Sur. Like the ocean in the Ariadne myth, it
surrounds and isolates the deserted mythic figure. Garcia Morales uses the
water element, rain, to extemalize the inner suffering of her protagonist, for rain
mimics human tears, a manifestation of Adriana’s loneliness.

Following her father’s suicide, Adriana must confront a critical moment of
her life. “Aquella penumbra me "and de esperanzas. Desde ella y desde los
rezos de las mujeres me vino el presentimiento de encontrarte alguna vez en un
espacio otro y nuevo” (39). Here she is determined to rewrite the myth. The new
Ariadne refuses to accept her abandonment. She chooses to take control of the
situation, breaking the tradition and rewriting the Ariadne script.

After her father’s suicide, Adriana locks herself in her room: “Pues yo me
abandonaba a una quietud absoluta, tumbada sobre la cama . . . cal en aquel
estado terrible que sclo he conocido en ti y en mi. Era esa total rigidez del
cuerpo desde la que no podia realizar ni el mas leve movimiento, ni articular
sonido alguno” (39). Ariadne also falls into a stupor, a deep sleep, after being
abandoned. Upon awakening, Ariadne waits for her lover; but in this rewriting,
the new Ariadne refuses to wait. She chooses to take action and pursue her
father in that “espacio otro y nuevo”: “[Ejntonces decidl salir a tu encuentro y

buscarte entre las huellas que habias dejado en otra ciudad: Sevilla” (39).

251

In order to resolve her own feelings regarding maternal coldness and
paternal abandonment, the protagonist descends, both geographically and
psychologically. She meets her brother, Miguel. Adriana begins an ambiguously
seductive relationship with her brother—a surrogate for her father—onto whom
she projects her unresolved feelings. “Habia algo en él [Miguel] que me asustaba
. . . descubri un gesto insignificante, una sonrisa fugaz, un ademan descuidado
que estaba segura, ya habia conocido en ti. Supuse que Miguel era tu hijo” (46).
Father and son are so similar that Adriana can role play and act out her desires.

Miguel believes that his father died mysteriously (47), but, again , we see
another abandonment. Adriana narrates

Un dia le pregunté a Miguel por su padre. El me contesto con indiferencia

que habia muerto. Note que se sentia seguro en aquel mundo del que tu

estabas excluido. Entonces me conto que su padre habia salido una
noche a pasear por la playa, mientras su madre, embarazada de él, le
esperaba en la casa. Pasaban unos dias en un pueblo del norte. Ella tuvo
que salir a buscarle, pues cuando ya amanecia él aun no habia
regresado. Sblo encontro su gabardina mojada sobre una roca. Desde
entonces fue cada dia a aquel lugar esperando hallar alguna serial de él.

Pero tuvo que volver a Sevilla poco antes del parto, convencida de que

habia muerto. como creian todos en el pueblo. Nunca Ilego a saber nada

mas de él. (47)

This story which Gloria has told to her son parallels that of Ariadne waiting for
Theseus, watching for his ship. But this short fiction of Rafael’s disappearance
also rewrites the Ariadne myth and prefigures Adriana’s choice to renounce any
hope of not feeling estranged by her father.

In order to come to terms with her father, or rather his surrogate, she

steals Miguel’s diary for a night to see what he divulges. Miguel writes:

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‘aQué queria de mi? ¢Por qué me buscaba? . . . ella me estaba
esperando dbnde y cuando se le antojaba, y yo, sin saberlo, sin pensar en
ella siquiera, iba como un sonambulo hasta el lugar donde estuviera,
como si ejerciera un fuerte poder sobre un lado de mi que yo mismo
desconocia. Después de nuestro primer encuentro pasé dos dias
deambulando tontamente por las calles y plazas en la que yo imaginaba
poder encontrarla . . . estaba [yo] totalmente en sus manos. Ejercla sobre

mi un poder fatal. Algo mas fuerte aun que el amor, pues, ademas, yo me

habia enamorado de ella. Lo supe encuanto la vi’. (49-50)

Wrth Adriana’s changing geographical position comes also a role reversal
in the dynamic of the relationship. Miguel becomes an Ariadne figure who
surrenders his heart to his beloved, who wanders aimlessly (as did Ariadne
within the labyrinth), who guides his beloved. “Yo empecé a mostrarle la ciudad
. . .ella . . . me cogio de la mano . . . de una manera insoportablemente fraternal
. . . Me pidio continuara con mis explicaciones sobre la ciudad” (51). Who is
guiding whom? Sevilla is Miguel’s familiar terrain, but it is she who takes him by
the hand. It is he who feels the strange attraction to her. He is in her hands to do
with as she wishes. The rewriting of the myth connotes a break with rigid
stereotypes, allowing for greater freedom. A character stops being rigidly
unidimensional. One can be both the one who abandons and the one who is
abandoned, for Adriana is abandoned by her father, but she in turn abandons her
brother. Adriana sought out Miguel because of his similarity with her father. He
became Rafael’s surrogate so that she might confront his abandonment. By
reading his diary, she reverses her father’s abandonment; she finally feels loved
and is capable of moving on.

Cuando tenniné de leer aquellas pocas paginas, decidl marchanne sin

despedirrne de él . . . [N]o me atrevi a decirle la verdad. No queria romper

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aquel mundo que Gloria Valle habia tejido para vuestro hijo, tan complejo
y fragil como una tela de ararla . . . Envié el cuademito a Miguel
afiadiendo algo a sus ultimas palabras: ‘Yo también te amo’ . . . Quizas
me impulsara el deseo de perrnanecer entre ellos, sumido en aquella
atmosfera de encantamiento que les envolvia. (51-52)
Ordbfiez states that “Miguel is the product of an exclusively maternal world”
(Voices 181). Having witnessed a world over which her father exerted no control,
Adriana gains the strength to move beyond him and to take control of her own

life.
Going south is a geographical descent similar to the submersion in the

labyrinth. By leaving the south, Adriana resurfaces. She played the role of
Theseus with a paternal surrogate in order to come to terms with the incestuous
dynamic between her father and her. She liberates herself from the role of the
patient betrothed forever awaiting the affections of a lover incapable of providing
her with happiness. Love is the equivalent of the redeeming and liberating thread
which Ariadne provides Theseus in the labyrinth. Because of reciprocated love,
Adriana faced and overcame her incestuous, minotauresque passion for her
father.

Ordéflez states that:

Every daughter is ‘daddy’s girl’. Sooner or later every female becomes

enfolded into the embrace of her father’s discourse. She absorbs its terms

perhaps unconsciously, and so her utterances may seem entirely her own.

Yet at some time her search for self-articulation must at least attempt to

come to terms with this invasion. El Sur . . . is the story of just such a

reckoning. (Voices 177)

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According to Concha Alborg, Adriana has matured: “ha pasado de ser una joven
adolescente enfatuada con la imagen patema a una mujer adulta aunque
todavia sufra por la muerte egoista del padre” (19). Ordol‘lez categorizes the
ending as painful: “its sense of total loss is profound. Yet this pain . . . promises
birth and rebirth” (“Writing Ambiguity and Desire” 264). In other words, El Sur is a
success story of how Adriana transcended her past. Adriana narrates: “encontré
tu péndulo [después de tu muerte], guardado en su cajita negra de laca. Me
parecio que surgla de un suel'lo, de aquel espacio magico y sin tiempo en el que
habia transcurrido mi infancia contigo. Lo dejé oscilar ante mis ojos, sin buscar
anda, como si ya hubiera perdido su sentido” (7). After her therapeutic
monologue to her dead father, she has exorcised his ghost; she has finally
overcome the Oedipal ties to her father. The pendulum, representative of
Ariadne’s ties to Theseus and also of the paternal phallus, has lost its sentido.
This ambivalent term can denote “meaning” as it can signify “direction.”
Regardless of the interpretation, Adriana is no longer guided by phallocentrism
nor is her symbolic order that of patriarchy (whether the patriarchal figure be her
father, Franco, or an abstract archetypal father). Having internalized and
subsequently rejected patriarchy—and its implicit misogyny and self-hatred—
adult-Adriana-narrator is now free to discover who she is.

Ordéflez claims that “After the father’s death . . . there is some promise of
rapprochement between mother and daughter. The gap left by the father‘s
absence opens the possibility that in the future it may be filled with a newly

forged bond between mother and daughter” (Voices 181). Perhaps. Perhaps not.

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After his death Adriana narrates, “Deseé acercarrne a ella [Mama], pero me senti
paralizada. Un peso brutal iba cayendo sobre mi y yo no podia sostenerlo” (39).
Her desire to turn to her mother is clear, but the action she took is not. What is
certain is that the adult Adriana's retrospective, spurred on by the crisis of her
father’s suicide, concludes as an invalidation of paternal, patriarchal order. As a
result, Garcia Morales’ protagonist successfully exits the labyrinth of Oedipal

desires.

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Conclusion
TYING UP LOOSE THREADS

Mythology personifies an ideology. By rewriting phallocentric and
misogynistic myths, Montserrat Roig, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Carmen Laforet,
and Esther Tusquets counter phallocentric, patriarchal ideology in order to
provide an alternative symbolic order that does not consist of a hierarchy of
binary oppositions. V

The four authors have implemented feminist literary strategies to combat a
particular worldview (i.e. phallogocentric). In feminist theory, Annis Pratt and
Nancy Miller have respectively coined the terms “Spinning Among Fields” and
“Arachnologies.” Both terms connote an eclectic, holistic, feminist approach to
knowledge and experience, drawing upon many schools of thought to provide an
altogether different way of regarding the world. “Spinning Among Fields” and
“Arachnologies” reweave the threads of familiar knowledge (thinking, history,
literature) into a feminist outlook; that is to say that this intertextual weaving
subverts the rewoven known threads.

Not only do the authors use this feminist strategy of drawing upon familiar
fields of knowledge for the purpose of subverting, but the theoretical framework
within this dissertation also does so, incorporating classics, feminism of
difference, psychoanalysis, archetypal theory, feminist archetypal theory, the

Foucauldian concept of genealogy, and Hispanism.

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To summarize as briefly as possible, myths, which are structured
according to a hierarchy of binary oppositions, are prescriptive behavioral models
that explain existence. Helene Cixous has termed this binarily oppositional
perception of reality “phallogocentrism,” a way to view experience in masculine.
Feminism of difference counters this masculine perspective/perception by
conceiving of women as different, not hierarchically better or worse. This
difference, as Rivera has offered, focuses on the variety of exclusively female
experiences: virginity, pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, liberated heterosexual
sexuality, lesbianism, maternal-filial relationships as daughter and/or mother,
among others. The matemal-filial bond (or lack of one) comes to the forefront,
highlighting the Foucauldian concept of genealogy, an alternative genealogy that
is not governed by the name/law of the father.

Psychoanalysis, specifically Freud’s Oedipal theory, can be subverted and
reinterpreted metaphorically to represent, according to Mitchell, a patriarchal
state in miniature. Therefore, the daughter’s horror at her castrated state,
subsequent dissociation from the also castrated/mutilated mother, and
association with the father (possessor of a penis, the symbol patriarchal power),
become clear in a feminist light: women are powerless in a patriarchal world and
have historically sided with those who have it, ignoring those who do not (the
mother, other women). The rejection of this patriarchal model of power, thus,
leads to liberation.

Feminist archetypal theory (as seen in Wehr, Pratt, Rupprecht, Lauter)

also becomes a liberating intellectual strategy. Jung’s archetypal theory is based,

258

in great part, on the polarized archetypes (anima/animus, shadow/persona) of
the collective unconscious, that have (descriptive and prescriptive) ontological
value. The only archetype not split into polarities is the self that is whole and
varies according to individuals. Feminist archetypal theory has embraced the
non-polarized property of the self to perceive experience archetypally, yet without
dichotomizing it. Furthermore, upon being deontologized, archetypes become a
liberating force, no longer prescribing fixed models.

In the field of Hispanism. Elizabeth Ordénez and Phyllis Zatlin have
identified certain characteristics common to peninsular women’s narrative:
demythification of patriarchal myths, an alternate mythopoeic process (unlike
Campbell’s monohero), the quest for matrilinear identity (Ordénez), the portrayal
of female experience, metafiction, subversion, and the reexamination of
hegemonic patriarchal values (Zatlin). Roig, Tusquets, Garcia Morales, and
Laforet participate in all of these feminist strategies identified by Ordénez and
Zatlin, yet they do so through the neo-mythic renditions of the Ariadne and
Penelope myths. This mythical rewriting has a feminist purpose: to denounce
phallocentric thought and patriarchy as sinister, to call out for new models, and to
present an altogether different symbolic order which celebrates femaleness. l
have termed this phenomenon “feminist remythification.”

Both the Ariadne and Penelope myths are based on the same archetype:
the patient woman who awaits rescue by a man through whom she has a
vicarious identity. In the original myths, the perspective is male-centered; all

actions revolve around the male hero; female characters (who are dichotomized)

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are secondary to the hero, somehow contributing to his storyline. Penelope can
be viewed as an incentive for Ulysses to return home, the Sirens are a fatal
temptation to Ulysses and are instrumental in revealing his cleverness, Ariadne is
responsible for Theseus successfully exiting the labyrinth.

The neo-mythic renditions are told from a female perspective. The hero
(female in these cases) and her feats are not at the center of the plot; rather, it is
the importance of relationships between and among characters that take center
stage. The characters cannot be compartmentalized or dichotomized; instead,
they are complex, round personages who engage the readers’ power of analysis
and abstract thinking.

The two works which deal with the Penelope, Ulysses, Sirens myth are
Roig’s L’hora violeta (within the trilogy that also includes Ramona, adeu and El
temps de les cireres) and Garcia Morales’ El silencio de las sirenas. Roig’s
works are the most explicitly feminist and neo—mythic. Both the author’s feminist
views and mythical allusions are patent. In fact, Natalia, one of the main
characters of El temps, is reading the Odyssey, narrates passages from it, and
draws explicit parallels between Roig’s characters and Homer’s.

Within the trilogy, the search for a matrilinear genealogy becomes evident.
In Ramona, adeu, three generations of Ramonas are linked by the name of the
mother, not that of the father. In L’hora violeta, Norma requests that Natalia
compile the diaries and correspondence of a previous generation of women.
Furthermore, Norma, Natalia and Agnes are compared to Calypso, Circe, and

Penelope, their literary, mythological foremothers against whom they must

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contend, struggling not to emulate. By opting not to accept her husband after his
years of absence and infidelities, Agnes, the seemingly weakest of all of Roig’s
characters, breaks from the behavioral fetters which tied her to emulate
Penelope’s patience and conjugal virtue. Linked to the concept of a matrilinear
genealogy is Roig’s choice to write in her lengua materna. Castilian is associated
with Francoist fascism, patriarchy, oppression, and the assumption of an
inauthentic identity for Catalonians. By writing in Catalan, Roig boldly claims her
“gendered” nationalistic and linguistic heritage, taking pride in her madre patria
(Catalonia) and lengua materna (Catalan). In so doing, the author celebrates
non-Castilian-centered, non-male, non-Francoist difference.

In El silencio de Ias sirenas, Garcia Morales achieves feminist
remythification through the power of the written word. In that chapter, I follow
Ong’s theories on orality and literacy, yet take a feminist approach. Homer’s
Odyssey is oral literature, whose structure can be classifed as hierarchical,
binarily oppositional, and phallocentric. Ulysses is the hero on a quest who
passes through a series of adventures. The Sirens, reflected in Garcia Morales’
title, are literally femmes fatales, whose allure is a testament to the hero’s
cleverness and fortitude for not succumbing to it. The binary opposition is clear:
good male hero—evil female temptresses. On the other hand, Garcia Morales’
structure is not so easily classifiable. Her work is highly intertextual, adopting
Kafka’s “Silence of the Sirens,” which is a reconfiguration of Homer's episode

with the fatal songstresses.

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Ong’s theories on orality and literacy explore the transition from the
mindset necessary to create oral literature (rigidly structured, allowing for
memorization and improvization by oral poets) to a literate worldview (governed
by abstract thinking). Therefore, El silencio de las sirenas abides by Pratt’s
feminist theory of “Spinning Among Fields”, exemplifying a “both/and” outlook
rather than an “either/or" one (as evident in phallogocentrism). Interestingly, this
feminist, holistic approach concurs with Ong’s view of literacy as an alternative to
hierarchical, binary thought. Therefore, Garcia Morales’ feminist treatment of the
subject matter is closely linked to her complex intertextuality of rewriting Kafl<a’s
“Silence of the Sirens” which is already a recontextualization of an episode in
Homer’s Odyssey.

Like the aforementioned authors, Laforet, Tusquets, and Garcia Morales
(in El Sur) remythify with a feminist purpose; in the case of the latter three
authors, it is the Ariadne, Theseus, and Minotaur myth which undergoes
rewriting.

Laforet’s Nada, published in 1944, should be considered a seminal work,
a prototype of feminist remythification. Laforet’s mythical alllusions are implicit,
yet her rewriting of the Cinderella fairy tale is the link to the Ariadne myth. Both
Cinderella and Ariadne are based on the woman who awaits rescue archetype.
In Cinderella’s case, her expectations were fulfilled copiously; whereas in
Ariadne’s, her hopes for Theseus’ return soured to the acceptance of
abandonment. In Nada, the importance Andrea gives to attending the party at

Pons’ house, the significance of her old shoes, and Pons’ mother’s rejection of

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her because of them, mimic and subvert the fairy tale plot in which Cinderella
attended the ball and was rescued fram her life of drudgery because of her glass
slippers. The subsequent scene in Nada entails Margarita, Ena’s mother,
approaching Andrea in order to recount her past with Roman, a trite love story
closely paralleling the Ariadne-Theseus myth. The lesson Ieamed by Andrea is
the value of vicarious female experience. Through Margarita’s misfortunes,
Andrea gleans that she need not make the same mistake of living solely for a
man. This lesson in female unity combined with Ena’s invitation to work and
study in Madrid highlight the female bond which has been absent from
phallogocentric thought and literature. Therefore, Laforet’s work, for rewriting a
previous text and offering a female-centered alternative ending, has blazed the
trail for subsequent writers, who have also given great importance to the bonds
between women as a result of having rejected male-centered mythology.

The female bond highlighted by Esther Tusquets in El mismo mar de
todos los veranos is explicitly homoerotic. This patent adaptation of the myth
allows both female characters the possibility of playing the role of Theseus and
that of Ariadne. Until her relationship with Clara, E, like several generations of
women in her family, had consistently been Ariadne to a male character‘s
Theseus. During the time that E and Clara are at the grandmother's seaside
home (a female, childhood environment), they take refuge from the bourgeois,
male-dominated world, and do not fall into the hierarchical scheme of
dominant/submissive, abandonerlabandoned. Rather, in this locus, their

homoerotic relationship ceases to be a power play and is truly homo-erotic: they

263

are equals in their eroticism and psychorelationship. Only upon the reintroduction
of Julio, the main Theseus figure of the novel, and his phallic power (both
metaphorical and physical as evident in the rape scene), does E revert to her
mythical role of Ariadne with him (for he cyclically abandons her for younger,
prettier women) and, for the first time, she, a woman, plays the role of Theseus
with Clara. Tusquets’ rewriting of the myth and feminist call to arms lie in the fact
that Clara does not take her abandonment lying down. She seduces “El
emperador”, a man more powerful than Julio. This act is not to be seen as
desperation, but rather, as a claim to (or fleeting manipulation of) male power
(literally, the phallus and, metaphorically, the power it symbolizes). Clara’s
actions constitute a categorical rejection of abandonment, a refusal to pine for an
impossible love (as Ariadne had done for Theseus).

A noteworthy extratextual aspect of El mismo mar is the ovenNhelming
amount of literary criticism it has generated. Coupled with the fact that it has
been reedited and published by Castalia (a conservative and academic, if not
canonical publisher), it is safe to say that Tusquets and her works are infiltrating
the lines of male-dominated literary canons.

The final chapter of this dissertation focuses on another work by Garcia
Morales, El Sur, whose rewriting of the Theseus-Ariadne myth parallels the
psychological stages necessary to overcome and reject the Oedipus complex. If,
as Juliet Mitchell has claimed, the Oedipal stage is to be viewed as a patriarchal

state in miniature, then, Garcia Morales’ rewriting of the Ariadne myth—as the

264

conquering of an Oedipal fixation—must be construed as a rejection of
patriarchal values.

Freud’s Oedipus theory, in brief, entails the sexual/sociallpsychological
dynamic within a patriarchal home. The presymbiotic and Oedipus stages differ
in children of different gender. Boys realize that their mothers and sisters lack a
penis (i.e. are castrated), subsequently react in horror (Freudian terminology),
feel castration anxiety, dissociate from the mother, and associate with the father
(possessor of a penis and patriachal power). On the other hand, girls recognize
their castrated, mutilated state, have ambiguous feelings for the mother (another
castrated women like themselves), develop penis envy and are drawn to the
father. "Women, unlike men, are incapable of resolving their Oedipus complex;
instead, they “rest in” the complex, marrying some one like the father and
emulating the mother (of course, with ambivalence due to the castrated state).
But, viewed, in a metaphorical and feminist light, the penis symbolizes male
power within a patriarchal society. Women vie for power, not genitalia.

The textual element in El Sur that links Ariadne’s thread to the daughter's
penis envy is the pendulum, a divining instrument in the novella through which
Adriana and Rafael establish and cultivate an ambiguous (inappropriate/
incestuous) relationship. Adriana guides her father with the pendulum, as
Ariadne guided Theseus with her thread. Adriana yearns for her father’s love and
feels the allure of the control he has over the household, such is a non-literal

interpretation of penis envy.

265

Upon dying, Rafael’s absence highlights Adriana’s unresolved feelings
toward him and mimics Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne. Adriana’s trip to
Andalucia equips her with the knowledge and maturity necessary to overcome
and reject her oedipality. In Sevilla, the protagonist meets her brother, Miguel,
and witnesses the non-patriarchal world in which Gloria Valle had raised him.
When Adriana Ieams of his love for her (which fills the void left by Rafael) and
accepts it, she can now resolve her feelings for the defunct Rafael and reject the
internalized patriarchal] Oedipal dynamic at the root of her psychic conflict.
Therefore, Adriana is a reborn Ariadne, who has overcome abandonment and
proceeds with her life.

The goal of this dissertation was to analyze precisely what Montserrat
Roig, Adelaida Garcia Morales, Carmen Laforet, and Esther Tusquets
accomplished by rewriting previous storylines, exemplified in the Ariadne and
Penelope myths. The conclusion I drew is that, since myths personify an
ideology, these authors have rewritten the mythical plots in order to provide and
alternative worldview. The. myth of Ulysses, Penelope, and the Sirens
(recontextualized by Roig in L’hora violeta and Garcia Morales in El silencio de
Ias sirenas) and that of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur (recast in Nada by
Laforet, El mismo mar de todos los veranos by Tusquets, and El Sur by Garcia
Morales) are phallogocentric myths that polarize the perception of female
experience and binarily oppose maleness (the superior center) to femaleness

(the inferior margin).

266

Feminist mythic rewriting combats patriarchalism, reconsiders sexuality
and sexual identity, and provides an altogether different symbolic order that does
not force knowledge, experience, and reality into a binarily oppositional
hierarchical structure. I have termed the phenomenon of rewriting a myth as a
feminist strategy “feminist remythification.” Mythology is more than a familiar
storyline whose outcomes vary throughout time and space; mythology embodies
a way of looking at the world. Feminist remythification conveys the concept of the
recreation of a myth without the element of apotheosis. It is mythoclastic in that is
shatters the concept of “Myth” (capitalized) as a lofty tale that explains origins or
the unexplainable and elevates the protagonist to the status of hero while
debasing his opponents; furthermore, feminist remythification redefines “myth”
(lower case) to connote a story that depicts a worldview from which icons and
epic heroes are absent and in which the focus is on relationships between the
characters, not the characters themselves. Feminist remythification attempts to
capture the essence of human bonds that reveal themselves through the “heroic
feats” of everyday life, through the courage needed to triumph personally,
socially, and psychologically on a daily basis in the face of masculinist,

hegemonic pressures.

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