Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature

Emma Staniland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134615049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region's socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration.

Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Part I
Construction

Archetype, Fairy Tale, Myth

1 Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1989)

In Como agua para chocolate, Laura Esquivel presents her reader with a female Bildungsroman recounting the life—from birth to death at the age of thirty-nine—of Tita de la Garza, youngest daughter of the fearsome, widowed Mamá Elena, and youngest sister of Rosaura and Gertrudis. The fulcrum of the plot is the family tradition that dictates the youngest daughter must remain unmarried until her mother’s death, essentially functioning as her personal servant. Tita’s ‘true love’, Pedro, accepts to marry the eldest sibling Rosaura instead, so that he can at least remain close to the heartbroken protagonist. From this seminal moment onwards, a series of fantastical events punctuate and motivate the storyline and, as is clear from just this brief summary, the formulaic nature of the plot and the cast of characters recall the structures and archetypes of fairy tales and their antecedents—ancient myths and folklore both indigenous and postcolonial. My critical interest in gender in this novel brings together the Bildungsroman and these archetypal narratives because of their common didactic imperative, and for their shared role in the socialization of the individual. By reading it within the broader framework presented by Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature, and considering its contribution to the formulation of gender the novel is given a new context within which to be explored. In terms of how this is mapped out as a narrative of self-development, Tita is denied from the outset experience of the rites of passage that the traditional womanhood of her historical and sociocultural context would engage. As a consequence of this, if she is to avoid being emptied of personhood she must cut her own path. Tita seeks a way to self-actualization via recourse to the dominant models available to her, and is depicted as doing so through innovative and subtle manipulations of her situation, as well as via more outright challenges to the forces of oppression by which she is subjugated.

This portrayal of a character who at once achieves and fails to achieve liberation has been key in inspiring a deeply dichotomized critical response to Esquivel’s novel. In broad terms, the work was ‘universally panned by the male-dominated literary establishment as “lite lit”’,¹ to quote Debra Castillo, and has also garnered disapproval among feminist literary critics for failing to challenge stereotypes. As an example of the former kind of critique, in her very useful summary of the wide range of academic studies on, and varied approaches taken to, Esquivel’s oeuvre in general, Elizabeth Moore Willingham rightly highlights Antonio Marquet’s extremely negative 1991 essay ‘¿Cómo escribir un best-seller? La receta de Laura Esquivel’ (‘How to Write a Bestseller?: Laura Esquivel’s Recipe’),² as one that ‘quickly took its place as the model negative review of Como agua para chocolate’. In it, Marquet levels at Esquivel accusations of presenting to her reader ‘a flat world, observed from an angle—unjustifiably biased towards the protagonist—in which only black and white exist, with no nuance at all’.³ As an example of negative feminist critiques, in turn, Diane Long Hoeveler’s assessment of the novel speaks very clearly, also adopting a terminology derived directly from the narrative features of the text itself, which is structured around twelve cooking recipes (one for each month of the year). Like Marquet, she characterizes its ‘ideological agenda’ as the presentation of a ‘recipe […] for the construction of femininity’; ‘the notion that women need to be the nurturers of both their culture and their families’,⁴ and summarizes the novel as recounting

an old platonic story mediated by down-home recipes and Mexican kitsch. It is a hybridized commodity, a text that attempts to mediate and therefore obviate the insoluble dilemmas that both Western and Mexican patriarchies have constructed for women. But it is ultimately a depressing saga of women defeated by their bodies, and as such I think that Like Water for Chocolate is, at best, problematic as feminist fiction.⁵

Hoeveler’s concern for the role of the female body here is interesting in light of the literary topoi with which this book is concerned, because it underlines the significance of that body as a locus for identity, an issue that is the primary concern of the final two chapters of this study. More immediately though, it also emphasizes the body as the site of definition in essentialist approaches to gendered identities, and an unease about the integration of such perspectives into Esquivel’s novel.

In direct contrast to this reaction, but also extremely indicative of the roots of consternation about the novel’s portrayal of normalized gendered identities and gender roles, we can take the example of Tony Spanos’s reaction to the novel. For him it is an ‘extraordinarily original’ piece of writing generated

as from a second uterus, which is the kitchen [space that] becomes different conflicting metaphors throughout the novel. Although this type of novelty may appear highly incompatible to many feminist critics, other women writers and women in general whose message is to reject patriarchal dominion and to move beyond the confines of domestic life, Esquivel reclaims the kitchen as a very serious domestic sphere which is the most sacred place in the house, and from which the protagonist controls her destiny through her recipes.⁶

It is rather difficult to grasp precisely what Spanos means when he says that Esquivel wrote the text ‘as from a second uterus’. But his conceptual choice embraces as openly as the above critics reject the alignment of female identity with the domestic realm that makes the kitchen setting of the story one of its most hotly debated features.

My own approach to this story is akin to that of María Teresa Martínez-Ortiz, who neatly summarizes the issues at stake by saying:

one can argue that Laura Esquivel’s text is neither feminist nor anti-feminist but a complex hybrid novel that both resists and embraces traditional Mexican patriarchy. While the text cannot fit within the limits of radical feminism, it would also be problematic to remove [it] from feminist shelves.⁷

We also have in common an interest in archetypal and mythical references in the novel, an approach that necessarily entails engagement with the polarized responses to Esquivel’s work, for they stem in large part from the text’s intertwining of archetypal characterizations with the intention to instigate reenvisionings of social orders and symbolic economies. Interpreted by voices such as Marquet’s as the creation of a ‘flat’ world, I find the myriad intertexts and intertwinings of archetypal, fairy tale and mythical points of reference for female identity found in the story to be precisely what generate within it a world of great depth and nuance. The simplicity of the narrative structure and fairy tale-esque writing style belie greater complexities framed therein. It is true that Como agua… does not provide answers to all the questions it poses, but the fact is that to ask questions at all is a vital first step in the identification of any problem, and in beginning to formulate responses to it.

It is noteworthy for me that Moore Willingham signals in her review chapter the need for ‘a re-examination of reductionist efforts on Esquivel’s fiction’ and, as part of this, further applications of the perspectives of fairy tale criticism as a pertinent avenue of critical analysis,⁸ for this chimes with my approaches to Esquivel’s story within the threefold framework of this study. I believe it is particularly valuable to approach this narrative as one about the foundations of female identity both in terms of its revelation of platforms and constructions, and its initiation of their critique. The novel represents important first steps on the overall journey of Bildung engaged in by all of the works studied in this book, and this chapter explores the key rites of passage experienced by Tita as the heroine of this female Bildungsroman, and their interspersing with fairy tale and mythical archetypes: birth, loss and grief, motherhood, and madness or loss of self, are examined here through an approach that accounts for the story of development of selfhood that Como agua… tells, as well as for the foundational narratives of female selfhood upon which it draws, into which it feeds, and which it challenges.

SETTING UP CINDERELLA

Como agua para chocolate begins at the very beginning, with its protagonist’s birth. Read against the frame of the classical Bildungsroman, this is a narrative shift that belies an interest in the earlier formative years; in the period when children are most reliant on adult intervention for survival and for an initiation into the project of selfhood. So rather than begin in early adolescence, when she has already undergone a number of important developments, as would a prototypical Bildungsroman narrative,⁹ Esquivel accounts for her main character’s entrance into this world, and establishes thereby a set of qualities the reader quickly grasps as tinged with fairy tale qualities:

Tita arribó a este mundo prematuramente, sobre la mesa de la cocina, entre los olores de una sopa de fideos que se estaba cocinando, los del tomillo, el laurel, el cilantro, el de la leche hervida, el de los ajos y, por supuesto, el de la cebolla […] [L]a consabida nalgada no fue necesaria pues Tita nació llorando de antemano, tal vez porque ella sabía que su oráculo determinaba que en esta vida le estaba negado el matrimonio. Contaba Nacha que Tita fue literalmente empujada a este mundo por un torrente impresionante de lágrimas que se desbordaron sobre la mesa y el piso de la cocina.¹⁰

Tita made her entrance into this world prematurely, upon the kitchen table, amidst the smells of the noodle soup that was cooking, of thyme, of bay leaf, of coriander, of boiling milk, of garlic and of course, of onion […] [T]he usual slap on the bottom was not necessary because Tita was already crying, perhaps because she knew that her destiny in life was to be forbidden to marry. As Nacha used to tell it, Tita was literally pushed into this world by an immense torrent of tears that overflowed onto the table and floor.

The youngest daughter confined to the kitchen space and kept removed from social rites of passage usual to her culture and class, Tita is established from the start as a Mexican take on Cinderella. And of course this is further compelled by the hyperbolic depiction of her arrival into this world upon a flood of tears—a key motif in early versions of Cinderella, as I shall discuss—and through references to mystical notions of ‘oracles’ and ‘destinies’.

Given Esquivel’s training and work as a kindergarten teacher before embarking on her writing career, it is perhaps not surprising that she found in fairy tales a compelling resource for her depiction of Mexican female Bildung. The clearly evident Cinderella intertext has been noted in numerous studies of the novel, and discussed in some depth by critics such as Cherie Meacham in her interesting article ‘Como agua para chocolate: Cinderella and the Revolution’. Meacham encapsulates the dualistic nature of critical reactions to this aspect of the novel by considering ‘the tension between elements [of it] that inscribe patriarchal tradition and those that transcend and transform it in Esquivel’s Mexican version of the European folktale’.¹¹ In fact, this facet of Esquivel’s narrative has become one of the most widely critiqued elements of her writing, informing negative perspectives on the novel along the lines of Marquet’s, cited above, for being a simplistic work filled with the kind of stock characters whose dichotomized portrayals allow no room for nuance, and therefore problematize any engagement with the complexities of non-essentialized gender identities.

Whether deemed positive or negative, however, the fairy tale intertext remains important at the levels of both genre and gender: as far as the former is concerned because it establishes a literary and canonical frame to which the narrative can speak, thereby articulating its generic identity as well as its fracturing of that mold. Here, however, I wish to develop the application of the Cinderella reference as a frame of analysis specifically for gender and within the context of the narrative of self-development, because it is so key in terms of how we engage with the female protagonist. It locates Tita and her Bildung within the domestic sphere and informs it with all of the issues that this implies when seen from more radical feminist perspectives: a life of confinement and drudgery, a lack of autonomy and recognition, limited power, and expectations of passivity. It establishes, or at least appears to, a destiny of precisely the type that women writers have long sought to challenge, and for that reason, as Meacham neatly summarizes, ‘while recognizing subversive elements in the original content of these stories, most feminists tend to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Construction: Archetype, Fairy Tale, Myth
• PART II Deconstruction: Exile and Gender
• PART III Reconstruction: The Female Body and Agency
• Inconclusion: Towards Agency: From Uncharted Lives to Uncharted Futures
• Index