Advance Access Publication 10 September 2008
OV E R O U R D E A D B O D I E S : E M I L I A
PA R D O B A Z Á N, RO S A R I O F E R R É , A N D
T H E F E M I N I N E FA N TA S T I C
ABSTRACT
This article examines how the nineteenth-century Spanish author Emilia
Pardo Bazán and the twentieth-century Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré
employ the fantastic’s “hesitation” between natural and supernatural events to
encourage the reader to pause and reflect upon the objectification of females
and the closing of narratives over their dead bodies. In the stories studied,
Pardo Bazán’s “El destripador de antaño” (“The Ripper of Yesteryear”, 1900),
and Ferré’s “La muñeca menor” (“The Youngest Doll”, 1976) and “La bella
durmiente” (“Sleeping Beauty”, 1976), the two authors employ a strikingly
similar strategy to question men’s figurations of the feminine: they take a prevalent literary image of women as inanimate beings (as a cadaver and as a
doll, respectively) and complicate this image in such a way that they undermine
the idea of passivity that informs the male writer’s representation of females. In
the process, they call into question both the masculine underpinnings of the
aesthetics they engage (of naturalism and the fantastic) and the authority of
various male figures (doctors, priests, fathers and husbands) who consider
control over women’s bodies their natural right.
Keywords: feminine fantastic, the; hesitation; naturalism; dolls; narrative closure;
violence against women; Pardo Bazán, Emilia; “El destripador de antaño”;
Ferré, Rosario; “La muñeca menor”; “La bella durmiente”
IN Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic, Elisabeth Bronfen notes
that women writers face a dilemma when they attempt to call into question
male authors’ continual – even obsessive – representation of dead females:
in order to critique this practice, they have to depict a woman’s death. Such
narratives, she says,
represent the topos and trope of feminine death differently [. . .] remain[ing] uncannily
between a disavowal and an affirmation of the dominant image repertoire; hovering
between cultural complicity and critique.1
In this essay, I examine the ways in which two modern Hispanic women
writers, the nineteenth-century Spanish author Emilia Pardo Bazán and the
twentieth-century Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré, contest the prevalent practice of closing stories over women’s dead bodies. Both writers negotiate the
impasse described by Bronfen, sailing through the Scylla of cultural complicity
and the Charybdis of critique, with the help of the fantastic, which allows them
Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 44 No. 4
doi:10.1093/fmls/cqn058
# The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.
All rights reserved.
The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
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to depart from their “realist” narratives in a moment of estrangement to force
the reader into a critical, analytical frame of mind, disabusing him or her of the
notion that the text is an inviolable, self-contained narrative. In particular,
by staging instances of what Tzvetan Todorov famously called the fantastic’s
“hesitat[ion] between a natural and a supernatural explanation”,2 they provoke
the reader into pausing to reflect over the fate of the women who have lost their
lives, as well as thinking through the oppressive conditions in their societies that
contributed to their violent deaths.
To investigate women’s appropriation of the fantastic is not to search for an
autonomous female voice, realm or language. What is specifically feminine
about the feminine fantastic is, as Barbara Claire Freeman says in her description of the feminine sublime, not “an assertion of innate sexual difference, but
[. . .] a position of critique with respect to the masculinist systems of thought
that contribute to women’s subjugation.”3 In the stories I examine, Emilia
Pardo Bazán’s “El destripador de antaño” (“The Ripper of Yesteryear”, 1900),
and Rosario Ferré’s “La muñeca menor” (“The Youngest Doll”, 1976) and “La
bella durmiente” (“Sleeping Beauty”, also 1976), the two authors employ a
strikingly similar strategy to question men’s figurations of the feminine: they take
a prevalent literary image of women as inanimate beings (as a cadaver and as a
doll, respectively) and complicate this image in such a way that they undermine
the idea of passivity that informs the male writer’s representation of females. In
the process, they call into question both the masculine underpinnings of the
aesthetics they engage (of naturalism and the fantastic) and the authority of
various male figures (doctors, priests, fathers and husbands) who consider
control over women’s bodies their natural right.
The narratives I consider do not provide answers to the problems of the dire
situation of the women they describe.4 In fact, the authors leave their stories openended – Ferré’s “La bella durmiente” actually ends in mid-sentence – precisely to
provoke further deliberation on the part of the reader. It is as if Pardo Bazán and
Ferré, by reflecting on the experiences of individual females, are inviting their
readers to critically reconsider Edgar Allan Poe’s disturbing dictum: “the death of
a beautiful woman is [. . .] the most poetical topic in the world.”5
An anatomy lesson
In one of the best-known depictions of literary figures of the nineteenth century,
the cartoonist Lemot depicted Gustave Flaubert holding a scalpel that has
pierced a heart, which drips blood into an inkwell on the floor. Though the
face of the object of this anatomical-literary lesson is not visible, the subject on
the table wears high heels, leaving little doubt as to her gender. The title of the
cartoon, “Dissecting Emma Bovary”, both clarifies the matter and implicitly
calls into question Flaubert’s famous declaration of identification with his
female protagonist: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” In this drawing, the artist
conveys the sense of an unbridgeable clinical distance between artist and
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447
subject, which, some years later, Émile Zola endorsed, describing the naturalist
writer as one who should “put on the white apron of the anatomist, and dissect,
fiber by fiber, the human beast laid out completely naked on the slab of the
amphitheatre.”6
While Emilia Pardo Bazán does not refer to this emblematic representation
of naturalism by Lemot, it is possible she had it in mind when she chose the
title of her essay on Zola’s “experimental” aesthetic, La cuestión palpitante (1882 –
1883),7 which, in a literal translation, would be “The Beating Question”.
Whether or not this was the case, her bodily metaphor evokes the heart, which,
in Lemot’s picture, is considered as both a physical organ and a symbol of sentiment, a “feminine” quality that had first been extirpated from the modern
novel by Balzac, who systematically undermined the aesthetic of the sentimental
novel and ridiculed its women authors.8 The title might also be seen to refer to
a widespread nervousness (manifested in palpitations) triggered by the arrival of
naturalism to the Iberian Peninsula. Among others, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
publicly railed against the new aesthetic, declaring that it was an offence to
good taste and the upright customs of the country, and calling it, after a
popular proverb about women’s honour, a “dirty literary hand”.9 Responding
to such a critique, Pardo Bazán says in her text that if the public cannot
stomach naturalist novels then they should not consume them. “To prohibit a
book because young ladies should not find nourishment in it for their intelligence,” she says, “is like throwing a piece of meat out the window so that
babies who are still breastfeeding do not eat it.”10
In her witty riposte, Pardo Bazán not only answers her critics but also calls
attention to one of the sources of naturalism’s scandal: its examination of the
maternal body. As Dorothy Kelly observes, “naturalism manifests a kind of
morbid curiosity with just how women conceive and give birth, just what
happens inside a woman’s body.”11 This morbid curiosity, she writes, is displayed most explicitly in Le Docteur Pascal (1893) in an emblematic scene of
dissection in which Zola’s idea of “experimental” narrative is shown as focusing
primarily on the body of the mother. For Doctor Pascal, illumination comes in
the form of a cache of pregnant women who have died during an epidemic of
cholera. Upon opening up the bodies, says the narrator, “the question of conception, at the heart of everything, posed itself to him in all its irritating
mystery.”12
In her early novel Los pazos de Ulloa (1886), Pardo Bazán showed that she was
aware of the central place occupied by the “irritating mystery” of the maternal
body in the naturalist imagination. Julián, the chaplain, imagines the marchioness, Nucha, giving birth as a terrifyingly impersonal matter and sees her in his
mind’s eye in the throes of labour as if she were on a dissection table, “as inert
matter that does not house the soul any longer”.13 But it was not until Pardo
Bazán published her story “El destripador de antaño” as part of her collection
of Historias y cuentos de Galicia (1900) that one finds her most intriguing representation of the female body. Like Zola, who famously evoked Claude Bernard’s
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Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865) as a model for his novels, the writer
from La Coruña depicts the opening up of a woman. But unlike the French
author, she does not bolster her authorial authority by establishing a parallel
with a doctor or any other professional. On the contrary, she subtly but surely
undercuts the two men invested with authority in her story, the pharmacist and
the priest, who, for their great arrogance, appear not only as unworthy of emulation but also as unwitting accomplices of a ghastly crime.
“El destripador de antaño” contains all the low life one expects from the
darkest of Zola’s naturalist novels. As in L’Assommoir and La Bête humaine, Pardo
Bazán’s plot is driven by a potent combination of poverty and alcoholism,
which leads to an inexorable, violent conclusion. The story tells of a young protagonist, Minia, who was orphaned at the age of one and a half, recently
weaned from her mother’s breast. She is adopted by her aunt, Pepona, and her
uncle, Juan Ramón, who, like the early modern French peasants who inspired
the story of Cinderella, see her more as a drain on the family than a blessing.14
Like the fairy-tale figure who had to sleep by the hearth in the cinders, Minia
is treated as a maid and is worked to the bone. What is worse, Juan Ramón
often comes home drunk, and, feeling like giving someone a good thrashing,
mercilessly beats the young orphan. Her life is, in short, a hell on earth, and the
young girl wishes for death. Each night, Minia falls asleep exhausted and
hungry, but before going to bed she prays to the patron saint of the town, Saint
Minia, to take her away with her so that she might rest.
The story turns darker when the family’s economy goes from bad to worse,
first because of the drunkenness and recklessness of Juan Ramón and, later, due
to a drought. It is at this point that the “hostile indifference” of Minia’s aunt is
said to turn into the “vicious hate of the wicked stepmother”.15 Yet this story is
not a fairy tale, and Pepona’s viciousness turns out to be a thousand times
greater than that of the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. When the family is on
the brink of losing their mill, Pepona happens to hear the rumour that a pharmacist would pay well for the insides of a girl to make an “unto de moza”, or a
“young girl unguent”. Taking this hearsay as fact, she kills her niece and takes
out her viscera. And though the text is vague on this point, she may have also
extracted Minia’s uterus, which, as the life-giving part of the female, would have
been considered the most curative part of the young girl. One might suspect
this even more given the way the story’s title seems to insist on a parallel with
the internationally famous murderer of ten years earlier. That is, with her reference to a “ripper of yesteryear”, Pardo Bazán evokes the nightmare figure for
every modern woman, Jack “el Destripador”, who was thought by Scotland Yard
to be a surgeon for the manner in which he so expertly removed the uterus and
entrails of more than a dozen prostitutes in London.
In “El destripador de antaño”, Pardo Bazán appropriates the techniques and
themes of naturalism, showing the conditions that lead to violence and the way
in which Minia’s body becomes dehumanised and ultimately converted in
brutal fashion into the raw material for an economic exchange. Yet the Spanish
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449
author veers away from a typical naturalist ending, frustrating the reader’s
expectation of a realistic scene of butchery as might seem to be promised by the
story’s title. In the moment Minia dies, murdered in her sleep, the text slips
seamlessly from a naturalist description (of the drunken husband, of the stable
where Minia sleeps) to the fantastic. She prays, says the narrator, just like every
other night, and imagines the effigy of Saint Minia, but with one very strange
difference: it is not the saint who is in the glass case in the church between the
candles holding a palm branch in her hands and wearing a crown of roses, but
she, Minia. At the moment of the murder, says the narrator:
the bleeding cut opened in her own throat, and through it her life flowed out, sweetly
and imperceptibly, in very soft little waves of blood, that upon seeping out left her tranquil, transposed, blessed . . . A sigh escaped from the child’s chest; her eyes rolled back
into her head, she shuddered . . ., and she became completely inert. Her last confused
impression was that she had arrived in heaven, accompanied by the Patron Saint.16
The scene of Minia’s transformation recalls the marvellous, from which, as
Dorothea E. von Mücke has argued, the fantastic emerged in Germany in the
early nineteenth century.17 Yet this tale, which, as the narrator says, is native to
Galicia but recalls the “phantasmagoric creations of [E. T. A.] Hoffmann”,18
avoids falling into the marvellous, in which, as Todorov notes, “supernatural
elements provoke no particular reaction either in the characters or in the
implicit reader”.19 Minia’s perceived ascension, as the narrator says, is perhaps
but a “confused impression”. Instead, what the reader is led to believe –
though is never entirely sure of – in this fantastic narrative is that she has now
become one with the saint in the glass case, as suggested by Minia’s incredible
likeness to her namesake and their shared stigma: the “tremendous cut” in her
neck is identical with that of the statue, which, even when studied with “clinical
exactitude”, seems to the viewer to be “bleeding fresh blood”.20
In this transition from naturalism to the fantastic, Minia’s body becomes
sacramentalised. As in the process of transubstantiation, in which a Roman
Catholic priest transforms a piece of bread (the host) into the flesh of Jesus
Christ, in Minia’s transmutation an inanimate substance (the wax statue
incrusted with relics) becomes inhabited by a living being. But it is important to
note that this “authorizing process of sacramentalization”21 is not overseen by
the Church, as was the real-life case of Saint Minia, who was transferred from
Rome to Brión, Galicia in 1848.22 Unlike the historical figure who died a
martyr’s death under Diocletian some sixteen hundred years earlier, Minia’s
death and the popular cult rendered to her as a new reincarnation of the saint
are not submitted to the scrutiny of ecclesiastical authorities.23 This fact, implies
the narrator, is for the best, as the canon Llorente appears as an unworthy
figure to carry out such an inquiry or, indeed, represent the Church at all. For
not only had the priest advised his friend the pharmacist to keep quiet about
his actions, he also suggested he sell the prescriptions even more expensively
because they were believed to be made from dead girls.24 Moreover, he is
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actually happy when Minia is killed, as her death serves as evidence for his
hypothesis of the complete and irredeemable ignorance and brutality of his
flock, a bunch of “animals” who cannot see the light of natural reason. To
argue otherwise, he says, is to make hosts out of bread (hacer “un pan como unas
hostias” 25).
Although Pardo Bazán does not do anything as “unwomanly” as explicitly
critiquing male figures of authority, she does represent them in an unfavourable
light, thereby implicitly calling into question their legitimacy. First, as I have
already noted, Pardo Bazán circumvents the control of the Catholic Church
with her use of the fantastic. In fact, she not only takes the process of making a
saint (beatification and canonisation) out of ecclesiastical hands but actually
secularises it as well.26 Similarly, Pardo Bazán calls into question both the authority of medical professionals and, by extension, the male naturalist author’s
claim to greater legitimacy through the parallel they draw between their literary
projects and a scientific one. In “El destripador de antaño”, the Paris-educated
pharmacist, Don Custodio, who is the representative of modern medicine in the
story, follows his friend Llorente’s advice and does not speak out against the
rumours that he has killed his two servant girls in order to make an “unto de
moza”. Instead, he cloaks his science in mystery, mixing his medicines in a back
room to further his mystique of a witch doctor, which ends up making his
business even more profitable, as he draws more clients away from his competition, the local curanderas, or medicine women.27 He finally does try to set the
record straight and dispel the rumours when he tells Pepona that there is no
such unguent, but it is, alas, too late for Minia.
Don Custodio, then, like the canon Llorente, appears as an irresponsible custodian of the truth, and we can safely assume that no writer would wish to
follow his example. Neither, of course, would an author desire to draw a parallel
between him or herself and the “surgeon” of the story, Pepona, whose disembowelment of Minia might be seen as a counter-example to the naturalist
metaphor of literature as surgery. Instead of a model of critical incisiveness and
objective distance, what one finds is a grotesque – or, given the story’s setting of
Galicia (also the native land of Ramón del Valle-Inclán), one is tempted to say
esperpéntico 28 – scene, which does not seem all that different from those of
Lemot or Zola. What I would like to propose, in other words, is that the
murder constitutes an amusement-park mirror-like reflection of the naturalist
scene of dissection, which is not “natural” at all, especially because it is never
presented as universal. As Elaine Showalter notes, the male fin-de-siècle writers
never think of themselves (or any other man) as being opened up, for their
interest in the anatomist metaphor is less because of their passion for science
than because of its usefulness in their narrative strategy: namely, they use it to
“gain control over an elusive and threatening femininity by turning the woman
into a ‘case’ to be opened or shut”.29
Pardo Bazán’s employment of the fantastic, which invites the reader to mull
over Minia’s murder – proscribing as it does the possibility of ever definitively
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451
closing her “case” – might be read like a prescription that her story’s pharmacist would be incapable of providing. Topics such as femicide, she seems to say,
cannot be avoided in narratives that claim to be “realist”, as they do in fact
happen in real life. But, she adds, they should not be treated lightly or in
an impersonal and detached manner. Similarly, while literary “surgery” might
be deemed necessary to pinpoint society’s “ills”, such an operation should be
carried out, as she writes in a review of a contemporary woman author, with
infinite respect for the body, being careful with the anaesthesia and the cleanliness of the bandages.30 And the surgeon, she adds, should be empathetic with
the situation of the patient, “shuddering inside from suffering and piety”.31 In
this way, the always and already gendered pen, “the metaphor of literary
paternity”,32 might less resemble the carving knife of Jack the Ripper.
On death and dolls
In Alfonsina Storni’s poem “To Eros”, Diana the Huntress speaks of how she
hunted down Cupid. She saw him by the seashore, she says, and, just before Eros
could get one of his arrows out from his quiver to shoot at her, she caught him by
the neck. Once in her hands, she ripped him open to discover his inner workings:
Como a un muñeco destripé tu vientre
y examiné sus ruedas engañosas
y muy envueltas en sus poleas de oro
hallé una trampa que decı́a: sexo.33
(I disemboweled you as if you were a doll
and examined your deceitful wheels
and hidden deep within their golden pulleys
I found a trap that said: sex.)
In her essay on Storni, Rosario Ferré calls this poem an “anti-sonnet” for the way
it demythologises and de-romanticises the figure of love, who is discarded by
Diana as a “guiñapo triste”, or a pathetic ragdoll.34 While in the traditional masculine love lyric the (female) beloved’s body is rhetorically dismembered – divided
into so many pearly teeth, emerald eyes, ivory hands and marble feet – in “To
Eros”, Storni eviscerates the figure that inspired this tradition of fetishising
females. In fact, she literally turns it inside out when she has Diana reveal the
god of love as but a mechanical contraption filled with wheels and pulleys and a
trap that says “sex”.
Like Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré “speaks from (and against) the vision of
the woman embodied in male discourse”.35 As the title of her anti-romantic
stories, Pandora’s Papers (1976), suggests (converting as it does a figure of culpability into one of creativity), one finds many voices against the traditional roles
imposed on women, as well as the many fetishising images masculine writers
have used in their depictions of females. In the context of women writers and the
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fantastic, one image in particular stands out from the rest: that of the female as a
life-size doll, a toy that dates back at least to the invention of automata in the late
eighteenth century and their appearance in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann.36 In
what follows, I examine the way in which, in the stories “La muñeca menor”
and “La bella durmiente”, Rosario Ferré appropriates this figure for her own
end of reversing the traditional fetishised image of women, “let[ting] the
Object”, in the words of Elba Pokorny, “tell her [. . .] side of the story”.37 In this
process of reversal, Ferré employs the fantastic to transform an emblem of passivity into a vehicle for revenge, a symbolic answer (though ultimately insufficient)
to a culture of objectification of women and the violence of rape.
“La muñeca menor” begins with the invasion of a body. When the protagonist, a maiden aunt, is bathing in a river, a chigger (or harvest mite) enters her
thigh and causes it to swell to immense proportions.38 Because the parasite
cannot be extricated without her losing the leg, the aunt retires from society.
And as she cannot get married and have children, she instead channels her
creative energy into her art, which consists of the fabrication of life-size dolls,
which she gives as gifts to her nine nieces.39 The youngest marries the son of
the doctor who had attended the aunt over the years and (much like a parasite
himself ) had made a fortune from her condition. The son, a doctor like his
father, married the niece not for love, however, but for status. After their marriage, he obliges the niece to sit out on the balcony as a reminder to passersby
that he has married into high society. Over time, the husband grows old but not
his wife, who always sits silently on the porch – much like the doll sits inside at
the piano – for all to see. Curiously, she appears to look more and more like
her porcelain, honey-filled double, whose diamond eyes the greedy husband
plucks out. The story ends in an astonishing moment of the fantastic: when the
husband lowers his stethoscope to examine his wife, he finds that she has metamorphosed into the doll. “She” opens her eyelids and infuriated chiggers
emerge from the empty eye sockets.
The monstrous ending of “La muñeca menor”, punctuated as it is with a
pair of empty eye sockets, might be read as a (metaphoric) invitation to look
anew at the representation of the female in fantastic literature, and in particular
such a story as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817), in which a young
man falls so desperately in love with a life-size doll that he throws aside his
fiancée for “her”. Hoffmann’s story, which was adapted as an opera and a
ballet, is perhaps most famous because of the central part it plays in Freud’s
essay on “The Uncanny” (1919). In this piece, Freud examines what Ronen
calls occurrences “where the subject comes across an object [that is] familiar to
the point of utter automatism of perception, and feels this object or event to be
strange and intimidating.”40 As his subject is an unsettling automatism of perception, it is not surprising that he examines the figure of the life-size doll – in
the story, an automaton – which provokes uneasiness in adults. Surprisingly,
however, despite the devastating results set into action because of Hoffmann’s
protagonist’s love of a dancing doll, Freud ultimately dismisses dolls as
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essentially innocuous: “the idea of a ‘living doll’,” he says, “excites no fear at
all.”41 Yet Ferré’s story shows that the contrary can be true: if dolls appear innocent, she seems to say, it is because male writers (including Freud) have
repressed the threatening aspects of the figure.42 Indeed, just as Edward
Burne-Jones preferred to eliminate the kiss and awakening from his Briar Rose
series, suppressing, as Nina Auerbach notes, the Sleeping Beauty’s “destined
awakening and her attendant power to awake the world”,43 it would seem male
writers prefer not to imagine what a female doll might do were she given a will
of her own.
In her novella “La bella durmiente”, Rosario Ferré entertains this possibility
by having her protagonist, Marı́a de los Ángeles, smashingly subvert the plot of
the balletic adaptation of “The Sandman”. In Coppèlia, Marı́a de los Ángeles
dances the role of Swanilde, who takes the place of a mechanical dancing doll,
leading its inventor, Doctor Coppélius, to believe that he has been able to bring
it to life. She begins her role normally, gracefully imitating the charming movements of the automaton (Coppèlia). Suddenly, however, she departs from her
choreographed part and improvises her own surprising twist to the tale. First,
she puts the body of Coppèlia on a table and begins to smash it to pieces.
Then, when the doll is reduced to debris, she does a wild solo dance “decapitating dolls, breaking clocks, and emitting a god-awful sound from her mouth just
as if a spring on her back had sprung, making her go out of control.”44 To top
off her improvisation, she leaps over the orchestra pit with a manic bound and
keeps dancing down the aisle until she is out of doors.
As this performance exemplifies, “[d]ance, although only temporarily, allows
[Marı́a de los Ángeles] to throw off all the restraints that limit and cancel her
individuality.”45 Yet while she momentarily breaks free of society’s surveillance,
the ballerina’s predicament is, in the end, similar to that of Nora at the conclusion of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: there is nowhere she can call her own to go to
once she walks out the door. Moreover, her rebellion brings retribution:
although Marı́a de los Ángeles temporarily avoids the happily-ever-after ending
of the marriage plot of the ballet when she spins her way down the aisle and
out the door, her spout of rebellion actually sets into motion the events that will
lead to her unwished-for wedding, and, shortly thereafter, her suicide. When,
because of her scandalous performance, her father prohibits her dancing,
Marı́a de los Ángeles falls into a coma, becoming (or appearing to become), in
this interlude of the fantastic, a fairy-tale figure. As Suzanne Hintz aptly puts it,
“All the external forces that oppose her professional dancing career cause a spell
to fall on Ferré’s Sleeping Beauty.”46 She wakes up only when a young man
promises that if she marries him he will allow her to continue to dance and that
he will not get her pregnant. Yet this young beauty had not imagined that her
prince might really be a beast who would betray his promise of protected sex in
the most violent way imaginable: he rapes her.47
The rape of Marı́a de los Ángeles, perhaps the most disturbing moment of
Papeles de Pandora, has gone completely unexamined by Ferré’s critics. This lack
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of critical attention suggests, at best, a misreading of the text and, at worst, an
unwillingness to address the “indecent” topic.48 More to my purposes here, this
inattention to the sexual violence has contributed to insufficient readings of the
final scene of the novella, which follows inexorably from the rape.49
First, the causes: Felisberto forces himself upon his wife as a way of affirming
his possession of her, of cementing the relationship between them through a
son, thereby establishing equality with the elite into which he has married, and
of asserting his primacy in her life over her art.50 It is an act of violence driven
by insecurity, as evidenced in particular by a telling metaphor he uses for
himself: he refuses to be considered, he says, a “pelele”,51 or puppet. This revealing statement calls to mind a work such as Goya’s famous painting entitled El
pelele, which shows four women throwing a life-size male doll up in the air, an
image that, as Janis Tomlinson notes, should not be read as the tossing of a
puppet but rather of “a man whose effeminacy and subjugation to women has
made him puppet-like”.52
Second, the effects: after the rape Marı́a de los Ángeles wishes she were
dead. She conveys this feeling through her reworking of the story of Gisèle along
the lines of her own life story: in her mind she has, at the moment her husband
betrays her, crossed over to an “other side” and imagines herself as one of the
willis, the maidens who, after being deceived by men, die and, in their afterlife,
become vengeful demons. In this alteration of the ballet, as in her earlier
version of Coppèlia, as Aida Apter-Cragnolino notes, Marı́a de los Ángeles
expresses her “true” self through a subversive narrative.53 Yet while in the first
instance the ballerina turns the ballet back on itself, subverting it and parodying
the figure of the doll, which functions as “a synonym of passivity, artificial ornamentation, and alienation from historical reality”,54 in her picturing herself as
one of the willis, dressed in “dirty and malodorous crinolines [with] dragonfly
wings tied to their backs with barbed wire”,55 she manifests a combination of
self-loathing and vengefulness, both of which can be traced back to her trauma.
Because Marı́a de los Ángeles has, in her mind, already disassociated herself
from her usurped body, it is tempting to read the last scene as a(n) (uncanny)
reprise of her earlier over-the-top ending of Coppèlia, but with the added element
of the vindictiveness of “La muñeca menor”. If her husband treats her like an
object, she seems to imply, then she will play the part and accept money for sex.
Emptying herself of all sentiment, the ballerina dresses herself up like a caricature
of a male fantasy of a garishly-dressed sex worker. The result, with her exaggerated makeup and flaming-red wig, is that she becomes her own recreation, as a
“future Eve” of her own making, so to speak. In fact, in becoming her own dolllike double, it is as if she appears in a story by her husband’s namesake, Felisberto
Hernández. I refer here in particular to “Las Hortensias” (“The Daisy Dolls”),
one of the tales Ferré examines in her “fantastic reading” of Hernández that tells
of a man who falls in love with – and makes love to – dolls.
As in the “eccentric” tales of Felisberto Hernández that push the themes of
E. T. A. Hoffmann to their limits, in Pandora’s Papers the erotic often goes hand
T H E F E M I N I N E FA N TA S T I C
455
in hand with madness.56 In “La bella durmiente”, this combination surfaces
when Marı́a de los Ángeles disappears into the role of her double. In her fragmented subjectivity, which can also be considered one of the effects of her
rape,57 she imagines that she is a death-defying tightrope walker and trapeze
artist, a figure that embodies, in Mary Russo’s term, the “aerial sublime”.58 In
particular, she imagines herself as Carmen Merengue, a circus performer who
represents for Marı́a de los Ángeles a life of freedom, for not only does she fearlessly fly above the crowds, but she also refuses the life of the kept woman.
“Carmen Merengue wouldn’t have married,” thinks the ballerina, who now
realises that marriage was even more dangerous than her (imagined) double’s
circus act of having daggers thrown at her. Imagining the circus performer as a
doll, she says to herself that, “she would have said no with her head moving
back and forth, her plaster face framed by artificial curls.”59
When Marı́a de los Ángeles sets up a high wire in the sordid hotel room
where she turns a trick with an anonymous punter, she evokes the carnivalesque
in explicit fashion.60 In this space, she turns her world upside down: her highwire act is a “low” equivalent to her “high” art of ballet,61 and accepting sex
for money is a perverse parody on her marriage, which her father desired for
an heir to whom he could pass on the family fortune.62 Also, she walks the
tightrope of the traditional whore/virgin dichotomy for expected female roles
when she prays to the Virgin while having sex, thereby travestying her immaculate name of “Marı́a” and destroying any notion that she is “of the angels” (of
the house, or otherwise). Yet, following the logic of carnival, this excess is ultimately contained. Marı́a de los Ángeles’ spectacular exit from life is covered up
by her father, who whitewashes the scandalous incident of her murder and her
husband’s suicide and, at the funeral, reasserts his paternal authority by dressing
his daughter up as a virginal bride. Those who saw her, writes her father, said
that it seemed she was performing the role of Sleeping Beauty for the last time.
Like Alfonsina Storni in “To Eros”, in her stories Rosario Ferré opens up the
workings of love and marriage in modern-day Puerto Rico to show both their
inner machinery and their traps for young women. Through her use of metamorphoses and doubles of the fantastic, her characters inhabit the figure of the
doll, a substitute for perfect femininity, and rip it apart from the inside out. Yet
unlike Storni’s poem, which ends with the disdain of Diana towards Eros’ protector, the Moon, she knows that these dolls will be stitched up again. Though a
bit the worse for wear, the status quo will survive and society will impose its
norms on young girls by picturing them as Sleeping Beauties, preferring that
their potential for questioning and change remain dormant.
An open ending
Reading the fantastic stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosario Ferré, like
reading the fairy tales that they evoke, is an uncanny experience in which the
reader is separated “from the restriction of reality [. . .] and makes the repressed
456
B RYA N T. S C O U L A R
unfamiliar familiar once again”.63 This estrangement from the everyday world,
as Rosario Ferré notes elsewhere, is both frightening and comforting, a combination she cultivates in her stories, which are, among other things, meant to be
cautionary tales for young women.64 The worlds the two women authors depict
are not only dangerous but deadly, and one finds little hope at the end of their
stories of Little Red Riding Hood emerging unscathed from the belly of the
wolf.65 Yet, as Jack Zipes notes, it is precisely the most upsetting of fairy tales
that have the most potential for change with “the unique ways they bring undesirable social relations into question and force readers to question themselves”.66
For the reader who has been given access to the inner workings of patriarchy,
the dead female bodies in Pardo Bazán and Ferré are by no means signs of a
closed case, or of a resolved tension. In these writers’ stories, there is no
happily-ever-after for their protagonists, which is, of course, one of their main
points. Yet while they are not optimistic about the likelihood of immediate
change, their use of the fantastic allows for an opening up to the possibility of a
better future, for a time when, hopefully, all women might live to tell their tales.
B RYA N T. S C O U L A R
18 rue de Neuchâtel
1201 Geneva
Switzerland
[email protected]
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
I wish to thank Kristine Ibsen and James D. Fernández for their helpful comments on drafts of this article.
NOTES
1
E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester, 1992), p. 395.
T. Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, 1973), p. 33.
3
B. C. Freeman, The Female Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley, 1997), p. 10.
4
I should note that Pardo Bazán and Ferré are only two of various Hispanic women writers
who employ the feminine fantastic. Among others are Elvira Orphee, Elena Garro and Silvia
Ocampo. Like the tales of these women, the stories studied here are ultimately ambiguous, the
“ambiguity in the text reflect[ing] the ambiguous position of women in patriarchal society”; see
C. Duncan, “An Eye for an ‘I’: Women Writers and the Fantastic as a Challenge to Patriarchal
Authority”, Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispanica 40–1 (1994–1995), 233– 46 ( p. 235).
5
E. A. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”, in: Essays and Reviews (New York, 1984 [1846]),
p. 46.
6
Quoted in E. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990),
p. 134.
7
La cuestión palpitante consists of twenty articles that first appeared in the Monday literary section
of La Época between 7 November 1882 and 16 April 1883.
8
On this, see M. Cohen’s The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, 1999).
9
Cited in Leopoldo Alas’ response in the prologue to the second edition of the essay (1883), in
E. Pardo Bazán, La cuestión palpitante, ed. R. de Diego (Madrid, 1988), p. 121. All translations from
Spanish, throughout, are mine.
2
T H E F E M I N I N E FA N TA S T I C
10
457
Ibid., p. 264.
D. Kelly, “Experimenting on Women: Zola’s Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel”,
in: Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre, ed. M. Cohen & C. Prendergast (Minneapolis, 1995),
pp. 231– 46 ( p. 243).
12
Cited in Kelly, “Experimenting on Women”, p. 244.
13
E. Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa (Madrid, 1993), p. 150.
14
On the economic origins of the tale of Cinderella, see R. Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and
Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), p. 27.
15
E. Pardo Bazán, “Un destripador de antaño” (henceforth, DA), in “Un destripador de antaño” y
otros cuentos (Madrid, 1994), p. 17.
16
DA, p. 32.
17
D. E. von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford, 2003),
pp. 3 –9.
18
DA, p. 7.
19
Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 54.
20
DA, pp. 42, 11, 12. Likewise, Pardo Bazán avoids ending her story with a vision of canny,
innocuous Otherness, as Minia, though innocent, harbours visions of revenge, as when she imagines
Saint Minia incinerating her aunt and uncle (DA, p. 21).
21
I borrow this term from Noël Valis’ brilliant essay on naturalism, “The Hospital Body: Misterios
del hospital ”, in: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Novel (Newark, 2005), pp. 257–74 ( p. 259).
22
Critics have not explored Pardo Bazán’s use of the story of the discovery of the body of the
Roman saint, found in 1781, and how, after a petition to the Pope, it was transferred to the town
of Brión, near the regional capital of Santiago de Compostela. For information on the history of
Saint Minia, as well as for pictures of the baroque church and statue described in the story, see
,www.saintminia.org..
23
Minia’s death might be read as a “restaging” of the virgin-martyr narrative, which Pardo
Bazán later takes up again at greater length in her novel Dulce Dueño (1911). See Kathy Bacon’s
“Death and the Virgin Martyr: Re-writing Hagiography in Dulce Dueño”, Forum for Modern Language
Studies 41:4 (2005), 375–84.
24
DA, p. 34
25
DA, p. 38.
26
Similarly, N. Valis has noted that Pardo Bazán elsewhere secularises the discourse of confession. See “Confession and the Body in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Insolación”, in: Reading the
Nineteenth-Century Spanish Novel, pp. 235– 56.
27
Though this female counterpart to the (male) doctor does not appear in the novel, Pardo
Bazán’s readers would have made the comparison, as she often does in her novels. On this topic,
see A. Doménech Montagut’s Medicina y enfermedad en las novelas de Emilia Pardo Bazán (Valencia, 2000),
especially the section entitled “La práctica tradicional y el higienismo positivista”, pp. 31– 53.
28
The term “esperpéntico” is intimately bound up with the theatrical works of Valle-Inclán and
can be translated, somewhat loosely, as “outlandish”.
29
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 134. On this metaphor in the Spanish context, see Marilyn
Bieder’s excellent essay “ ‘El escalpelo anatómico en mano feminina’: The Realist Novel and the
Woman Writer”, Letras Peninsulares 5 (1992), 209–23.
30
E. Pardo Bazán, “Impresiones de lectura: Concepción Arenal ”, La Lectura 7 (1907), 331– 53
( p. 337).
31
Cited in Bieder, “ ‘El escalpelo anatómico en mano feminina’ ”, p. 214.
32
S. Gilbert & S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, 1984), pp. 3– 44.
33
Cited in R. Ferré, El coloquio de las Perras (Rı́o Piedras, 1990), p. 131.
34
Ibid.
35
G. Kirkpatrick, “Alfonsina Storni: ‘Aquel micromundo poético’ ”, MLN 99 (1984), 386– 92
( p. 386).
36
T. Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford,
1995), pp. 10–14.
37
E. Pokorny, “(Re)Writing the Body: The Legitimization of the Female Voice, History, Culture
and Space in Rosario Ferré’s ‘La muñeca menor’ ”, Confluencia 10 (1994), 75– 80 ( p. 77). Cynthia
Sloan makes a similar comment, noting that in her narratives “[Ferré] allows the object to move into
a subject position in order to re-appropriate and rework the original image”; see “Caricature,
11
458
B RYA N T. S C O U L A R
Parody, and Dolls: How to Play at Deconstructing and (Re-)Constructing Female Identity in Rosario
Ferré’s Papeles de Pandora”, Pacific Coast Philology 35 (2000), 35– 48 ( p. 41).
38
Though critics do not mention Horacio Quiroga in their studies, it is striking how much
Ferré’s story resembles his “The Feather Pillow” (1917), in which a blood-sucking parasite empties a
newly-wed young woman of her blood.
39
As C. Vega Varney insightfully notes, this scene is an echo of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which
Ferré, in Sitio a Eros, reads as a tale of the distortion of maternity and of the tyranny of maternity
over the lives of women; “Sexo y texto en Rosario Ferré”, Confluencia 4 (1988), 119–27 ( p. 121).
40
R. Ronen, “Look the Doll in the Eyes: the Uncanny in Contemporary Art”, Psyart (2004). See:
,http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_ronen01.shtml#ronen01..
41
S. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’ ”, in Vol. 17 of the Complete Psychological Works (London, 1959),
pp. 218–52 ( p. 233).
42
For other studies on the figure of the doll in Ferré, see Sloan, “Caricature, Parody, and Dolls”;
K. Bilbija, “Rosario Ferré’s ‘The Youngest Doll’: On Women, Dolls, Golems and Cyborgs”, Callaloo
17 (1994), 878– 88; C. Rivera, “Porcelain Face/Rotten Flesh: The Doll in Papeles de Pandora”, Chasqui
23 (1994), 95–101; L. Zee, “Rosario Ferré’s ‘La muñeca menor’ and Caribbean Myth”, Chasqui 23
(1994), 102 –10.
43
N. Auerbach, The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, 1982), p. 42.
44
R. Ferré, Papeles de Pandora (Mexico, 1976), p. 148 (henceforth PP ).
45
G. Norat, “Del despertar de ‘La bella durmiente’ al reino patriarcal”, Lingüı́stica y Literatura 15
(1989), 17– 31 ( p. 23).
46
S. Hintz, Rosario Ferré: A Search for Identity (New York, 1995), p. 144.
47
Ferré’s story can be read in the context of feminist rewritings of the fairy tale. See
C. Fernández Rodrı́guez, “The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary
Feminist Revisions of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ ”, Marvels & Tales 16 (2002), pp. 51–70.
48
More troubling, perhaps, is the fact that Rosario Ferré, in her translation into English of the
story with Diana Vélez, extracts both the direct admission of the crime by the husband as well as
the victim’s indirect reference to the act as a “deflowering”. This stroke of self-censorship by which
the author cleans up the text for a “decent” audience that does not tolerate representations of sexual
violence furthers a resounding silence regarding the topic, which is rarely touched upon in critical
fashion by Hispanic authors. See “Sleeping Beauty”, in R. Ferré, The Youngest Doll (Lincoln, 1991),
pp. 89–120.
49
This scene has been most often (mis)read as an attempt at liberation, which cannot be the case
because Marı́a de los Ángeles is resigned to her death. Jill Netchinsky exemplifies this tendency
when she says that in the final scene of the novel the protagonist feels “that she can finally be
herself, now, this transgressive act completed”; see J. Netchinsky, “Madness and Colonization: Ferré’s
Ballet”, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 25 (1991), 103–28 ( p. 117). This scene cannot be properly read,
as Netchinsky attempts to do, as an “act of resistance” (ibid.), as she is not trying to survive.
Similarly, the protagonist’s period in a coma cannot be read as an attempt to “maintain her autonomy” (ibid., p. 114), as one cannot will oneself into this state, and one definitely does not, as the
critic contends, “have power there” (ibid.).
50
As J. Franco notes, “Sleeping Beauty” gives a twist to the usual love triangle: Marı́a de los
Ángeles “is unfaithful not with a man, but with art”; see “Self-Destructing Heroines”, in: Critical
Passions, ed. M. L. Pratt & K. Newman (Durham, 1999), pp. 366 –78 ( p. 375).
51
PP, p. 175.
52
J. Tomlinson, Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and the Early Career at the Court in Madrid
(New York, 1989), pp. 209– 10.
53
A. Apter-Cragnolino, “El cuento de hadas y la Bildungsroman: Modelo y subversión en ‘La bella
durmiente’ de Rosario Ferré”, Chasqui 20 (1991), 3–9 ( p. 6).
54
L. Guerra-Cunningham, “Tensiones paradójicas de la femineidad en la narrativa de Rosario
Ferré”, Chasqui 13 (1984), 13– 25 ( p. 17).
55
PP, p. 167.
56
See R. Ferré, El acomodador: Una lectura fantástica de Felisberto Hernández (Mexico, 1986), pp. 52–4.
Although it seems that with her choice of this uncommon name Ferré invites a comparative reading
with Hernández, none of her critics to my knowledge has ever mentioned the Uruguayan author in
their studies.
57
As M. Bal observes, rape “destroys [the victim’s] self-image, her subjectivity, which is temporarily narcotized, definitely changed and often destroyed”; see “Reading with the Other Art”, in:
T H E F E M I N I N E FA N TA S T I C
459
Theory Between the Disciplines, ed. M. Kreiswirth & M. Cheetham (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 135– 51
( p. 142).
58
M. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York, 1994), p. 29.
59
PP, p. 152.
60
Ferré might also be seen as evoking the connection between the uncanny and the figure of the
prostitute, particularly in Freud’s unpremeditated “détours” in a provincial town in Italy that led
him back three times to a street where “painted women” were on display in the windows of small
houses (Freud, Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 17, p. 237).
61
The name Carmen Merengue, which evokes both the tropical dance of African rhythms – a
contrast to the European ballet – and a version of Caribbean exoticism for export (as a Puerto
Rican counterpart to Carmen Miranda, as it were), adds another layer to this carnivalesque
dynamic and underscores the element of colonialism in the story. Also, various critics have noted the
fact that the circus performer was the lover of the father of Marı́a de los Ángeles, but are divided on
the significance (or not) of this fact which, all seem to agree, makes the scene all the more perverse.
62
Marı́a de los Ángeles is converted into both an object of exchange and a money-making
venture in the struggle for superiority between the son-in-law and father-in-law. While Felisberto
allows his wife to dance, he profits from her performances by buying the company, thereby converting his wife into the “asset” he wished she had been in the first place (PP, p. 174).
63
J. Zipes, “The Potential for Liberating Fairy Tales for Children”, New Literary History 13 (1982),
309–25 ( p. 309).
64
R. Ferré, Sitio a Eros (Mexico, 1986), p. 7.
65
Pardo Bazán ends “El destripador de antaño” with an oblique allusion to “Little Red Riding
Hood”. Pepona, who, early in the story, is referred to as a “she-wolf ” (DA, 20), leaves Minia’s mutilated body in the woods so that others might think she had been killed by wolves. She is found out
to be the Big Bad Wolf, however, and is executed for her crime.
66
Zipes, “The Potential for Liberating Fairy Tales for Children”, p. 322.