[In the following excerpt, Olivera-Williams discusses two of Storni's poems as feminist statements.]

By the time that Argentine Alfonsina Storni published her first book of poetry in 1916, two years after Agustini's death, other Spanish American women had followed Agustini's path and were being recognized in literary circles. Among them were the Uruguayan Juana de Ibarbourou, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, and the Cuban, Dulce María Loynaz. But these women were considered “islands,” “exceptions” in the predominantly male world of Latin American literature. Storni's voice was the only feminist voice insisting upon an end to the sexual bias of her time. Like Delmira Agustini, Storni not only shocked her society with her profession—poetry—but also with her life. In the Buenos Aires of the first half of the century, which, in spite of being considered the Paris of South America, was as provincial as Montevideo, she dared to give birth to a child out of wedlock and, in 1938, knowing that she had a fatal illness, she took her life in the muddy waters of the River of the Plate.

The style of Storni's poetry shows her great mastery of poetic technique. Sometimes satiric and sometimes elegiac, above all, her poetry was “thorny,” and, like her own attitude toward men, loaded with disdain and resentment. As was the case with any Hispanic woman who did not fit into her traditional role, Storni was branded a feminist and a Socialist; her cross/curse was to consider man her inferior but to need him. Her cry for equality in literature and in society made her contemporaries uneasy. No one denied that in her anguish at sexual injustice lay the power and tormented beauty of her poetry. But many found her claim too open and too loud. Unlike Agustini, whose poetry revealed a largely unconscious subversion of patriarchal poetics, Storni was a woman poet who wrote her mind. Until the end of her life, she pointed out the unfairness of phallic power. But her poetry—even her satiric poetry—is always transcendent with love and understanding.

Storni did not want to invert the order of power. She did not want to place men where women were and had been, in an inferior position, in order for her, and for women in general, to occupy man's superior place. But this was what male writers and critics feared. However, Storni wanted to replace the terms superiority/inferiority with the term equality. In her body of work: La inquietud del rosal (The Anxiety of the Rose, 1916); El dulce daño (The Sweet Harm, 1918); Irremediablemente (Hopelessly, 1919); Languidez (Langour, 1925); Ocre (Ochre, 1925); Mundo de siete pozos (The World of Seven Wells, 1934); Mascarilla y trébol (Death Mask and Clover, 1938), and twenty-two poems written from 1916 to 1921 and from 1934 to 1938, Storni tried to nullify men's power and freedom symbolically. In “You Want Me White” (“Tú me quieres blanca,” El dulce daño, 1918), her anger toward sexual bias is powerfully expressed. The poem moves in crescendo from its beautiful traditional images of virginity imposed on the female speaker by the man to whom the poem is addressed to its horrifying sacramental images of death in life, the reality the woman envisions for herself if she allows the man to possess her:

Tú me quieres alba,
Me quieres de espumas,
Me quieres de naćar,
Que sea azucena,
Sobre todas, casta.
De perfume tenue.
Corola cerrada.
Tú que el esqueleto
Conservas intacto
No sé todavía
Por cuales milagros,
Me pretendes blanca
(Dios te lo perdone),
Me pretendes casta
(Dios te lo perdone),
You want me white,
Like foam,
Like ivory.
I should be a lily,
Above all of them, chaste.
Just a soft fragrance.
Unopened corolla.
You, that your skeleton
Keep untouched
I don't know yet
By which miracles,
You expect me white
(God forgive you),
You expect me chaste
(God forgive you),

(120–21)

The speaker would have the traditional hierarchy Man/Woman, Superior/Inferior erased. After the poetic “I” reaches the height of her indignation, the tone of the poem changes, moving from indignation to exhortation. In spite of the use of the imperative tense in the last two stanzas, the speaker asks the man to perform a ritual voyage to the place of all origins, to the womb, to Mother Earth: “Escape to the forests / Go to the mountains / Clean your mouth; / Live in cabins; / Touch with your hands / The wet ground / … Renovate your skin / With salt and water” (“Huye hacia los bosques / Vete a la montaña; / Límpiate la boca; / Vive en las cabanãs; / Toca con las manos / La tierra mojada; / … Renueva tejidos / Con salitre y agua”). This return to the primal earth, a space untouched by civilization that has, at least in Lacanian terms,¹ made man the bearer of language, gives the male-other the possibility of a pure rebirth. Since femininity and masculinity are not innate qualities (Jones 253), a rebirth in Nature is an initiation into a space uncontaminated by “the Law of the Father,” by phallogocentrism. But perhaps the speaker despairs of the man's potential for rebirth for the ending of the poem is ironical: “And when your flesh / Returns, / And when you have placed / In it your soul / Which was entangled / In so many beds, / Then, good man, / Expect me white / Expect me pure / Expect me chaste” (“Y cuando las carnes / Te sean tornadas, / Y cuando hayas puesto / En ellas el alma / Que por las alcobas / Se quedó enredada / Entonces, buen hombre, / Preténdeme blanca / Preténdeme nívea / Preténdeme casta”). In utopian Nature, the dualistic and hierarchical opposition Man/Woman is irrelevant. But Storni does not allow her readers to fantasize about Utopia; she wants to efface the double standard and to upset phallic power in her poetry and in her own day and in her own society. In “Tú me quieres blanca” the expectations of the male-other whom the speaker addresses vanish—men are left powerless. The speaker has shown the weakness of the male's phallic power. Only when true reciprocity exists and when he offers the kind of sexual purity he demands can he expect her submission and chastity.

Storni recognized that men enjoyed social power and sexual freedom denied to women and that men were also privileged to speak in ways prohibited to women. But Storni insisted on speaking herself and on speaking in a way that subjected male pretence to ridicule. In her most popular poem, (“Hombre pequeñito”) (“Little Man,” Irremediablemente, 1919), the poet appears in the figure of a canary, the singing bird, which only can live in captivity. Civilization transformed the canary, a bird that sings/cries; that sings/talks; that sings/laughs, into a symbol of captivity rather than a symbol of flight/freedom. In Storni's terms, however, men cannot hear woman's song. Like Hélène Cixous, Storni, in “Hombre pequeñito,” describes man's inability to hear woman's voice. Cixous likens woman to a sphinx who “sings out because women do—they do utter a little, but they don't speak … they talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, mouth sound: but they don't actually speak, they have nothing to say” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 49). Storni likens woman to a canary who demands her freedom but cannot be heard. From the man's perspective, the canary sings to fill the silence—his silence—with music or noise he can interpret as he wishes. However, the canary does speak to the reader movingly of its plight and its desire for the freedom stolen from it.

Storni's canary speaks to its/her warden as though he is smaller than she: “Little man, little man, / Free your canary that wants to fly … I am the canary, little man, / Let me jump” (“Hombre pequeñito, hombre pequeñito, / Suelta a tu canario que quiere volar … Yo soy el canario, hombre pequeñito, / Déjame saltar”). The canary speaks as though she expects the man to understand her language though he and she are species apart. Through repetition of the word small, Storni emphasizes the difference that point of view makes in assigning size and status. To the man, the canary is a tiny addition to his pleasure. To the canary, the man, her jailer, is insignificant except in his role as guardian of the door of her cage, for the man can neither sing nor can he fly as she can. If we are to agree that woman, like the canary, has been domesticated in the interests of man, then man, too, at least in Storni's poem, has been reduced in human terms by the relations available to him in phallogocentric society.

Storni suggests that were the man larger he might understand woman's/the canary's desire: “I say little man because you don't understand me / Nor will you ever understand me” (“Digo pequeñito porque no me entiendes / Ni me entenderás”). “I can't understand you either” (“Tampoco te entiendo”) says the canary. “Open the cage! I want to escape” (“Ábreme la jaula que quiero escapar”). With a retaliatory insistence on her incomprehension of her keeper's speech, the canary completes her process of belittling the man and by extension all men who require power to validate their masculinity. “Little man, half an hour I loved you / Don't ask me more” (“Hombre pequeñito, te amé media hora / No me pidas más”), she says. By implication the man can take the canary's liberty but he cannot constrain her to sing the song he craves.

“Tú me quieres blanca” and “Hombre pequeñito” were written at a time when Storni was seeking her position as a woman writer in the Hispanic literary world and as a woman in Hispanic society. In 1925 when Languidez was published, Storni had achieved enough success to foreswear what she thought was subjective poetry: “I did not have the time and calm needed, until now, to free myself from my anguish and see what surrounds me,” she wrote (193). However, Storni did not succeed in abandoning the subjectivity that had been won at such cost in her earlier poetry. This subjectivity emerges in her tormented and powerful “I,” though her torment now derives from her desire to be known as a woman who has achieved recognition as a poet. According to Storni, loneliness and lack of love are the price that a modern liberated woman must pay for her freedom.

Her poems present two kinds of women: the “intellectual women,” the dreamers, the creators, and the “passional women” (those who play the role of the woman of man's dream). “Their heart (men's hearts) is placed not in the spiritual ones, / Who tire at the end. Like tillers / They adore what they create: they think that the best / Are those molded to their carnal ways” (“Su corazón lo ponen no en las espirituales, / Que fatigan al cabo. Como cultivadores / Adoran lo que crean: piensan que las mejores / Son aquellas plegadas a sus modos carnales”) (“The Other Friend,” Ocre, 1925).

Storni recognized that women must create themselves to gain liberation. She also recognized her debt to her foremothers. Although “little men” would ignore or misinterpret women's poetry, the noise women were making was impossible to ignore. Women were reading women's works, according to Storni. They were trying to tear down the “bars of their cages.” And it was inevitable that the liberation of women such as Agustini and Storni, who spoke to women through their poetry, would foster women's consciousness in general. Storni noted her debt to Agustini obliquely by suggesting the transformation of women under the spell of her writing: “The skinny doña Elvira, / The chaste doña Ines, / Today are reading Delmira (Agustini) / And Stendhal, in French” (“La flaca doña Elvira, / La casta doña Ines, / Hoy leen a Delmira, / Y a Stendhal, en francés”) (“Funny Stanzas to Don Juan,” Ocre, 1925).

Agustini's and Storni's contributions to Hispanic literary history broke ground for the next generation of Hispanic women authors. Young writers recognized in their foremothers' works a voice that enunciated their desires, their dreams, their emotions, their needs. Women writers after Agustini and Storni did not have to struggle to prove that they had a voice. They were able to write freely and unfettered.

Indeed, if we situate Agustini and Storni and their work in what Julia Kristeva has called, after Nietzsche, “monumental history” (14–15), their voices, their steps toward autonomy blaze a path for other women, not just women who would become writers, to follow. Although, but also perhaps, because they were marginalized in Hispanic culture, Delmira Agustini and Alfonsina Storni decentered the Hispanic literary discourse, providing an example for women who would turn from reading to the task of undergoing and articulating their own struggles.

Note

1. For a detailed discussion of this topic see Anika Lemaire, “The Role of the Oedipus in Accession to the Symbolic,” in Jacques Lacan, trans. David Mackey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).