SOURCE: “The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo,” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, pp. 94–107.

[In the following essay, Alarcón analyzes Castillo's writing in the context of male/female relationships and the politics of women's sexuality.]

Ana Castillo, a native of Chicago, first made an impact on the Chicano writers' community with the publication of her chapbook, Otro Canto (1977). Written mostly in English (as is almost all of Castillo's work), it ensured her reputation as a “social protest” poet at a time when it was difficult to be anything else. As a result, some of the ironic tones already present in the early work have been easily over-looked in favor of the protest message, which in fact is re-doubled by irony. It can be argued that irony is one of Castillo's trademarks. Irony often appears when experience is viewed after-the-fact or in opposition to another's subjectivity. In this essay, I would like to explore the ironically erotic dance that Castillo's speaking subjects often take up with men. Thus, my exploration will follow the trajectory of the traditional heterosexual, female speaking subjects in Castillo's published works: Otro Canto, The Invitation (1979), Women Are Not Roses (1984), and The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986).¹

Otro Canto portrayed the burdens of the urban poor through the voice of a young woman who had learned the bitter lessons of disillusionment early in life. Thus, in the poem “1975,” we hear a sigh of relief when all those “proletarian talks”—the nemesis of many a left-wing activist—are finally translated into action. The speaker underscores the repetitiveness of mere talk by starting off every stanza with the line, “talking proletarian talks,” which subsequently opens the way for details that give rise to such talk. We are not relieved from this tactical monotony “until one long / awaited day— / we are tired / of talking” (pp. 49–51). Though in “1975” the speaker is not gender-marked but is revealed as being in a “we-us” speaking position within a Marxist revolutionary stance, that speaker is transformed into a “we-us” who makes “A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition.” In this poem we are called upon to make love and “forget / that Everything matters” (Women Are Not Roses, p. 63). Given the litany of the things that matter in the stanza preceding the call, however, the poem urges me to ask if the speaker is wryly alluding to the well-known Anglo counterculture slogan of the sixties: “Make Love, Not War.” As the poem notes, what matters to the proletarian (i.e., Marxist) revolutionary speaker is the struggle to overcome class oppression, a struggle that is spoken through a supposedly non-gendered we. However, juxtaposing the poem's title, “A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition,” with the implicit allusion to the slogan “Make Love, Not War,” may help us to unravel a story with a difference for the underclass female speaker who addresses her partner, “Let's forget …” (p. 63).

Notwithstanding the recent involvement of women in revolutionary struggles (i.e., Cuba and Nicaragua), it is still the case that in opposition to the erotic, a revolution or a war is especially marked with a traditional male subjectivity that awaits analysis. In order for a female speaker to recover the full meaningful impact of herself, she still must address how that self figures in the “heterosexual erotic contract,” revolutions not excepted. Within this contract, the female body continues to be the site of both reproduction and the erotic; despite class position, a speaker and her gendered social experience are imbricated in that age-old contract. Thus, “A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition” may now be understood as a call to explore the politics of the erotic. Let us actively explore the neo-revolutionary implications of erotic relations that have been constantly displaced, undervalued, and even erased by masculine-marked militancy, or at best rendered passively by the male poet, with the woman as the muse, the wife, the mother.

From this point of view, the poem's title acquires a polyvalence that goes beyond the private, where the erotic has often been held “hostage,” and is placed in the political arena. In a sense, then, “Let's ‘make love’” is taken from the lips of an Anglo, male, left-wing activist by the most unexpected of speakers—Ana Castillo's poetic persona. In retrospect, Castillo's early work stands out as one of her first attempts to appropriate the erotic and its significances for the female speaker, with ironic repercussions. Given the assumed class position of the speaker herself, affirming the erotic, as she takes pause from the class struggle, is tantamount to speaking against herself, or so her “brother/lover” may attest. The implicit suggestion that the erotic and the class struggle may be incompatible in a patriarchal world, when both are made public, places the underclass female in a double bind, since she may be forced to choose between areas of life that, for her, are intertwined or indivisible. In my view, the speakers in Castillo's work refuse to make such choices. Choosing one or the other splits the subject into the domains that heretofore have been symbolically marked feminine or masculine.

In the seventies, Chicanas and other women of color had a difficult time within their fraternal group when they insisted that feminist politics, with its commitment to the exploration of women's sexuality and gendered identities, also applied to them. The supposed contradictory position of women of color, one that was between a male-identified class liberation struggle and a middle- or upper-class, white, female-identified sexual liberation struggle, forced women of color to walk a tightrope in their quest for an exploration of gender.² Thus, a poem such as “A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition” was politically risky, as the speaker addresses another, ostensibly male, and asks that he forget that “Everything matters.” Yet, it is only within this apparent self-contradictory situation that such a speaker may be able to claim sexuality for herself and explore the significance of the female body that is always, and already, sexually marked. Such a “proposition” simultaneously opens up a gap between the fact of economic oppression and the desire for erotic pleasure and significance that faces us when we perceive the separation between the first and the second stanzas in the poem.

In The Invitation (1979), a chapbook-length collection of erotic poems and vignettes, Castillo's speaker no longer requests that her interlocutor forget that “everything matters” but pursues, instead, a sustained exploration of her erotic, at times bisexual, desires. The appropriation of the erotic for the female speaker is again a motivating force. The emphasis, however, is not so much on the speaker's uneasy conjunction with “proletarian politics” as it is with “textual politics.” That is, the appropriative process resonates respectively against, and with, two important books of our time: Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), and Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno, and Maria Velho da Costa's The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1975).³ Consider, for example, that in the second chapter of his book, Paz affirms women's dormant and submissive sexuality that awaits discovery through male efforts, while “The Three Marias” reject this view throughout their book and protest women's political bondage that, at the core, is based on their sexuality. Notwithstanding the different approaches that each of “The Three Marias” would take to liberate women, there is very little doubt that they agree that male perception of women's sexuality pervades all levels of women's existence.

The erotic thematics of The Invitation openly declare the influence of those two books (pp. iii, 9). Castillo's text, when viewed in their light, becomes a purposefully glossed negation of Paz's view and an extension of the authors' own erotic vision. It is as if the relative absence of any sociopolitical debate of the Chicana/Mexicana's sexuality had made it imperative that Castillo explore instead her speaker's desire in the light of a textual milieu. Moreover, reading Castillo's work in this fashion enables us to clarify her struggle to place her erotic thematics and voices in the interstice of both her sociopolitical and textual experiences. In other words, if, due to her social position, the underclass female is called upon to address her class oppression with a ready-made, class struggle rhetoric, attempting to address her sexual/erotic oppression forces her to see it in relation to texts. Her own response to those texts enables her to give voice to her experience and make it public. If she does not make an effort to bring out that voice herself, it will remain muted, as she is forced to align herself with the heretofore masculine-marked class voice. Thus, she is reconfirming, from another angle, Gilbert and Gubar's call in The Madwoman in the Attic for our critical need to explore “the metaphor of experience” (in “1975” and “A Counter-Revolutionary Proposition”) and “the experience of metaphor” (in The Invitation).⁴ The speaker/writer and the critic must discern, insofar as it is possible, between the metaphors female speakers create to represent our sociopolitical and erotic experience and the metaphors these speakers inherit and that a priori inscribe our potential experience. Thus, a writer/speaker can unwittingly live out the experiences that the metaphors call upon her to duplicate (i.e., Paz's description of female sexuality) or she can struggle to lay them bare and thus reinscribe her evolving position (i.e., “The Three Marias” struggle to reinscribe women's sexuality).

Paz's work, as well as The Three Marias and The Invitation itself, are, in a sense, all glossed over in Castillo's epistolary narrative, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), which more closely approximates the sociopolitical images of Otro Canto. In a sense, Letters is more aggressive in its conjugation of “the experience of metaphor” and “the metaphor of experience” as it pertains to the erotic, for it is yet another link in Castillo's exploration of sexuality and its significance for women. If in Letters, however, the negation of Paz's view of women's sexuality is continued, even as it is ironically reconfirmed by some of the males represented in the text, the work of “The Three Marias” is honored by adapting its epistolary form. However, the letters of “The Three Marias” are also supplemented by Castillo's Anglo-American political and sexual angle of vision. Castillo's sole speaking protagonist—Teresa (“Tere”)—takes up the position, initially, of a free agent, while the narrative web of The Three Marias starts out by recognizing that women are not free agents in any sense whatsoever. Moreover, as Darlene Sadlier's essay makes clear, “The Three Marias” did not have the political freedom to explore women's sexual oppression or question its nature even textually, let alone in practice.⁵ As a result, they were placed on trial for publishing their book. Ironically, the trial itself corroborated their point; women have not been free to express an uncensored subjectivity. Ana Castillo's Letters supplements “The Three Marias” insofar as her protagonist projects a subjectivity, free to express and practice her sexuality, but still imprisoned by an intangible heterosexist ideology, a heterosexist ideology for which we may posit Paz's view as the model. Thus, in Letters we have a protagonist who, by virtue of North American political practices and feminist influence, had “forgotten” what it is like to live in the world of “The Three Marias” or even in Paz's world. As a result, Tere, the main speaker in Letters, undergoes a trial by fire when Mexico's cultural configuration is put into play. She is forced to recall that she is not as free as she thought. Since Teresa is a woman of Mexican descent (a Chicana), she should not have forgotten but, insofar as she wants to be a freer agent, she would want to forget. The complexities of her diverse levels of consciousness may be located in the push and pull of divergent political countries, i.e., the United States and Mexico. As Gloria Anzaldúa states in “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness”:

Within us and within la cultura chicana, commonly held beliefs of the white culture attack commonly held beliefs of the Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beliefs of the indigenous culture. … In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another … and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?⁶

Indeed, this may explain the rationale behind addressing the letters to Alicia, who was Tere's traveling companion and ought to have known what they experienced. Nevertheless, the technique enables Tere to bring out, through Alicia, the Anglo-American cultural influence that, in any case, does not save either of them in the face of the erotic, as we shall see.

Before further consideration of The Mixquiahuala Letters, however, other important points must be brought up that will clarify its social and literary importance as well as my necessarily complex critical approaches. The critical conjugation of “the metaphor of experience” and “the experience of metaphor” is as complex as its literary elaboration.

Selections from both chapbooks, Otro Canto and The Invitation, as well as sixteen new poems, have been made available to a wider audience in Castillo's book, Women Are Not Roses. As happens in “selections” books, the evolution of a writer's work is often cut short in favor of the “best” that a writer has produced, a factor that is the prerogative of editors. As a result, Women Are Not Roses does not provide the reader with many clues to the intertextual observations made above. Theorists of the text, of course, have taught us that one does not need to have recourse to direct intertextual sources for the pursuit of such considerations. However, it is also the case that writers do respond consciously to their textual milieus and effect a revisionary dialogue. As such, it is of paramount political importance to identify the textual milieu of culturally marginalized writers such as Chicanas, as well as to clarify the appropriative strategies at work in the struggle to construct and reconstruct an identity despite its instability, lest a writer appear to speak in a vacuum. Moreover, writers and critics often rely on a textual milieu and an actual experience, insofar as that milieu assists with the verbal translation of our cultural experience. In this fashion, a variety of discourses can be negated, supplemented, modified, and repeated, though it may not always be possible, or even necessary, to make clear-cut source identifications.⁷

Women Are Not Roses does not provide any clues to Castillo's appropriative strategies and experimentations, though the word “roses” in the title points to, and plays upon, the masculine textual production in which women are represented as flowers/nature. In this book, however, there are at least two poems that resonate intertextually and intratextually, and their examination may also help us in the reading of The Mixquiahuala Letters.

Both “An Idyll” (pp. 8–10) and “The Antihero” (p. 24) warrant a closer look because they not only evoke the Western romantic tradition that has underpinned women's erotic image within patriarchy but also, in this instance, further the female speaker's appropriation of that tradition to explore her sexuality and revise the image. Moreover, since Tere, the letter-writing protagonist of Letters, does not explicitly speak of her erotic illusions and ideals but instead reconstructs, from a ten-year distance, a period of her life that she calls a “cesspool” (Letter #2), a consideration of these two poems may help us come to terms with the nature of her failed erotic quest. Though Letters represents sexual encounters with men, Tere often assumes a sarcastic, pragmatic, and even distant tone that contrasts sharply with whatever illusions and ideals may have led her (Letter #1) and her friend Alicia to actively explore their sexuality. This is an exploration that falls short of erotic bliss, to say the least: hence, the label “cesspool.” In a sense, the expectations of heterosexual erotic bliss constitute the partially repressed aspects of Letters, which on occasion contains such startling confessions as “i was docile” (p. 113) or “i believed i would be placed in the little house and be cared for …” (p. 118).⁸ These occasional confessions are barely audible. They tend to get lost in Tere's latter-day, after-the-fact sardonic anger. As we shall see, she has been framed a priori by certain “semantic charters,”⁹ and Castillo mocks her further by framing her with the “reading charts” offered to the reader.

“An Idyll” and “The Antihero” reinscribe two aspects of the erotic/romantic hero—the god-like and the demonic—from the point of view of a female speaker. Their representation, however, is complicated by the different spatio-temporal positions that the speaker takes, consequently putting into question how one translates and interprets (writes/reads) the experience. Since “The Antihero” is a significant inversion of the hero in “An Idyll,” the speaker's relational position to each becomes very important, adding another dimension to their inscription. A speaker's position in relation to such monumental and heroic figures cannot be all that simple. The speaker is probing not only a relationship to the symbolic, that is, how the romantic hero has figures in textual tradition, but her social experience as well, that is, how she has lived her sexuality in, and through, such figurations.

In these two poems, the speaker filters her position through an intricate use of the first- (“An Idyll”) and third- (“The Antihero”) person pronouns in combination with temporal distance and proximity, respectively. These spatiotemporal, positional techniques are employed in Letters as well; though most of the letters are first-person accounts, Letters #21 and #32 are examples of speaker shifts. “An Idyll” is a first-person narration of past experience, punctuated by contemporaneous evaluations of that experience that is represented in fantastic terms, a virtual parody of male literary figurations:

                              now
i          can          tell
of being swept b
y a god a michael
angelo's david a
man of such phys
ical          perfection,
one could not be
lieve him human.

(P. 8)

In this poem, the very columnar shape points to a phallic symmetry that distorts the potential plasticity of language for its own sake. It takes a very well-programmed machine to reproduce that form. It is akin to a divine hierarchical account that only “now,” by stepping outside of it, can be apprehended. The narrator, who only “now” can represent her enthrallment with the beautiful stony hero, assesses that erotic dance as “truer” because it was satisfying, in some measure. Enthrallment itself may have its own temporary erotic rewards. The romantic interlude—an idyll—as a symbolic fantasy may be spellbinding, but the effort to transform it into a social reality literally enslaves her:

                                                            i ate
with it slept wi
th it made its b
ed in the mornin
g when it disapp
eared … i waited
for its return—
each night.

(P. 9)

Indeed, like language, she is immobilized and transfixed by “it,” a god-like man. “It” has turned her into a robot. The murder of this fantastic being is due to her almost sudden awareness that her union with him, despite its insane and masochistic pleasures, is tantamount to her own self-destructive collusion. In the poem, his murder is anonymous, perhaps collective. As a crowd gathers to demand his expulsion, one of them shoots him when he refuses to leave:

until one of us c
ould not stand it
any longer and
shot him.

(P. 10)

Now that the fantasy, with its perverse truth, is over, the first-person speaker is free to recall her delusion. Indeed, it is the newer, after-the-fact consciousness that makes it possible to see the enthrallment as a delusion. The one who narrates, however, is distanced from the one who lives the fantasy, that distance itself muting the emotional charge of the actual experience that was once lived as true and is now viewed through the lens of fabulous fiction. It is as if there was something inherently ironic in an experience recollected from the now-distant point of a changed consciousness. This is precisely the ironic tone effected in many of the letters (see, for example, Letter #16 where Tere's attraction to Alvaro is later viewed as a weakness). Tere mocks her initial enthrallment. She “Believed that beneath his rebellion was a sensitive human being with an insight that was unique and profound” (p. 48). Years later, however, either Tere's narrative hindsight or that of an unidentified narrator reports, “This is a woman conditioned to accept a man about whom she has serious doubts …” (p. 48).

The ironies of “An Idyll” take a more cruel turn in “The Antihero,” who exhibits a reckless disregard for his partner's erotic desires: “the antihero / always gets the woman / not in the end / an anticlimax instead” (p. 24). If the heterosexual dance in “An Idyll” is paradoxically viewed as a true fiction by the first-person narrator, the lyrical speaker of “The Antihero” views him as purposely playing his partner false. He obfuscates erotic desire by rendering sexual experience anticlimactic, as against pleasure and dénouement. He manipulates her desire so as “to leave her yearning lest / she discover that is all” (p. 24). She is double-crossed by the anticlimactic ruse into continuing to conflate desire with him. It is clear, as Luce Irigaray comments in another context, that “man's desire and woman's are strangers to each other.”¹⁰ If she discovered the infinite power of her own desire, then certainly the cruel dance would undergo a transformation or come to a stop. The poem presents the anticlimactic sexual event in the present-tense lyrical mode, through the lens of the third person. The couple is objectified in the present tense to suggest an ongoing, unsatisfactory scenario of desire that brings them together, yet keeps them apart. Thus, contrary to the dictates of the lyric, which calls for a personal account of sensual experience, the poem switches the speaker's position to suggest a model of contemporaneous behavior that distorts erotic desire. For Castillo, then, angles of perception, which may be both spatial and/or temporal, are sites for discrete eruptions of meaning that may be subsequently juxtaposed, thus effecting additional meanings. In a sense, the significance of any one thing is highly unstable and much depends on the angle of vision.

Conventionally, the letter form has shared at least two important features with the lyric, notwithstanding the fact that the first is prose and the second is poetry.¹¹ Both reveal the intimate events in the life of the speaker, combined with the speaker's emotional response to them, thus exploring the personal states of mind at the moment of the event or with respect to it. It should be noted, in passing, that Letters is a mixture of poetic and prosaic forms, but the speaker, who may not always be identified with Tere, does not feel bound by conventions. This disruption of conventions signals, in my view, a pursuit of narrative approaches that may be beyond Tere's simple “i.” In a sense, she is undergoing an inquisition that makes her both the subject of her narrative and the object of someone else's.

Consider how, in recalling events shared with Alicia, her sole interlocutor, Tere almost consistently shifts to a third-person, present narration to explore emotional responses to an event. Letter #21 is an example of such an instance, an account telling of Tere's breakdown as a result of her misalliance with Alexis:

After a while, she adapts to neglecting herself more than he can. Her nails are bitten to the quick. She forgets to eat or eats when she's not hungry. Her inability to sleep makes her face droop like the jowls of an old hound dog. She is twenty-six years old. With nervous gestures, she tears an invisible thread from the edge of her slip. If she doesn't watch out, she will quietly go mad and no one will have noticed.

(P. 112)

As in “An Idyll,” enthrallment again leads to a slavish madness, but it cannot be stated in the first person. Who narrates? An older Tere, who fears to re-enter that period of insanity with a personal “i”? Also, as in “The Antihero,” the speaker shifts to the third-person account, thus creating distance with regard to speaking positions, but not to time. As a narrator of her own letters, Tere reveals that she occasionally shifts personae to “create distance with the use of a personal ‘i’” (p. 64). As such, it would appear to be an admission that, emotionally, events have a dangerous, contemporaneous power that must be objectified, displaced to a “she/her.” Often, Tere can only re-present what has lost the power to hurt her. Romantic love, however, cannot be spoken of, intimately or directly. As she—or is it she?—coldly says; “Love? In the classic sense, it describes in one syllable all the humiliation that one is born to and pressed upon to surrender to a man” (p. 111). In our time, “the classic sense” of love is the erotically romantic one that has been popularized ad nauseam through romance novels or, in the case of Mexico and Latin America, fotonovelas—as Tere knows (p. 50). It is a genre that cuts across classes and makes many women, regardless of their economic status, sisters under the skin, daughters of patriarchy. In fact, it is the erotic quest that holds Tere and Alicia's friendship together. The true closeness of the friendship is placed in question when we read Letter #13, in which Tere emphasizes her occasional loathing of Alicia. The wedge between them is Alicia's privilege, color, and worldly wise airs. Clearly, Tere and Alicia's relationship requires further scrutiny. However, what keeps them together is their shared relationship to the romantic. Letter #40 serves to additionally reiterate the erotic common ground.

In Letter #33, to further explore her relations with Alexis, Tere again shifts speaking positions. On this occasion, she switches to her fantasy of his voice. When Tere encounters Alexis five years after the breakup, she imagines what he should be thinking upon seeing her. This is the end to the affair that pleases her (p. 114). The poem, entitled “Epilogue” and attributed to Alexis, is a tribute to Tere's unequaled charms, a testimonial to his lingering affection for Tere, despite the passage of time and his subsequent involvements with other women: “It was her. / … She / was there, in the same room …” (p. 115). Tere is effectively converted into his Muse, the one still capable of stirring him into poetic reverie. Indeed, she reveals that being the object of his desire is something in which she is well trained, so well in fact, that she can even write poems about that object, herself, and assume his voice. Even as this version of the end pleases her more than the actual reported sordid end of their affair, Tere's self-conscious posing parodies the experience of the romantic metaphor: She, the muse, the love object that truly moves him; He, the desiring lover/poet. In Tere's relationship with Alexis, the gap between the metaphor of experience, insanity and abandonment, and the experience of metaphor, the enchanting muse, provides us with a variation of the chords struck in “The Antihero” and “An Idyll” (see Letter #28 for Tere's initial response to Alexis). As Janice A. Radway has told us in Reading the Romance,¹² romantic/erotic bliss is the salient promise that Western patriarchy holds out to women, a bliss that constantly eludes our hapless heroines. Why? I can only conjecture that, while both Tere and Alicia are quite adept at posing as the object of desire, they find it impossible to carry through the subsequent social actualization of that objectification, primarily because it is not an option at all. It spells the death of their subjectivity. Ironically, that is their near-unconscious discovery. The patriarchal promise of romantic/erotic bliss, re-presented in all manner of popular literature, is an ideological maneuver to kill their subjectivity and any further exploration of their own desire.

The understated, failed quest for romantic/erotic bliss effects a blisteringly sardonic tone in the Letters, which are an exercise in hindsight. If, in fact, Letters represents the struggle to move beyond the quest, the irony is Tere's inability to succeed. In part, this is due to the fact that both the women and their string of men are still operating under a romantic/erotic heterosexist ideology that is hard to shake, notwithstanding Tere's latterday awareness that this is so. Consider what she says ten years after the quest for “womanhood”: “Destiny is not a metaphysical confrontation with one's self, rather, society has knit its pattern so tight that a confrontation with it is inevitable” (p. 59). The quest for “womanhood” is still socially defined in sexual terms under the popular emblem of the romantic/erotic. Both Tere and Alicia are pressed to fulfill the pattern. In a sense, Letters offers us a different version of the so-called “star-crossed” lovers. Destiny, as such, is a socially enforced misrecognition under the guise of love that places Tere in a double bind: on the one hand, a desire for her own sexual definition, and on the other, an overly determined script in which she takes part. Tere, in short, is bitter over her unwitting, yet unavoidable, folly. The appropriation of the erotic, as enjoyed and desired in the more symbolic book, The Invitation, is betrayed in Letters. Letters makes evident the possibility that an appropriation of the erotic in a heterosexist society may only end up being revealed as a misappropriation.

Castillo's experimentations with shifting pronouns and appropriative techniques for the purpose of exploring the romantic/erotic does not stop with Tere's letters, however. If we return to the “real beginning” of Letters, we must note that the first letter is to the reader, penned by Castillo. We are directed to undertake a variety of unconventional readings—“The Conformist,” “The Cynic,” and “The Quixotic”—each tailored to our reading needs. We are also given the option to read each of the forty letters separately, as if they were short fiction. We are alerted that we are in for a variety of ironic and parodic plays but we are ignorant of what they might be. In short, the book brings into question our own reading practices, for the apparently unconventional suggested readings actually lead to resolutions that are more conventional than the handful of letters attributed to Tere. Insofar as each suggested reading by Castillo presents us with a resolution, we are handed an ideological nexus (i.e., The Conformist-idyllic conjugal life) that forces us to reconstruct the meaning of Tere's letters as always and already leading in that direction.¹³ Was that Tere's desired end, or is it The Quixotic, or The Cynic's? If, as readers, we play along with the suggested charts, we are forced to come to terms with the notion that Tere is very much trapped by a variety of ideological nexus that she, and we, need to question and disrupt.

But it is not only our reading and interpretive practices that are in question; Tere's are, too. She constantly shifts voices in an effort to “read” and interpret her own experiences. Which one of the various selves that she explores is she? Is she the vampish one, the docile one, the clever one, the fearful one, the liberated one, or the oppressed one? Insofar as each is connected with her sexuality, she is all of them, and more. Above all, I think she is betrayed by a cultural fabric that presses its images of her upon her, and her response (as well as Castillo's) is to give them all back to us, albeit sardonically. Tere is no longer a sitting duck, as Paz or even “The Three Marias” would have it, but she still inhabits a shooting gallery in which she must wear many a mask to survive and to understand where she has been.

Notes

1. Ana Castillo, Otro Canto (Chicago: n.p., 1977); The Invitation (Chicago: n.p., 1979; 2d. ed. n.p., 1986) (may be obtained by writing: P.O. Box 163, 3309 Mission St., San Francisco, Calif. 94110); Women Are Not Roses (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984); The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Review Press, 1986). All cited pages are from Women Are Not Roses and The Mixquiahuala Letters and shall be indicated in body of text.

2. For testimonials regarding this predicament, one of the most accessible books is This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2d. ed., ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983). Leftist feminists in Latin America encounter similar predicaments when working in a framework of “grassroots” feminism. See Magaly Pineda, “Feminism and Popular Education: A Critical but Necessary Relationship,” Isis International, no. 6 (1986): 111–13.

3. For the purposes of this essay I have used The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961); and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Doubleday, 1975).

4. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), xiii. Sigrid Weigel makes a similar suggestion in her essay “Double Focus: On the History of Women's Writing,” in Feminist Aesthetics, ed. Gisela Ecker, trans. Harriet Anderson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 59–80.

5. For an excellent discussion of both the political problems and the narrative modes of this book, see Darlene Sadlier, “Form in Novas Cartas Portuguesas,” Novel 19:3 (Spring 1986): 246–63.

6. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” in Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinster/Aunt Lute, 1987), 77–91.

7. I am specifically referring to the work of Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 59–60; and Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 15; as well as the work of M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422.

8. The use of the small “i” pronoun throughout Letters is disturbing but something other than an affectation. Weigel suggests that to use the “I” in public, women will have to learn to speak “without having first to acknowledge the male definition of their gender role” (see note 4).

9. Pierre Maranda suggests that “Semantic charters condition our thoughts and emotions. They are culture specific networks that we internalize as we undergo the process of socialization.” Moreover, these charters or signifying systems “have an inertia and a momentum of their own. There are semantic domains whose inertia is high: kinship terminologies, the dogmas of authoritarian churches, the conception of sex roles” (184–85). See his essay “The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Corsman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 183–204.

10. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 27.

11. Ruth Perry discusses at length the enactment of “a self-conscious and self-perpetuating process of emotional self-examination,” as well as the history of the epistolary genre, in her book, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 117.

12. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

13. Fredric Jameson's commentary on “the kind of reading which attaches itself to finding out how everything turns out in the end” provides a helpful perspective for understanding Castillo's parodic plots. See “The Ideology of the Text,” Salmagundi 31–32 (Fall 1975/Winter 1976): 225.