SOURCE: Southerland, Stacy. “Elusive Dreams, Shattered Illusions. The Theater of Elena Garro.” In Latin American Women Dramatists. Theater, Texts, and Theories, edited by Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas, pp. 243-62. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Southerland traces Garro's manipulation of time and reality throughout her literary canon.]

Regarded as one of the most important contemporary Mexican authors, Elena Garro, born on December 11, 1920, in Puebla, Mexico, is perhaps best known for her unique and diverse representations of vastly different perspectives of reality. Her distinctive ability to manipulate—often erase—the boundaries separating those realities from mere illusion forces her audience to question appearances. In fact, the most comprehensive study of Garro's work, A Different Reality, edited by Anita K. Stoll, focuses on the writer's appropriation of traditional semiotic systems, to which she attributes alternative meanings in order to create a discourse better suited to the expression of new conceptions of reality.

In Garro's work, one finds a predilection for themes pertaining to the marginalized, repressed, and forgotten factions of society, specifically the poor and the female. Her texts prove significant for their treatment of universal themes like class, race, and politics. A great deal of the recent critical interest in her literature, however, may be attributed to the fact that many of her texts, especially the dramatic ones, lend themselves to an interpretation that posits women as subject, an alternative and welcomed reading within a predominantly masculine literary tradition. Garro maintains that what many identify as feminist tendencies in her discourse are purely coincidental. Yet a brief consideration of her life offers some insight into the recurrence of themes pertaining to the female condition, which she often explores in terms of women's need to find a space of their own or to create an escape from daily oppression, silencing, and violence.

Although she now occupies a position of prominence among the literary greats, Garro's choices and experiences mirror those of her female protagonists who find themselves unable to act on their dreams. Garro was introduced early to the literary classics, attended secondary school in Guerrero, Mexico, and then entered the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1936 to study humanities. During this time she worked as a journalist for México en la Cultura, La Palabra y el Hombre, and Así. One year into her studies, she married Octavio Paz, whose influence may be detected throughout her work. For instance, the association with Paz exposed Garro to new cultural situations that awakened her social conscience and led to her activism on behalf of peasant workers, for whom she founded the publication Presente [Present]. More significant here, however, is the fact that Garro relates the chronology of her life in terms of where Paz's work led her, as if he were the force controlling the direction of her life. She even acknowledges that her first literary effort, Los recuerdos del porvenir [Memories of Things to Come], resulted from having little to do while living in Europe (see Muncy, “The Author” 24). This situation recalls that of many of Garro's women protagonists, whose routines are determined by those of their husbands and who have little to do with their time. Like those protagonists, Garro finds escape and intellectual activity through the creative act.

After returning in 1954 from a three-year stay in Japan, Garro wrote her first theatrical piece, Felipe Angeles, a three-act historical docudrama of the Mexican Revolution which details the court-martial of Felipe Angeles. Garro's admiration for the hero's self-sacrifice in the interest of liberating his country contrasts with her denunciation of morally corrupt military officials and her critique of a society that forgets its heroes and renders their death meaningless. Garro's one-act plays, published in the collection Un hogar sólido [A Solid Home] (1958), met with earlier and more public success than Felipe Angeles. Three of these plays—Un hogar sólido, Los pilares de doña Blanca [The Pillars of Doña Blanca], and Andarse por las ramas [Wandering Off the Point]—were soon produced by Héctor Mendoza. This edition also contains three other pieces: El rey mago [The Wise King], Ventura Allende, and Encanto, tendajón mixto [Enchantment, General Store]. All six works are thematically linked by the idea that illusion serves to help characters avoid facing reality or leads them to destruction.

In the title piece, Garro offers a pessimistic but humorous look at the search for impossible ideals. Inhabiting the depths of a tomb, the characters continue searching for what eluded them in life—an impossible reality that they yearned for as an escape from life's difficulties. Ironically, in death as in life, living in the past prevents them from attaining their ideal existence. Los pilares de doña Blanca is Garro's poetic, fable-like treatment of illusion that leads to disaster. Doña Blanca lives in her castle with her protector, the half-horse knight Rubí, until the knight Alazán, also a mythical half-animal, threatens their security. In his attempt to win Blanca's heart, Alazán destroys her protective fortress, leaving Blanca and Rubí with nothing but fragments of a mirror that represent the shattered illusions from which they must forge a new reality. In Andarse por las ramas, Garro portrays the stereotype of the woman oppressed in marriage by a husband who is the embodiment of monotonous routine and who belittles her every attempt at self-expression. The protagonist's tendencies toward the eccentric and her inability to conform lead her to draw chalk houses through whose doors she escapes into her tree—a space she creates for herself where she wanders around free from the oppressive reality of marriage. Garro highlights the irony of reality-based illusion, and the harsh reality of missed opportunity that prolongs one's search, in El rey mago, in which the incarcerated Felipe Ramos realizes too late that the child who offered to make him king for a day truly had the power to make the dream a reality. Encanto, tendajón mixto depicts the clash of illusion and reality, as two men try to dissuade a third man from pursuing his ideals and following a woman shopkeeper into another dimension. The remaining work from this collection, Ventura Allende, is a more socially oriented work which satirizes politicians who go to any extent to obtain their ends. Based on the legend of Circe, the story presents the temptation of Allende to feast in order to forget life's difficulties.

The 1983 edition of Un hogar sólido adds six works to the original. In addition to the better known pieces, Los perros [The Dogs], La dama boba (1963) [The Lady Simpleton], and La mudanza (1959) [The Move], it also includes El árbol [The Tree], El rastro [The Trace], and Benito Fernández. Los perros depicts the violent exploitation of Mexican women through the story of Ursula, a twelve-year-old girl who is abducted because she threatened non-conformity to the expectations of a machista society. Negative and gruesome in its symbols of sacrifice—the men mutilate the family dogs—the work is positive in its portrayal of the enduring strength of women characters. La dama boba, Garro's second three-act play, reenacts the lesson scene from Lope de Vega's comedia bearing the same title. A young urban actor is abducted by the mayor of a small, rural Indian village and required to instruct the mayor's daughter. The daughter proves to have a great deal to teach the “teacher,” leading the actor to question his former views of the world with regard to class, race, and gender. La mudanza brings together issues as diverse as class, age, lack of communication, and nostalgia for lost ideals; it details an elderly woman's struggle to preserve the illusion of the past when she is forced to leave the home that housed her precious memories. The piece, which ends in suicide, provides a detailed view of one woman's struggle to accept responsibility for her predicament and regain control of her destiny.

Garro's commercial theatrical success was marked by the 1960 television production of El rey mago and the subsequent translation of the play into other languages. In 1963, Garro's literary achievements were recognized by the Villaurrutia prize for Los recuerdos del porvenir. This same year she published La señora en su balcón [The Lady on Her Balcony], which exemplifies women's struggle against the limitations faced in a patriarchal world.¹ Also in 1963, La dama boba was published in Revista de la Escuela de Arte Teatral. After this, Garro's contributions to theatrical writings include only the 1983 reprint of Un hogar sólido; renewed public interest in Felipe Angeles led to its reprinting in 1967 in Coátl and by the UNAM in 1979, the same year it was first staged. The remainder of Garro's publications have been in the area of prose, including Y Matarazo no llamó (1991), Memorias de España 1937 (1992), Un corazón en un bote de basura (1996), Inés (1995), and Busca mi esquela y Primer amor (1996). She won the 1981 Grijalbo prize for Testimonios sobra Mariana.²

Of Garro's later theatrical activity, La señora en su balcón is perhaps the one play in which the many themes underlying Garro's corpus of work converge. The piece is also significant as a subversive act of writing, offering a controversial view of suicide as an empowering act: the choice to cease to live in unacceptable conditions allows the protagonist, Clara, to regain control of her life. Support for this view lies, first, in an exploration of Garro's unique revisionary technique for communicating the unbearable conditions of entrapment and the urgency of the dream of a different reality; and second, in a consideration of philosophies that regard suicide as an assertive and self-affirming act.

In La señora, an adult Clara, approximately fifty years old, reviews the major events of her life through a series of flashbacks that reflect the influence of three men: Professor García, her first teacher; Andrés, a fiancé; and Julio, her husband. All three suppress Clara's desire to follow her dreams, thereby instigating a crisis that arises from her lack of self-defined identity and from being forced to conform to a definition of self that is not her own. Clara's frustration manifests itself through many textual images that convey a sense of limitation and of longing for a new, self-created identity, and that describe her life-long search for her true self, which culminates in suicide. Numerous images of circularity and entrapment express the protagonist's repressed desires. Intermittent references to the idealized, fabled city of Nineveh indicate Clara's resistance to the life imposed upon her; this ever-present hope surfaces periodically until, no longer able to contain her desperation, she jumps from her balcony.

The quest theme is a primary preoccupation of Mexican culture as a whole, and although La señora reflects many of the motifs characteristic of the Mexicans' search for self-defined identity, Garro revises the usual treatment. She offers a noteworthy contribution to this subject in the way she addresses the “female condition both in Mexico and on a universal level” (Meyer 164). Although it is not difficult to find a variety of literary approaches to this quintessentially Mexican search for identity, its treatment traditionally has been patriarchal, casting women in the role of the Other, defining them in terms of male standards. This dependence on men's views to shape women's identity gives rise to a need for an alternative, revisionary writing, which Garro has supplied—perhaps better than any other Latin American woman dramatist. Her revisionary discourse expresses new realities so subversive that, within them, suicide becomes a form of empowerment rather than an acquiescence to rules imposed upon women by others.

In an effort to determine why women might feel the urge to express new realities—or to rethink the way one reads literature by women and women in literature—Sandra Gilbert writes of the need “to reform … a thousand years of Western culture” (32). She encourages women “to review, reimagine, rethink, rewrite, revise, and reinterpret the events and documents that constitute” history, because history has excluded the female half of humanity (32). The image of the Mexican woman demonstrates perfectly this need for revisionary tactics. Although she has not been entirely excluded from history, her characterization has hardly been favorable, with two mythical stereotypes, both negative, permeating Mexican culture: La Chingada, who suffers the stigma of betrayal and prostitution, and La Virgen, the maternal figure, who “in Mexico is always characterized as suffering, humble, and passive” (Leal 232). Octavio Paz summarizes this problem best in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “Mexicans consider women … an instrument … of the desires of man, or of the ends assigned to her by … society, … about which she has never been consulted and in whose execution she only participates passively as a depository of certain values. Whether as a prostitute [or] goddess … women transmit or preserve, but do not [create], the values … entrusted to them. … In a world made in man's image, women are only a reflection of masculine will and desire.” (35)³ Thus, women find themselves posited as “man's Other: his negative mirror image,” a view that men need to maintain in order to prevent women from being complete without them (Moi 133). This inability to define themselves other than as the reflection of men deprives women of any chance to arrive at a self-formed definition of self and denies the specificity of their experiences and modes of expression (Moi 135).

For Clara in La señora, Professor García initiates the life-long cycle of influential men who stifle her imagination and individuality. In effect, the freedom that she enjoyed until the age of eight ended with the beginning of her education, which introduced her to men's laws. After describing the times in which she was free to be herself and to enjoy a world unbound by patriarchal strictures, Clara at fifty asks Clara at eight, “¿Te acuerdas?” (347) [Do you remember? (59)].⁴ She replies, “Sí, me acuerdo; pero vino el profesor García” (347) [Yes, I remember. But Mr. García, the teacher, came along (59)]. The teacher's influence is paradoxical in that he introduces Clara to the concept of the fabulous, mythical city of Nineveh and its possibilities while telling her that she cannot pursue this dream because “Nínive … ya no existe” (350) [Nineveh … doesn't exist anymore (62)]. He wants to guide her away from what, for Clara, represents the only chance for freedom and finding her true identity. Mr. García's insistence that “Nadie puede irse por los siglos” (351) [But you can't cross the centuries (62)] further underscores the futility of her search, since returning to the origin of time is exactly what she must do in order to reshape her history as her own story.

After the teacher, two other domineering men enter Clara's life, and, appropriately enough, she accuses each of being another Mr. García. Andrés makes no attempt to hide his ideas concerning the place of women, telling Clara, “me importa sólo … oír el ritmo de tambores de tus pasos, la música geométrica de tu falda, el golpe marino de tu garganta, único puerto en dónde puedo anclar” (352) [All that's important is … to hear the rhythm of the drum-beats of your steps, the geometric music of your skirt, the beating of the sea in your throat, the only port where I can anchor (63)]. The words ritmo, música geométrica, pasos, golpe, and anclar give the impression that the regularity and predictability that Clara resists are exactly what Andrés expects. Moreover, his requirements—especially of a port for anchoring—support Luce Irigaray's observation that men see providing stability for their own identities as one of women's major functions.

Andrés's domination of Clara often takes the form of silencing, as he orders her: “¡Cállate! No digas esas cosas, es como salar de mi dicha” (353) [Be quiet. Don't say those things. It's like spoiling my happiness (64)]. Such mandates emphasize Clara's need to find an individual means of self-expression. Unfortunately, when she does try to speak in her own language about a reality uniquely her own (Nineveh), Andrés fails to understand and attributes her irrational ramblings to Freudian hysteria: “No vuelvas a repetir eso. Estás muy exaltada, no sabes lo que dices” (354) [Don't say that to me again. You're very excited, you don't know what you're saying (65)]. Nevertheless, Andrés's most severe form of repression is his ability to relegate Clara to nonexistence in one of two ways: he either does not appear to care about what she says—“¡Vida mía! ¡No me importa lo que dices” (352) [My love! I don't care what you say (63)]; or he completely ignores her, as when, after her fantastic description of Nineveh, he responds as if she had never spoken and continues discussing their future together in terms that contrast with Clara's need for spontaneity and non-conformity.

Clara eventually leaves Andrés, only to marry Julio, with whom she has the life that she never wanted, the one she feared and fled when she left Andrés. Julio, too, believes that Clara is crazy; he attempts to stifle her imagination, because the woman who imagines poses a threat to the stability of men's existence (Moi 136). In this marriage, Clara gets caught up in the same tedium and repetition about which her husband always complains: “¿Sabes lo que es el infierno? Es la repetición. Y todos los días repetimos el mismo gesto, la misma frase. … Estamos en el infierno, condenados a repetirnos para siempre …” (355) [Do you know what hell is? It's repetition. And every day we repeat the same gestures, the same sentences, … We're in hell, condemned to repeat ourselves forever (66)]. Because the man with whom she chose to travel through life is locked into a circular pattern and going nowhere, so is Clara. In the opening lines, Garro introduces the images of circularity found in the repetitious nature of life with Julio:

CLARA:
¿Cuál fue el día, cuál la Clara que me dejó sentada en este balcón, mirándome a mí misma? … Hubo un tiempo en que corría por el mundo, cuando era plano y hermoso. Pero los compases, las leyes y los hombres lo volvieron redondo y empezó a girar sobre sí mismo. … Antes, los ríos corrían como yo, libres; todavía no los encerraban en el círculo maldito … ¿Te acuerdas?
(Entra a escena CLARA, de ocho años. …)
CLARA de 8 Años:
(A CLARA en el balcón.) Sí, me acuerdo; pero vino el profesor García … (347)
[CLARA:
What day was it, what Clara was it who left me here sitting on this balcony, looking at myself? … There was a time I ran through the world, when it was flat and beautiful. But the compasses and laws and men made it round, and it began to spin round itself. … Before, the rivers used to run as I did, free; they were not yet enclosed in the cursed circle … Do you remember? (CLARA, at eight years old, enters). …
CLARA, at eight:
(To CLARA on the balcony.) Yes, I remember. But Mr. García, the teacher, came along. (57)]

The images of entrapment in this passage characterize Clara's search as endless, always leading back to its point of origin. The adjective redondo [round], the círculo maldito [cursed circle], girar for the image of a world spinning round and round itself, and the verb encerraban [enclosed, confined], are all rather straightforward, but there are other representations here and elsewhere that warrant further consideration.

The compases [compasses, spherical instruments] carry two possible connotations. The first refers to the instrument used to draw arcs and circles, like the one the teacher uses on his blackboard to signify the roundness of the world that Clara wants to flee. The second indicates the compass used to determine navigational directions, which suggests a destiny guided by external forces beyond one's control (the men directing Clara's life), just as the compass is controlled by magnetism.⁵

Whereas the compass represents Mr. García's primary instrument of enclosure, Andrés uses the engagement ring as his mark of ownership. If Clara were to accept his ring, she would be consenting to have her every move mandated by him; as his choice of words—“hablo para siempre”—reveals, in the traditional, patriarchal household his word would be law.⁶ Andrés offers Clara the ring as a sign that he will love her forever, but Clara views it as a sign that she will be forever entrapped. The ring still signifies entrapment after Clara marries Julio; her life endlessly traces the ring's spherical shape as she repeats monotonous daily patterns, just as the round world in the opening passage spins around itself relentlessly with Clara as its axis.

Another complex image of entrapment lies in the contrast between the world that is flat and beautiful and the one, made round by modern men, that spins like a merry-go-round Clara cannot stop or slow. This distinction recalls the different concepts of time that Doris Meyer points out in her study of Garro's La semana de colores. Meyer distinguishes between a “lineal and progressive” concept of time and a Mexican one, which is “multiple and simultaneous” and leads to “aborted and unfulfilled destinies” (156). Clara envisions the world as flat, as did the men of antiquity, associating it with linearity, beauty, freedom, and the infinite, believing that it will allow her to progress and escape the circular repetition of her daily routine. This notion renders a round world unacceptable to Clara, because she is certain that such a surface would direct the river's flow along its circular shape, leaving no other choice but a perpetual return to its origin. To Clara, a flat world offers endless possibilities for freedom to shape her destiny. It matters little that circles can also engage one in an infinite variety of patterns. Mr. García promoted the view of a round world, and since his teachings mark the beginning of the cycle of limitation for her, Clara can accept only a view that opposes his. Also, she did as she pleased before learning about the new, revised theory of the world as round, and she wants to return to that state of freedom. Moreover, the circular must be rejected if only because such images are too closely connected to entrapment for anything round to be acceptable.

Nevertheless, Clara experiences an unavoidable conflict because, as both Irigaray and Cixous maintain, women must return to their origins in order to begin their revision of history. Clara's need to rewrite requires that she begin her revisionary act at the beginning of time, when the world offered a utopian existence, so that she can make a fresh start from a world not shaped—rounded—by men's laws. After reaching the origin and undertaking the revision, however, she must eventually reject the circular, or its cyclical pattern of limitation will repeat itself. Clara's refusal to abandon her dream of Nineveh indicates that once circularity has served its purpose, she will indeed opt for the linear and the many possibilities it offers.

Clara's affinity for the linear does not mean that Garro's work is written in a linear manner. In fact, it reflects Irigaray's belief that such a reading should be impossible: “the retroactive impact of … each word, utterance, or sentence upon its beginning must be taken into consideration in order to undo the power of its teleological effect, including its deferred action” (81). In La señora, the conclusion, beginning with the final dialogue between the Claras at forty and fifty years old, brings the play's action full-circle: it recalls the work's opening passage and the reason for Clara's self-interrogation, and shows how she will alleviate her feelings of desperation.

Garro further disrupts traditional chronological unity by having Clara at fifty step out of herself to question Clara at other ages. This technique begins with Clara's simple question to herself at eight—“¿Te acuerdas?”. Discourse presented as memory is naturally subject to chronological ruptures because “we rarely remember things in chronological sequence” (Duncan 118). Robert Anderson identifies this narration oriented by memory as one of two primary motifs in Garro's works; the other is the circular, repetitive trajectory of history, which is also pertinent here because a “slipping back in time is a symbolic expression” of the notion of unfulfilled destiny (25). When Clara at fifty addresses her question to a memory of herself, reality and illusion are fused for her as well as for the reader. Garro then presents Clara's life as a series of flashbacks that put dialogues in the present tense, as if they were occurring at that moment. Additional rupture comes from the older Clara's interjections that presage the future or that advise and warn the younger Clara, completely destroying any sense of chronological unity that might have been preserved by the flashbacks' internal progression from childhood to adulthood.

The division of characters that Garro uses to manipulate time also reveals an inner separation within Clara that has a great deal to do with the character's imminent choice to relieve her desperation through suicide. When she asks herself which Clara left her seated on her balcony in a suicidal state, Clara indicates that she considers her identity multiple, not single, and, more importantly, that she feels betrayed by some part of herself. Just before she jumps, Clara experiences an anagnorisis when she realizes that there have been not one, but two sources of repression: one external, one internal. In essence, the external factors are the men in her life, and the internal, self-imposed obstacles are her unwise decisions about how to deal with the external ones. Granted, Clara at all ages clings to the dream of searching for Nineveh, one of the ancient cities of power that offered irresistible possibilities for escape and freedom. Despite being ridiculed as foolish and childish, the middle-aged Clara still contains the eight-year-old Clara. Trapped in marriage, she stares into the dust stirred up from the furniture she cleans (symbolic of her decaying existence and the dung heap where she believes men threw Nineveh) and imagines that the colors reflected in it represent Nineveh's sun and rivers. That she always searches, at least in her mind, is confirmed by her travels “por la pata de una silla” (356) [through the leg of a chair (66)] that provide her only outlet or escape.

Even so, by waiting fifty years to break free from her life's pattern (teacher r Andrés r Julio), by continuing to mimic men's image of her, Clara limited her options; and by suppressing her desires for so many years, she betrayed herself. This betrayal instills a feeling of self-alienation that stems from the belief that one of the other persons existing within her, represented by the Claras at eight, twenty, and forty, has become her most formidable enemy. One of them abandoned the eight-year-old Clara and her dreams by allowing her to become resigned, for fifty years, to a patriarchal definition of self. Clara's inner enemy is the most difficult to conquer because of the concept of unity that guides her initial search. Even her mythical vision of Nineveh gives away her longing for oneness. Cixous maintains that “biblical and mythological imagery signals … investment in the world of myth: that, like the distant country of fairy tales is perceived as … unity. … The mythical … discourse presents a universe where all difference, struggle and discord can in the end be satisfactorily resolved” (Moi 116). Cixous continues by noting the water images associated with myth, which recall Clara's many thoughts about Nineveh's rivers and the ports that open to the Sargasso Sea that she wants to navigate in search of her city.

The most problematic aspect of Clara's notion of unity lies in her conviction that it is impossible to reach her dream without a man. Her desire for oneness with a man is understandable, in part, if one considers Cixous's theories. Rather than aim for exclusion of the Other, the critic calls for a multiple concept of woman, which allows for the recognition of both the male and the female in one being, without suppressing woman's difference and the specificity of her experience. This is unlike Irigaray's Sameness, which “eradicates the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representative of a ‘masculine subject’” (74). Clara fails to recognize the difference between these two concepts soon enough, having so internalized the male view of her as to believe that she can have no identity without his specular image. Irigaray stipulates that although women must first accept and internalize men's view of them, they must then begin the rescripting of their lives. Clara finds that she waits too long to act and, therefore, considers suicide her only alternative; with her leap from the balcony, Clara will shatter the mirror that excludes the feminine reflection, which she must find in order to write her own definition of self.

Clara's misconception of unity first manifests itself in her relationship with Andrés, to whom she says, “Tú y yo seremos el mismo río; y llegaremos hasta Nínive … yo pido … un acuerdo para, después de vivir, seguir viviendo siempre juntos, inseparables. … Yo te pido la voluntad de ser uno” (352-353) [You and I will be the same river, and we will reach Nineveh … I'm asking for an agreement so that, after living, we can continue to live together forever, inseparable. … I ask you for the will to become one (62-63)]. She soon realizes that Andrés cannot appreciate her wish to be one with him:

ANDRéS:
… ¿No quieres el anillo? ¿Me rechazas?
CLARA:
Digo que eso no es el amor … el amor es estar solo en este hermoso mundo … y llegar a Nínive. … El amor, Andrés, no es vivir juntos; es morir siendo una misma persona. … Tú no me amas. (354)
[ANDRéS:
… Don't you want the ring? Are you rejecting me?
CLARA:
I say that is not love. … Love is being alone in this beautiful world … and reaching Nineveh. … Love, Andrés, is not living together; it's dying as the same person. … You don't love me. (64-65)]

This revelation causes Clara to insist that she must be free from marital conventions in order to reach Nineveh. Yet she still guards her hope of unity and the possibility of achieving it with a man, which leads her to marriage after all, once again delaying her active search.

Clara fails to learn as quickly with Julio, telling him that “Nadie se salva solo. Uno se salva en el otro” (357) [Nobody can save himself alone. One person saves himself in another (67)]. Julio's rejection of her ideas is harsh as he informs her that her life “no es sino una perpetua huida” (356) [is nothing but a perpetual flight (66)]. Though cruel, at least he provides her with the incentive to embark on her final journey when he insists that she leave him alone, forcing her to accept the fact that she will have to find Nineveh by herself. He also moves Clara toward recognition of the enemy that she carries within when he suggests she take a good, hard look at herself in the mirror.

Interestingly, Irigaray's idea of women as a specular image of men takes on an added dimension here. As Clara watches herself at various stages (and stages they are, upon which she acts out the role assigned to her), she views herself as in a mirror. The reflection she sees has two facets: in one, Clara sees herself conforming to the male image, as his Other; in the other, she is reflected in—and evaluated against—the mirror of her own eyes and standards. This dual reflection helps Clara realize that much of her problem lies within herself. In the first, she must face the Clara who had internalized male standards for women. This image reflected in men's eyes constitutes the external source of repression, the one that Clara was least able to control since people naturally depend on others to help establish their identity. Thus, Clara can be defended as behaving “normally” for having accepted the male image that she thought was necessary in order to be complete. In the second, however, she sees that in order to truly live, she must reject the male specular image in favor of a female one. By standing in front of the mirror of her own eyes, she provides herself with just such a female specular image, and it shows her the problems with her previous acquiescent behavior. Clara can no longer deny that she contributed to her own self-limitation because she had never questioned why she used a male image to define herself.

With a new image that reflects her specificity, Clara may start her history anew, shaping an identity based on something familiar, not Other, that does not exclude her. Clara finds, however, that she has internalized the male image to such an extent that she can only escape it through the complete destruction of her body. Paradoxically, she can begin to live only through death. It might seem, at this point, that Clara would abandon all hope for unity, but only her conception of it changes. She now seeks union with a specifically female image—her own—as she endeavors to reconcile the division she feels within. Once that reconciliation has been attained, Clara will enjoy a oneness of self that will reunite her with the Clara at eight whom she left alone with her dream. When she leaves Julio, Clara departs on what will be her final journey, since it leads to death, but also her most fulfilling, proving to be the first real step toward taking control. Now that she recognizes that she must travel alone, the possibility for internal change exists.

The concept of union with one's own self—the perfect union—recalls a mystical notion, which Irigaray identifies as the only space of women (Lemaitre 1011-1013). Moi finds that mysticism appeals to Irigaray because it brings about a “division of the subject/object opposition” (136), which Cixous also supports. Irigaray asserts that mysticism's “ecstatic vision … is one that seems to escape specularity. … The mystic's self-representation escapes the specular logic of nonrepresentation imposed on her under patriarchy. … [Her] often self-inflicted abjection paradoxically opens up a space where her own pleasure can unfold” (Moi 137). In Clara's case, the self-inflicted abjection corresponds to her self-imposed repression, and her new space will be death, which results when the frustration of her situation becomes too much to bear.

Once she understands that her inner division must be unified, Clara embarks on a final, solitary search for Nineveh. In the process of this quest she realizes that she was partly responsible for the restrictions placed upon her. She spent her life running away from men, only to discover in the end that all those years of flight and search were misguided because the problem ultimately lay within herself: “Ahora sé que sólo me falta huir de mí misma para alcanzarla [la ciudad de Nínive]. Eso debería haber hecho desde que supe que existía. ¡Me hubiera evitado tantas lágrimas!” (358) [Now I know that all I need is to flee from myself to reach it (the city of Nineveh). That's what I should have done as soon as I found out it existed. I could have avoided so many tears! (68)]. With this comment, the work's end unites with its beginning, adding greater meaning to Clara's earlier admission that she did remember the times before her resignation. Her words indicate that she was aware of the external source of repression—men—but chose, nevertheless, to continue almost mindlessly along the same path, always holding on to her dreams but never acting positively to make them reality. Now, the unity she wants is with the Clara at eight who defended the dream of Nineveh, not with the one who abandoned and betrayed that child. This is the second paradox of Clara's suicide—she can achieve unity with herself only by fleeing from herself. What she needed all along was to face herself, a fact alluded to by Andrés:

ANDRéS:
… ¿Por qué huyes? Tienes miedo. …
CLARA:
No tengo miedo.
ANDRéS:
Sí, miedo de ti misma, … (351)
[ANDRéS:
Why are you running away? You are afraid. …
CLARA:
I am not afraid.
ANDRéS:
Yes, you are afraid of yourself. … (62)]

The stage direction that immediately follows this passage—Descubriéndose—can be taken literally as an uncovering of herself, her face.⁷ Yet, descubrir also means to discover, in which case the reflexive form of the verb suggests forthcoming insight into Clara and her potential discovery of her inner self. As such, Garro implies that her protagonist knew subconsciously that Andrés's accusation had substance, even though she denied the fact and continued her search with Julio.

Although Clara finally took a positive step by leaving Julio, her journey without a man still followed a circular path. She reflects on the situation in a dialogue with the forty-year-old Clara: “Me fui de viaje y llegué a mí misma” (357) [I went away on a trip and came to myself (67)]. The following exchange identifies the internal problem of Clara's participation in her own repression, which will ultimately result in the solution of a suicidal leap from her balcony. Ironically, Clara at forty, the dreamer, now becomes the voice of reality; the once pessimistic Clara at fifty, who criticized the futility of a journey, now finds the idea appealing and inevitable, because it offers her what she always wanted:

CLARA de 40 Años:
No puedes escaparte más. Has huido del profesor García … de Andrés … de Julio siempre buscando algo que te faltaba. Era Nínive … el tiempo infinito … Ya no puedes huir para salir en busca. Dime: ¿Qué vas a hacer?
CLARA de 50 Años:
… Iré al encuentro de Nínive y del infinito tiempo. … Ya sólo me falta el gran salto para entrar en la ciudad plateada. … (358)
[CLARA at 40:
You can't escape anymore. You ran away from Prof. García, you ran away from Andrés … from Julio, always looking for something that was missing. It was Nineveh, it was infinite time … but you can't run away anymore to go looking for it. Tell me. What are you going to do?
CLARA at 50:
I'm going to find Nineveh and infinite time. … All that's missing now is the great leap to enter the silver city. (68)

When Clara began her reminiscing, she feared the journey, and warned the younger Clara, “¡No huyas del pizarrón … la huida no te va a llevar sino al balcón!” (351) [Don't flee from the blackboard … running away will only lead you to the balcony (62)]. Now, however, she looks forward to the journey and does not fear the balcony, nor the fate that awaits her there. Clara's death—her gran salto—will free her from the confines of the patriarchal world and permit her to reach Nineveh. It is precisely this reversal in roles and attitudes that makes it possible to view Clara's suicide as a positive, self-assertive action.

This by no means suggests that the work advocates suicide as a real-life alternative to an unpleasant condition of being. In a dramatic context, however, extreme acts serve well to shock the audience into awareness of the need for change. Moreover, in Clara's case, the death of Clara at fifty may be viewed favorably as the (re)birth of the eight-year-old Clara, who most strongly resisted patriarchal law. Clara sees death as a remedial action that will finally lead her to happiness, and as the chance to correct the mistake of engaging in the useless flights that had rendered meaningless her life in a patriarchal reality. Suicide is presented to her as an active, control-taking move because it will permit her to reembark on a solitary, independent journey to Nineveh.

In a study of other works in which Garro ends her protagonist's life, Mark Frisch has shown that death, including suicide, offers the protagonist a “second chance … and represents, to some extent, an affirmation of the human spirit” (187). This is especially true in the works that lend themselves to a feminist reading, as Monique Lemaitre has noted: “Garro opta por la ‘muerte,’ único tiempo verdaderamente ‘femenino’ en su obra” (1010) [Garro opts for death, the only truly feminine time in her work].⁸ Lemaitre maintains that for Garro, “el único espacio que les pertenece [a las mujeres] es el de la imaginación que crea sus propios recuerdos que son pulsiones de muerte” (1011) [the only space that pertains to women is the imagination, which creates its own memories that are impulses toward death]. She further argues that in Garro's works, death provides an attractive alternative for the female protagonist who, like Clara, desires an infinite time. Death is the atemporal space where the suppressed hope to find a world where they can act as the lawmakers and creators of their own identities (Lemaitre 1013).

In The Savage God, A. Alvarez identifies a feeling of self-alienation common to most suicides. He also distinguishes one particular motivation for suicide that recalls Clara's situation, because it distinguishes the act as an avenue through which people hope to “achieve a calm and control they never find in life … to create an unencumbered reality for themselves or to break through the patterns of obsession and necessity which they have unwittingly imposed on their lives” (131-132). Alvarez maintains that the reason most of us do not commit suicide is that the fear of life is outweighed by the fear of death and “the next world” (137). Such a fear does not deter Clara, nor is it supported by the beliefs of her culture's indigenous ancestors, who viewed this life as preparation for life after death in the realm of the eternal—the realm of true life.

Alvarez's study includes a quote from Artaud that expresses what suicide may represent for Clara:

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself. … By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will. I free myself from the conditioned reflexes …, which are so badly adjusted to my inner self, and life is for me no longer an absurd accident whereby I think what I am told to think. But now I choose my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality. … I put myself in suspension.

(131)

Crucial here to Garro's treatment of suicide is the need to reconquer the self, as in Clara's need to repossess herself from men and from the Clara conquered by men. The notion of shaping destiny according to one's own will also recalls Clara's desire for a change from always doing what was expected of her to doing what she wants. Artaud depicts life before death as one controlled by others: conditioned and absurd. Suicide brings a new life after life in the form of death, which allows one a choice and creates a reality that is specifically one's own.

Clara's suicide is the act that makes La señora en su balcón a revisionary creation. Without this final act, which Clara utilizes to subvert the traditional interpretation of suicide as acquiescence and to empower herself, the play would merely offer itself to a semiotic analysis of repression. The decision to exit one world in order to continue living in another renders Clara the author of her own history as she refuses “to let others finalize … her character” (Boschetto 8). She affirms her belief in the reality of Nineveh, choosing “to merge with the ultimate point at which life and death meet … in the vast expanse of infinite time in which Nínive is reality” (Larson 11). With Clara's gran salto, Garro shows that women do have a choice as to whether or not they will passively accept the roles predetermined for them in patriarchal societies, and further suggests that they must act or be forever entrapped. Garro uses her authority as a writer to produce a rewriting that “becomes the site both of challenge and Otherness” (Jacobus 12) and that offers a rescripting of the archaic myth of the compliant woman.

Notes

1. For more detailed summaries see Frank Dauster's “El teatro de Elena Garro: Evasión e Ilusión” and Vicky Unruh's “(Free)/Plays of Difference: Language and Eccentricity in Elena Garro's Theater.”

2. Michèle Muncy's interview with Garro in A Different Reality contains a detailed account of the author's life. As this book went to press, we were informed of Garro's death, 22 August 1998.

3. This translation is as it appears in Kemp's edition, except that I have included the change from “believe in” to “create” made by Luis Leal, who finds the former to be an error.

4. Translation by Beth Miller in A Different Reality.

5. The Vox Diccionario manual ilustrado de la lengua española offers both definitions after the entry compás: “1) instrumento, para trazar arcos de circunferencia y tomar distancias, formado por dos piernas agudas, unidas en su extremidad superior por un eje o clavillo, 2) Brújula, esp. la usada en la navegación” (295). The former is the first definition listed, and the latter is the third listed.

6. Beth Miller translates Andrés “hablo para siempre” as “I mean forever” in reference to the ring signifying that his love for Clara will last forever. This is an acceptable translation given the context in which it occurs, but it offers only one possible connotation. I prefer the literal meaning of hablo—I speak—for the purpose of this essay.

7. In her translation, Beth Miller adds “her face” to the word discovering, although it is not in the original Spanish version (Stoll 62).

8. My translation of Lemaitre here and elsewhere.

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