SOURCE: Eysturoy, Annie O. “Trini: A Chicana Quest Myth.” In Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel, pp. 57-84. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Eysturoy views Trini as a Chicana bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story.]

Female, a Quixote is no Quixote at all; told about a woman, the tale of being caught in a fantasy becomes the story of everyday life.

—Rachel Brownstein

Trini (1986), by Estela Portillo Trambley, is perhaps the most conventional of the Chicana Bildungsromane under consideration in this study. Its narrative pattern is essentially chronological, showing a continuous development from childhood to maturity, much in keeping with the linear structural paradigm of the traditional male Bildungsroman. The story of the protagonist, Trini, is told in third person by an omniscient narrator and conforms to the convention of tracing the development through different stages of the heroic quest for identity, but with the essential differences social and cultural conditions generate in respect to female development. Like many narratives that cover the development from childhood to maturity, Trini carries, to use Annis Pratt's phrase, “the undertones of the mythic” (1981, 13). Employing the motif of the journey, an important element in quest myths, the author traces the Bildungs process of Trini, from her childhood in the Mexican valley of Bachotigori during the 1920s to the difficult migration north into the United States where in the early 1950s she is finally able to settle down in Valverde, Texas. The narrative outline of Trini is structured around the basic patterns of the psycho-mythological “myth of the hero” as it has been outlined by Jung, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell, but with the notable distinctions characterizing a female heroic quest. These deviations in heroic development illustrate Pratt's contention that “if there is a ‘myth of the hero’ there must be a ‘myth of the heroine,’ a female as well as a male bildungsroman, parallel, perhaps, but by no means identical” (1971, 877). In Trini's Bildungs process we perceive the broad outlines of the challenges and pitfalls of female development, that is, the developmental phases that form the basic pattern of “the myth of the heroine.” Trini illustrates how the happy denouement of the traditional male Bildungsroman carries quite different consequences when it comes to the female quest for self. Being a Chicana Bildungsroman it reveals, furthermore, the additional hardships social and cultural circumstances present in the protagonist's Bildungs process.

In the prologue, Trini is confronted with a portrait of herself, a symbolic creation that she recognizes as her own image:

The figure of Trini on canvas was painted into the light, almost as if it had appeared out of the depths of rocks and earth. The whole body was a movement of strength, sustained, yet free. There was something mystical about her eyes, dark, looking to the level of the living, yet seeing beyond. The hair flew loose and long in the wind. The most amazing thing in the painting were the feet, bare, brown, seeming to grow out of the earth itself. … Yes, thought Trini, it is me. What I am inside. … She had seen many women like herself, who had crossed a river illegally into the United States. So many brown women faceless in the world. Yet, here she was. Only she, a life etched in an unpoised moment, in a fragment of continuous change, all spelled out to its very beginning and all the beginnings to follow.

(7)

Trini's recognition of her own being as strong and free, her life “spelled out to its very beginning and all the beginnings to follow,” foreshadows the story of her Bildungs process, the stages in her life that have led up to this instance of self-recognition. The author's choice to introduce this Bildungsroman with a portrait of the Chicana Bildungsheld is significant because the German word Bildung was originally a synonym of Bild, that is, imago or portrait.¹ Because Bild translates as the artistic formation of a material into an exemplary model, the opening scene takes on a double meaning: Trini's portrait, much like the novel itself, becomes symbolic of an exemplary Bild/Bildung of one of “the many brown women faceless in the world” (7).

Another important aspect of this initial prologue is Trini's recognition of the portrait as an authentic reflection of herself. This points to a concern that formed part of the Chicano literary endeavors from the very beginning, namely the creation of authentic images reflecting the Chicano cultural and social identity. In the preface to the first Chicano anthology to be published, El Espejo (1969), the editors declared that “to know themselves, to know who they are, some need nothing more than to see their own reflection” (5). The Chicana, however, has until recently for the most part encountered only distorted reflections of herself. While contemporary Chicano literature has modified the predominantly negative image of the Chicana in Anglo-American fiction, she has with few exceptions been typecast into secondary roles with little attention to her individuality, her life as a Chicana. It is therefore not surprising that Trini, among the first Chicana novels to be published, is introduced by a supposedly authentic image of the protagonist, symbolic of the novelistic intent to create an authentic literary image of a Chicana.

Close ties to Mexico form an important part of Chicano cultural reality. The continuous migrations north across the Mexican-American border of 1848 reinforce these cultural ties and, at the same time, call attention to the geopolitical nature of the border. Thus several early works by Chicano authors use Mexico as the point of departure in order to render a literary depiction and interpretation of the migration north across the border into the United States and the social and cultural consequences of that migration.² This experience, however, was rendered from a male perspective without attention to the particular risks such migration may present to women. Given the fact that Chicanas “represent one of the most ignored and neglected groups of ethnic women in American society today” (Enríquez, 105), the women coming across the border from Mexico, las indocumentadas, have remained virtually invisible, the drama of their lives unacknowledged. In keeping with the general intent by Chicana authors to explore and articulate their identity as women of Mexican descent, Trini stands as a literary attempt to draw a symbolic portrait of one of the “faceless” indocumentadas; the experiences she confronts migrating north form part of her Bildungs process and shape her understanding of her individual self.

With Trini we enter into the world of Bachotigori, Mexico, a pastoral green valley, the archetypal Eden, poised in a seemingly timeless space. Shaped by indigenous beliefs, the mestizo community in the valley lives in harmonious coexistence with nature: “The people of the valley planted after the winds of February, everyone sharing the crops for miles around. No one person owned the land” (16). It is a world where the gods speak through the winds and the land is peopled by duendes, elf-like beings, and magic dwarfs who play with the children. This archetypal green world constitutes the microcosm of Trini's childhood.

Our initial introduction into this harmonious green world is accompanied by the death of Trini's mother. In light of Trini being a Bildungsroman, the death of the mother takes on special significance as it signals the disruption of Trini's social and emotional context and the initiation of the subsequent search for self. According to Nancy Chodorow a girl must model herself on her mother if she is to have “a strong, healthy, sex-appropriate identity” (60) within a particular social context. A fictional mother's death, then, indicates an absence of the maternal role model, which would insure the daughter of “an unencumbered ascent as a self-made person” (Gardiner, 1978, 244). The death of Trini's mother through a miscarriage, that is, as a victim of her own body and her biological social role, thus becomes a catalyst for Trini's own search for selfhood and a viable existence as a woman.

Sabochi, a young Tarahumara Indian, plays a central role throughout Trini's childhood; he is her guide into the natural and spiritual world, who makes “nature gods quite real” and speaks of the winds of “freedom, change, timelessness” (19). Through him she comes to recognize how closely she is connected to the valley, that “it is something in the blood,” and that her sense of self is intimately related to “the love of the earth, the ways of the valley” (39), a vision of herself that will guide her throughout her life. This portrait of Trini as a free spirit at one with the green world coincides with Simone de Beauvoir's observation that the adolescent girl

will devote a special love for Nature; still more than the adolescent boy, she worships it. Unconquered, inhuman, Nature subsumes most clearly the totality of what exists. The adolescent girl has not as yet acquired for her use any portion of the universal: hence it is her kingdom as a whole; when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes possession of herself.

(405)

It is in nature that Trini feels a sense of independence and wholeness. Her vision of herself as connected to a mystical natural sphere and her experiences of what has been termed “the green-world epiphany” (Pratt, 1981, 170) will in the course of her Bildung serve as touchstones in her quest for identity and selfhood.

As Trini grows into adolescence her feelings for Sabochi change: whereas before she had related to him as her playmate and a guide who could introduce her into the mysteries of life, she now sees him as a man who arouses “strange new magical feelings” (18) in her. Sabochi's departure becomes significant as it terminates their “chaste love” (N. Frye, 200) relationship and thereby also the innocent phase of Trini's life; her relationship to men will henceforth be of a different nature. Trini's first encounter with love in this green valley, reminiscent of the “prelapsarian mythic garden world where the male and female once existed as equals” (Goodman, 30), or of “the archetype of erotic innocence” (N. Frye, 200), forms an important part of her development, as it represents an independence she will slowly lose with her introduction into the norms of womanhood. This phase of Trini's development constitutes the green-world archetype of female development, the place “from which she sets forth and a memory to which she returns for renewal” (Pratt, 1981, 17), and it remains throughout her Bildungs process the ideal state of wholeness she tries to recapture in her quest for self.

Trini's discovery of this new emotional part of her being signals a turning point in her life, a moment when she no longer relates to the world as a child, but rather as a young woman:

The rain was falling hard. Its excitement was her excitement. She opened her mouth to breathe in the wetness of the world, the discovery of herself, the greyness of the world empty of a Sabochi that would always be the thunder and lightning of her life. The excitement grew as if the world were opening up to strange, terrible things, with such beauty.

(22)

These new sensations change Trini's perceptions of herself: as she becomes aware that “life was no longer a mere design of colors and dreams like the rainbow rocks” (29), she slowly withdraws from the world of her childhood. This emerging of a sensual being sends Trini to the mirror to contemplate her own reflection, finding “a trace of womanliness in the shape of mouth,” yet still “a child's face, a face wanting so many things unhad” (34). Her glance into the mirror for her own self-image is a search for a viable self, a search for answers to who she is, and although her mirror image does not give her any answers about her self-identity, the traces of “womanliness” she finds in her still childlike face suggest that her transformation into a woman has begun.

These personal changes that Trini undergoes are paralleled and underscored by changes taking place in her social world, the harmonious green world of her childhood. The presence of foreign economic interests has violated indigenous sacred beliefs about the nature of gold and destroyed its significance to the communal identity and its relationship to nature. The presence of gold in the valley used to be a sign of a valley being “the sacred ground of Gods” (16), but now this sacred light has turned out to be “gold, only gold” (16), an indication that “the gods have left the valley” (17). This disruption of sacred beliefs, the breakdown of the previous harmony between the people, the land, and the spiritual world corresponds to the disruption of Trini's childhood, which causes a fragmentation of the wholeness she had experienced as a child in possession of herself.

Trini's departure from her childhood and its indigenous context is accompanied by her introduction to Catholicism. Tía Pancha becomes the prime purveyor of Catholic beliefs and introduces Christian concepts of human worthlessness into Trini's life; Trini is thus taught to think of herself as a sinner, “tainted and weak,” who should be “meek and humble” (35), in perpetual need of forgiveness from an omnipotent God. Apart from challenging Trini's concept of herself as closely connected to the indigenous spiritual world, the aunt's Catholic doctrines also influence her budding perceptions of herself as a woman. She is admonished about “the importance of virginity,” that “a girl must be very careful and remain unsullied up to her marriage day. She must go to her husband pure and dutiful” (95). Trini is made to understand her sexuality and the physiological changes she is undergoing in a patriarchal Christian context of physical prohibitions, rather than as part of the natural cycle of life. These Catholic concepts of sexuality change her perception of herself and further remove her from the magic innocence of her childhood. Her previous freedom and independence in the natural world stand in sharp contrast to these new restrictions placed upon her life as she is about to enter womanhood. These changes make her “long for the old way of life” (38). She has reached a stage in her development when the adolescent girl, according to social conventions of female conditioning, “slowly buries her childhood, puts away the independent and imperious being that was she, and enters submissively upon adult existence” (de Beauvoir, 408). Trini's Bildungs process is thus informed by traditional female conditioning, which prepares her for her role as a woman within a patriarchal system but which also will have far-reaching consequences when it comes to her quest for selfhood.

The foreign economic exploitation of the valley and the consequent violation of its spiritual world is followed by a religious intrusion that transforms the individual perception of self and its relationship to the cosmos. This repetition of the colonization process eventually drives Trini and her family out of their green valley. The departure from the harmonious world of the valley is paralleled with Trini's adolescent awakening of self, her loss of innocence and her separation from the unconscious state of her childhood. This internal as well as external separation, what Pearson and Pope term “the exit from the garden” (68), exemplifies the initial stage of the heroic journey toward self-fulfillment, a central theme of mythic quest stories. According to Joseph Campbell, this mythic quest is a symbolic reflection of the Bildungs process: “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage, separation-initiation-return, which might be the nuclear unit, the monomyth” (30). These three principal stages of the monomyth, enacted through an infinite variety of incidents that represent the various phases of the quest story, constitute the mythical journey, initiated by a departure and culminating in a successful reconciliation. Trini's departure from the green valley of her childhood is the initiation of her journey that will become a spiritual and social quest for wholeness and an authentic female identity. Henceforth, driven by the central urge to recapture the lost harmony of her childhood, a proposition that may be defined as an “unconscious quest for the impossible” (Salazar Parr and Ramirez, 1985, 57), Trini undergoes trials and experiences that test her sense of self and mold her into a woman who must reconsider her own relationship to the world in order to realize her self.

With the departure from the pastoral green world, Trini sets out on a journey that presents extreme dangers from natural forces as well as human beings. As with the traditional Bildungsheld, this passage into the land of trials represents “the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination” (Campbell, 109). The journey leads Trini to the Valley of San Domingo, “bleak and bare,” “dreary, interminable grey” hills enclosed by a desert, “a brown dry world” (81). It is in this barren wasteland, reminiscent of what Northrop Frye calls “the natural sterility of a fallen world” (189), the symbolic physical and psychological antithesis to the green valley of her childhood, that Trini undergoes her first trial, her sexual initiation.

In this valley an Indian girl is being held at the local brothel, El Jardín de Venus. The fact that the girl is said to have no name only underscores that women are both invisible and powerless in a patriarchal system.³ In their refusal to take pity on the girl, however, village women show their own conditioned complicity with patriarchal abuse of women and their alienation from their own status as women. When Trini helps the Indian girl to flee, she is attacked and violently raped. She eventually escapes, but when she tries to report the crime to the authorities, the policeman, “suggestive and lewd” (107), insinuates that being fifteen she probably provoked the sexual violation. This accusation leaves her a “painful chrysalis of helplessness and anger” (107) as it becomes clear that she, a woman, a mestiza, can claim no rights when it comes to socially sanctioned male prerogatives in respect to women. Trini's sexual initiation, rather than being a life-affirming experience, thus becomes a violent introduction into the conditions of womanhood.

Sexual initiation, playing an essential role in human development, represents one of the thematic features of the Bildungsroman. This inevitable initiation, however, often carries dramatically different implications for the female adolescent. Trini's sexual initiation is representative of a recurrent theme in female Bildungsromane, that is, the sexual violation. Sexual initiation in male Bildungsromane is generally portrayed as the adolescent protagonist's initiation into manhood, in other words, the initial proof of male prowess and power and therefore an affirmation of his male identity according to socio-sexual patriarchal ideology; a “hot-blooded taking” of a woman, sexual aggression, is thus portrayed as a sort of “baptism of fire in passion … the baptism of life” (Buckley, 208). For the female adolescent protagonist, however, the sexual initiation frequently carries quite different implications: physically weaker than her male counterpart, her initiation is often forced upon her against her will. Whereas a “hot-blooded taking” of a woman supposedly confirms manhood in an adolescent male, for the female adolescent, the object of such aggression, a forced sexual initiation becomes not only a physical violation, but a denigration of her integrity and personal identity as a woman. Her inability to avenge herself further underscores her defenselessness within a system that sanctions the violation of the female self in its physical and psychological integrity. Her sexual initiation is thus not a positive initiation into womanhood, but rather her initiation into the conditions of womanhood within a patriarchal system.

In Mexican and Chicano mythology, however, the metaphor of rape carries further significance as it associates the Chicana with the archetypal Malinche figure, also known as Doña Marina, who, according to legend, “politically and sexually betrayed indigenous Mexico by becoming Cortes' mistress on the eve of Spanish conquest” (Limón, 59). Through this legend the Malinche has come to represent, according to Octavio Paz, “the Chingada, … the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived” (79). This myth associates cultural/sexual rape with a woman's betrayal of her own people, a legend that has given shape to the Malinche archetype in Mexican/Chicano mythology.⁴ Within this cultural framework rape thus carries a double meaning in that it signifies not only a violation of the female self but becomes a symbol of collective rape. As Elizabeth Ordóñez maintains,

if rape has become a powerful image of woman's helplessness and subjugation before the sheer brute force of the male, then that universal trauma for all women becomes exacerbated in the Chicana experience by those remnants of the collective physical and cultural rape which she carries buried within her collective unconscious.

(328)

The psycho-mythological implications of Trini's sexual initiation are hinted at in the names Héctor and El Jardín de Venus. In Greek mythology Hector is the ideal warrior, characterized as a good son, a loving husband and father, and a trusty friend, and Venus, the goddess of fertility and love. In Trini, however, Héctor takes on the opposite characteristics and becomes the embodiment of a misogynous villain, while the Garden of Venus becomes the physical manifestation of sexual exploitation. That the rapist is a Eurocentric mythic hero is an implicit evocation of the cultural violation that the act of rape stands for in Mexican/Chicano mythology.

This use of mythical characters and the reversal of their general mythic identity are indicative of both the mythical nature of female development and the opposite nature of female sexual initiation, and typifies what Annis Pratt calls “the rape-trauma archetype” of female development. The fact that this rape-trauma archetype is “one of the most frequent plot structures in women's fiction” (1981, 5) testifies to the significance of sexual violation in female development. Rather than following “the path of initiatory conquest,” which defines the male heroic quest according to Campbell, the female heroic quest may be defined as following a path of initiatory defeats in which sexual subjugation plays a central role and stands as a metaphor for patriarchal violation of female identity that foreshadows a distinct female Bildungs course.

The sexual violation has a traumatic effect on Trini, yet it becomes a catalyst in her decision to forge her own destiny. Her dreams of a life reminiscent of that of her childhood having come to naught, dreams that included the Indian Sabochi as her loving mate, she is determined to put her negative experiences behind her, to find “a way out of old disappointments” (133) and shape a life of her own. Her decision to depart for the city provokes an essential confrontation with her father, who wants her to remain within the realm of family and cultural traditions. Although she has always identified with her father's beliefs and way of life, shaped by “Indian ways, Indian rhythms of the blood” (133), it becomes clear to her that a search for an authentic self includes breaking away from his way of life in an attempt to explore her own mestiza identity: “She didn't want to love all that was Indian anymore. She would learn about the city, become the city, learn to prefer her white blood” (133); doubts notwithstanding, she is determined to become a “city girl” and make a life for herself in the city. The journey that started in Bachotigori, the valley of her happy childhood, and led her to San Domingo, the valley of her violent sexual initiation, thus brings her to Chihuahua, the city where new challenges and trials will have a decisive influence on her Bildungs process.

In Chihuahua Trini becomes acquainted with women whose sole point of reference seems to be their respective husbands or lovers; the relationship to a man, or lack of the same, is the principal determinant of their lives. Within this circle of women, getting a casita is quite an accomplishment: “It was hard to find a man to set up a house for you, to pay expenses. Sometimes girls secretly admitted that getting a casita offered more advantages than marriage” (137). Their preference for a casita rather than marriage may be interpreted as an example of women's “refusal to abide by capitalist and patriarchal needs of ownership” (Gonzales-Berry, 2), yet a casita means only a temporary escape from poverty for these women whose importance is measured by their ability to accommodate to the roles of wife, mother, and/or sexual object. In the barrio the visible signs of poor women's economic dependency in exchange for sexual favors are omnipresent: “Casitas were sprinkled in all the poor neighborhoods where they stood out like sore thumbs with their fresh paint, picket fences, gardens, and many of the luxuries the poor could not afford” (141). Life seems to offer only two accessible options to the women of this poverty stricken barrio: either you marry or you become a paid mistress.

These economic and cultural conditions that divide the female population into either wives/mothers or whores are most clearly represented through Trini's roommates, Licha and Celia. The gentle and self-sacrificing Celia has two children and a husband who has contracted cancer from poisonous pesticides in the fields of California; after patiently waiting for his return she nurses him, suffering while she watches him slowly die. Licha, her diametrical opposite, is the embodiment of selfishness: good-looking and calculating, and seeing love as “childish and foolish” (145), she escapes poverty by marrying Don Alejandro, a rich old man whose fortune will provide her with future economic security; emotionally independent, Licha plans her life “like a careful mathematician” (145). This portrayal of Licha as calculating and insensitive is further underscored when later, despite her friendship with Trini, she is presented as the ruthless seductress of Trini's lover. Portillo Trambley here presents a social context where female bonding gives way to female competition for male favors: seeing herself as a male-defined object, Licha can only find a confirmation of her being in the eyes of a man and in her victory over another woman.

It may seem surprising that the author should choose to depict these two women in roles that do not go beyond the traditional stereotypes of Hispanic women. Celia and Licha are prime examples of what Judy Salinas has termed the “good” woman and the “bad” woman (192): Celia, patient and self-denying, can do no wrong and sacrifices herself for others; Licha, insatiate and craving, shuns no means to get what she wants. In the context of Trini's Bildungs process, however, these two women represent false role models, the false female prototypes Trini has to overcome in her quest for an authentic self. Both women see themselves as the “other” to a male counterpart, their role as women being realized only through their relationship to a man; although they appear to be diametrically opposite to each other, they only represent two faces of the same coin, as both adhere to male-imposed definitions of womanhood. These female prototypes represent the patriarchal trap of socially sanctioned roles. It therefore becomes crucial for the female protagonist to escape these traditional roles and patriarchal definitions of her female self; only then will she be able to continue her heroic journey toward self-fulfillment.

The test comes in the form of Tonio, a mujeriego (womanizer) whom Trini used to know as a child in the valley of Bachotigori. Tonio has his own image of Trini—“you'll always be a descalza [literally barefoot, or a country girl], in spite of the lipstick and high heels. … You are still Tonantzín” (148)—and Trini, now eighteen and searching for a viable self in the city, begins to see herself through his eyes and accepts his definitions of her as her own. In his role as “Prince Charming,” Tonio wants “to claim” (149) Trini, and Trini, flattered by his desire for her, acquiesces to his sexual seduction. Although she initially insists that she belongs to herself only, it is not long before she expresses her “joy of belonging” to Antonio (151), of being his desired possession. She automatically takes on the roles of both wife and mistress, existing passively in the shadow of his life, grateful for any attention he chooses to bestow upon her, without being conscious of the true nature of their relationship. It becomes clear, however, when Trini becomes pregnant that he is only interested in having her as a comforting mistress; refusing to give up his independence for a child, he abandons Trini for a new mistress, Licha. Living in an abandoned casita, her fate is a repetition of that of the woman who lived there before her, a continuation of a cycle of female dependency. Trini's “joy of belonging” is thus short-lived, making clear the deceptive security these roles have to offer. She is yet another victim of a patriarchal system of female objectification that only fosters rivalry and divides women against each other.

Trini's move to the city, her encounter with false female prototypes, and her subsequent ordeal as she falls into the patriarchal trap of female subordination and dependency, occupy a central phase in her Bildungs process. Her determination to come to the city to find herself is obscured by a patriarchal conditioning that is only reinforced by the predominant pattern of behavior among the women she encounters there. Despite her intentions to discover some clues to the meaning of her life, her experiences in the city remove her only further from her goal of personal authenticity. Her urban experience, the corruption and deception of the urban environment, thus contrasts sharply with the harmonious transcendence experienced in the natural setting of her childhood.

Trini's passage from home to the city is reminiscent of a recurrent theme in the traditional male Bildungsroman, the city often representing a source of corruption for the initiate. Despite its promise of infinite possibilities and newness, the city, as Buckley points out, “all too often brings disenchantment more alarming and decisive” loneliness weaken her resolution to shape her own life and push her back to Tonio. Hating herself for “falling into the old pattern,” she is tempted once more by the words “husband” and “home,” by the illusory dream of “security, safety” (175). Trini marries Tonio as if it is a destiny she cannot escape. It is here that the conflict between autonomy and female social conditioning becomes most evident: although she is conscious that marriage is a “mere refuge” for her, and despite the physical abuse she suffers for being pregnant with Sabochi's child, she trusts Tonio's promises more than her own ability to create a life of her own. When Tonio pronounces the words “my wife,” a role she passively accepts, he is only asserting the social expectations that have conditioned Trini to view her role as a wife as her only feasible destiny. The image of herself as a wife, her romantic notion of marriage and the supposed security it entails, is powerful and tempting and overshadows any previous determination she might have had to achieve autonomy and self-fulfillment by creating her own life independent of a man.

Trini's situation exemplifies the severe obstacles economic deprivation places on women's independence: she struggles to understand and overcome her dependency on men and the psychological effects of female conditioning, yet as a single mother with a second child on the way she is also facing the harsh reality of destitution, a reality she cannot escape. Her opting for the prospect of future security with Tonio illustrates how “women's marginality leads to economic and social dependency on the male” (Herrera-Sobek, 1988, 175). However, it also shows how Trini, given her social situation, is more vulnerable to the romantic notions of marriage and its promises of “security” and “safety” and thus more likely to fall into the trap of dependency on the male. Trini's previous experiences with Tonio notwithstanding, she takes refuge once more in his promises, yet once more she is confronted with the deceptive nature of such promises: shortly after she joins him in Juárez, he leaves her “to make American money” (181) across the border. Left again to fend for herself, Trini is forced to recognize that she will have to rely on her own resources, that she will find security only in her own self-reliance. If she feels as if she has “journeyed for centuries, her destiny still unshaped,” a mere “blur in the future,” she also realizes that it is mainly because she has expected a man to shape that destiny. This recognition of her own situation together with a basic need for survival gives her a new determination to continue, “to journey again, to search, to find, to plan” (182).

Necessity forces her to cross the border to work illegally as a domestic in El Paso. Eventually she has to return to Mexico where, destitute and helpless, she ends up in El Terreno de Brujas among retired prostitutes, among “the debris of the world … decaying, forgotten” (189). It is significant that it is through this symbolic descent into a “living burial ground” (190) that she is brought into an existential confrontation with herself that reawakens the old dream of land and spiritual wholeness. With a renewed awareness of the supernatural world she had known throughout her childhood, she begins to rely more and more on her own intuition for survival. Among the social outcasts of this “burial ground” she encounters an old prostitute, popularly thought to be a witch, and a dwarf who appears to be a reincarnation of the dwarf Trini used to play with as a child. These two characters become her guides and confirm her notion that, despite all the difficulties and setbacks, there is a design, an ultimate meaning to her trials and her long journey north.

Trini's old dream of land is given further impetus when she hears about the possibility of citizenship “in the land of plenty” (206) if her child is born on the other side of the border. Guided by dreams and following the “intuitive pull” of destiny, her “plan with a dream” (207), Trini succeeds in crossing the border to give birth to a son in El Paso. Utterly destitute, but guided by what she perceives to be cosmic signs, she finds her way to Valverde, the Green Valley, where a dying dwarf, Salvador—whose name translates as “savior,” “redeemer”—gives her a piece of land in exchange for her performing his funeral in accordance with indigenous religious rites. Salvador appears to be yet another reincarnation of the dwarf of her childhood, who, through his various appearances, has guided her toward what seems to be the completion of her quest, her final settlement in Valverde. The burning of his dead body thus becomes a ceremony for her arrival in the green valley that holds the promises of self-fulfillment, a ceremony that leaves “a clean, fragrant hope, the trust in a new beginning” (233).

Trini's arrival in Valverde should, according to the paradigm of the traditional quest story, signal the completion of her spiritual and social quest for wholeness. That her journey leads her to a place called Valverde underscores once more the overall psycho-mythological design of this female quest story. Trini's quest—the initial separation, the initiation, the tests she undergoes along the way, and the guides who eventually lead her to the green valley—corresponds in its general design to the basic outlines of Campbell's monomyth, yet the expected self-fulfillment and restoration of lost harmony upon her arrival in Valverde does not materialize. If, according to traditional plot expectations, Trini's arrival in the Green Valley should indicate the happy denouement of her quest, then this female quest story goes beyond the ending, so to speak.

Trini also expects Valverde to be the place where “the better part” of her life will materialize, where she will be able to recapture lost harmony and create her own life: “The journey was over, the land had been found, the family had been gathered. The dream had come true” (235). This fulfillment of her dream for land and a family of her own, however, does not fulfill her quest for self. When we meet her again, nine years later, she has become “la madre abnegada,” the hard-working, self-sacrificing wife and mother who works herself “numb to keep her sanity” (236). Tonio, mostly absent, rejects her for other women. Yet, trapped in her dependency on him, she accepts his status as the patriarch of the family who is entitled to do as he pleases. Her submission to him and her conformity to traditional patriarchal expectations lead her to an enslaving role as wife and mother, but only through a denial of her own selfhood. Her precarious situation as a woman and as a Mexicana, a stranger in a foreign culture, makes her alienation and loneliness doubly oppressive: estranged from her husband and her five children who are becoming more and more Americanized, her daily life is a struggle “to accept an insurmountable existence that hung, split, folding into loneliness” (235) that is “about to drown her” (244).

It is this sense of disillusionment and suffocation that prompts Trini to examine the confining pattern of her present life with the awareness her experiences have given her. In an act reminiscent of her adolescent search for a viable self, she now, at thirty, returns to the mirror only to refuse to accept her own self-image: “There's more to me” (236), just as there “must be more” (239) than the deceptive pattern of her own life. Her old dream of marriage and family having turned into a suffocating trap, she channels her protest into fantasy and begins to create a new dream to sustain herself. Trini's consciousness is thus divided into an apparent acceptance of patriarchal social structures and a wish to escape the alienation and confinement those structures have imposed upon her life. She wants to escape this alienation, but finding herself at an impasse in her social world, she turns to nature for spiritual wholeness. She takes the first step toward such wholeness when one night she refuses to be a victim and walks out, “her senses awakened to the moon” (244) and to the forces of nature. In this awakening she envisions a return to nature as the only feasible path toward authenticity and selfhood.

This mystical identification with nature has its origins in her childhood when she had identified with the earth and its fertility goddess Tonantzín. Part of her education leads her to forsake indigenous beliefs for Catholicism, to prefer the Catholic Virgin to Tonantzín, yet throughout her quest she remains sensitive to the presence of an indigenous spiritual world. The religious conflict between traditional Catholicism and indigenous beliefs corresponds closely to Trini's cultural conflict as a mestiza: initially torn between the Indian and the white part of herself, she is slowly removed from her indigenous past and learns to see herself as “part of the white man's world” (171). This same Bildungs process has led her to accept patriarchal definitions of womanhood, to accept prescribed self-sacrificing and nurturing roles, but at the cost of her own self. It is when Trini awakens to this stultifying and self-effacing existence, an alienation intensified by her additional cultural alienation in the United States, that she reclaims her connection to Tonantzín. This identification with a gyno-centered spiritual sphere allows her to envision a renewed unity with nature as an escape from the confines of patriarchal space. Trini's awakening to the reality of her life is an awakening to limitations. At the denouement of Trini her spiritual relationship to nature prevails as the ultimate reality in the life of our female Bildungsheld.

In its structural outline Trini adheres to the linear paradigm of the traditional male Bildungsroman by tracing a personal development from childhood to maturity. Much like the traditional male Bildungsheld Trini is orphaned, leaves the ideal setting of her childhood, and sets out on a perilous quest for identity. Unlike her male counterpart, however, Trini has to undergo trials that do not further her Bildungs process, but rather remove her further and further away from authenticity and selfhood. Throughout the novel there is a recurrent oppositional tension between, on the one hand, Trini's search for a viable self, and on the other hand, social demands of submission to the confines of a male culture. Trini's quest for identity is thus disrupted at every stage by what Pratt calls the “hidden agenda of gender norms” (1981, 16) of dependency and submission. Trini encounters a world defined by patriarchal prerogatives inimical to female independence, a fundamental discrepancy between social demands and her own search for selfhood, or in Rosowski's terms, a “disparity between her needs as a human being and the role expected of her as a woman” (328). Driven by relentless social pressures into seeing herself defined by love and marriage, Trini is caught in a world of “enclosure and atrophy” (Pratt, 1981, 16). When she awakens to this “drowning” of herself, only a withdrawal into nature seems to offer the possibility of a personal transformation and self-fulfillment.

The traditional Bildungsroman is a genre in which “social realism is apt to become mixed with elements of romance” (Pratt, 1981, 13). This mixture of social realism and romance is reflected in the prototypical Bildungsroman plot: the successful completion of the Bildungs quest is an affirmation of the hero's manhood and autonomy and includes romantic interludes that often lead to marriage and general accommodations to social values. This is also the case when we turn to the basic patterns of Northrop Frye's “Mythos of Romance,” the successful quest myth: the hero undergoes a perilous journey—agon, pathos, anagnorisis—then emerges empowered from his quest, the reward of which “usually is or includes a bride” (N. Frye, 193) with whom he supposedly lives happily ever after. These romantic plot conventions—that is, the active male quester, the passive female, and the concluding marriage—are also governing features of most fairy tales and romantic stories, which both reflect and reinforce cultural paradigms of gender roles and behaviors. The leading assumption behind these socio-cultural expectations reflected in literary plot conventions is that marriage is an additional aspect of the male quest, whereas to the female hero marriage is presented as “not simply one ideal, but the only estate toward which women should aspire” (Rowe, 239). Social accommodations through marriage, however, have additional dramatic consequences for the female hero than for her male counterpart:

Because the heroine adopts conventional female virtues, that is, patience, sacrifice, and dependency, and because she submits to patriarchal needs, she consequently receives both the prince and guarantee of social and financial security through marriage.

(Rowe, 246)

Since this so-called “happy ending” in marriage can only be obtained through female submission to the patriarchal status quo, the traditional romantic plot structure stands in direct opposition to the female quest for identity and selfhood.

In both Victuum and Trini the generic mixture of social realism and romance is reflected in the romantic plot conventions that direct the development of the female protagonists toward marriage and family. At the end of a traditional female Bildung, womanhood is defined not through selfhood and autonomy, but by a gradual succumbing to social norms and prescriptions of female behavior. The Bildungs process in both Victuum and Trini is governed by this, it seems, inevitable path toward marriage, which, at the same time, leads the protagonists away from an autonomous female identity. Throughout her childhood and adolescence Valentina in Victuum is prepared for her future role as wife and mother, a role she seemingly accepts with the same inevitability as she later accepts the authority of her husband to control her life. Trini undergoes a similar preparation throughout her adolescence, but unlike Valentina, Trini comes to question her own relationship to men and her position as a woman in a male-dominated world; she is, nevertheless, relentlessly driven toward becoming a mother and a submissive wife. Both protagonists go through a Bildungs process that unequivocally leads toward an apparent predestined future of marriage and maternity.

Victuum and Trini are woman-centered novels of the female quest for selfhood, yet the process of growing up female portrayed in these two novels does not lead to the expected affirmation of self, but rather to alienation of self. This narrative plot of female development, positioned within a male-defined tradition, thus reflects both the “ideological underpinnings” (J. Frye, 1) of the traditional Bildungs story and the larger socio-cultural context that circumscribes an authentic female Bildung. Bound by socio-cultural assumptions and economic constraints, the protagonists here are doomed to follow a prescribed path of female development, as they are not invested with a consciousness that would enable them to resist or take an oppositional stance against social norms and definitions of female behavior. Thus growing up female leads to socio-cultural entrapment, exemplifying Joanne Frye's contention that “the power of a male-dominated sexual ideology entraps women characters and women novelists within outworn plots and outworn definitions; women in novels—and even in life—seem doomed to live within those old stories” (5). These two Chicana Bildungsromane variously illustrate that as long as the Bildungs process is not accompanied by an evolving consciousness about women's position in a manmade world it is most likely to lead to socio-cultural entrapment.

Not withstanding their socio-cultural entrapment, both Victuum and Trini circumvent in the end the paradigms of a male-defined genre and lead the protagonists beyond prescribed norms of womanhood: through a mid-life awakening of self, Valentina and Trini are given an alternative vision of selfhood, a vision of escape that signals a rejection of existing patterns and, in terms of the female quest story, a rejection of “outworn plots and outworn definitions.” Valentina seeks awareness and self-fulfillment in the psychic sphere, a process of self-awakening that Bonnie Hoover Braendlin recognizes as central to women's quest for wholeness:

When a fictional woman reaches an impasse in her quest for freedom and self-determination, when her linear journey in the world of experience leads to an enslaving, fragmenting role as wife and mother, there still remains open to her the alternative of an inward journey to the depths of the psyche.

(20)

Trini reaches this same impasse in her social existence, but perceives a return to nature as the only feasible alternative to socio-cultural alienation and the “drowning” of her own self. Although each Bildungs process leads to socio-cultural entrapment, both novels subvert in the end the traditional Bildungsroman plot pattern by showing Chicana lives as an ongoing process whose reach carries beyond passive entrapment and the traditional ending in marriage and cultural accommodation.

These two novels present both an implicit and explicit critique of the patriarchal system. More rooted in the mundane, Trini shows a process of entrapment that is assured by two tiers of oppression—the economic and the psychological dependency on the oppressor—and suggests thereby that an authentic female Bildungsroman will not materialize until these twin yokes of oppression are thrown off. Victuum, in turn, never overtly articulates a critique of such socio-cultural entrapment, but the reader can interpret Valentina's flight into the interior psychic world as a resistance to entrapment and a quest beyond social roles for an authentic interior self. Neither woman is in the end fully realized, but both novels suggest that in order to realize the self it is necessary for women to get in touch with the original intuition of being. For Valentina this original intuition of being is located in the psychic realm, whereas Trini finds it in her connection to nature.

Victuum and Trini are women-centered novels where women are, to use Bell Hooks's phrase, moved from the margin to the center and given the power of speech central to female self-definition, yet each individual voice is very much determined by the socio-cultural expectations to which the protagonists succumb in the process of their development. In the end Valentina and Trini are marginalized solitary figures who withdraw into an extra-social existence. Their withdrawal exemplifies Annis Pratt's contention that the female Bildungsheld

does not choose a life to one side of society after conscious deliberation on the subject; rather, she is ontologically or radically alienated by gender-role norms from the very outset. Thus, although the authors attempt to accommodate their hero's Bildung, or development, to the general pattern of the genre, the disjunctions … inevitably make the woman's initiation less a self-determined progression towards maturity than a regression from full participation in adult life.

(1981, 36)

Such regression characterizes the denouement of both Victuum and Trini and situates these two Chicana Bildungshelde in a long line of female protagonists who have been caught in a conflict between “that outward existence which conforms, and the inward life which questions” (Chopin, The Awakening, 14). This fundamental conflict between patriarchal demands and female authenticity that impels Valentina and Trini to seek sustenance and selfhood in an extra-social sphere demonstrates the disjunction between the generic intent of the traditional Bildungsroman and the socio-cultural realities that inform the female developmental process.

Portraying Chicana self-development from approximately 1920 to 1960, these two Chicana Bildungsromane situate their female protagonists in circumstances that correspond to different aspects of the Chicano historical background: one is kept firmly within the extended family of an old Hispanic community in California; the other follows the migratory path north through Mexico and into the United States. Given the particular time and place of their setting, both novels show a Chicana Bildungs process that is bound by powerful economic and socio-cultural constraints. Lacking visions of alternative destinies for women, the protagonists succumb to cultural expectations in respect to their own gender formation and socio-cultural role and become submissive, self-sacrificing, and dependent. Although both protagonists go through a mid-life awakening that may lead to personal liberation, their initial entrapment differs decisively from the developmental process of other Chicana Bildungshelde whose quest for a self-defined identity is formed through a conscious opposition to patriarchal confinement of the female self.

Notes

1. The first Chicana novel to be published is Come Down from the Mound (1975) by Berta Ornelas; for further publication information, see “Isabella Ríos and the Chicano Psychic Novel” and “Chicana Novelists in the Process of Creating Fictive Voices” by Francisco A. Lomelí.

2. For a discussion on the influence of the oral tradition in Chicano literature, see “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective” by Luis Leal, “Chicano Literature: An Overview” by Luis Leal and Pepe Barrón, and “The Evolution of Chicano Literature” by Raymund A. Paredes.

3. For further discussion and information on these early Hispanic women writers see “Tradition and Mythology: Signatures of Landscape in Chicana Literature” and “Hispanic Woman Writers of the Southwest: Tradition and Innovation” by Tey Diana Rebolledo, “Chicana Novelists in the Process of Creating Fictive Voices” by Francisco A. Lomelí, and “Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicana Literature” by Gloria Velásquez Treviño.

4. The publication history of Victuum exemplifies the difficulties Chicanas and other ethnic women writers have when it comes to having their work published; Victuum was published through the author's own efforts, funded partly by herself, partly by friends and relatives. Information on the particular circumstances surrounding the creation and publication of Victuum, including biographical information on the author, can be found in “Isabella Ríos and the Chicano Psychic Novel,” which includes an interview with the author, and “Chicana Novelists in the Process of Creating Fictive Voices” by Francisco A. Lomelí, and “Isabella Ríos” by Annie O. Eysturoy.