[In the following essay, Ordóñez analyzes how Portillo Trambley's Rain of Scorpions and works by three other female authors become “both the means and embodiment of modifying and reshaping female history, myths, and ultimately personal and collective identity.”]

History and morality are written and read within the infrastructure of texts.

—“Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language

The consensus among many ethnic writers today is that the eighties will be a time to move beyond cultural nationalism, beyond dogmatism, and that readers will need to learn to read as they draw from the past to reshape the future. This essay will propose that the narrative text itself, if properly read and decoded, may indeed be a tool for accomplishing this goal, for as Borges has observed: “[Each] work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”¹ This analysis will also address itself to some specific issues raised by a particular group of ethnic writers—women—who should by now be recognized and read as having produced a coherent and interrelated system of texts with its own observable characteristics.

Four works published during the mid-seventies will serve as our models: Toni Morrison's Sula, Estela Portillo's Rain of Scorpions, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and E. M. Broner's Her Mothers. Representing recent works of Black, Chicana, Chinese-American and Jewish women writers respectively, each text explores a particular female and ethnic socio-historical identity. Yet, at the same time, each narrative moves beyond cultural nationalism to a commonality of textual coding as the text itself becomes both the means and embodiment of modifying and reshaping female history, myths, and ultimately personal and collective identity.

Several modes of discourse can be identified as common threads linking these various texts: 1. the disruption of genre, of particular relevance to the female text which fuses discourse and body in a rejection of genre/gender limitations; 2. the power to displace “the central patriarchal text”;² that is, the Bible and other commonly accepted mythical constructs exerting power over woman; and, 3. the writing and rewriting of a heretofore buried or subversively oral matrilineal tradition, or the invention—either through inversion or compensation—of alternate mythical and even historical accounts of women. Though the first two functions of the text are limited neither to women nor to ethnic writers, and the last is certainly not limited to ethnic women, their identification and commonality still provide the reader with a suggestive theoretical framework within which to reevaluate her/his past through narrative. By linking the female ethnic text into an all-embracing system, we may be better equipped to forge beyond cultural nationalism toward a re-vision and revitalization of female ethnicity in a more broadly conceived context.

“Most Western literary genres are, after all, essentially male—devised by male authors to tell male stories about the world.”³ This reminder by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar comes as no surprise, yet I believe it provides a theoretical key to why so much experimentation with genre is occurring in today's neofeminist text. There exists a need to break out of what many women writers believe are the rules to somebody else's game. Furthermore, generic distinctions such as those of Hayden White between history (“discourse of the real”) and narrative fiction (“discourse of desire”)⁴ are untenable when we reflect upon much of the male-authored historical or fictional discourse written about women: too often it is neither real nor desirable. A ponderous realization for a woman writer, especially an ethnic woman writer who, again too often, has been caged up in just such a generic double bind. What should she do? Logically (or perhaps with creative illogic), our writers have overlapped and mixed up their discourse in order to make history more real and fiction more desirable from their point of view.

Our cross-ethnic models all exhibit, to a greater or lesser degree, the mixing of genre and discourse. In The Woman Warrior, for example, Patricia Lin Blinde has discovered a “shift from one set of generic constraints to another,” attributing this phenomenon to “the richness of a bi-cultural life experience [which] cannot be contained within the limits of literary dictates.”⁵ Not only would an opting for one pure generic form be too restrictive to contain the dynamic and dialectical experience of being Chinese in America, but by blending autobiographical recollections and history (discourse of the real) with her own original versions of folktale, myth, and legend (discourse of desire), Hong Kingston wages verbal battle with the problems of being a Chinese American woman as well. The narrator's supposed inability to “tell real from false”⁶ is a sign for the very text she is shaping: she and her mother are as paradoxical as the mixed genre they inhabit, caught between the contradictions of dreaming heroic feats and still painfully hobbling on traditionally bound feet. By enmeshing the reader into this textual ambivalence, Hong Kingston enables her/him to participate in a revision of the duality of past history, the anger and exhilaration out of which a new future will be born.

Her Mothers has been described by Nan Bauer Maglin as a “fictional journey into personal and historical matrilineage.”⁷ Broner's text is thus also a weave of fictional and historical discourse. Beatrix Palmer, the book's protagonist, is historian, academician and author of books on women. As she searches for her own lost daughter, she does research for a text on American women of the nineteenth century and discovers some disturbing facts about such historical mothers as Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Charlotte Forten. The fictional character's sources are actually documented, thus reinforcing the effect of an historical study intercalated within a fictional plot. The result is a mordantly ironic rewriting of history, as Palmer brandishes her satirical sword at the male historical community, lopping off the head of what often amounts to a one-sided, demeaning, and condescending historical legacy. The following slice of conversation among male academics provides an example of how Broner's satirically witty narrative text also insists implicitly that the reader revise her/his traditional, male-defined notions of women in history:

“Margaret?” [Fuller]

Raucous male laughter at an American Studies Conference.

“A horse face,” says a goat-bearded professor. “Do you know how she held her audience's attention at her Conversations? She froze them to their chairs in horror.”

“Uglier than Emily?” asks a twittering, fringe-haired professor of Criticism.

“Emily?”

“The poetess.”

“Uglier.”⁸

Though Sula and Rain of Scorpions are less obviously mixed as genres, they still go beyond the conventional format of novel and short story to give the feel of historical discourse as well. The narrative divisions of Sula are marked off with dates, creating the palpable fiction that Sula, Nel and the historical evolution of their community—the Bottom, Medallion, Ohio—really existed in time and space. We cannot dismiss them as mere fiction. Many of the stories of Rain also read like historical chronicles, reshaping our conception of the chicana's personal and collective history. In all the works there is much that comes from oral history (Brave Orchid's talk-stories in WW, [The Woman Warrior] the stories told by Israeli women to Bea Palmer in HM [Her Mother] the dream readings of Eva Peace in Sula, the reminiscences of Clotilde in Portillo's “The Paris Gown”). Through these spoken sources, as well as through letters, journals, memoirs, and tales, the ethnic woman writer breaks out of gender/genre restrictions to allow for revisionist readings of her past, and she frees up textual energy for the reshaping of her future.

If most texts derive in some way from the central patriarchal text, the Bible, as Edward Said has suggested, and if the texts of women strain to break out of the boundaries of male-inscribed discourse, then an impulse to displace the authority of the Biblical text, and other sacred or mythical texts as they traditionally affect women, should emerge from a reading of our models. In the textual space left vacant, matrilineal myths may take the place of those patriarchal ones which are pushed aside. This is what occurs in a pair of Portillo's stories, “The Trees” and “If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle”: in the former the protagonist is called “an Eve in a Garden of Eden,”⁹ but some crucial distinctions are established between this Eve and her Biblical predecessor. The latter story fills the void left by the fatal hubris of “The Trees'” protagonist. Sula's Eva implicitly recalls her Biblical foremother, then shifts our perspective away from the authority of the Biblical text toward matrilineal autonomy and bonding. Her Mothers systematically retells Genesis in order to force a feisty reconsideration of the Biblical matriarchs and struggle to discover female defined foremothers. And Hong Kingston retells Chinese legends so that her readers may displace the patriarchal implications of these traditional stories.

Nina of “The Trees” is at once Eve, serpent and “an avenging angel come to the Garden of Eden” (RS [Rain of Scorpions], p. 16). However, unlike the Biblical Eve, “her sin was not innocence reaching for ‘the knowing.’ No … her sin was a violence grown out of the fear of inadequacy” (RS, p. 13). Incubating inside her the infection of male-inflicted violence (a brutal childhood rape by four drunks), Nina harbors a diffuse need for vengeance when she marries Ismael and goes with him to inhabit his family's apple orchard—that “working patriarchal order” (RS, p. 13). Both Nina and her new orchard home constitute a swerve away from the Edenic utopia of the Biblical text. She has already been pushed down by man (in contrast to the supposed Biblical fall), and the Ayala family garden has already lost its creative innocence when Nina arrives: the lives of its women and men are separate and stagnant, the women following in silent submissiveness patterns long before set forth by their men.

Nina chafes under the strict generic divisions of this ersatz paradise and sets out to destroy it in the only way she knows how: by disrupting the patriarchal order on its own terms. Fomenting sexual violence, suspicion, and greed, her generalized vengeance stops at nothing short of the complete disruption and destruction of the social order which victimized her: “the Garden of Eden became a desolation” (RS, p. 23). Though we may read Nina as something less than a feminist hero—her misguided and misdirected rage destroying everything in her wake including herself—we still should remember that Nina's paradise had fallen before her appearance there; it carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. As this patriarchal space allowed neither her nor the other women autonomy within it, Nina—as avenging angel—was impelled by a kind of blind revolutionary impulse to clear the way for another order.

Beatriz of “If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle” replaces the patriarchal text displaced by Nina with a matrilineal paradigm of her own. Beatriz cultivates her own “thriving” garden; she has built her own house: Beatriz has created and defined her own space. Another survivor of male harshness—of the brutish ways of Robles, her intermittent male companion—Beatriz has learned to give order to things, as bad as they may be. Welcoming Robles' subsequent conquests as companions and allies, Beatriz forges matrilineal links between herself and the younger women, Sofa and Lucretia. The three women together form a stronger line of defense against Robles than could one woman alone. (The three women also suggest a noteworthy inversion of the Christian Holy Trinity.)

One day, while cultivating her honeysuckles, Beatriz discovers three deadly Amanitas mushrooms and decides to use them to acquire freedom for herself and her female companions. Robles is eliminated in a Dionysian ritual—another reversal of Christian symbolism—, the women's garden is rid of its serpent, and what we might call a “working matriarchal order” is established. The myth of Eve is inverted; the patriarch alone—not woman—is displaced from the garden. Thus the garden becomes wholly woman's space, its reappropriation signifying a displacement of Biblical myth with a plot shaped and defined by woman herself.

Again we encounter a matrilineal trinity of women in Sula: Eva, Hannah and Sula Peace are, as Jerilyn Fisher has described them, “three of the fiercest, most resolute women to be found in Black writing of this decade” (the seventies).¹⁰ Eva is “the creator and sovereign”¹¹ of this line of women who incarnate one of the hallmarks of matriliny: they “thought all men available” (S [Sula], p. 103). Eva's strength, independence, and power to survive; Hannah's spontaneity and sensuality; and above all, Sula's subversion of the myths circulated by both white and Black society about Black women, engaged the reader to participate in a displacement of the patriarchal Eve archetype and the polarities of Amazon and Black Lady which have long oppressed Black women.¹²

Eva Peace, as Beatriz of “Honeysuckle,” does what has to be done to provide order in her female household. When her abusive, womanizing husband, BoyBoy, left her, she “had ＄1.65, five eggs, three beets and no idea of what or how to feel” (S, pp. 27-28). She struggled with the help of neighbors, but too proud to be dependent, she disappeared one day only to return eighteen months later without one leg and with the means to support her children. Her hatred for BoyBoy, much like Beatriz's for Robles, actually consolidated and mobilized her spirit, helping her to remain free. Again, like Beatriz, a certain kind of order is central to Eva for survival and the maintenance of life. When her son Plum returns from the war a drug addict and but the shadow of a human being, she extinguishes him in flames she herself has ignited. As does Beatriz with Robles, Eva sacrifices a man who has already died in life, performing a matriarchal ritual of purification and renewal.

The novel Sula is structured around the poignant separation and reunion of the two friends Nel and Sula. Consistently faithful to the legacy of her mother and grandmother, Sula lives always on the margins of socially acceptable morality; she is society's necessary pariah, the shadow or underbelly of itself. And she represents what Michele Wallace has called the Amazon, the free and independent Black woman feared and often despised even by other Black women, especially the Black Lady. Nel, following the example set by her mother, becomes even more a personification of this opposite polarity, the Black Lady, guided by conventional moral codes and patterns of thought and behavior (though she, too, must learn to live alone when Jude, her husband, leaves her). Together, Sula and Nel would make the complete Black woman, but tragically social custom and man come between them—Jude, Nel's husband and briefly Sula's lover—to make another Eve of Sula and drive a wedge into the two women's friendship.

Only years after Sula's death, the loss of her corporeality and Nel's realization—through the senile but madly wise Eva—that she (Nel) and Sula were “just alike” (S, p. 145), does Sula become for Nel the desired object of an illusive female bonding. As Nel finally confronts the memory of Sula, free from the attendant moral significations of her friend, and as Nel accepts her own complicity in guilt, she is finally able to pierce through the barriers separating the two women into separate categories or classes. the novel ends in an excruciating cry of desire—Nel's “O Lard, Sula, girl, girl, girlgirlgirl”—a longing cutting through cultural mythology to wrench the memory of Nel's dead friend out of her status as fallen Amazon to rewrite her as the desired text of Black female friendship and bonding, or of matrilineal links between women in general.

Traditionally, the Jewish male has been the serious reader and interpreter of the Biblical text. Woman has been his helpmeet so that he could be free from mundane worries and devote himself entirely to Biblical exegesis. The Biblical matriarch in this tradition has been considered above all the mother of lines of heroes; the literary version of the matriarch has traditionally been the grandmother (the “Alte Bobbe”), who gives advice on family matters. In Her Mothers, E. M. Broner reverses these traditional textual functions and thus compensates for some commonly accepted notions of the Jewish woman as reader, writer, and character of Biblical and literary texts. Broner becomes a female reader and re-interpreter of Genesis, and in her own text, she forces her readers to revise their notions of Biblical and literary matriarchs. No longer can we read the Bible without realizing some shocking truths about the fate of its female heroes.

Broner shows how Avram sold Sara into prostitution, then with ironic brevity comments: “she was the First Matriarch” (HM, p. 141). Continuing with her retelling of Genesis she reveals how “Yitzhak enticed the King of the Philistines with a view of Rivka” (HM, p. 146), using, as did his father, the ruse that Rivka was his sister so that he could buy his way to survival in enemy territory. These so-called matriarchs must dissemble and attack the other women in their households in order to insure their own survival: “Sister against sister, woman betrays woman. The man is the seed and the woman the gourd, filled with the seed and rattling or dried and to be discarded” (HM, p. 151).

So much for the word matriarch; surely, as Broner shows us, its meaning has too long been defined from a patriarchal perspective. Traditionally these women were supposed to cut heroic figures, loom grandly as progenitors of a chosen race. Yet, when Broner enumerates the names and destinies of the twelve sons of Yaakov, and then asks what will become of the daughter, Dina, her curt answer underscores the divergence between the fates of male and female, patriarch and matriarch: “she will be raped and then not mentioned again” (HM, p. 155). The heroic patriarchal ideology which veils these Biblical women often belies their actually painful and degrading destinies.

Through unveiling and unmasking, this Jewish woman reader and writer as Biblical exegete jolts and shocks and ironically forces our reappraisal of Biblical text: “Mothers you have taught me that a woman is as good as her womb … if she is barren, she is not part of the Old Testicle. Who named you my mothers? Who named this a matriarchy?” (HM, p. 155). The answer is by this point more than apparent: the patriarchs have done most of the naming until now; Broner's text marks the moment for woman to do her own naming, tell her own story, sing her own song. And that is literally how Her Mothers concludes: women musicians band together to sing “unafraid.” Broner thus enables all women of the Judeo-Christian heritage to reread their Biblical past in order to possess the power to reshape their future identity.

Maxine Hong Kingston does much the same for the Chinese-American woman and all women who read The Woman Warrior with female sensitivity. As we have already observed with the aid of Patricia Lin Blinde's excellent study of WW, the textual tension generated by an overlapping of genre in WW gives that work its powerful capacity to retell tradition in accordance with the needs of today's woman. A central patriarchal text which Hong Kingston displaces in her work is the ballad of Hua Mu-lan. Again, turning to Lin Blinde, we learn that the original fifth century ballad is only about sixty lines long; it tells but a sparse story of vengeance and filial piety.¹³ A traditional reading of the Mu-lan ballad would focus with admiration on Mu-lan's temporary, ephemeral adoption of higher masculine traits, yet, upon completion of her masculine mission, there would be little question remaining in the reader's mind about the inevitability of her shedding her unnatural male disguise and reverting back to her traditional female role.¹⁴

Hong Kingston's retelling of the ancient story allows us, as readers, to shift our own interpretation of Mu-lan. When we read her from a matriarchal or matrilineal rather than a patriarchal perspective, she emerges as a new figure, an avenger for women rather than for men, a Woman Warrior capable of providing a model for real as well as fictive lives. As Hong Kingston's creation, Mu-lan/Woman Warrior shapes a new myth of female initiation in the wilderness: the new warrior woman acquires physical strength and mental acumen through solitary survival in nature. Hunger allows her to see ethnic unity and androgyny in the convergence of dancers from different lands, male and female. Wisdom allows room for paradoxes. The new woman warrior is Chinese but also unmistakably American: she will not allow menstrual days to interrupt her training; her newborn rides with her into battle secured by a sling beneath her armor. Above all, she calls herself “a female avenger,” (WW, p. 51), freeing imprisoned women from captivity, tearing down ancestral tablets.

The coalescing of Mu-lan, the Warrior Woman, and Hong Kingston is ultimately to be found in “the words at our backs” (WW, p. 63). The new Woman Warrior is a writer, a re-teller of ancient tales so that woman may emerge hero of her own destiny, her own text. The Woman Warrior/writer's attack against the falsities of the historical past, her invention of the truths of the future, must lie in the pen rather than in the sword: “The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (WW, p. 63). Herein we discovered Nina's tragic error, for which Portillo had to compensate as writer. Through words, then, Hong Kingston also compensates for and overturns the lies told about and to Chinese and Chinese-American women. As does Broner in HM, she ends her text with a song: Ts'ai Yen's “woman's voice singing,” her children singing along. (Not insignificantly, Sula dies when she runs out of songs to sing.) The voice ritual, woman singing perhaps in exile but singing her own song and passing it on to her children, is part of the same creative vengeance which may become an alternate form of matrilineal discourse.¹⁵ The evolution of this new discourse—or the rebirth of its ancient roots—in the texts of ethnic women writers provides us, as readers, with the potential to reshape our future as we reread our past.

Notes

1. In Maria Corti, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 3.

2. See Edward W. Said, “The Text, the World, the Critic,” Textual Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 179.

3. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 67.

4. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1980), 23.

5. “The Icicle in the Desert: Perspective and Form in the Works of Two Chinese-American Women,” Melus, 6, No. 3 (Fall 1979), 53.

6. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 235. Hereafter referred to as WW.

7. “‘Don't never forget the bridge that you crossed over on’: The Literature of Matrilineage,” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson & E. M. Broner (New York: Frederick Ungar Pub. Co., 1980), p. 264.

8. E. M. Broner, Her Mothers (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1975), p. 15. Hereafter referred to as HM.

9. Estela Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions (Berkeley, Calif.: Tonatiuh International, 1975), p. 13. Hereafter referred to as RS.

10. “From Under the Yoke of Race and Sex: Black and Chicano Women's Fiction of the Seventies,” Minority Voices, 2, No. 2 (Fall 1978), 6.

11. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 26. Hereafter referred to as S.

12. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 154.

13. “The Icicle …,” p. 67.

14. See Yi-Tsi Feuerwerker, “Women as Writers in the 1920's and 1930's,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 147, for a footnote commentary on the survival of the Mu-lan type or “Mu-lan complex” in Chinese popular literature.

15. Interestingly, Susanne K. Langer in Philosophy in a New Key (New York: The New American Library, 1951), p. 115, points out how song probably preceded speech in the overall development of language.