SOURCE: Lattin, Patricia and Vernon Lattin. “Power and Freedom in the Stories of Estela Portillo Trambley.” Critique 21, no. 1 (1979): 93-101.

[In the following essay, the critics investigate the treatment of women and power in Portillo Trambley's short fiction, asserting that many of her female characters “resist being merely a passive reflection of man's will and rebel against the unjust system of power and order that has enslaved them.”]

Malinalli Tenepal, called “La Malinche,” took her place in the “history of man” as the betrayer responsible for the Spanish conquest of the Indians, for she is said to have revealed important military information to Cortez. One must realize, however, that “La Malinche” was not a free citizen, having been first sold into slavery by her parents and then given to Cortez by her owner.¹ Her position as slave to both Aztec and Spanish masters raises questions about the meaning of her “betrayal.” Did she as woman/slave owe loyalty to any of her masters? Was her act a rebellion against the social powers that made her a slave and concubine? As a victim of oppression, did she seek in the only possible way a form of individual freedom and expression? Ironically, the myth that makes her responsible for the conquest also makes her the mother of the first mestizo, whose descendants threw off the Spanish conquerors. As a woman, she is both Eve and the Serpent, created by men who failed to see history from the woman's point of view.

In 1975 a mestizo descendant of “La Malinche” added the voice of la mujer Chicana to American fiction, publishing Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, the first book of fiction by a Chicana. Not surprisingly, one of the central themes of the collection is the relationship between freedom and power as these forces affect women. Examining the cosmic, social, and psychological dimensions of women's struggle to be free in a power structure that has historically oppressed them, Estela Portillo Trambley takes the reader back to the Garden of Eden to rediscover not the American Adam but la mujer living in her own garden, cultivating her flowers, and seeking her own sun.

Cosmically, Trambley sees a world in which the human spirit, unwilling to accept a universe of mere stasis and repetition, challenges the “tried pattern” of existence. Meditating on the night sounds, the narrator of “Duende” considers Chance itself as merely the substrata of “a careful calculation” but then rejects such a view, believing that acts of will, the assertion of human feeling, and the individual spirit of duende defy a fixed order and fate. As her vision clears, she sees man “standing alone” and calls this “good.” She recognizes, however, that freedom has been only for man: “And woman? Each woman sadly waits.”²

Throughout the ten stories Trambley shows us many waiting women who have no gardens to cultivate, because they have no freedom to participate in their creation. Most of these women form a social backdrop to the fiction: nameless, faceless people playing secondary roles in life, day by day ground down by the male power-structure. Such were the women of Cetna (“The Trees”) before Nina came, women who “followed in silent steps, fulfilled in their women ways. … The lives were well patterned like the rows of apple trees and the trenches that fed them” (13). The image suggests that the women are like the apples, used and cultivated, but never themselves the Adamic cultivators. Juana in “Pay the Criers,” defined as “among the vanquished,” seems to spend all her time waiting for her husband, Chuco; he, who can “do as he wished,” beats her when she resists his taking her mother's burial money, part of which he uses to visit prostitutes. Without freedoms to nourish them, such women of the barrio become what Triano sees in “Duende”: “worn-faced women with fringes and traces of dreams,” trapped “within a cubicle that makes small demands, but that kills with that same smallness” (56).

Many of Trambley's women resist being merely a passive reflection of man's will and rebel against the unjust system of power and order that has enslaved them. These heroic women express a value system that honors freedom, instinct, wholeness, feeling, and primitiveness against slavery, barbarized reason, tradition, civilized order, and inequality. In the image of the wild, untamed garden Trambley sees the symbol of women's freedom, while in the ordered, symmetrical garden she sees the patriarchal traditions that have limited and tortured women.

In “The Paris Gown” Clotilde Romero de Traske is “a liberated form from civilized order” (2). Reared at a time when women “had small freedoms” (1), she seized freedom many years ago by daring to come down the stairs naked, in the middle of the party where her father was to announce her coming arranged marriage to a repulsive elderly man. Significantly, the idea for rebellion had come to her as she viewed a symmetrical, manicured garden with swans in a pond and “flowers arranged by species” (6). A small child playing in this patterned world spontaneously removed his clothes and waded into the water, prompting a spanking from his nurse. From this innocent rebellion against order and orders, Clo saw a model for escaping the “overwhelming, unfair tradition” (3) that gave woman the role of sexual servant in a marriage which was often “a patterned, strict garden of dead things, poisoned things” (4).

Clo of the present is a sophisticated woman of the world who has found in Paris her own freedom and also developed a strong hope that others can know a similar freedom. Rejecting Greek thought in favor of Romanticism, she sees reason as a “boxed-in circumstance” that has been violent against human beings and has produced “barbarism”; in contrast, she presents instinct as the saving element in life, “an innate law without barriers,” “a part of what gathers a wholeness.” More specifically, she expresses to her granddaughter the belief that although “overwhelming, unfair tradition” has reigned for many years, surviving in each person is “the instinct that respects all life, the instinct that understands equality.” Such instinct, she believes, can eliminate “the violence of men against women” (3).

Key elements of Clo's optimistic view of human possibility appear in her description of Gaudier-Brzeska, the sculptor whose works express the values by which she has tried to live: “Gaudier was a man of great passion; many consider him a primitive. He plunged into the instinctual and emotional to surface with an energy, a feeling, an ability free of barbarism” (2, emphasis added). Reinforcing the image of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture, which Clo touches “reverently,” is her garden which she and Teresa see outside the window: “It had no symmetry, no pattern; the lawn and trailing vines, the cypress trees and profuse flowers had only been given a kind of order, only to free the life from complete chaos. Everything reached for the sun in its own way” (3-4). Thus Clotilde's energies, once destined for a dead garden, have created a free, larger Edenic existence.

Significantly, Trambley has taken the romantic myth of the regeneration and rebirth of human kind, the return to a golden age by way of instinctive, free-feeling, child-like innocence and rebellion from restraint, and has transferred the hope for the New Millennium, the New Jerusalem, into the hands of women who can break the pattern of oppression. Her optimism parallels that expressed by writers in the decade following the French Revolution, a belief in the indestructability of the human spirit of freedom. For Trambley, however, the future even of men lies in the hands of women who can change the enslaving tradition.

Trambley presents a static but complete illustration of the kind of woman who can free others when she creates Elsa of “The Secret Room.” Since she is not the main character of the story, Elsa does not take an active, revolutionary role, but her natural freedom and ability to give love without seeking power over the loved one form the catalyst that frees Julio (Julius Otto Vass Schleifer). Sweet and childlike but also passionate and wise, she has given herself freely to Julio, but she makes no claims on him, realizing that she can only open, not shut, doors for him. Self-possessed, close to the earth, “She knew who she was” (85). Having drunk the fresh water of the fountain and having removed her shoes and socks, Elsa represents the earth-people, the Mexicans who, in this story with an international theme, counterpoint the Nazis with their war, machines, and smokestacks, the Nazis whose Hitler salute is “a power orgasm” (83). Elsa's visit stimulates Julio's breaking loose from his family's Nazi tradition and his final rejection of the role of master. Elsa inspires Julio as he develops his vision of the true nature of power, a force which enslaves the master more than the slave. When Julio decides to “refuse the slavery of power” and to create “some kind of freedom out of masterdom” (87), he expresses outwardly the inward change by rejecting Helga, “the Rhine maiden … principled in German ways” (81), who would bring to a marriage her family fortune to bolster his own and who would create with him “an epic of the Aryan race.” Rather, he expresses a willingness to give up his fortune and goes to live with Elsa, the artist-teacher who has brought only herself, her instinctual freedom, and her understanding of how one can turn “separateness inside out to find love” (87). Julio's final choice has been foreshadowed in the second paragraph of the story by the description of a garden which is like Elsa: Mexican rather than German, the garden is an “opened surprise of patio encircled by profuse foliage. … It had a natural opulence. … Nothing was bordered or trimmed” (79).

The garden that the peasant woman Beatriz cultivates in “If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle …” bears a strange fruit and allows her to seize her freedom, like Clotilde, through a daring act. Unlike Clotilde, however, she must destroy another person, an active agent of evil. In many ways Beatriz resembles Trambley's faceless women who blend into the background and show no heroic tendencies. Although at fourteen she felt the “idiocy” of the female condition (99), she had no aspirations when she ran away from her mother and nine brothers to live with the brutish Robles, who had women and children scattered all over: “Washing for one man was better than washing for nine” was her practical, illusion-free reasoning. Now, however, no longer young, Beatriz can look back over years of dreading Robles' coming to town, because “living with him was like living with a pig who insisted upon a sty. He was dirty, destructive, and greedy. He looked like a pig. She hated the touch of his thick, heavy hands and the rotten smell of his mouth” (100).

Beatriz has survived her years as a sex object through one saving trait: a sense of individual order, which must be distinguished from the strict, stifling patterns of tradition which Trambley consistently finds inimical to the freedom of the human spirit. Although placing value in wildness and spontaneity, Trambley always recognizes that some order is necessary to prevent complete chaos. Beatriz has structured her hard life around such a belief: “Things were what they were. One only had to give them order” (100). The central element of Beatriz' sense of order is her house, which she spent twelve years building, using materials she could “beg, buy, or steal.” Covered by honeysuckle vines, the little hut is an extension of her garden and represents the strength and potential power that have been building up inside Beatriz during her years of victimization. The house is “the realization of an order more important to her than anything else.” Even Robles' bringing home a second woman adds to Beatriz' individual order, because then he leaves her alone; Sofa also becomes a good companion for Beatriz. Sewing shoes, cooking candy to sell, and working in her garden, Beatriz has managed to become self-sufficient and to create a spot of freedom—small and limited but sufficient to keep her alive and safe in an ugly, chaotic world.

When Robles, “getting old and insecure about his prowess as a man” (100), disturbs her order and, therefore, takes away her small freedom, he is setting the stage for an overturning of power by this simple but strong woman. His frequent beating and eventual crippling of Sofa disturbs Beatriz' order, as do his threats to sell the house she has worked so hard to build. His final disturbance is bringing home a third victim, a fourteen-year-old cholera-infected waif whose imminent rape so disgusts Beatriz that she knows she must act to save her. Understanding historical patterns through her own experiences, Beatriz can now recognize that manmade laws have rendered women “possessions, slaves, pawns in the hands of men with ways of beasts. … walloped effigies to burn upon the altars of men. … no more than durable spectacles to prove a fearful potency that was a shudder and a blow” (106).

The garden in this story is both symbol and essential plot element. Spreading over Beatriz' hut, the honeysuckle vines are called “the Dionysian covering of a soul”; although they have a certain pattern as they follow the trellises, they form “their own geography, going in all directions” (98), symbolizing the freedom represented by the plants in Trambley's other gardens. The honeysuckle vines are in danger, however, their bottom so overgrown that they can hardly breathe. Like the garden in “The Paris Gown” which had only enough order “to free the life from complete chaos” (4) and like Beatriz herself, the vines need a little order. When Beatriz sets out to cut away some of the overgrown vines to save the main artery, she is giving the honeysuckles a chance to find their way to the sun and remain free and beautiful; her act foreshadows what she must soon do to create freedom for herself and her two female companions. The garden becomes an essential element of the story's plot when Beatriz finds among the profusion of honeysuckle vines “three white, fruiting Amanitas” (103), her instrument of death for Robles. These small mushrooms are Nature's offering, a gift of the way to freedom. They have appeared as a result of Beatriz' seeking order in her garden as well as her life; significantly, when Beatriz shares her plan, Sofa stares at the Amanitas and sees “the order Beatriz gave to freedom” (105).

In poisoning Robles and burying him in the place where the mushrooms were found, the women not only save the innocence of Lucretia and allow her the freedom to find her sun, but they also plant the seed for the liberation of all women. Robles is “a human sacrifice to a Dionysian god dressed in honeysuckle vines” (109), for Trambley sees the positive order as Dionysian rather than Apollonian. Trambley's vision is suggested by the Dionysian Zeitgeist described by Nietzsche: “Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him.”³ Julio (“The Secret Room”) came to see this same Nietzschean spirit—not the Nazi Superman but the humanist above the violent struggle of hate (81). Out of death come life, freedom, and a hope for a new Eden, created not by Apollo and man's controlling reason but out of Dionysian slaughter and woman's instinctive creativity.

A tragic figure among Trambley's heroic women is the ambiguous Nina of “The Trees,” who is able to free herself only by destroying other people as well as herself. Much of Trambley's vision of power and freedom is expressed in this story of the Fall from Eden. “The Trees” has all the trappings of Eden, including the apples, for the earthly paradise created years ago by Don Teofilo Ayala is the Quintico apple orchard where his family worked in “love and harmony,” executing a “task of God and for God” (12). Growing the sweetest apples in the world, the orchard is a natural, protected place that seems whole and wholesome. However, it is a false paradise in which father and four sons have established a “working patriarchal order,” everyone living “for a fraternal cause, the apple orchards” (13), with the women following silently behind; like the apples, the women are mere extensions of the men, cultivated for male use. They appear to have been untouched either by ambition or a desire for power. The orchard is also a stagnant paradise where newness and change never enter: a world of the false innocence of stasis and a destructive lack of dialectics and creation.

Nina, who marries the youngest brother, Ismael, challenges both the patriarchal order and the stagnation. Like a Blakean Orc, she destroys what is false so that something new can be created. She is, however, more ambiguous than Blake's figures of destructive creation. Having no “substantial background in tradition or security,” she is free, and she sees the lives of the other women in the family as “imitated rituals” which are like a “dumb-show” (13). Refusing to follow the old patterns of female submission, Nina with her blushing cheek and “coquettish smile” is an Eve who offers newness to this false paradise. She is, however, “also the snake,” tempting her brother-in-law to sin and thereby bringing evil and destruction. Complicating Nina even more, Trambley makes her the apple, “soft, with that special sweetness” (15), when she makes love with Rafael. In all these roles Nina is attempting to drive out the fear she has felt since her stepmother sold her to four drunken men and caused her early to suffer the “inhumanities and cruelties” of men. Denied her individuality, her freedom, even her own body, she eventually lost her ability to love and replaced it with the masculine desire for power: she wants to own the orchard even if she must destroy everything in her way. When she comes close to her goal, she has a “feeling of power” described as “almost orgiastic” (18). As in other Trambley stories where the knife and gun are phallic symbols substituting for love, here power has replaced love.

Trambley presents still a fourth image of Nina, that of “an avenging angel come to the Garden of Eden” (16), indicating that in one sense Nina does not cause the Fall but rather comes after it to cast out those who have created an order contrary to the divine. The patriarchal order that has denied Nina her human potential, that makes the apples more important than the women, must be destroyed before a new Eden can be created—and Nina must move “to a form of innocence regained.”⁴ Although Nina kills herself, she dies thinking of “a good harvest in Paradise.” Tragically, she has been unable to find in this life the higher innocence and freedom she sought, but her heroic, if perverted, defiance of the oppressive order has created a desolation that is not a nothingness. The narrator comments during Nina's death leap: “A shower of rocks followed the path of her falling body in full symphony. It sang the praises of a something new in erosive change” (22). Here the reader can understand the narrator's comments at the beginning of the story: “The newness itself, nevertheless, be it creation or destruction, finds its way of changing people, apples, ways. Experience finds expansion in this newness, in this unknown. Even if it becomes the remnants of a dead paradise, it leaves another richness and creation for other men” (12). Nina is, therefore, both the product of the male-oriented society and the angel who brings about a possibility of change.

The women of Trambley's fiction live in a world they did not create, a world of male dominance, oppression, and terrifying control. Some, subjugated and crippled, can only wait; others, however, consciously or unconsciously, create a freer, more vital, more open paradise. One of the dominant myths of American life and literature is that of the American Adam who came to the new world to create a Garden of Eden. That Eve has been a victim in the new garden is an historical fact. The predicted transfiguration and regeneration have failed, and out of the failure emerges Trambley's myth of the archetypal woman who has remained truer to vision and ideals than her male counterpart. Rejecting inequality between the sexes and the male violence and hunger for power that perpetuate unnatural order, Trambley's new woman can bring about a spiritual and moral revolution.

Notes

1. See Martha Cotera, Profile on the Mexican American Woman (Las Cruces: New Mexico State Univ. Press, 1976).

2. Estela Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Berkeley: Tonatuih International, 1975), p. 65. Subsequent references are to this edition.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), p. 23.

4. Olivia Castellano, “Of Clarity and the Moon: A Study of Two Women in Rebellion,” De Colores, 3, No. 3 (1977), 29.