SOURCE: Parotti, Phillip. “Nature and Symbol in Estela Portillo's ‘The Paris Gown.’” Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. 4 (fall 1987): 417-24.

[In the following essay, Parotti identifies nature as the controlling symbol of “The Paris Gown.”]

Estela Portillo de Trambley's short story, “The Paris Gown,” is a crafted fiction which develops its theme through masterful manipulation of traditional literary devices. The work is, certainly, other things as well. Charles M. Tatum has called attention to the story's liberation theme and declared its sensitive, feminine thrust.¹ Judy Salinas has suggested that the piece emphasizes the “humanness” of woman “through an understanding of her role in Chicano society and in all society and how it restricts or frees her.”² Finally, Bruce-Novoa writes:

“The Paris Gown” offers a less violent, but certainly equally positive tale of female liberation. Besides the open attack on anachronistic machismo and the creation of a strong, interesting female protagonist, the story proposes the need to shift from a rigidly defined, intellectualized aesthetic to a fluid, sensual one, what Susan Sontag calls the movement from the hermeneutics to the erotics of art, or what Portillo would call the victory of the Dionysian principle over the Apollonian. When the metaphor of aesthetics is expanded to its cosmic significance, we understand that Portillo advocates a radical social revolution.³

Comments like these have tended to classify Estela Portillo as a Chicano feminist. Admittedly, the classification is just, but we err if we do not look beyond the classification, if we do not see more than the feminist, if we do not try to discover the writer as artist. Portillo, herself, has said “It's going to take a lot of conditioning before men say that I am a Chicano writer and that I write just as well as the men.”⁴Not so, and “The Paris Gown,” ostensibly Portillo's first short story (by virtue of its position in Rain of Scorpions), is the proof. In fact, in “The Paris Gown,” one finds a tightly unified artifact that is fully capable of supporting a hermeneutic reading. When so read, Portillo's theme unfolds in such a way as to reveal that it has been developed through a skillful combination of image, metaphor, and symbol.

Put simply, Portillo's plot in “The Paris Gown” is straightforward; Tatum's synopsis captures its essence with crisp economy:

“The Paris Gown” deals with the personal courage of a woman who is out of step with the expectations and restrictions of the Mexican society in which she is raised. Clo escapes the heavy tradition of her age by refusing to submit to the dictates of her parents who insist that she marry an elderly widower. Filled with justified resentment after years of being treated differently because of her sex, she decides to liberate herself in a most unusual but effective way—she makes a dramatic entrance at her formal engagement party completely nude! Convinced of her insanity, her father quickly accedes to her demand that she be allowed to live in Paris with his full financial support. Years later she relates the story of her unorthodox liberation to her amazed granddaughter Theresa, a young woman who is on the brink of asserting her own womanhood.⁵

As a nutshell appreciation of the story's incidents, of the story's action, this is precise. However, the artistic question we have to consider, here, is not so much what but how the writer achieves her ends, and the answer is found in Portillo's manipulation of a controlling symbol.

Nature—and more specifically, the garden—is Portillo's controlling symbol in “The Paris Gown.” On the surface, both as an idea and a device, nature figures so prominently in Rain of Scorpions that one is tempted to cite Portillo as a direct Twentieth-Century heir to the entire tradition of Nineteenth-Century English and American Romanticism. In fact, her Anglo literary antecedents seem fairly clear, but the question demands a far more lengthy treatment than present space allows, so, for the moment, attention must focus on the controlling symbol in a single story. Nevertheless, our issue remains complex because Portillo has made the symbol complex. In “The Paris Gown,” nature never is merely nature and a garden is never merely a garden. Instead, Portillo renders the symbol in what seems to be four relatively distinct forms, forms that I will call raw nature, civilized nature, barbaric nature, and dead nature. Superficially, and briefly, raw nature, the wild garden, is manifested in the wilderness; civilized nature, the Dionysian garden, is manifested in the liberated order of the tended garden; barbaric nature, the Apollonian garden, is manifested in the elaborate, contrived formality of a rigid garden, and dead nature, the poisoned garden, is manifested in the bitter garden of the dead heart, in hate. Human beings who are afoot on the geo-cosm, in the geo-garden, have the potential to move into any of the four gardens; final disposition of the individual person and psyche is a matter of choice, and “The Paris Gown” is about that choice.

In her opening paragraphs, Portillo carefully establishes the story's aesthetic, and this aesthetic is the foundation upon which her controlling symbol functions. As Clo passes through her Parisian living room, speaking with her granddaughter, she pauses briefly before a sculpture by a favorite artist: “Gautier was a man of great passions; many consider him a primitive. He plunged into the instinctual and emotional to surface with an energy, a feeling, an ability free of barbarism.”⁶ Mystified, Theresa attempts to interpret Clo's remark negatively on the basis of historical tradition, “Isn't barbarism equated with the primitive?” (p. 2). In response, Clo becomes aesthetically explicit:

But look at it from a human viewpoint; barbarism is the subjugation of the instinctual for reason. I know that within the pretty works of the great Hellenes, reason is primary and instinct secondary. But man's reason is a boxed-in circumstance that has proved itself more violent against human beings than instinct. Instinct is part of survival law; it is also a part of what gathers a wholeness. Barbarism is a product of limited reason. And what reason is not, at least in part, limited? Instinct is an innate law without barrier. … It is important to leave the field of invention open in art … as in life.

(p. 3)

Portillo has offered some intense self-criticism for introducing this kind of philosophical inquiry into her fiction,⁷ but in so far as that criticism concerns “The Paris Gown,” she may have been too hard on herself: Clo is an art dealer, a one-time artist; her remarks are in character, realistically as well as thematically. Clearly, Clo is a Dionysian rather than an Apollonian, and the explicit revelation of this aesthetic distills her personality, establishing for Theresa the governing principle of her grandmother's life. Earlier, when Theresa had first entered Clo's living room, the environment had stirred her feelings:

How fresh and open was the world in this room. Theresa felt that the room itself was a composite of what Clotilde had become in the life process. Every piece of art and sculpture gave the impact of humanness. The colors were profuse and rich; they seemed to touch impulse and awaken still undefined passions. Yes, it was a room with a singular ferocity for life.

(p. 2)

Following Clo's statement of principle, Theresa experiences an instantaneous jolt that clarifies her own perceptions: “That's what I feel about this room! It is an open field!” (p. 3). For the fiction, Theresa's choice of the word field is artistically significant.

As image, “field” is visually sensual, suggesting a free and open expanse where natural order prevails through unfettered growth. The image, I submit, is Dionysian to its roots, and when one recognizes that Theresa has arrived at the image through intuitive “natural discovery” (p. 3) and, then, used it metaphorically, one sees that her spontaneous perceptions about the room—that it is fresh, open, profuse, rich, a world—correctly characterize not only her grandmother's art collection but her grandmother's environment. Still, more may be said, but it is not until we move from metaphor to symbol that we are able to recognize the Dionysian garden as a symbol for Clo's mature life and, indeed, her soul.

Enthusiastic about her natural discovery, Theresa rises to join her grandmother at the window. Thematically, the moment is pregnant; having understood her grandmother so spontaneously, Theresa moves closer to her in realms of both space and time, and what both women see is Clo's garden:

Both looked out into a garden with its own kind of freedom. 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. Theresa caught a lovely fragrance.

(pp. 3-4)

Literally, Clo's garden is as Dionysian as her living room; in fact, the two spacial entities are reflections of each other, places where loving care, a tending influence, has nurtured growth and fecundity within a civilized, liberated, artistic order. Care has been taken with both, and a degree of discipline is apparent, but, in Clo's case, the discipline, cultivation, has been applied to room and garden only to avoid chaos, never to thwart culture or natural growth. Theresa's movement in space, then, is literal, obvious, toward a physical window with a physical view, but her movement in time is symbolic. Having experienced an epiphany of understanding with her grandmother, Theresa is afforded a momentary spiritual window into Clo's soul, and what she sees is the Dionysian garden of Clo's life. What she sees there is free, beautiful, and fresh, Parisian, but the cost of that freedom, that “opening up … as does a flower to the sun. That is the feel of Paris” (p. 1), has been high. Had Clo not had the strength of character to make her Dionysian choice, the window of her soul might have afforded Theresa an unencumbered view of far less attractive gardens, all of which become apparent as Clo takes us back in time by narrating the story of her choice.

If Clo chose for herself the “civilized” Dionysian life of Paris, the life of the opening flower, her culture, her society, her family, and her father—the ultimate authority figure in her life—had something quite different in mind for her. As Clo tells Theresa:

‘Yes, tradition was much heavier in my time. There was but a single fate for the gentlewoman … one variation of a cloister or another. To marry meant to become the lovely mistress of a household where husbands took unfair freedoms, unfair only because the freedoms belonged to them and were unthinkable for women! Children were the recompense, but children should not be a recompense; they are human beings belonging to themselves; and we should not need recompense. … If we did not marry, there was total dependency on the generosity of pitying relatives, with church and its rituals for comfort. The nunnery or running away with the stable boy offered many sacrifices and discomforts. No … no. … There must be another solution, I would tell myself!’

(p. 4)

Boxed-in by tradition, Clo seeks an escape through art, an avenue accidentally opened to her by her bohemian uncle, Gaspar. A Dionysian spirit himself, a dabbler in painting, writing, and theatre, Gaspar chauvinistically attempts to interest Clo's brother Felix (a name no doubt chosen by Portillo for its connotations of masculine freedom and happiness) in painting, and when Felix, who has little talent, discards his materials, Clo picks them up:

‘I worked at it everyday … so naturally I acquired a certain proficiency and decided I had a talent and my brother did not. I had a compulsion to compare, to outdo him, because he was a boy with born privileges and I was a girl born into a kind of slavery.’

(p. 5)

Harboring delusions of her own artistic superiority, harboring a type of pride, Clo is further driven by envy of her brother's masculine freedom. The result is that she becomes increasingly frustrated, more and more envious. As she explained to Theresa when describing the boxed-in nature of aristocratic Mexican culture, “It can turn to bitterness, then we become the bitterness itself, a patterned, strict garden of dead things, poisoned things” (p. 4). In her pride and her envy, Clo drives herself harder and harder to compete with Felix for their father's affections, and in doing so, she risks the Garden of Death itself: “I poisoned my garden early in life, but to an extent, it was my nature to want freedom” (p. 5). Finally, in her competition with her brother, Clo gives herself over to a kind of wildness, a wildness that manifests itself in her attempts to best Felix in races between their matched stallions. Symbolically and psychologically, Clo's capacity to master her stallion suggests that she is competing with her brother in an attempt to impress their father with the potency of her sexual energy, and, clearly, she fails:

‘My father would say. … A man must never allow a woman to outdo him. How typical of him! The way of the varón, and Felix was his varón. … I was just a daughter, an afterthought, so I thought. My mother would whisper to me. … Let your brother win when you race. It would please your father. … I did not wish to please my father with the accomplishments of my brother. To outdo him became my constant form of revenge. My father resented the fact and overlooked my ability to outdo, as if it did not exist. This was adding salt to my wounds. … I think I began to hate my father, poor father!’ Clotilde caught Theresa's glance for a second. There was a slight sliver of anxiety in Clotilde's voice. ‘You must remember, Theresa, it was my poison.’

(p. 5)

When Felix irresponsibly decides to have his way, delay his studies, and travel to Paris, “to sow his wild oats,” Clo finally pushes her father beyond his limits. Then, temporarily, both father and daughter cross over into the realm of raw nature, what I choose to call the wild garden. There, the rule is survival of the fittest, and the consequences of Clo's acts take her mentally and physically close to a final entrance into the garden of death. “I decided to confront my father and ask him what he was going to do about my wild oats. Poor man! His reaction was violent. He accused me of insanity and wilfulness. Perhaps, he said, what I needed was a nunnery. He meant it too!” (p. 5). Stubborn in her refusal to relent, Clo continues to bait and resist her father, pushing him so hard that he finally arranges to marry her off, to the best advantage. “I drove him half-crazy with the potency of legitimate complaint. It was then that his natural instinct of survival prompted him to do what he did” (p. 6). Don Ignacio Maez de Tulares, the man Clo's father selects for her husband, is a wealthy widower more than twice Clo's age. Clo is so repulsed by the arrangement that she first tries to starve herself and then, literally, runs away into the wild garden, giving herself wholly over to raw nature in the wilderness, and it nearly kills her. This is the same wilderness through which she once rode with Felix, a place of high hills, high winds, and tempests; symbolically, it is a place of unrestrained passion and wildness, of uninhibited, absolute freedom run to chaos. It is not primitive; it is savage, and in its way, it is as antithetical to the tended Dionysian garden as death itself. “I even ran away on my horse and stayed out in the hills until my father sent out a searching party who found me half starved and with a bad case of pneumonia” (p. 6).

During her convalescence, when “For the first time in my life, I felt the full attention of my parents” (p. 6), Clo makes one more attempt to persuade her father to relent on the issue of her marriage to Don Ignacio. As she remembers later, “You simply do not unpetal a flower for your own advantage. You give it a chance of life” (p. 6). Regardless of his genuine concern for his daughter's health and regardless of his kindness and gentleness toward her person, Clo's father refuses to relent; in turn, this threat of violence to her spirit leads Clo to a final revelation:

‘Yes, he refused.’ Her eyes roamed the great expanse of horizon as if trying to forget, not the pain, but a loved one's shortcoming. ‘I remember a similar garden while I was getting well. … no, now that I think of it, it was different. It was impressive and almost manicured to perfection. It was a showcase with swans in a pond and flowers arranged by specie. There was hedge after hedge where children played hide-and-go-seek. One afternoon, during my illness, I watched some children bathing in the pond. They were three or four years old, no more. There was a little boy who decided to join the bathing children, so he took off his clothes and waded in. His nurse caught sight of him and with great indignation caught him up in her arms and spanked his little bare back. It was a curious episode of innocence and the declaration of a truth. I remember going back into the house with the imprint in my mind. For the next few weeks, I felt a growing peace. I did not argue, or beg, or cajole, I simply enjoyed my time for contemplation. It was an attempt to accept. I tried, but I could not.’

(pp. 6-7)

What Clo sees here is a symbol of what her culture, her society, her family, and her father would have her accept, a life like the Apollonian garden before her, a life hemmed in by hedges that have been arranged in advance according to elaborate, formal plans that figure forth artificial constrictions, limits, and rigidly enforced patterns of discipline. In fact, the Apollonian garden is contrived; whatever beauty it possesses is cold. In so far as life goes on there, it is either a place for immature children or a showcase for beautiful, captive swans, and flowers, Portillo's symbol for lives, arranged by specie. In the absence of colors, light, feelings, and freedom, the Apollonian garden is walled and barbarous, wholly boxed-in. “Isn't that the objective of love … to break walls?” (p. 3), Clo asks Theresa. But Clo's father did not break the wall, so breaking out must be left up to Clo.

Refusing to be “unpetaled” by those she loves, Clo arranges her own unique way of breaking through the hedges that have been placed to constrict her. Seeming to acquiesce to her father's wishes, she joins in the spirit of her proposed engagement, and for her engagement ball, she orders an expensive Paris gown. The gown's arrival is a moment of excitement: “It was a maze of tulle and lace and pearl insets. The ultimate of fashion” (p. 7). The key word, I think, is maze: the gown itself is Portillo's ultimate symbol for the constricted Apollonian garden to which Clo's father would consign her; it is her showcase, her arrangement by specie, where—like the captive swans and the flowers—she will be boxed-in and displayed, coldly, in a fashionably beautiful but lifeless ensemble. Thus, on the night of the ball, at the precise moment of her grand entrance, she appears stark naked, shattering forever the confines of her showcase with one final exhibition of instinctive wildness, and in doing so, she creates the conditions of her liberation. Small wonder that Clo should be such a legend to the clans of aristocratic women who remained behind, confined to their own rigidly Apollonian mazes, and small wonder that Theresa, a young woman verging on her own maturity, should find herself unable to call Clo by the name Grandmother. In context, Grandmother itself becomes a rigidly Apollonian form, a limiting label, a specie denomination, and when Theresa tries to use it, she finds that she cannot; the term simply will not fit Clotilde Romero de Traske whose fluidly sophisticated chic transcends it. “The traces of age in Clotilde were indistinguishable in the grace and youthful confidence exuded from her gestures, her eyes, her flexible body, and the quick disarming eyes” (p. 1). Like her favorite sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska, Clo had “plunged into the instinctual and emotional” only to resurface, free, with a feeling transcending the Apollonian barbarism of her past. As she told Theresa, “the artist makes his own rules for finding a strength out of the life experience” (p. 2). Having made her choice and taken her plunge, Clo emerged, an opening flower, in Paris where, she says, “I made my home. … my home” (p. 9) into a Dionysian garden of the spirit. Clearly, Theresa understands the symbol and the choice, and as the story closes, we see not a Grandmother and a Granddaughter but two women engaged in silent but sympathetic communion: “Both women looked out the window and caught the full colors of life” (p. 9).

Speaking of Blake, Northrop Frye once said:

If we describe Blake's conception of art independently of the traditional myth of fall and apocalypse that embodies it, we may say that the poetic activity is fundamentally one of identifying the human with the nonhuman world. This identity is what the poetic metaphor expresses, and the end of the poetic vision is the humanization of reality. …⁸

Much the same thing, I submit, may be said about Portillo's art in “The Paris Gown,” although I would want to be sure to read Frye's “poetic metaphor” in the broadest possible sense. What Portillo achieves, certainly, is an identification of the human with the nonhuman world; she does so by skillfully moving from image to metaphor and, then, to symbol; the final result is a humanization of reality in which “humanness” and nature realize a unity.

Notes

1. Charles M. Tatum, Chicano Literature (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), p. 98. Hereafter cited as Tatum.

2. Judy Salinas, “The Role of Women in Chicano Literature,” in The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, ed. Francisco Jiménez (New York: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1979), p. 193.

3. John D. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), p. 164. Hereafter cited as Bruce-Novoa.

4. Ibid., p. 171.

5. Tatum, p. 98.

6. Estela Portillo de Trambley, “The Paris Gown,” Rain of Scorpions (Berkeley: Tonatiuh International Inc., 1975), p. 2. Hereafter, all parenthetical citations are to this text.

7. Bruce-Novoa, p. 170.

8. Northrop Frye, “The Road of Excess,” in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 19.