SOURCE: Pérez, Janet. “Masks, Gender Expectations, Machismo and (Criss) Cross-Gender Writing in the Fiction of José Donoso.” Hispanofila 119 (January 1997): 47-58.

[In the following essay, Pérez analyzes the way Donoso critiques gender stereotyping and the cult of machismo by using cross-gender themes and symbols in his writing.]

Criticism of Donoso to date has tended to categorize his works as social realism or even neo-naturalism during an early period up to the late 1960s and publication of El obsceno pájaro de la noche, [hereafter abbreviated EOPN] and as experimental thereafter. Those novels published after EOPN—a work so fragmented, contradictory, multivocal and multivalent as to defy most efforts at interpretation—have been comparably traditional in format and structure, so that views of Donoso as a social realist have not entirely disappeared, even though freudian, jungian and neo-freudian interpretations are also common and some structuralist and deconstructionist readings have appeared. Donoso in fact is neither as simplistic as early readings of his works of the 1950s and 1960s suggest, nor as impossibly obscure and unintelligible as some reactions to EOPN indicate. As Sharon Magnarelli points out, his “fiction invites, indeed exacts … disparate and multivocal readings. [It] can never be read simplistically” (3).

Among the oft-mentioned aspects of Donoso's writing are his treatment of the decadence of the Chilean bourgeoisie,¹ the crumbling of feudal structures and the “decay of an oligarchy.”² The presence of numerous contradictions, use of multiple layers of reality and meaning, unstable identities and gender roles, consistent use of masks, role-playing and role reversal, and depiction of identity crises render his characters complex, even in the early works. Many commentators focus upon sexual problems,³ highly visible in Donoso's fiction. But his work has not been read specifically from the perspective of the interface between social and sexual expectations, gender roles and models, employing the filter of machismo as a cultural gender imposition. Such an approach would be compatible with extant critical commentary on Donoso, and has the potential of identifying common ground between earlier approaches, a point of contact or intersection between social, historical, sociological, cultural, sociopolitical, economic, psychological, freudian and jungian readings and interpretations based on recent critical theory (structural, semiotic, deconstructionist, etc.).

Numerous Donoso characters lend themselves to readings as subversions of the macho stereotype, and consideration of gender roles is a basic prerequisite to understanding his depiction of Chilean society. While extended families in Chile are ostensibly ruled by patriarchs, reality within the home frequently approaches the matriarchal model, with the mother or nanny governing the child's existence and often holding the home together. Such, indeed, was the experience of Donoso's formative years, with a distant and unreliable father replaced by various elderly maternal relatives, possibly inspiring the powerful, witchlike females in his fiction. Small wonder, then, that ideal, intact families are seldom found in Donoso's work, and men “are frequently portrayed as weak, ineffectual and pathetic. When, on rare occasions, the text depicts an ostensibly strong, powerful man, that power is undercut by females” (Magnarelli 8). A repeated type is the male who has been emasculated or rendered impotent by a powerful mother figure (e.g., Andrés in Coronación, Álvaro in Este domingo). Elsewhere, exaggeratedly “masculine” behavior conceals self-doubt or masks latent homosexuality (Pancho in El lugar sin límites, Mario in Coronación).

This study examines passages relevant to Donoso's subversion of machismo and similar normative gender types, analyzing his peculiar use of cross-gender writing which incorporates the layering technique characteristic of other aspects of his fiction. Donoso does not simply, as a male writer, adopt the feminine gender perspective, role and attributes to write from the viewpoint of a female character, but sometimes adds other layers of reality or masquerade, for example, adopting the perspective of an ostensible female who ultimately proves to be a male homosexual and transvestite (in El lugar sin límites) or employing the putative masculine perspective of a character, supposedly the husband and narrator-protagonist, who is subsequently revealed not as “himself” but as the wife, who has adopted or usurped the husband's identity and point of view, making him a character—the narrator-protagonist—in her novel (El jardín de al lado). Given such added complexities, Donoso's technique might be termed “criss-cross gender writing” to distinguish it from more straightforward approaches.

Examining gender roles and expectations in relation to certain major motifs of Donoso's fiction, such as the mask, can illuminate prior interpretation and open additional avenues of meaning. The mask or disguise sometimes appears when characters are too repressed or insecure to reveal their true selves. The novelist himself calls attention to his use of disguise and the significance in his work of impersonation:

¿Por qué me interesan tanto los disfraces? ¿Por qué me interesan los travesti (sic)? ¿Por qué me interesa en Coronación la locura de la señora? ¿Por qué en Este domingo los disfraces tienen un lugar tan importante? Es porque éstas son maneras de deshacer la unidad del ser humano. Deshacer la unidad psicológica, ese mito horrible que nos hemos inventado.

(Quoted by Rodríguez Monegal 525)

Such devices function equally well to subvert stereotypes, which obviously form part of what Donoso terms the horrible myth of psychological unity; indeed, a premise of unity and similarity underlies stereotyping per se. And sexual or gender stereotypes are among the most basic and widespread. Masks, costumes, cross-dressing, disguises and games, instances of identity and/or gender exchange, role reversals, and varying degress of failure to conform to or live up to stereotypical expectations are among techniques employed by Donoso which function to subvert antiquated, outmoded or unrealistic class and gender paradigms. Cross-gender writing, while not necessarily subversive, may be used effectively to parody or undermine.

Magnarelli points out that the motif of the mask sometimes “reveals itself in a form of transvestism … wearing the clothing of the opposite sex [as in El lugar sin límites] … but at other times, it is an interchangeability of characters when one places himself in the clothes and thus the social position of the other” (5). Identity transfer is carried to extremes of the absurd when characters exchange not only clothing and names but body parts, as in El obsceno pájaro and “Chatanooga Choo-choo,” both featuring detachable, reusable sexual organs and other parts of the body. Donoso's writings of the 1970s and 1980s, his exile fiction, abound in “homosexuality, schizophrenia, sterility, absence, estrangement, the double and role reversal” (Pérez 36) which may indeed be metaphors of exilic experience,⁴ but also represent alternatives to assuming stereotyped gender roles, alternatives implying rejection, which provide other perspectives from which to view traditional, patriarchally-sanctioned gender models. Much like the fluid, Protean, changing identities in EOPN, the fragmented or multivocal “yo” undermines narrative reliability through its very multiplicity which Cirlot states is reductive and degrading.

Oscar Montero sees Donoso as deliberately trying to undermine the authority of the text, a patriarchal authority based upon traditional hierarchies of discourse. Clearly, efforts at such subversion would be in harmony with subversion of gender stereotypes, social class limitations, and patriarchally prescribed roles, and would probably have similar origins. Gutiérrez Mouat examines the ludic and carnivalesque aspects of Donoso's fiction, noting that play (juego) is typically juvenile and solitary, carnival adult and collective (25). Carnival, obviously, reinforces mask motifs and vice versa. Citing Bakhtin to the effect that the carnival is “funcional, no sustantivo” (27), Gutiérrez Mouat argues that it is an adjectival phenomenon whose function is to modify what convention has defined as stable or fixed (a category implicitly subsuming stereotypes). Bakhtin holds that “carnival celebrates change itself”—pure metamorphosis—but most readers of Donoso will agree that his ends are less celebratory and more serious, involving existential, ontological and social aims. The carnival function in Donoso, given its linkages to masks and to the the key theme of (multiplicity of) identity, underscored by the writer himself, probably transcends the “adjectival.”

Aspects of Donoso's fiction lend themselves to a feminist reading, especially in the subversion of patriarchal norms and restrictions, undermining or reversing expectations of machista behavior, and the enclosure and perjorative treatment of women. Inversion, parody and deformation are seen by Bakhtin as carnivalesque techniques, and all are frequently used by Donoso to subversive ends. Gutiérrez Mouat maintains that “la temática de Donoso parte de una concepción del yo … como máscara, como protagonista de un rol, como personaje de un guión” (31), a concept rendering it logical to use techniques such as cross-gender writing (or criss-crossing), and motifs of replaceable identities and interchangeable body parts, much like changing the mask. This critic asserts that Donoso's view of society and social interaction is “como juego de actores cuyos roles están inscritos en un ‘guión’ social generalizado, cognoscible y transmitible” (33). The notion of the generalized, transmitted script recalls the commedia dell'arte with its stereotypical figures and unwritten but mutually understood scripts. Just as the commedia dell'arte masks or figures acquired easily recognizable characteristics (making their identities transferrable, interchangeable among members of a troupe), so also do such gender types as the macho: the word evokes mental images almost as concrete as do the names of Harlequin or Polichinella.

Interestingly, many of Donoso's works take place in houses—domestic, feminized spaces as opposed to the “man's world” (business, politics, professions and public spaces).⁵ Indeed, the huge, rambling, labyrinthine, crumbling house is paradigmatic in his fiction, with its physical decay and decadence constituting a visible, Expressionistic symbol of the moral decay of those within, as seen in Coronación, Este domingo, and Casa de campo, as well as with the collapse of the convent “Casa de la Encarnación de la Chimba” in EOPN. Such humanized, decaying or declining houses are Donoso's hallmarks, as distinctive and recognizable as his neurotic, disguised, aberrant characters.

Among the most ludic and carnivalesque of all of Donoso's fiction is Casa de campo. The elaborate episodes of the cousins' stylized performances of “La Marquesa Salió a Las Cinco” constitute both an escape from adult control and a preparation for adult roles (cf. 95), allowing the novelist to satirize gender expectations, e.g., “la obligación número uno—si no la única—de las mujeres era justamente ser bonita” (96). A feminist could hardly have said it better! One grotesquely Expressionistic episode which clearly subverts gender expectations involves the “make-believe” housewifery in imitation of an earlier feast of roast pig shared by men of the family, whereby Mignon prepares a meal for her father, roasting her little sister Aída as a cochinito with an apple stuffed in her mouth. Upon viewing the ghastly repast, the father beats Mignon to a bloody, lifeless pulp with a log of firewood (85-87).

Another feminine role expectation or patriarchal norm subverted is the view of women as destined irrevocably to an unending child-bearing function: “Mauro solía tenderse sobre el cuerpo de Melania en un ruboroso simulacro del amor, un episodio más de La Marquesa Salió a Las Cinco, y debajo de la cama salía chillando una bandada de pequeñuelos desnudos participando en la parodia de un multitudinario alumbramiento” (150). By contrast, an episode between three male cousins involves a moralizing lecture by the homosexual Juvenal when he visits the bedroom and finds two younger boys masturbating: “cuidado: de esto que han estado haciendo a ser maricones que se disfrazan de marquesas y entornan los ojos al tocar el piano, como yo, hay un solo paso” (155). Neither these edifying thoughts nor Juvenal's pride in his “difference” as the only maricón among the thirty-three cousins prevent his climbing into bed with the younger boys and furthering their delinquency.

Not only sexual stereotypes and gender expectations but social distances are satirized, as the cousins play at lackeys and mayordomos, lords and ladies. The ritualistic, artificial nature of social intercourse is summarized in the codified hypocrisy of family laws: “el primer mandamiento era que jamás nadie debía enfrentarse con nada, que la vida era pura alusión y ritual y símbolo” (182); logically, reality is avoided and disguised: “se podía hacer todo, sentirlo todo, desearlo todo, aceptarlo todo, siempre que no se nombrara” (182). This clear allusion to the power of appearances and el qué dirán, the notion that what matters socially is not reality but what people think, occurs repeatedly throughout Donoso's work, explaining why masks and disguises acquire such visibility and significance. Machismo and gender stereotypes, as masks, when subverted or removed from the scene, permit manifestation of underlying authenticity or reality.

One may subvert stereotypes directly, portraying them in circumstances which make visible their limitations or shortcomings, via ridicule, parody or travesty. But one may also subvert indirectly, substituting other models, an approach which has the effect of suggesting alternatives or insinuating that the stereotype is not fully pervasive. Attaching positive attributes to alternative types functions to strengthen this latter approach. Both models appear in Donoso's fiction. Andrés, the wealthy bachelor in Coronación (a logical candidate for a macho or Don Juan) instead is depicted as bored, compulsive, repressed, a fearful introvert. Mario, his young lower-class rival for the favors of Estela, encarnates the archetypal macho, but his bullying behavior also underscores the shortcomings of the paradigm: ready to exploit Estela and her love by making her his accomplice in theft, he beats and insults her after her eleventh-hour decision not to be his partner in crime. In Este domingo, retired barrister and law professor Álvaro Vives is remembered by his grandson not as the womanizer he believes himself to be, but as an absurd, obsessive, self-centered, spoiled, immature hypochondriac. Álvaro, an archetypal male chauvinist, voices the most negative machista attitudes; for example, he scornfully refers to his wife's charitable, nurturing, caregiving personality by comparing her to a bitch nursing pups (22, 25, 28, 68), perhaps out of resentment at not being the focus of her attention. Taking social inequities for granted, Álvaro abuses master-servant relationships, impregnating the family maid and rationalizing that servants' role in life is to accept the master's sexual advances. Too irresponsible to acknowledge his paternity of Violeta's child, he is unable to function sexually with his social equals, i.e., without feeling superior: he manages to make love to his wife only by imagining her to be a servant. Obsessed with eroticism, he has repeated affairs, one resulting in the woman's suicide, but proves essentially impotent with women who are sexually demanding rather than maternal, subservient and submissive. Donoso's exploration of Álvaro's neuroses and fetichism, his egocentrism and inability to accept responsibility underscores the abyss between appearance and reality, between the mask of machismo and the insecure, spoiled, aging adolescent concealed beneath.

One of Donoso's most interesting characters and his most extensive early use of cross-gender writing appear in El lugar sin límites (1966). Manuel/a, a fiftyish transvestite, a male homosexual with a feminine psyche, refers to him/herself via feminine adjectives in interior monologues which for some fifty pages appear to convey a woman's thoughts. Only later does it become evident that beneath the red flamenco dancer's dress, Manuel/a possesses male genitalia, and is in fact Japonesita's biological father. Pancho Vega, the local bully super-macho and would-be don Juan, abuses and beats Manuel/a, leaving “her” for dead, but his sadistic attack is clearly sexual, a cruel, violent possessing which reveals Pancho's repressed homosexuality, cowardice and insecurity. Pancho's visible emblem, the phallic red truck, fails to assure his masculinity despite his noisy horn-blowing and careening about the village, and his partial demonstration of self-sufficiency and power, achieved by repaying his loan to the patriarch don Alejo, does not restore his full machista prestige, already violated and diminished by don Alejo's public scoldings and Octavio's taunts. Beneath his mask, this blustering bully remains insecure, doubt-filled, his gender identity the victim of arrested development (as Donoso suggests by Pancho's lacking a father and the years the boy was forced to spend as the playmate of Alejo's daughter. In this, he incorporates the freudian psychoanalytic model of male homosexuality whose central thesis is that the condition is “caused by a disturbed upbringing and developmental arrest”).⁶ Magnarelli concludes that “Pancho's gratuitous and exaggeratedly ‘macho’ violence toward Manuela is fraught with eroticism” (69) and “his treatment of Manuela is certainly a form of rape” (70). By contrast, Manuel/a thinks as a woman, realizing or acknowledging maleness, only when pain from the beating forces the admission. While biologically male, Manuel/a has assumed the feminine gender identity to the point of feeling superior to biological females (Japonesita and the prostitutes), fantasizing that “she” can show them what a real woman is (LSL 111). Cross-gender writing in this case surrenders its mask once Manuel/a's gender is revealed, although the character persistently clings to the feminine identity long after the reader knows that this psychic entity is biologically male. Only briefly and nearly at the end does s/he revert to masculine adjectives, upon realization in final moments of lucidity that not being biologically female could prove fatal. In subsequent novels, Donoso uses his growing expertise in more recent liberal psychology to foreground the extent to which gender identity and roles may be masks.

In El obsceno pájaro de la noche, infertility becomes a metaphor subverting machismo. Don Jerónimo incorporates both class and gender stereotypes: patriarch par excellence, noble landowner and handsome, desirable male, representing power, aristocratic privilege, and the abuses thereof. Jerónimo and his wife Inés fail for years to conceive a son, finally engendered during a magical copulation involving identity substitutions. In the several variations of this hallucinatory event, the primal pair Jerónimo-Inés is repeatedly replaced and successively re-composed of Humberto and Inés; Humberto and the old servant Peta Ponce; Jerónimo and Peta Ponce (thereby subverting myths of race as well as class and identity). Each time, there are suggestions that the old servant possesses witchlike powers, that hers may be the real and ultimate authority. Regardless of progenitors, the monstrous offspring “Boy” (who has neither boyhood nor boyish appearance) encarnates negative visions of hereditary aristocracy, of which he is the anachronistic continuation.

Protagonist-narrator, Humberto, a “counterhero” in Barthes' terminology, lives in a fantasy world populated by obsessive fears, the phantoms of his frustrated desires, a universe of ongoing psychic deterioration only exacerbated by his occasional contacts with those in the external world, especially Jerónimo, who has repeatedly affirmed his own machismo or phallic power via symbolic castration of Humberto, his erstwhile secretary. Humberto's attempts to climb the social ladder (fulfilling his father's wishes and affirming his own identity), force him to seek Jerónimo's aid to publish his book—the tangible manifestation of his identity, subsequently appropriated by his employer and locked away. Humberto is similarly “robbed” of his heroism and near-martyrdom when wounded in a political skirmish as Jerónimo attributes Humberto's blood to himself. Finally, he suffers various operations, organ transplants, implants, and castration by Jerónimo's evil surgeon in La Rinconada. In sequences reminiscent of Nazi experiments, 80٪ of his body parts are replaced with monster parts. While no commentators of this novel have managed to discern where reality ends and Humberto's imagination or hallucinations begin, Donoso implies that some part of the atmosphere of floating paranoia comes as a reaction to Jerónimo's own insecurity and irrational fear of being cuckolded. For Enrique Luengo, EOPN “es una búsqueda por resolver el enigma de la identidad personal … penetra en la complejidad síquica de una mente extraviada que vive un proceso imaginativo exacerbado.” In various ways, Humberto's plight results from paternal desire and gender expectations—i.e., that he succeed economically and socially—which exceed his capabilities. Not only are such expectations unrealistic given the rigid social structure of Chile, but they do not allow for variations in individual potential. For Humberto, schizophrenia is the result. Donoso explores other negative results of demands imposed by gender stereotypes and models in El jardín de al lado.

“Chatanooga Choo-choo” (Tres novelitas burguesas), set among the haute bourgeoisie of contemporary Barcelona, features two couples, Ramón and Sylvia, Magdalena and Anselmo. Initially, the identically-dressed women perform a song-and-dance routine; at story's end a week later, this skit is repeated by the identically-attired men, obviously suggesting some kind of gender-role reversal. A critique of easy sexuality, drugs and materialism, the story presents Sylvia as a mannequin, a mirror of masculine desire, a decorative object whose features can be erased at will and repainted to please the man of the moment. Not only does this story employ exaggeration and fantasy to subvert the machista concept of woman as sex object, but it ultimately turns the tables. Anselmo, during a brief affair with Sylvia, paints and erases her face; she then appropriates his penis, but not until after having first shown his wife Magdalena how to disassemble him. In both cases, character identity—including gender role identity—depends upon the Other. Anselmo, the initial narrator and self-proclaimed voice of power and authority, leads readers to several erroneous perceptions, which are blamed upon the visibly castrating female. Later, a more nearly omniscient narrator replaces Anselmo and gives a different version. Not only does Donoso subvert machismo via real or imagined castration, but he also questions the phallocentric authority of the text by offering competing versions.

El jardín de al lado (1981), one of Donoso's most sustained exercises in [criss]cross-gender writing, centers upon Julio Méndez and his wife Gloria, impoverished Chilean exiles living in Spain, who accept the chance to spend the summer (circa 1980) in a luxurious Madrid flat in exchange for caring for a Chilean painter's dog and Siamese cat. Méndez, a former English professor jailed for a week during the recent revolutionary coup, was so terrified by his imprisonment that he fled to Spain upon release. Factors undermining his already shaky machismo include realization of his cowardice, inability to find work, and rejection of his novel of imprisonment, all of which contribute to a subsequent identity crisis. The stagnating marriage, obsession with his dead father and moribund mother, and unsuccessful struggles to overcome his fear enough to visit his dying mother's bedside occupy Julio more than the work of revising his novel. He and Gloria use alcohol to get through the days and drugs to make it through the nights. Depressed at Julio's criticisms (due to her not bringing in money), Gloria hysterically rejects Méndez: “grita y me quiere arañar, chillando que soy el culpable de su vida destrozada, de su incapacidad para enfrentar cualquier lucha, incluso cualquier acción o proyecto porque yo la he devorado” (201). Carlos, her psychotherapist, speaks for Donoso when he places the blame in the broad context of gender and culture: “como el fracaso de algo mayor, de una educación, de una clase, de un mundo, de un momento en la historia” (202). Significantly, however, he does not exculpate the husband: “—Tal vez algo de culpa tendrás—sugiere Carlos.—No sé, no creo …” (ibid). Informing Julio's inability to accept, even theoretically, some portion of responsibility, some chance that Gloria may be right, is the traditional patriarchal concept of women as hysterical and intellectually inferior.

Gloria's apparent failed suicide attempt, coinciding with Julio's mother's death and severance of his last roots in Chile, provides the stimulus for completing the revisions and resubmitting his novel. Unable to confess his failure upon receiving a second rejection, Julio informs Gloria the novel has been accepted and proposes a visit to their son in Marrakesh. Purloining one of their host's paintings, he sells it to a dealer. Returning to Gloria with money and plane tickets, he is momentarily transformed: “Me acerco: el falso triunfador, el macho falsificado” (231); for the first time in many months, he makes love to his wife, whereby Donoso subtly underscores the interdependency between machismo and the appearance of success or power. Julio's crime, their trip which resembles flight more than a vacation, and filial guilt at having refused his mother's dying wish, combine to produce an acute identity crisis in Tangiers. Flight and denial or avoidance having been his solutions before, Julio opts for switching identities with a beggar, a barely-conscious addict. The night he decides upon this symbolically suicidal identity switch, he leaves the hotel on the pretext of a brief errand.

Up to this point, Julio has ostensibly narrated events, but an unexpected change of narrator/narrative perspective in the final part reveals that the entire narrative is a novel written by Gloria who has done her own cross-gender writing by adopting Julio's identity, gender, perspective and profession or avocation. Gloria's novel is accepted by the same publisher who twice rejected Julio's. At the same time that Gloria emerges as a woman unknown to her husband despite a quarter-century of matrimony, Donoso shows the exiled writer reverting to a non-entity, his machismo eroded, his hopes as a writer dashed, his role as speaking voice supplanted by that of his wife. Actually, Julio proves unable to stand the rigors accompanying his new [non]identity and returns to his wife the next day. Months later, Gloria recalls that when she overheard the phone call rejecting Julio's novel,

mezclado con mi compasión y mi dolor, sentí … un componente de vengativa alegría ante su fracaso, el fracaso del macho de la familia, cuyo deber es el triunfo que saca a los suyos de la pobreza … misión ante la sociedad que ambos despreciamos en su contenido actual, pero de cuya forma todavía dependemos. Fue esta derrota final de Julio lo que más me ayudó a salir de mi depresión; necesitaba verlo menos fuerte.

(255-56)

Gloria's resentment of Julio as the macho who has failed in his duty is exacerbated by her long-time resentment against her father who forced her into the Procrustean bed of an unwanted gender role, and this latent anger is momentarily transferred to Julio as well: “¿No estaba expiando Julio con su fracaso la culpa de mi padre, que me sacó de cuarto año de las monjas a los catorce años, yo, la primera de la clase, que soñaba con ser médico?” (256). Gloria envied Julio's educational opportunity, which both she and Donoso suggest that she might have used better. Ignoring their intelligence, her father condemns Gloria and her equally bright sisters to boring conventional marriages and “vidas consumistas” instead of giving their intellects a chance to develop and allowing them to become productive members of society. His patriarchal tyranny not only deprived the girls of any right of career choice, but was short-sighted in a rapidly-changing world where it suddenly became necessary for Gloria to contribute to the family income. Gloria's literary success, enabling the couple to establish a home in exile, provides the respite necessary for Julio to find a teaching job. These details form the essential ingredients of Donoso's critique of the failures and wasted potential that result from gender stereotyping. As have various recent feminist writers as well, he shows that not only do such reactionary gender-role impositions deny education and equal opportunity to talented women, but also impose expectations of success or triumph upon men, which many cannot meet. Rather than blame individuals, Donoso targets the norms, the cultural expectations and gender stereotypes which deny women their self-realization, and still judge men—including those that heredity and socialization have predisposed to be Milquetoasts—by the Procrustean standard of machismo.

Notes

1. For example, Antonio Cornejo Polar, “El obsceno pájaro de la noche: la reversibilidad de la metáfora,” in José Donoso: La destrucción de un mundo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Fernando García Cambeiro, 1975). See especially page 110.

2. Charles M. Tatum, “El obsceno pájaro de la noche: The Demise of a Feudal Society,” Latin American Literary Review 1, 2 (Spring 1973) 99-105.

3. Silvia Martínez D'Acosta, Dos ensayos literarios: Barrios y Donoso (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1976) suggests that Humberto [in El obsceno pájaro] experiences homosexual attraction toward don Jerónimo, the suppression/repression of which leads to paranoia. Hernán Vidal, José Donoso: Surrealismo y rebelión de los instintos (Gerona: Ediciones Aubi, 1972) uses Jungian theory to analyze Humberto's schizophrenic behavior as a result of alienation from society and inability to gain access to the upper class, wealth and power desired. George McMurray, José Donoso (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979) also bases his analysis on the mental state of the protagonist.

4. Janet Pérez, “Paradigms of Exile in Donoso's Spanish Fiction,” The Literature of Emigration and Exile, eds. James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992) 33-42. I have argued in this essay that such identity problems are emblematic of exilic ailenation, but are simultaneously intertwined with gender role and gender identity issues, often subverting the stereotype.

5. While the present study was in press, I examined Flora González Mandri, José Donoso's House of Fiction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), subtitled “A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place.” This critic examines Donoso's work in the context of “melodrama” and the house as “the scene for its theatrical deployment,” according to Carlos J. Alonso (cited on cover). I would concur that space, for Donoso, is much more important than my essay has been able to recognize, given the specificity of its focus. González Mandri's Chapter 5, “The Androgynous Narrator in El jardín de al lado,” treats some relevant issues such as transformations and “writing disguises,” but does not directly address cross-gender writing strategies.

6. For explanation of this concept see Robert M. Friedman, “The Psychoanalytic Model of Male Homosexuality: A Historical and Theoretical Critique” in Toward a New Psychology of Men. Psychoanalytic and Social Perspectives. Edited by Robert M. Friedman and Leila Lerner. New York: The Guilford Press, 1986. 79-116.

Works Cited

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Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.

Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1962.

Donoso, José. Casa de campo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978.

———. El jardín de al lado. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981.

———. Tres novelitas burguesas. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973.

González Mandri, Flora. José Donoso's House of Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo. José Donoso: Impostura e impostación. Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamerica, 1983.

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Magnarelli, Sharon. Understanding José Donoso. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1993.

Montero, Oscar. “Donoso by Donoso: An Introduction to the Writer's Notebooks.” Unpublished paper cited by Gutiérrez Mouat, 12.

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. “José Donoso: La novela como Happening.” Revista Iberoamericana 76-77 (July-December 1971). 525.