Do feminists have a sense of humor? Perhaps one of the most appropriate people to ask would have been the late Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), noted for both her wit and her outspoken feminism. In her creative writing as well as her journalism, she unleashed the formidable arsenal of her humor to attack the kinds of mind-sets and myths that were keeping Mexican women relegated to traditional roles of selfless wife and mother. For Castellanos the problem began with Genesis. A woman, she reports, is to be satisfied with her place in the world because once upon a time a man gave up one of his ribs to create her. “In the first place,” she writes, “no one was asking his consent to carry out this operation. Second, while this operation was being performed he was in a state of unconsciousness so complete that when he woke up he had the surprise of that century and all others when he found at his side the seductive creature that in time would incite him to leave paradise. This creature has never stopped beating her breast in repentance for that sin, but in that same breast, lacerated by mea culpas, she harbors the eternal flame of gratitude toward him who gave her her being.” As will be seen in the following study, this combination of irony and cliché is a hallmark of Castellanos's feminist style. As she observed in 1970 in one of her editorial columns, “When one reads these pages, one asks oneself with indignation how it is possible that at this date in time, when civilized man is crossing the limits of the cosmos, a woman is still striving to cross the domestic threshold, because only beyond this point can she have access to a particle of autonomy, to a crumb of self-determination and independence, to a shred of dignity.” For this iconoclast, humor was a very serious business.

Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), one of modern Mexico's best writers and most outspoken feminists, is famous for the wit and humor that characterize her multifaceted literary production. Ever since the publication in 1950 of her master's thesis Sobre cultura femenina [On Feminine Culture], Castellanos used her writing not only to discover her own particular identity as a woman but to foreground the absurd and conflictive customs of Mexican society which prevented women in general from developing their selfhood. Her most openly feminist essays are contained in Mujer que sabe latin [Woman Who Knows Latin] (1984 [1973]) and El uso de la palabra [The Use of the Word] (1974), the posthumous collection of her editorials from Excelsior;¹ in her fiction she is at her most radical in her late works, the dramatic farce El eterno femenino [The Eternal Feminine] (1975) and Album de familia [Family Album] (1975 [1971]), particularly in the short story “Lección de cocina” [“The Cooking Lesson”].² The focus of this study will concern itself with these four works, examining first Castellanos's iconoclastic stance vis à vis destructive myths about women, with a subsequent look at her use of particular types of humor and the justification thereof within the framework of her feminist philosophy.

During her lifetime, Castellanos's wit and charm were legendary. Fellow writer and friend Elena Poniatowska recalls in an essay that

Rosario in daily life was a woman who laughed and made others laugh with enormous ease; to be with her was a true pleasure … a person who knows how to make others laugh is akin to the one who can make good bread, a giver of gifts. Rosario gave with both hands.³

(1985: 51, 52)

Poet José Emilio Pacheco made a similar observation in a preliminary note to one of her books after her tragic death in Tel Aviv in 1974:⁴

Something of what was the insatiable charm of her conversation is left in many of her articles. But the tone, the gesture, the sparkle in her eyes, the smile—neither page nor film can capture those and they have been irremediably lost.

(Castellanos 1974: 8)

Beneath this lighthearted exterior, however, lay intense seriousness of purpose and constant tension, a tension which stemmed from an inability to reconcile herself to her cultural context and manifested itself in a dialectical opposition between understanding and rebellion (Alarcón 1983: 24). In quasi-melodramatic terms Castellanos delineates both her feminist goals and the function which humor assumes in the realization thereof:

I would suggest a campaign: not to rush to attack our customs with the flaming sword of indignation nor with the mournful tremolo of tears but by showing up that which makes them ridiculous. I assure you that we have inexhaustible material for laughter. And we need to laugh so badly because laughter is the most immediate form of freeing ourselves from that which oppresses us the most, of distancing ourselves from that which imprisons us!.

(1984 [1973]: 39)

Castellanos uses wit and humor as classic weapons of attack against authority, taking pride in becoming one of the “iconoclasts who apply the ‘corrosive acid of laughter’ to institutions in order to destroy them because they are absurd, because they are unjust, because they lack foundation and meaning. …” Like her model Democritus, she is a revolutionary “who has a good time deconstructing mechanisms, showing their inconsistencies, reducing to ashes with one breath a construction which defied the centuries” (1984 [1973]: 184).

Much of Castellanos's efforts to speak out on behalf of women's issues took place on the editorial pages of Excelsior. As I said in a previous study on the interrelationship between Castellanos's journalism and her creative writing, “The editorial page has traditionally provided men with a forum from which to express their opinion; a woman's voice was unusual in this context and Castellanos' overt feminism was controversial enough to both attract and alienate readers” (1986: 370). Aware of this, Castellanos often adopted an attitude of humorous self-deprecation in order to defuse potential reader hostility: “My column is the mirror, mirror on the wall whom I ask every Saturday who is the most marvelous woman on this planet, and just as in the fairy tale, it always tells me that Snow White is” (1974: 219); however, Alarcón is also right in her assessment that “Rosario Castellanos controls and masks her intellectual rage through the self-conscious assumption of inferiority” (1983: 52). The lightness of touch was a useful tactic in that it masked her real intention, that of using humor as a means of liberation, for in her opinion “to laugh at something is the most immediate form of putting yourself out of reach of that something” (1984 [1973]: 173). What Castellanos as iconoclast wished most to destroy were the myths which reduced the existence of the Mexican woman to a living cliché. The use of the verbal cliché is one of the hallmarks of Castellanos' humor, a point to which I shall return later.

The introductory essays of Mujer que sabe latín provide the reader with a resumé of Castellanos's feminist credo and are a useful point of departure for the examination of her ideas.⁵ Castellanos begins by pointing out the male tendency to reduce woman to myth and thereby to nullify her authentic existence: “The process of mythification … impedes the free and direct contemplation of the object, the clear understanding of the being which it has substituted and usurped” (1984) [1973]: 7). She cites three categories of myth—esthetic, ethic, and intellectual—all of which contribute to the psychological and physical deformation of women. Castellanos provides numerous examples to illustrate her thesis, and an examination of several of these will provide a sense of the characteristic forms in which her brand of humor is expressed.

Esthetic myths transform woman into muse, Castellanos noted, “and in order to achieve this one must maintain distance and be silent. And be beautiful” (1984 [1973]: 23). In the process of undermining this myth Castellanos points out that, whereas it is a woman's obligation to be beautiful, standards of beauty and fashion are often dictated by men who ignore factors such as physical comfort or well-being.

Large, vigorous feet are said to be ugly. But they're good for walking and for maintaining oneself in an upright position. In a man large and vigorous feet are more than acceptable: they are obligatory. But in a woman? Even our most ridiculous local troubadors are smitten by “the foot as dainty as a pincushion”. With a foot like that … you can't go anywhere. Which is what it was all about, evidently.

(1984 [1973]: 9)

To be considered beautiful a woman must be both slender and impeccably groomed, a dictum which applies with slight variations to all social classes. Among the wealthy,

the wife's function might be that of a decorative piece of furniture which has the advantage, apart from being able to be shown off to visitors, of being able to be transported and displayed at parties and gatherings. She is expected to avoid anything which might spoil her figure and is permitted to give the rest of her free time to charitable works.

(1974: 27)

A middle-class woman has an even harder time living up to expectations:

She, too, aspires and is obligated to be a decorative element, only she has fewer means and less time at her disposal because she has to take care of all domestic chores and annually brightens her home with a visit by the stork. It is difficult, between diapers and wails … to conserve not only equanimity, but human characteristics. The lady begins to forget … even the most elementary principles of civilization; she doesn't comb her hair, for example. And, from his impeccable countenance, her husband surveys a dishevelled spouse on his return from his harsh bureaucratic duties.

(1974: 27-28)

The husband's justified response to such slovenliness, Castellanos concludes ironically, is either to go out and party with his friends or to set up a mistress in another apartment.

But it is not only men who impose absurd esthetic expectations: women, too, participate actively in keeping them alive and well. In El eterno femenino, for example, the newly pregnant Lupita has just confessed to her mother that the stork is on its way and is severely reprimanded by her mother for feeling and looking fantastic:

Mamá (near fainting): Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You're expecting? And in those clothes? … You need a housecoat. Comfortable. From the beginning you have to let the baby grow the way it wants to. [Does as she says.] There. Don't you feel better? No, no, I see it in your face: you're nauseated, terribly nauseated, right?

Lupita: No.

Mamá: How dare you contradict me? Who knows about these things, you or I? Of course you're nauseated.

(1975: 40)

Another major culprit is the media, for example the popular women's magazines which project false or conflictive images to their readers and thereby foster guilt feelings in women unable to measure up to these expectations. Castellanos describes the hypothetical case of a sleepless woman whose husband has not yet come home:

To while away the time, what could be better than reading one of those magazines especially designed for housewives? … And there on the cover is a seductive young woman with brilliant eyes, brilliant lips, brilliant teeth, and with her hair done by some of the world's best hairdressers. The wife looks at her the way a condemned man might view the vision of an angel. Between irritation and distraction she leafs through the interior pages. Pastries in living color, and here she, at great cost, has just skipped dinner with the hope of taking off even one centimeter from her waistline!.

(1974: 28-29)

The second type of myth is of an ethic nature and relates to the fact that in Mexican society women are taught that their ultimate fulfillment can only come through being, as Alarcón calls it, “Beloved or Mother” (1983: 13). “Among the institutions which cynical wit is wont to attack,” Freud observed, “there is none more important and more completely protected by moral precepts, and yet more inviting of attack, than the institution of marriage” (1938: 704). Castellanos would agree. On the one hand she faults an educational system which fails to educate girls so that they can become independently functioning human beings and on the other a culture which encourages women to remain in a permanent state of passive immobility: “The social apparatus … has decreed, once and for all, that the only legitimate attitude for womanhood is that of waiting around” (1984 [1973]: 14). Poets, too, have told a woman that domesticity is her principal function: “As the bard Díaz Mirón's verses said, she was born like the dove for the nest. And as don Melchor Ocampo instructed her … her mission is that of being the balsam that soothes the wounds which a man incurs in his daily confrontation with life” (1984 [1973]: 31). As in her discussion of the esthetic myth, here, too, Castellanos avoids Manichean oversimplification by underscoring women's complicity in its perpetuation. She once observed that Mexican women tend to be parasites more than victims (1974: 60) and noted that, in Mexican society, “complicity between the executioner and his victim [is] so long-standing that it is impossible to distinguish who is who” (1984 [1973]: 38). The newlywed protagonist of “Lección de cocina” ruefully acknowledges this type of complicity. In an imaginary conversation with her friends about her sex life, she knows that instead of articulating her growing disenchantment therewith she would most likely extol and thereby falsify her husband's prowess in bed: “They would subject me to an interrogation. … I would invent acrobatics, sublime swoonings, transports, as they say in A Thousand and One Nights, records. If you heard me then you wouldn't recognize yourself, Casanova!” (1975 [1971]: 16).

Within the parameters of this discussion of ethic concerns, Castellanos points out that the myth of the glories of motherhood is one of the most powerful in Hispanic culture and, in her opinion, one of the most insidious. To a great extent she blamed the creation and perpetuation of this myth on the teachings of the Church:

Motherhood redeems woman from the original sin of being one, [and] confers meaning and justification onto her life (which would otherwise be superfluous). It anoints with holy unguents the sexual drive which, by itself, is considered an unparadonable sin when it is a female being who feels it. It exalts the institution of matrimony to the point of absolute stability, makes the domestic yoke easy and the scourge of responsibilities a delight. It serves as an infallible panacea for the deepest and most wrenching personal frustrations.

(1974: 53)

The unctuous clichés in the above lines are paralleled by the hyperbolic sentimentality of those directed at the venerable mother whose life has consisted of abnegation and sacrifice: “Praise the little gray heads! Eternal glory to ‘the one who loved us even before she knew us’! Statues in the parks, days set aside to honor her, etc. etc.” (1984 [1973]: 16). On the other hand, Castellanos also reminds her readers that the basest insults the Spanish language has to offer refer to mothers and motherhood, “which is nothing more than the other side of the shining coin of her importance” (1974: 53). She points out that the universal exaltation of motherhood as “the fast lane to sanctification” (1984 [1973]: 40) excludes any element of choice on the part of the woman, for Mexican society rejects women who might prefer to be single, choose not to have children, or aspire to an education and a career. This point leads Castellanos to examine the third kind of myth, that which concerns a woman's intellectual development.

With mock seriousness she cites a number of scientific sources, most of them Germanic, to prove that women are endowed with minuscule brains which render them biologically unfit to think. She again faults both society and the Church for limiting the instruction of many women to purely religious subjects, taught by rote memorization or drill in devotional rituals of whose deeper meanings the students are never apprised. An intellectual woman such as Sor Juana, the brilliant, seventeenth-century Mexican nun, was considered “a devouring monster” (1984 [1973]: 211), and even in modern times an intelligent young woman who aspires to a university education is classified by both men and women as “abnormal, pedantic, impertinent, Miss-know-it-all, a ridiculous stuck-up, etc.” (1974: 48-49). Supposing that a woman persists and succeeds in entering the career world? Well, Castellanos asks, would you entrust a woman architect with the building of your house?

A house is too much money, too many years of dreams and doing without to let some hysterical woman or some lady who's worrying about where her husband is nights throw it all overboard. Besides which, neither one of them would know how to be boss to the kind of people construction workers are. No, as a last resort better hire a contractor.

(1984 [1973]: 36)

The above barrage of clichés may be humorous, but unfortunately it also echoes the opinion of many a potential client. The effect of such attitudes on a trained professional cannot help but be destructive: “Efficiency depends to a large degree on interior equilibrium. An equilibrium which everything conspires to destroy” (1984 [1973]: 36-37).

The examples cited above show several types of humor characteristic of Castellanos's writing: direct, colloquial dialogue, irony, of course, apparent self-denigration, witty asides, and, most of all, the accumulation ad absurdum of the hackneyed cliché. The use of the cliché is so constant in her writing that it becomes necessary to ask why Castellanos had such a predilection for this particular form of expression.

In her perceptive article on Castellanos's language, Regina Harrison Macdonald notes that “Language serves as a codifying system for examining false institutions, antiquated prejudices and iron-clad hierarchies which have been erected in the name of Mexican culture” (1980: 41). Because men tend to reify women it is not surprising that they speak of them in clichés. The fact that many women are not trained to think or speak responsibly contributes not only to their continued cultural passivity but also, on a linguistic plane, to their own affinity for the cliché. For those accustomed to mental passivity the cliché is a useful form of expression, for it can be appropriated without thinking. Because of the anonymity of its origin, the cliché avoids responsibility for the opinion stated, yet by dint of repetition it has acquired universal authority and acceptance. For Castellanos the articulation of concepts into language was far too serious a matter to be relegated to a passive act:

Just the way that the precision of the stamp on a coin, which is what defines its value, is worn off by constant use, so do words become equivocal, multivalent. After too much handling and being spit upon they must undergo a purifying bath in order to recover their original condition.

(1984 [1973]: 179)

Women, especially, had to be made aware of the importance of the conscious speech act and of “the passion of the word which is flesh, which is deed, which is understanding and which will endure as memory” (1984 [1973]: 44).

Aside from the cliché, Castellanos also calls attention to the way in which women are victimized by the use of the euphemism, which by its nature masks and displaces real meaning. Because of their lack of experience in life and in critical thought, she saw women as especially vulnerable to this kind of linguistic deception, so that what is hailed by society as a young woman's “purity” and “virginity,” for example, turn out on closer inspection to mean “ignorance” and “confinement” (1984 [1973]: 13, 14). The protagonist of “Lección de cocina” has learned something of this lesson of shifting meanings; musing on her lack of physical coordination she observes, “Now it's called clumsiness; before [we got married] it was called innocence and you loved it” (1975 [1971]: 16).

Language as a tool of domination is a frequent topic in her writing. Castellanos was raised in rural Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, and knew firsthand that the Spanish language had long been used as a tool to keep the Indian and the mestizo in a state of subjection; in her opinion, it had been utilized equally effectively with respect to the female sector of Mexican society. In her campaign to make women linguistically aware, Castellanos does not limit herself to questions of vocabulary and meaning but also points out the power of structural aspects of language to influence thought patterns and attitudes. The suggestive power of passive grammatical constructions is a good example hereof.⁶ The expression “to remain single” (quedarse soltera) enraged her particularly:

Because one does not choose to be single as a way of life; rather, as the expression says, one remains single, that is, one accepts passively a fate that others impose on us. … What it means is that one has never gone beyond a way of being that is superfluous and adjectival as opposed to another which is necessary and substantive.⁷

(1984 [1973]: 33)

The character of Eve, as presented in El eterno femenino, also rebels against the use of the passive construction. When a worried Adam asks her, “Who put those ideas in your head?,” she replies tartly, “Ideas are not put in heads; they come out of heads” (1975: 84). In Castellanos's case the rejection of the passive—in both grammatical and behavioral terms—is much more than a personal linguistic peeve: it is a cornerstone of her feminist ethic. Eve, for example, rejects the role of passive recipient in the Garden of Eden and thereby inverts the concept of the Fall. Rather than transgression, the eating of the apple is for her the first act of human freedom, and when Adam laments the past—“We were so happy … we didn't need a thing”—Eve's perspective is entirely different: “We didn't want anything, which is different. And we weren't happy. … The human condition is not something which is received; it is fought for” (1975: 84).

The affirmation of an active, conscious role in life, especially for women, is thus inseparably linked to Rosario Castellanos's concept of humor. From her close association with both women and the Indian population of her native Chiapas she understood the pernicious psychological damage to people who are permanently marginalized and silenced. As Freud had observed, wit unleashes immediate psychic energy (1938: 733-735), and Castellanos, too, conceived of humor as “the demand for an immediate physical response” (1984 [1973]: 82). Humor as immediate stimulus is therefore a first stage in combatting physical as well as mental passivity. Longer-term strategies involved making patent to Mexican women the absurdity and injustice of widely accepted cultural beliefs and institutions which continued to imprison them. Castellanos, who often made use of mirror imagery in her writing, also applied it to the function of humor as a means to make these absurdities more evident: “Sometimes it's good to go into the fun house and to see our image reflected in mirrors which distort it” (1974: 62). By establishing distance between herself and the institutions of which she is critical, laughter was for her especially useful for keeping a balanced perspective: “Only that person is able to laugh who has been able to safeguard a lightness of spirit because he [sic] has not been tied to any dogma, who has been able to preserve freedom of judgment …” (1974: 52). An indispensable ingredient of Castellanos's humor is irony, precisely because “the grain of salt of irony … [is] distrust” (1974: 160) and therefore “irony adds a grain more of freedom” (1984 [1973]: 155). For women to learn to distrust both appearances and verbal messages was essential in the battle to achieve authentic selfhood: “The feat of becoming who you are … demands … above all the rejection of those false images which those false mirrors offer to women in the closed galleries where their lives take place” (1984 [1973]: 20). In Castellanos's opinion laughter is revolutionary because it helps to shatter these mirrors. The protagonist of “Lección de cocina” has thus come a long way when she is able to say, “I am not the reflection of an image in a mirror. … I, too, am a conscience” (1975 [1971]: 10).

But in the final analysis self-discovery alone is not sufficient: “It is not enough … to discover what we are. We have to invent ourselves” (1975: 194). In this process of self-creation, humor is again indispensable: “We are agreed on one point: to form our conscience, to awaken the critical spirit, to defend it, to spread it. Not to accept any dogma until we see if it is able to withstand a good joke” (1984 [1973]: 40).

This brief analysis of the function of humor in some of Rosario Castellanos's works offers convincing evidence that laughter was an indispensable part of her feminist stance precisely because it was an extremely serious matter. And whereas she repeatedly stressed the ability of laughter to provide distance, in her role as narrator Castellanos never adopted a peripheral position with respect to her reader. She consistently shared in the painful process of battling for self-affirmation—at considerble personal cost. Elena Poniatowska's splendid essay on her friend (1985) offers many clarifying insights into Rosario Castellanos's life and character. It is not surprising that irony—the classic form of humor of the underdog—should be so prevalent in her writing for, in spite of literary prizes and important political appointments, Castellanos herself was chronically insecure. While ambassadress to Israel, and on the point of attending an important state dinner, she reflected wryly,

Once I wrote in one of my unforgettable pages that success is no more than a series of well-managed failures. If I wrote something like that it's because it's true. Well, then you have to act according to the principle.

(1974: 270)

“I always had the feeling,” Poniatowska writes, “that Rosario walked among people with a flower in her hand, looking for someone to whom to give it” (1985: 57). Her gift turned out to be her humor, by means of which she probed, questioned, and exposed to view the absurd myths and social inequalities endemic to women's roles in Mexico. In this process she was unafraid to make public testimony of her own fears and foibles, which not only attracted the sympathy and loyalty of her readers but gave other women the encouragement to strive for a sense of self. “What are the constants of Rosario Castellanos' life and work?” Poniatowska queries. “Feeling victimized and rising above this feeling … by means of irony, intelligence and creativity … Women above all recognize themselves in her and feel vindicated” (1985: 131, 107).

Notes

1. Excelsior is Mexico City's leading newspaper.

2. “The Cooking Lesson” was translated into English by Maureen Ahern and appears in Meyer, Doris, and Margarite Fernández Olmos (eds.) (1983), Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America. New Translations. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn College Press, 158-165.

3. All translations in this article are mine.

4. She was electrocuted in a freak accident while serving as Mexican ambassadress to Israel.

5. It is important to note that the title of this work comes from a popular refrán—another type of cliché—which in its entirety reads, “Mujer que sabe latín, ni tiene marido ni tiene buen fin”, “The woman who knows Latin has neither a husband nor a good end”, in and of itself a telling statement as to the misogyny of Hispanic folk wisdom.

6. Note, for example, the accumulation of passive constructions in the passage referring to the wealthy woman.

7. “Substantive,” in this context, not only has its usual meaning but also refers to the grammatical function of denoting a noun—equated in Castellanos's mind with masculine properties—as opposed to the generally adjectival function of the feminine.