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Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contacts, Voices, and Signs

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In the following excerpt, Ahern discusses several factors that shaped Castellanos's development as a short fiction writer.
SOURCE: Ahern, Maureen. “Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contacts, Voices, and Signs,” In A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays, and Drama, edited by Maureen Ahern, pp. 31-8. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

FICTION: UNDER A MAN'S HAND

Rosario Castellanos' fiction centers on two areas of experience long overlooked in Mexican letters: the critique of racial and cultural oppression of indigenous peoples in Chiapas and the status of women in provincial and urban Mexico. The stories translated in this anthology [A Rosario Castellanos Reader], represent those major foci of her prose: a perversion of signs and values in “The Eagle” and women as signs of solitude and conflict under patriarchal rule in “Fleeting Friendships” and “The Widower Román.” “Three Knots in the Net” and “Cooking Lesson” are concerned with women's struggle to assert their authentic selves. However, before we turn to the texts, let us consider some of the factors that shaped Castellanos' development as a narrator of social reality in Mexico.

CHIAPAS AND CULTURAL OPPRESSION

Upon her return from Europe in 1951, Castellanos went straight to Chiapas, where she worked and wrote from 1951 to 1952 and again from 1956 to 1957. Already a published poet, she considered prose the next challenge to her goal of becoming a professional writer. Emilio Carballido suggested that she work on some of her childhood experiences, which she had set down in the earlier short stories1 and which later became the nucleus of her first novel, The Nine Guardians (Balún-Canán) (1957). Set in the mythic structure of the Tzotzil world of Chiapas, it is narrated through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl. Yet, “more than the life of the Chamula Indians, it relates the solitude of her girlhood,” Elena Poniatowska wrote (“Vida,” 90).

Between 16 October 1956 and 3 March 1957, Rosario Castellanos wrote three letters from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas to Elías Nandino, director of Estaciones, a magazine that played a key role in the publication of Mexican literature in the fifties. These letters clearly express the break with European symbolism that Mexican writers of that generation carried out. Above all, they attest to Castellanos' consciousness of her own place in this endeavor and the formative role that challenged her own circle of writers: “The postures the Mexican writer has assumed by following European models seem to me to be the most ridiculous betrayal. Betrayal of a reality that is our own—that has not been interpreted by art, defined by science, or tamed by technique. … The difficult task is to come to grips with it, with the small or large talent that we may have, with honesty, patience, and perseverance. Knowing that, whatever we do can be no more than laying foundations” (“Cartas a Elías Nandino,” 20-23). In Chiapas, Castellanos defined the changes that she wanted to effect in her writing and committed herself to achieving a firsthand knowledge of the Indian culture she had chosen as her subject. “So here I am. Working with the Indigenist Institute, which allows me a very intimate contact undistorted by intermediaries, with the mentality, customs, and hopes of the Indians” (“Cartas a Elías Nandino,” 21).

The nine stories in Ciudad Real (1960), an old name for San Cristóbal de las Casas, grew out of those experiences. They are linked to Oficio de tinieblas (1962), the second novel, which used the historical events of a Chamula Indian uprising in San Cristóbal in 1867 that culminated in the crucifixion of one of the participants. Castellanos recast them in the struggle of Catalina Díaz Puijla, an Indian leader who uses her powers as a shaman against modern colonialism. It is still considered to be one of the very best examples of neoindigenist writing in Latin America (Sommers, “Oficio de tinieblas,” 15-16).

Castellanos' fiction signified an important break with the lurid picture postcard type of prose that other authors had been writing in the social realism vein of the thirties and forties, in which regional indigenous cultures were perceived to be exotic worlds where the characters, because they were victims, were “portrayed as strange, poetic, or good.” “I'm not an indigenist writer,” she bristled in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo:

This simplicity makes me laugh. Indians are human beings absolutely equal to whites, except [they've been] placed in circumstances that are unique and unfavorable. Because they are weaker they can be worse—more violent, more treacherous, or more hypocritical—than white people. Indians do not seem mysterious or poetic to me. What happens is that they live in atrocious poverty. It's necessary to describe how that poverty has atrophied their best qualities. Another detail that indigenist authors neglect—or execute very badly—is form. They assume that, since the theme is noble and interesting, it's not necessary to take care in developing it. Since they nearly always refer to unpleasant events, they do it in an unpleasant manner: they neglect language and do not polish their style … Since my books have different goals, I can't be included in that kind of writing.

(422-423)

Castellanos' lucid perception of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the task of her generation of writers links her work with the ideas and the writing of the Peruvian narrator José María Arguedas.2 But the ideological paradigm that explained the relations of domination and oppression Castellanos found in her reading of Simone Weil on “the attitude of the conquered toward the conquerors, the treatment of the weak by the powerful … the current of evil that runs from strong to weak, returning once again to the strong” (Carballo, 420).

“The Eagle” is an excellent example of some of those relationships between races that Castellanos explores in the short stories in Ciudad Real and in her essay “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”: “… the reality wherein descendants of the conquered Indians live side by side with the descendants of the conquering Europeans. If the former have lost the memory of their greatness, the latter have lost the attributes of their strength, and they all conflict in total decadence. The daily social behavior of beings so dissimilar produces phenomena and situations that began by interesting the anthropologists and have never stopped appealing to writers, who struggle to get to the very root of these extreme forms of human misery.” In “The Eagle” these conflicts are represented through the perversion of signs. The symbol of political authority, the official stamp of the Mexican republic with its national symbol, the eagle, is used to pervert that same authority for the personal gain of a corrupt ladino (a person of mixed Indian-Spanish blood, usually Spanish speaking) by robbing an Indian community. The conflicting perspectives are textually contrasted by the modes of speech representation. In the initial sections, Villafuerte's perspective is represented by free indirect discourse that integrates his prejudices and inner monologues about the Indians. The climax shifts to direct discourse to represent the Indian perception of the stamp with the figure of the eagle as a different kind of sign—a transparent one where the signifier denotes a living bird. Thus it can be read as an allegory about the conflict of signs. At stake is the issue of how their manipulation across cultures may be corrupted into ethnic oppression of Indian communities by mestizos, of Spanish-Indian origin.

DAUGHTERS AND FRIENDS

With the publication of Los convidados de agosto in 1964, Castellanos widened the scope of her lens to examine another neglected sector of Mexican society: the life of women in the stifling middle class of provincial Chiapas, whose designated place was “under a man's hand.” “Fleeting Friendships” and “The Widower Román” narrate lives of women who are used as pawns to attest to the honor of their fathers and husbands, “this honor that the various structures of male dominance—property, the law, social status, political authority—exist to protect” (Greene and Kahn, 6). Both stories question parental proprietary by showing its catastrophic negativity—the way it ruins not only women's lives but men's also. But the new element that Castellanos brings to her representation is the focus on women's relationships to each other—her reconstruction of women's perspectives of their experiences that was unique in Mexican prose.

In “Fleeting Friendships,” the female adolescent narrator relates the story of her girlfriend who learns to survive under the dire penalties meted out to a young woman who heeds her own impulses to run off with a stranger without benefit of wedlock. However, it is the friendship between the two young women that offers one of them a second chance at living her own life and forces the other to ponder the connections between their lives and her words as a struggling writer. This is an open-ended text that implies alternative scripts for both female characters. Did Gertrudis find a life of her own? Did the narrator find a way to reconcile writing and living?

“The Widower Román” focuses on fathers controlling their daughters' and sisters' lives and sexuality in Comitán, where women are objects of exchange that assure continuity and control of a social community. “At once an object of desire and an object of exchange … at the intersection of two incompatible systems, woman appears as the embodiment of an impossible duality, the locus of an opposition” (Furman, 61).3 Romelia's wedding day is the day she enters this world of women in rural Chiapas:

From today on Romelia would join the company of women who never say, “I want” or “I don't want,” but who always dodge issues by deferring to the man of the house to achieve their aims. This side-stepping may be condensed in a single phrase: “the master wishes … the master prefers … the master orders … one mustn't contradict the master … above all one must please the master … first I must consult the master”—the master who would exalt her above all to the rank of wife and intimately give her a true image of her body that would finally reach the fullness of knowing, feeling, and performing the functions for which it had been created.

The exploration of women's relatedness to each other through fiction enables Castellanos to explore a literary area that had not been addressed by male writers or critics in Mexico. It is in this sense that her fiction is truly pioneering: the central questions that her work raises about the interdependence of attitudes toward gender and race, and the bonding or absence of it, are the same issues that confront women. The origins of these concerns are found in the acute solitude that Castellanos experienced in her own life and observed in lives of other women during those years of growing up in Comitán.

My earliest experience was individual solitude: I soon discovered that all the other women I knew were in the same situation. The single women were alone, the married women were alone, the mothers were alone. Alone, in a town that was not in touch with other towns. Alone, enduring harsh customs that condemned love and surrender as an unredeemable sin. Alone in their leisure because that was the only luxury their money could buy them. To portray these lives, draw those figures, involved a process that was autobiographical. I hid from solitude in my work, which offered a sense of solidarity with others in something abstract that did not hurt me or disturb me as later on love and cohabitation were going to hurt me.

(Poniatowska, “Vida,” 60-61)

CONCOMITANT READINGS

Three essays may be read as companion texts to the three stories discussed above. They begin with biographical details from Castellanos' life that become springboards to wider issues, a textual strategy characteristic of her chronicles. “Incident at Yalentay” documents the case of an Indian daughter whose efforts to escape her tyrannical father were frustrated when Rosario and her traveling theater team did not use their best negotiator, the Indian puppet, Petul. It also takes a hard look at how little some bureaucrats knew about communicating with indigenous people in their own region, a message delivered with considerable impact since Castellanos inscribes herself as one of the actors in this account of a young woman's failure to free herself from her future as a commodity of her father's property. In this case the theater troupe should have enlisted the help of the powerful cultural signs transmitted by their puppet Petul—whose signifying powers for the Indian community reached far beyond the didactic function used by the Spanish-speaking troupe.

“A Man of Destiny” is probably the best introduction to the world of Chiapas in which Rosario Castellanos grew up and from which she created the characters and incidents that populate her prose. Written a decade after the first collection of stories, it is a chilling reflection on the legacy of women under the provincial oligarchy, where “a young lady married according to her parents' wishes, a fairly close relative …,” where a bride woke up the next day to discover that “she had become a respectable married woman after having been an attractive one,” and “a respectable married woman had a child every year and delegated its up-bringing to the Indian nannies. … This was the paradise that I lost out on ‘through Cárdenas' fault.’” Through inscription of personal experiences this and other essays form an intimate intratextual relationship with Castellanos' fictional characters, heightening her haunting visions of Mexican women of both races caught in webs of cultural oppression and social change in the microcosm of Chiapas that can be read metonymically for Central America. A third text, “Discrimination in the United States and in Chiapas,” provides the historical context for the cultural conflicts that Castellanos transforms into such remarkable prose—reminding her compatriots of the injustices still to be remedied among their own citizens.

URBAN MEXICO

“Three Knots in the Net” (1961) is a story that was never included in any of the author's collected fiction, remaining practically unknown in Spanish. Yet it is an important bridge text in several respects. It spans the worlds of women between the patriarchal society of Chiapas and the urban Mexico where Castellanos sets the stories published in Álbum de familia, ten years later. In addition, it functions as a bridge where biography and writing meet, this time in the moving study of a girl from the provinces caught in the changes between generations and values that urban migration to the capital meant for the provincial families. Now the author focuses on women struggling with the complexities of mother-daughter alienation produced by their changing generations and values. Yet both maintain their dignity and different senses of interior privacy to the end. Patently autobiographical, this story may also be read as an allegory of the transition of power from the old order of provincial landholding Mexico to that of the modern urban capital. With this text Castellanos' inquiry shifts to women in their urban space and to the question of how women's vocations are developed. The four stories in Álbum de familia are narrative representations of concepts that the author discussed in her essays written during the same period and had begun to develop for a second play about women.

THE FEMINIZATION OF DISCOURSE

“Cooking Lesson,” from that last group of short stories, is the best example of Castellanos' creation of an intrinsically feminine discourse. The form chosen is the interior monologue of a young intellectual bride, who is following a recipe from a cookbook in an attempt to prepare her first meal, a beefsteak for her husband. As she does so, her narrating I is directed to two explicit narratees, one a specifically female reader marked by the formal You (usted), “Oh, You, experienced housewife,” and the second, an intimate you (), who is obviously her new husband. Thus, the first and principal receiver of this message is the same “self-sacrificing little Mexican housewife” that Rosario Castellanos is so fond of addressing. This feminine narratee completes a feminine communication frame that ensures Castellanos control of the full impact of her feminist aesthetic message.

This is the feminist context for Castellanos' exposition of a traditional rite of passage, a bride's first cooking lesson, or, better said, a cooking disaster, which Castellanos will employ to build a critique of marriage and the myths that surround it, made all the more devastating by her comic irony. The frozen meat reminds the neophyte cook of her honeymoon and sexual initiation: “Red, as if it were just about to start bleeding” (emphasis added):

Our backs were that same color, my husband and I, after our orgiastic sunbathing on the beaches of Acapulco. He could afford the luxury of “behaving like the man he is” and stretch out face down to avoid rubbing his painful skin … But I, self-sacrificing little Mexican wife, born like a dove to the nest, smiled like Cuauhtémoc under torture on the rack when he said, “My bed is not made of roses,” and fell silent. Face up, I bore not only my own weight but also his on top of me. The classic position for making love. And I moaned, from the tearing and the pleasure. The classic moan. Myths, myths.

When the steak turns gray, it reminds her that “I lost my old name and I still can't get used to the new one, which is not mine either.” When she thanks her groom for a martini at the bar, she thinks, “Thanks for letting me out of the cage of one sterile routine only to lock me into the cage of another.” Later she recalls that more thanks are due, to the second addressee, her new husband: “And what about you. Don't you have anything to thank me for? … my virginity. When you discovered it I felt like the last dinosaur on a planet where the species was extinct. … I'll stay the same as I am. Calm. When you throw your body on top of mine I feel as though a gravestone were covering me, full of inscriptions, strange names, memorable dates. You moan unintelligibly and I'd like to whisper my name in your ear to remind you who it is you are possessing.”

When the meat starts to shrink, it motivates a series of cinematic fantasies. As it turns black on one side, she fantasizes about having an affair with an older man. When it's finally burned to a crisp, it becomes the perfect analogy for reality. “So that piece of meat that gave the impression of being so solid and real no longer exists. So? My husband also gives the impression of being solid and real when we're together, when I touch him, when I see him. He certainly changes and I change too … The meat hasn't stopped existing. It has undergone a series of metamorphoses.”

The narrator recalls other “recipes” for a successful marriage. Obedience and conformity. “The recipe of course is ancient and its efficiency is proven … it's just that it revolts me to behave that way.” The domestic textuality of a recipe does not equate with the sexual or intellectual needs of a modern woman: both the steak and the marriage produced by this conventional cookbook turn out to be unpalatable.

“Cooking Lesson” encodes many of the issues that are characteristic of Castellanos' mature writing in the seventies and displays some of her best ironic humor. The startling analogies that the narrator draws between beefsteak and her own female body, between a shrinking gray steak and the ingredients for successful marriages, encode feminine experience by using specifically feminine metaphors. The analogy between raw flesh, virginity, and female sexuality in the account of the honeymoon transforms Castellanos' vision of middle-class marriage in Mexico into a social catastrophe. With it her critique of marriage comes full circle: first examined in terms of the mesh of reciprocal exchanges that held together the provincial oligarchy, it is now presented in terms of its proprietary constraints on an intellectual woman in urban Mexico.

No text better represents Castellanos' superb command of the feminine metaphor as a vehicle to create literature that is intrinsically feminine in speech act situation, metaphor, and message. Feminine lessons are life lessons and the way to explore them is through feminine metaphors. When these tropes are displaced from their original domestic systems—their cookbook, kitchen, and honeymoon—they acquire powerful new connotations in the context of this story, where they become signs of repression, annihilation, ruin. Their new function of transmitting a message that is exactly the opposite of their original one—in other words, the displacement of traditional sign values to transmit radical messages—is what produces the powerful irony and total feminization of this discourse. Thus, Castellanos achieved at the outset of the seventies a task considered to be one of the most important ones for women writing into the nineties: “deconstructing male patterns of thought and social practice; and reconstructing female experience previously hidden or overlooked” (Greene and Kahn, 6).

Notes

  1. Castellanos set down the experience of the death of her younger brother as told by a first-person narrator in 1950 in her story “Primera revelación,” published in América: Revista antológica.

  2. See, particularly, José María Arguedas' novels Yawar Fiesta and Deep Rivers and his essay “El indigenismo en el Perú,” written in 1965.

  3. Nelly Furman, “The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Principle?,” 60-61. She bases her discussion on Claude Lévi-Strauss' discussion of marriage as a communication device between groups where, “in contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value” (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 496).

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The Short Story as a Vehicle for Mexican Literary Indigenismo.

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