I HOW TO LET YOURSELF FALL FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE

Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons: Emily Brontë wrote to prove the revolutionary nature of passion; Virginia Woolf wrote to exorcise her terror of madness and death; Joan Didion writes to discover what and how she thinks; Clarice Lispector discovered in her writing a reason to love and be loved. In my case, writing is simultaneously a constructive and a destructive urge, a possibility for growth and change. I write to build myself word by word, to banish my terror of silence; I write as a speaking, human mask. With respect to words, I have much for which to be grateful. Words have allowed me to forge for myself a unique identity, one that owes its existence only to my efforts. For this reason, I place more trust in the words I use than perhaps I ever did in my natural mother. When all else fails, when life becomes an absurd theater, I know words are there, ready to return my confidence to me. This need to reconstruct which moves me to write is closely tied to my need for love: I write so as to reinvent myself, to convince myself that what I love will endure.

But my urge to write is also destructive, an attempt to annihilate myself and the world. Words are infinitely wise and, like all mothers, they know when to destroy what is worn out or corrupt so that life may be rebuilt on new foundations. To the degree that I take part in the corruption of the world, I turn my instrument against myself. I write because I am poorly adjusted to reality; because the deep disillusionment within me has given rise to a need to re-create life, to replace it with a more compassionate, tolerable reality. I carry within me a Utopian person, a Utopian world.

This destructive urge that moves me to write is tied to my need for hate, my need for vengeance. I write so as to avenge myself against reality and against myself; I write to give permanence to what hurts me and to what tempts me. I believe that deep wounds and harsh insults might someday release within me all the creative forces available to human expression, a belief that implies, after all, that I love the word passionately.

Now I would like to address these constructive and destructive forces with relation to my work. The day I finally sat down at my typewriter to write my first story, I knew from experience how hard it was for a woman to obtain her own room with a lock on the door, as well as those metaphorical five hundred pounds a year that assure her independence. I had gotten divorced and had suffered many changes because of love, or because of what I had then thought was love: the renouncing of my own intellectual and spiritual space for the sake of the relationship with the one I loved. What made me turn against myself was the determination to become the perfect wife. I wanted to be as they were telling me I should be, so I had ceased to exist; I had renounced my soul's private obligations. It has always seemed to me that living intensely was the most important of these obligations. I did not like the protected existence I had led until then in the sanctuary of my home, free from all danger but also from any responsibilities. I wanted to live, to enjoy firsthand knowledge, art, adventure, danger, without waiting for someone else to tell me about them. In fact, what I wanted was to dispel my fear of death. We all fear death, but I had a special terror of it, the terror of those who have not lived. Life tears us apart, making us become partners to its pleasures and terrors, yet in the end it consoles us; it teaches us to accept death as a necessary and natural end. But to see myself forced to face death without having known life—without passing through its apprenticeship—seemed to me unforgivable cruelty. I would tell myself that that was why children who die without having lived, without having to account for their own acts, all went to Limbo. I was convinced that Heaven was for the good, and Hell for the evil, for those men who had arduously earned either salvation or damnation. But in Limbo there were only women and children, unaware of how we had gotten there.

The day of my debut as a writer, I sat at my typewriter for a long time, mulling over these thoughts. Inevitably, writing my first story meant taking my first step toward Heaven or Hell, and that made me vacillate between a state of euphoria and a state of depression. It was as if I were about to be born, peering timidly through the doors of Limbo. If my voice rings false or my will fails me, I said to myself, all my sacrifices will have been in vain. I will have foolishly given up the protection that despite its disadvantages, at least allowed me to be a good wife and mother, and I will have justly fallen from the frying pan into the fire.

In those days, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir were my mentors; I wanted them to show me how to write well, or at least how not to write poorly. I would read everything they had written like a person who takes several spoonfuls of a health potion nightly before retiring. The potion would prevent death from a host of plagues and ills that had killed off the majority of women writers before them, as well as some of their contemporaries. I must admit that those readings didn't do much to strengthen my as yet newborn and fragile identity as a writer. My hand's instinctive reflex was still to hold the frying pan patiently over the fire—not to blandish my pen aggressively through the flames—and Simone and Virginia, while recognizing the achievements that women writers had attained up to that time, criticized them quite severely. Simone was of the opinion that women too frequently insisted on themes traditionally considered feminine, the preoccupation with love, for example, or the denunciation of training and customs that had irreparably limited their existence. Justifiable though these themes were, to reduce oneself to them meant that the capacity for freedom had not been adequately internalized. "Art, literature, and philosophy," Simone would say to me, "are attempts to base the world on a new human freedom, the freedom of the individual creator, and to achieve this goal a woman must, above all, assume the status of a being who already has freedom."

In her opinion, a woman should be constructive in her literature, not of interior realities, but of exterior realities, principally of those of a historical and social nature. For Simone, the intuitive capacity, the contact with irrational forces, the capacity for emotion, were all important talents, but they were also of secondary importance. "The functioning of the world, the order of political and social events which determine the course of our lives, are in the hands of those who make their decisions in the light of knowledge and reason," Simone would say to me, "and not in the light of intuition and emotion," and it was with those themes that women should henceforth occupy themselves in their literature.

Virginia Woolf, for her part, was obsessed with the need for an objectivity and distance which, she thought, had seldom been found in the writings of women. Of the writers of the past, Virginia excluded only Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, because only they had managed to write, like Shakespeare, "with a mind incandescent, unimpeded." "It is deadly for a writer to think about his or her gender," Virginia would say to me, and "it is deadly for a woman to register a complaint, however mild, to advocate a cause, however justifiably"—deadly then, to speak consciously as a woman. In Virginia's opinion, the books of a woman writer who doesn't free herself from rage will contain distortions, deviations. She will write with anger instead of with sensitivity. She will speak of herself, instead of about her characters. At war with her fate, how can she avoid dying young, frustrated, always at odds with the world? Clearly, for Virginia, women's literature should never be destructive or irate, but rather harmonious and translucid as was her own.

I had, then, chosen my subject—nothing less than the world—as well as my style—nothing less than an absolutely neutral and serene language, which could let the truth of the material emerge, exactly as Simone and Virginia had advised. Now I had only to find my starting point, that most personal window, from among the thousands that Henry James says fiction possesses, through which I would gain access to my theme, the window to my story. I thought it best to select a historical anecdote, perhaps something related to how our Puerto Rican bourgeois culture changed from an agrarian one based on sugar cane and ruled by a rural oligarchy to an urban or industrial one ruled by a new professional class, an anecdote that would convey how this change brought about a shift in values at the turn of the century—the abandonment of the land and the replacement of a patriarchal code of behavior, based on exploitation but also on certain ethical principles and on Christian charity, with a new utilitarian code that came to us from the United States.

A story centered on this series of events seemed excellent to me in every way. There was no possibility whatever that I might be accused of useless constructions or destructions; there was nothing further from the boring feminine conflicts than that kind of plot. With the context of my plot finally chosen, I raised by hands to the typewriter, ready to begin writing. Under my fingers, ready to leap to the fore, trembled the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet, like the chords of a powerful instrument. An hour passed, two, then three, without a single idea crossing the frighteningly limpid horizon of my mind. There was so much information, so many writable events in that moment of our historical becoming, that I had not the faintest idea where to begin. Everything seemed worthy, not just of the clumsy and amateurish story I might write, but of a dozen novels yet to be written.

I decided to be patient and not to despair, to spend the whole night keeping vigil if necessary. Maturity is everything, I told myself, and this was, after all, my first story. If I concentrated hard enough, I would at last find the starting point of my story. It was dawn and a purple light washed over my study windows. Surrounded by full ashtrays and abandoned cups of cold coffee, I fell into a deep sleep, draped over my typewriter's silent keyboard.

Fortunately, I have since learned that the setbacks we must face don't matter, for life keeps right on living us. That night's defeat, after all, had nothing to do with my love for short stories. If I couldn't write stories I could at least listen to them, and in daily life I have always been an avid listener of stories. Verbal tales, the ones people tell me in the street, are the ones that always interest me the most, and I marvel at the fact that those who tell them tend to be unaware that what they are telling me is a story. Something like this took place a few days later, when I was invited to lunch at my aunt's house.

Sitting at the head of the table, dropping a slow spoonful of honey into her tea, my aunt began to tell a story while I listened. It had taken place at a sugarcane plantation some distance away, at the beginning of the century, she said, and its heroine was a distant cousin of hers who made dolls filled with honey. The strange woman had been the victim of her husband, a ne'er-do-well and a drunkard who had wasted away her fortune, kicked her out of the house, and taken up with another woman. My aunt's family, out of respect for the customs of the time, had offered her room and board, despite the fact that by that time the cane plantation on which they lived was on the verge of ruin. To reciprocate for their generosity she had dedicated herself to making honey-filled dolls for the girls in the family.

Soon after her arrival at the plantation, my aunt's cousin, who was still young and beautiful, had developed a strange ailment: her right leg began to swell with no apparent cause, and her relatives sent for the doctor from the nearby town so he could examine her. The doctor, an unscrupulous young man recently graduated from a university in the United States, made the young woman fall in love with him, then falsely diagnosed her ailment as being incurable. Applying plasters like a quack, he condemned her to live like an invalid in an armchair while he dispassionately relieved her of the little money the unfortunate woman had managed to save from her marriage. The doctor's behavior seemed reprehensible to me, of course, but what moved me most about the story were not his despicable acts but the absolute resignation with which, in the name of love, that woman had let herself be exploited for twenty years.

I am not going to repeat here the rest of the story my aunt told me that afternoon because it appears in "La muñeca menor," my first story. True, I didn't tell it with the words my aunt used, nor did I repeat her naive praises to a world fortunately gone by, a world in which day laborers in the cane fields died of malnutrition while the daughters of plantation owners played with honey-filled dolls. But the story I listened to, in its broad outlines, fulfilled the requirements I had imposed on myself: it dealt with the ruin of one social class and its replacement by another, with the metamorphosis of a value system based on the concept of family into one based on profit and personal gain, a value system implanted among us by strangers from the United States.

The flame was lit. That very afternoon I locked myself in my study and didn't stop until the spark that danced before my eyes stopped right at the heart of what I wanted to say. With my story finished, I leaned back in my chair to read the whole thing, sure of having written a story with an objective theme, a story absolutely free of feminine conflicts, a story with transcendence. Then I realized that all my care had been in vain. That strange relative, victim of a love that subjected her twice to exploitation by her loved one, had appropriated my story; she reigned over it like a tragic, implacable vestal. My theme, while framed in the historical and sociopolitical context I had outlined, was still love, complaint, and—oh! I had to admit it—even vengeance. The image of that woman, hovering for years on end at the edge of the cane field with her broken heart, had touched me deeply. It was she who had finally opened the window for me, the window that had been so hermetically sealed, the window to my story.

I had betrayed Simone, writing once again about the interior reality of women; and I had betrayed Virginia, letting myself get carried away by my anger, by the fury the story produced in me. I confess that I was on the verge of throwing my story into the trash so as to rid myself of the evidence that, in the opinion of my mentors, identified me with all the women writers past and present who had tragically wasted themselves. Luckily I didn't do it; I kept it in a desk drawer to await better times, to await a day when I would perhaps arrive at a better understanding of myself.

Ten years have passed since I wrote "La muñeca menor," and I have written many stories since then; I think now I can objectively analyze the lessons I learned that day with more maturity. I feel less guilt toward Simone and Virginia because I have discovered that, when one tries to write a story (or a poem or novel), stopping to listen to advice, even from those masters whom one most admires, almost always has negative consequences. Today I know from experience that it is no use to write by setting out beforehand to construct exterior realities or to deal with universal and objective themes if one doesn't first create one's own interior reality. It is no use to try to write in a neutral, harmonious, distant way if one doesn't first have the courage to destroy one's own interior reality. When writing about her characters, a writer is always writing about herself, or about possible versions of herself because, as with all human beings, no virtue or vice is alien to her.

By identifying with the strange relative from "La muñeca menor" I had made possible both processes. On the one hand I had reconstructed, in her misfortune, my own amorous misfortune; and on the other hand, by realizing where her weaknesses and failings were—her passivity, her acceptance, her terrifying resignation—I had destroyed her in my name. Although I may also have saved her. In subsequent stories, my heroines have managed to be braver, freer, more energetic and positive, perhaps because they were born from the ashes of "La muñeca menor." Her betrayal was, in any case, what brought about my fall from the frying pan into the fire of literature.

II HOW TO RESCUE CERTAIN THINGS FROM THE FIRE

I have related how I came to write my first story, and now I would like to talk about some of the satisfactions I discover today in that task which at the beginning was so painful for me. Literature is a contradictory art, perhaps the most contradictory of all. On the one hand it is the result of an absolute surrender of energy, intelligence, but, above all, will, to the creative task. On the other hand, will has very little to do with it because the writer never chooses themes, the themes choose the writer. It is between these two poles that literary works flourish, and they generate the writer's satisfactions. In my case, these satisfactions are born of a desire to make myself useful and a desire for pleasure.

The desire to make myself useful is related to my attempt to substitute the Utopian world I imagine for the one I must live in. It is a curious desire in that it is a posteriori; my wish to address the problems of women's condition and the other social and political realities which concern me is completely absent when I begin to write a story, despite the clarity with which I perceive its presence when it is finished. It is as impossible for me to intend to be useful to such and such a cause before beginning to write as it is for me to declare my adherence to such and such a religious, political, or social creed. But language as creator is like the powerful current of a river, whose lateral currents ensnare loyalties and convictions, and a writer finds himself or herself swept along by its truth.

My view of the world has inevitably much to do with the inequality that women still suffer from in our modern age. One of the problems that preoccupies me continues to be society's demonstrated inability to resolve effectively our dilemma, the obstacles that society continues to place before us in our struggle to realize ourselves in our private and public lives. I would like to touch briefly here, from among the enormous range of possible topics related to this theme, on the matter of sexually explicit language in women's literature.

Several months ago, I attended a banquet in commemoration of the centenary of Juan Ramón Jiménez. A renowned critic, grey-haired because of his age, approached me. Before a rather large group of people he began to talk to me about my books. Smiling maliciously and winking at me as if we were accomplices, he asked me in a titillating tone of voice charged with insinuation if it was true that I wrote pornographic stories and, if so, would I send them to him so he could read them. I confess that at that moment, perhaps due to my excessive respect for his grey hairs—a respect that seems naive to me in retrospect—I did not have the courage to respectfully call him an SOB, but the incident affected me deeply. I returned home depressed, afraid that the rumor had gotten around among illustrious critics that my stories were nothing more than a more or less artistic transcription of The Story of O.

Of course I didn't send my books to the egregious critic, but once the initial disagreeable impression had passed, I told myself that the matter of sexually explicit language in women's literature deserved to be studied more closely. Convinced that the old gentleman was just a specimen of an almost extinct species of openly sexist critics, I decided to forget the matter and turn his petty insult to my advantage and began to read everything that fell into my hands on the theme of obscenity in women's literature.

Today much of the criticism of women's literature is written by women. Their criticism focuses on the problem of women from various angles: Marxist, Freudian, radical feminist, and so on. Despite the diversity of their approaches, women critics—Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, Ellen Moers in Literary Women, Patricia Meyer Spacks in The Female Imagination, Erica Jong in her many essays—all seemed to agree that violence, anger, and a disharmony with their situation had generated much of the energy that made women's narrative possible for several centuries. Beginning with the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, whose most important practitioner was Mrs. Radcliffe; through the Brontës' novels; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot; the novels of Jean Rhys, Edith Wharton, and even those of Virginia Woolf—for what is Mrs. Dalloway if not a sublimated, poetic, but nonetheless ironic and accusatory interpretation of the frivolous life of the social hostess?—women's narrative had been characterized by an often aggressive, denunciatory language. All had been irate and rebellious though some with perhaps more irony, cleverness, and wisdom than others.

One thing caught my attention about those critics, however: it was their absolute silence about the use of profanity in contemporary women's literature. Not one of them touched on the topic, despite the fact that the use of sexually proscribed language in women's literature seemed to me an inevitable result of a centuries-old current of violence. In 1933, after the prohibitions against Ulysses were lifted in the United States, the first women novelists to use profane language were Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, and Carson McCullers, all of whom for the first time gave a natural and uninhibited use to the verb "to fuck." Erica Jong had become famous precisely because of the aggressively immodest vocabulary found in her novels, but she never made mention of it in her well-researched and scholarly essays about contemporary women's literature.

It would not serve my purpose to go into depth on this subject, rife as it is with social and political implications. I touch on it merely to give an example of my wish to make myself useful as a writer, a wish that always becomes apparent to me only after the fact. When the distinguished critic approached me at the banquet and referred to my fame as a militant in pornographic literature, I had never asked myself what my purpose was in using sexually explicit language in my stories. When I realized that contemporary women critics were persistently avoiding the touchy subject, my purpose became clear to me. I had wanted to turn the sexually humiliating insult—a weapon society had wielded against us for centuries—against society's own outworn and unacceptable biases.

If profanity had traditionally been used to degrade and humiliate women, I said to myself, it should be doubly effective in redeeming them. If in my story "When Women Love Men" or in "From Your Side to Paradise," for example, profane language has made just one person feel moved when faced with the injustice implied in the sexual exploitation of women, it doesn't matter to me that I may be considered a pornographic writer. I'm content because I know I have been effective.

But my desire to be useful and my constructive and destructive urges are but two sides of a coin held together by a third need, the gleam of the coin's edge, my desire for pleasure. Writing is for me above all a physical knowledge, an irrefutable proof that my human form—individual and collective—exists. But writing is also an intellectual knowledge, the discovery of a form that precedes me. It is only through pleasure that we can encode the testimony of the particular in the experience of the general, as a record of our history and our time.

The fervid condition, in which the writer—woman or man—is absorbed by the pleasure of words, is never achieved on first attempt. The urge is there, but pleasure is skittish and eludes us, slipping through the interstices of words, closing up at the slightest touch like a sentient plant. At first the words seem cold and indifferent to the writer's needs, a situation that inevitably mires the writer in the blackest desperation. But by sculpting and shaping words, loving, and even mistreating them, the writer begins to feel them taking on warmth and movement; they begin to breathe and pulsate under the writer's fingers, until they appropriate her or his own desire. Then the words become tyrants, ruling each syllable, taking over thoughts, occupying every minute of the writer's day and night; they keep the writer from abandoning them until the form that she or he has awakened, the form they also intuit now, becomes flesh. The secret of physical knowledge of the text is found, finally, in the desire for pleasure, and it is that desire that ultimately makes it possible for the author to fulfill other desires: the desire to be effective, for example, or the desire to build or destroy the world.

The immediacy of text and body brings another, more intellectual kind of knowledge: a knowledge born of the incandescence that the desire of the text awakens in me. Any writer or artist, woman or man, has a sixth sense that indicates when the goal has been reached, when what she or he has been molding has acquired the definitive form it must have. Once that point has been reached, one extra word (a single note, a single line) will irreversibly extinguish that spark or state of grace brought about by the loving struggle between the writer and his or her work. That moment is always one of awe and reverence: Marguerite Yourcenar compares it to that mysterious moment when the baker knows it is time to stop kneading the dough; Virginia Woolf defines it as the instant in which she feels the blood flow from end to end through the body of her text. The satisfaction this knowledge gives me, when I finish writing a story, is the most worthwhile thing I have managed to save from the fire of literature.

III HOW TO STOKE THE FIRE

I would now like to speak a bit about that mysterious combustible element that feeds all literature—imagination. This topic interests me because I often discover, among the general public, a curious skepticism toward the existence of the imagination and because I find that both laypeople and professionals in the literary community tend to overemphasize the biographical details of authors' lives. One of the questions most often asked of me, by strangers as well as friends, is how I was able to write about Isabel la Negra, a famous whore of Ponce, my hometown, without ever having met her. The question always surprises me because it bespeaks a fairly generalized difficulty in establishing boundaries between imagined reality and lived reality, or perhaps the difficulty lies only in understanding the intrinsic nature of literature. It would never have occurred to me to ask Mary Shelley, for example, if, on her walks along the bucolic paths surrounding Lake Geneva, she had ever run into a living-dead monster around ten feet tall. But perhaps this was only because when I first read Frankenstein I was only a child, and Mary Shelley had already been dead for well over a hundred years. At first I thought the naive question was understandable in Puerto Rico, among a public little accustomed to reading fiction, but when several critics asked me if I had personally met Isabel la Negra—a woman who had already been dead for several years—or whether I had ever visited her whorehouse—a suggestion that would always make me blush violently—I knew that the difficulty in recognizing the existence of the imagination was more widespread than I had thought.

It had always seemed to me that contemporary criticism gave too much importance to the study of writers' lives, but that insistence on the unabashedly autobiographical nature of my stories confirmed my fears. The importance autobiographic studies have achieved today seems to be based on the premise that the lives of writers in some way make their works more easily understood, when in fact it is just the reverse. The writer's work, once completed, acquires absolute independence from its creator, and it is related to the writer only to the degree that it gives deeper meaning to her or his life or deprives it of meaning. But this type of literary exegesis, fairly common today in studies of male literature, is found even more often in studies of women's literature. The number of recently published volumes on the lives of the Brontes, or on the life of Virginia Woolf, for example, surely exceeds the number of novels they wrote. I have a sneaking suspicion that this interest in the biographical facts about women writers comes from the hidden belief that women have less imagination than men and that their works rely more heavily on the unscrupulous plundering of reality than do those by male writers.

There is a social reason for this difficulty in recognizing the existence of the imagination. The imagination is a playing with reality, an irreverence toward what exists, a willingness to dare to imagine a possible order of things better than the one we have. Without this playing, there would be no literature. Thus the imagination—like literature—is subversive. I agree with Octavio Paz that there is something terribly base in the modern mind's willing acceptance of all kinds of unworthy lies and unspeakable realities while it is unwilling to accept the existence of the fable. This is clear from the way literature is taught in our universities.

There is today, as there has always been, a principally analytical approach to literature. Works are analyzed in dozens of ways: according to structuralist, sociological, stylistic, semiotic, and other methodologies. When the work has been thus analyzed, nothing is left of it except a cloud of disembodied sememes and morphemes. It is as if, in order to dignify the literary work, we must disembowel it like a watch we take apart to study its inner workings, when what really matters is not how it functions but how well it tells time. The teaching of literature in our society seems to be admissible only from the point of view of the critic: to be a specialist, one who disassembles literature, carries status and is remunerated. To be a writer, one who plays with the possibilities of change, however, is a subversive enterprise, which brings neither status nor remuneration. That is why our universities offer so few courses in creative writings and writers find themselves, in most cases, forced to earn their living in other professions, writing literally "for the love of art."

Learning to write (not to do literary criticism) is a magical undertaking, but it is also quite specific. Spells, too, have their formulas, and magicians measure very carefully the amount of charm they put into their caldron of words. The rules on how to write a story, a novel, or a poem are not secret. They are preserved in beakers for eternity by the critics, but they are worth nothing to the writer if she or he doesn't learn to use them.

The first lesson students of literature should learn is not only that imagination exists but that it is also the most powerful combustible element that feeds fiction. It is through the imagination that writers transform the raw material of their experience into the fabric of art.

IV HOW TO SIMMER THE STEW OVER THE FIRE

I would now like to go straight to the theme that has been simmering at the bottom of my saucepan since the beginning of this essay. The theme is undoubtedly the source of heated debate today, which is why I had not yet dared place it before you at the table. When all is said and done, is there such a thing as women's writing? Does there exist a literature by women, radically different from that of men? Further, shall our writing be passionate and intuitive, based on sensations and sentiments—as Virginia wanted—or shall it be rational and analytical, inspired by historical, social, and political knowledge—as Simone wanted? Are we to be defenders of female values in the traditional sense of the term, cultivating a harmonious, poetic, pure literature, unconditionally realist and even obscene? In sum, shall we be Cordelias or Lady Macbeths? Dorotheas or Medeas?

Virginia Woolf said that a woman's writing was always "feminine," that it couldn't be otherwise, but that the difficulty lay in defining the term. Despite my disagreement with many of her theories, I find myself in complete agreement with her on this. I think women writers of today, before anything else, must write well, and this is achieved only by mastering the techniques of writing. A sonnet has only fourteen lines, a specific number of syllables, and a predetermined rhyme and meter, and is therefore a neutral form—neither female nor male—and a woman is as capable of writing a perfect sonnet as is a man. A perfect novel, as Rilke said, must be a sublime cathedral, constructed brick by brick, with infinite patience, and therefore it too lacks gender and may be written by a woman as well as by a man. Writing well involves a much more arduous struggle for women than for men, however: Flaubert rewrote the chapters of Madame Bovary seven times, but Virginia Woolf rewrote The Waves fourteen times, doubtless double the number of Flaubert's revisions because she was a woman and knew that the critics would be doubly hard on her.

Perhaps what I'm saying might smack of heresy, a kind of evil brew, but this essay deals, after all, with the writer's kitchen. Despite my metamorphosis from a housewife into a writer, I often confuse writing and cooking, and I discover some surprising parallels between the two. I suspect there does not exist a women's way of writing different from that of men. To insist that it does exist would imply at the same time the existence of a female nature, different from the male, when it seems most logical to insist on their radically different experiences. The insistence on a female or a male nature would imply different capacities in women and men, insofar as the achievement of a work of art is concerned, when in fact the capacities of each sex are the same because they are, above all, basically human.

An immutable female nature, a female mind perpetually defined by its gender, would justify the existence of an unchanging female style characterized by specific and easily recognized traits of structure and language in past and present works. Notwithstanding the theories that abound today on the subject, I believe the existence of such traits is debatable. The novels of Jane Austen, for example, were rational, meticulously closed and lucid structures, diametrically opposed to the diabolical, mysterious, and passionate novels of her near contemporary, Emily Bronte. And the novels of both couldn't be more different from the open, fragmented, and psychologically subtle novels of such modern writers as Clarice Lispector or Elena Garro. Style varies profoundly not only from person to person but also from work to work.

Where I do believe women's literature is distinguishable from that of men is in the themes that obsess women. In the past, we women have had a limited access to the worlds of politics, science, or adventure, for example, although today this is changing. Our literature often finds itself determined by an immediate relationship to our bodies: it is we who carry children within us and give birth to them; it is we who nurture them and take charge of their survival. This biological fate curtails our mobility and creates very serious problems for us as we attempt to reconcile our emotional needs with our professional needs, but it also puts us in contact with the mysterious generative forces of life. That is why women's literature has, much more so than men's literature, concerned itself with interior experiences, experiences that have little to do with the historical, the social, or the political. Women's literature is also more subversive than men's because it delves into forbidden zones—areas bordering on the irrational, madness, love, and death—zones that our rational and utilitarian society makes it dangerous to recognize. These themes interest women because they are the patient, varied harvest of their experience, an experience that like that of men, may change, becoming richer and broader.

In summary, I suspect that the endless debate over whether there is or is not a specifically "feminine" literature is vain and insubstantial. What matters is not whether we should write with open structures or closed ones, with poetic language or obscene language, with our heads or with our hearts. The important thing is to apply that fundamental lesson taught to us by our mothers, who were the first to show us how to summon the spirit of the cooking stove. The secret of writing, like the secret of good cooking, has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with the skill with which we mix the ingredients over the fire.