SOURCE: "Literary Archetypes and Female Role Alternatives: The Woman and the Novel in Latin America," in Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, edited by Ann Pescatello, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973, pp. 3-27.

[In the following essay, Jaquette analyzes images of women in Peruvian literature in an attempt to discover the changing roles of women in Latin American culture.]

It is the intent of this paper to examine literary images of women in Peru (a "prerevolutionary" society in the sense that, in contrast to Castro, the new military elite has not focused on changing female roles as an aspect of its "revolutionary" program) in order to cast new light on sociological perspectives of women in Latin American society. It is assumed, as female studies have assumed in the North American and British context, that there is a vital link between literature and social behavior, that literature both represents existing social relationships and at the same time socializes women into their roles. Thus literature can be a legitimate source of data and a useful generator of hypotheses for empirical research.

In examining Peruvian literature I found that there was a tendency among Peruvian writers to avoid creating "real" female characters. In the case of Ciro Algería and the social protest novelist in general, this was due to the use of females as symbols. In the case of José Maria Arguedas, however, the absence of female characters seemed to result from the author's preference for male characters and his tendency to equate human existence with male existence in the modern urban context. In this way women become part of the existential problem for men, an additional cross to bear. Mario Vargas Llosa treats female and male characters as interacting stereotypes; character development is simply not a part of his style. The absence of female characters in novels by male authors is contrasted with the centrality of the female psyche in La Rifa by female novelist Katia Saks: the plot of her very short but polished novel is the unsuccessful attempt of an upper-class Limeña to free herself from the traditional female roles.

While the Peruvian novel gives ample opportunity to deal with male attitudes toward women, it is weak in behavioral imagery. For this reason I have gone to a book which has been described as a "mythic representation of a third-world culture," Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad. In Macondo, women play at least as significant a part as the men; in fact, women seem to dominate in many respects. As in Vargas Llosa's writing, women appear as stereotypes rather than as individuals, but the stereotypes are developed in detail; they become true archetypes. The goal of the novel is the presentation of exterior relations, not interior conflict, and the use of stereotypes is suited to the "mythical" atmosphere that García Márquez generates. From Cien años de soledad I have drawn three archetypes which I think represent female role alternatives in Latin American society: woman as Mother, as Witch, and as Wife/Concubine. Further illustrations are provided from the writings of Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Octavio Paz.

Of importance throughout the section on archetypes and roles is an implied comparison between female options in Latin America and those available in the United States. This is significant not only as an abstract exercise in sociology but from the standpoint of strategy for the feminist movement in Latin America. I conclude that the availability of strong female roles in Latin American culture is a sign of the vitality of the "traditional" forms of role differentiation and that machismo, often thought by North Americans as the clearest evidence of the oppression and powerlessness of women in Latin America, is really a social convention in which women have an important stake, for male "immorality" is basic to female legitimacy and influence. Thus the prospects for winning converts to North American-style "liberation" seem dim indeed.

The direction of modern Peruvian literature has been most strongly influenced by the figures of Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas, writers who combined the traditions of the local-color novel and the novel of social protest to bring about a new perspective on Indian culture and to raise the question of the future role of the Indian in the national society. As Earl M. Aldrich¹ has written: "Rural Peru, Indians and mestizos, local color and social protest are primary elements in their works; but these elements are consciously and masterfully blended with stylistic and linguistic techniques calculated to express as never before the complexities of character and environment." Given the "complexity" of character development and the success of both writers in evoking the "essence" of Peru, their books seem a logical starting place in the search for images of women.

Alegría, who had his first major literary success with the publication of La serpiente de oro in 1935, concentrates on the conflict between the exploited Indian population and the dominant criollo culture. In offering a sympathetic view of Indian culture, however, Alegría idealizes the life of the Indians, not by underplaying the hardships they suffer as a result of exploitation, but by portraying Utopian social relations. As a result, female characters become a set of props, useful in the task of symbolizing the essential harmony between man and nature, in showing the positive personal qualities of male characters, or in providing appropriate romantic interludes.

Thus in the opening lines of La serpiente de oro he begins with a lyrical description of a valley near the Marañón in which the woman is little more than an extension of nature:

We cholos whose story this is live in Calemar. We know many other valleys which have been formed where the hills have retreated or been eaten away by the river, but we do not know how many there are downstream. We do know that they are all beautiful and that they speak to us with their haunting ancestral voice which is strong like the voice of the river. . . .

It was Lucinda who was rattling the cooking gourds about inside. Lucinda was from the town. In her green eyes there was rain with sunshine and she was all grace as she walked, her pliant body swaying like a papaya tree. From her womb she had borne a son named Adán.²

We learn that Lucinda is at one with nature and fertile, but we are also told that fertility is her only reason for being: "[Adán] was really the link between [Lucinda and Arturo], for what good is a sterile woman? She is complete only if she has children. Then she is water for thirst, bread for life, and besides a furrow—a furrow for life."³

Lucinda's qualities of "womanliness" serve to emphasize Arturo's "manliness." Lucinda first meets Arturo, her husband and father of her child, while serving food in her mother's inn in "the town." Arturo was immediately attracted to her ("In the two years they had missed coming to the festival she had ripened like a fruit") and takes her to the dance. They engage in a courtship in which Lucinda holds her own fairly well ("What a pretty girl you've become" / "And what a liar you've become") and they dance and drink a great deal. In the end Lucinda decides to return to Calemar with Arturo and runs away with him without telling her mother. During the festival itself, Lucinda provides Arturo with the opportunity to defend her against the advances of two state troopers (who represent the repressive coastal culture); after the general melee that results Arturo decides it is time to go. Lucinda is hesitant, but she bends to Arturo's will and to the call of nature: "She wanted to go into the house and throw her arms about her mother and never let go of her. But at the same time she felt an inescapable command within her, a powerful voice that came from some far off world of dreams . . . and she walked swiftly toward it."⁴ Later she has doubts and begins to cry, and Arturo asserts himself in the expected male way:

"Are you crying?"
"My mamma. My little brother."
He answered almost brutally: "There's nothing to
do about it. . . . It's too late now." 

It is the voice of the river, imperious and relentless. . . .
Lucinda now heard only that voice
and she yielded, without further resistance, to
the current.⁵

In another novel, El mundo es ancho y ajeno, Alegría again returns to the theme Here the symbolism is emphasized by being posed as an unanswerable question in the mind of the Indian Rosendo Maqui, hero of the novel. Rosendo is contemplating his home, the town of Rumi:

Rumi was both forbidding and gentle, stern and friendly, solemn and benign. The Indian Rosendo believed that he understood its physical and spiritual secrets as though they were his own. Or, rather, those of his wife, for love is a stimulus to knowledge and possession. Except that his wife had grown old and sick, while Rumi was always the same, haloed by the prestige of immortality.

"Which is better," Rosendo tried to decide, "the earth or woman?"

He had never thought it through clearly, but he knew that he loved the earth very much.⁶

But within Alegría's philosophical system, the question is pointless (as earth and woman are the same) and serves only to illustrate the "good" quality of males, that they concern themselves with these difficult questions. (Should the male superiority contention made here seem farfetched, try imagining a female character pondering the relative worth of males and the earth.) When Alegría returns to the question, it is to emphasize the oneness of female and earth, although Rosendo, strangely enough, gains rather than loses stature after all this pointless pondering:

Marguicha had grown like a flourishing plant. . . . When the time came her lips and cheeks became flowers and her young breasts fruit. Her solid hips promised the fecundity of the deep furrow. .. . In a word, she was life which fructifies and is eternal, for the destiny of woman is the same as the earth. Once more Maqui asked himself, "Which is better, woman or the earth?"

A sudden rush of wind shook the ears of wheat and carried away his thoughts.⁷

Woman is a "pliant tree," a "furrow," "fruit." Like the earth she has but one purpose, to reproduce. And like the earth she is merely one part of the universe man contemplates, he thinking, she one of the possible objects of his thought. It should perhaps be remembered that the audience that will respond to this imagery is in Lima and not in Rumi.

Alegría uses descriptions of sexual relations between men and women in Indian culture and between men and women from the "coast" to symbolize contrasts between the two cultures themselves. In El mundo es ancho y ajeno, lovemaking takes place between a boy and girl with the harvest as a backdrop: "The afternoon came with shimmering heat and the penetrating exhalation of the earth mingled with that of ripe plants. Juan was a branch and Simona a fruit, and neither was more than twenty." As the afternoon wore on the two separate themselves from the group; Juan chases Simona and they wrestle in the alfalfa. The scene is both spontaneous and morally acceptable, for this is the "real thing": "Simona's body discovered the joy of a man, and Juan, who had laid many a girl under the hedges and in the fields, felt that call of the blood which makes a man select one woman among all others."⁸ One wonders what the effect would have been if Simona had been "just another girl" with whom Juan was making it. Would her healthy spontaneity then have been a little misplaced? And as for all the "others" treated so lightly by Juan—are their futures ruined because they cannot any longer offer men the gift of their virginity? But these comments are inappropriate, of course. The point Alegría is making is that Indian relations between men and women are spontaneous, healthy, and moral in comparison with the unhealthy, artificial, and decadent sexual behavior characteristic of coastal criollo culture.

The coastal lovers are Bismark Ruiz and Melba Cortez. We first come upon Bismark Ruiz fleeing from his home and family into the arms of Melba, madam of the "house of La Costeña."⁹ He is being sought by Rosendo Maqui and others from Rumi to serve as lawyer for the townspeople in a case involving the status of their legal claims to the land on which they have been living. The bordello atmosphere as contrasted with the innocence and purpose of the Indians who enter it is a perfect device for contrasting the purity of the Indians with the decadence of the lawyer and, by extension, coastal culture. It is interesting that the bordello is a recurring theme in the Peruvian novels discussed in this paper. It appears to function as a sort of "men's house": relationships in the bordello are among men, not between men and women. In fact, the house of prostitution often seems to be the only place in town with any life in it, the place where men fight, exchange information, and conduct business.

In the particular scene Alegria paints, the Indians first go to the house of Bismark Ruiz and find that he is not at home. We are given the picture of the "deserted" wife and the neighbor women who support her in condemning her husband's licentiousness:

The calvalcade stopped before the house of Bismark Ruiz. .. . A woman came out carrying a baby over her shoulder. Her deep circled eyes and drawn face showed traces of tears.

"What?" she asked. "You are asking for Bismark? You come to his house to look for him? What an ideal"¹⁰

When the Indians look properly confused, a neighbor explains: "That man stays at La Costeña's. He's there all the time and I know the wicked creature has bewitched him. Oh, the faithless one. He almost never comes home. To leave his children like this, poor helpless babies."¹¹

But the conflict of the novel does not lie here and we are not encouraged to linger over this woman whose problems are, after all, simply a normal part of the corrupt (i.e., non-Indian) culture. "They weren't all babies," Alegría informs us, as if to show us how our sympathies have been misplaced. "A tall son appeared who acted as his father's secretary . . . and offered to conduct them to his father."¹² If children can act as accomplices, it is clear that the system is to be condemned, not the individuals within it.

Melba has arrived at her position as a "fallen woman" partly out of a natural skill at it (she "enjoyed coquetting") and partly out of economic need. When the Indians led by Rosendo enter the house, Melba, "tall and fair, rather stout, with eyes shaded by long lashes and a full, red mouth" looks at the Indians "with condescending aloofness."¹³

At this moment Bismark Ruiz appears, the epitome of duplicity, criollo-style:

"Here are my best clients," said the lawyer. "They are the villagers of Rumi, hard-working honorable men against whom an iniquitous robbery is being plotted. . . . "

"Bring out beer for my clients," shouted the lawyer, and his friends smiled and even Melba Cortez smiled a little. They brought out the beer in big glasses crowned with foam. Abram and his son declined. Rosendo and Goyo Auca politely drank theirs. . . .

The lawyer wore a greenish suit, heavy rings on his fingers, and across his stomach, from one vest pocket to the other, stretched a chain of gold. His eyes were bleary with drink and he reeked of brandy as though he had been soaked in it. He half closed the door as they went into the room.

"It's a pity that just now . . . with this party going on. . . . Not the best moment to deal with weighty matters."¹⁴

In Alegría novels the good women are fecund, strong but dominated by their husbands, in touch with nature and indistinguishable from it. The good woman represents the best qualities of the Indian culture. The bad woman, representing criollo culture, is artificial, weak (Melba is always presented as dependent and clinging), and decadent. Given this use of female characters it is very difficult to see women as individuals in Alegía's novels. The most that can be extracted are generalizations about "healthy" sexual behavior that will appeal to the morality of a coastal audience. The woman should be premaritally chaste, yet capable of "knowing a man"; there is a value placed on monogamy and on the family unit in contrast to the bordello which, while "normal," is not ideal. The conflict between the good and the bad woman is a choice made by males in the plot of many novels. In Alegría, however, the choice is not an internal, psychological conflict between man's carnal nature and his moral self, rather the conflict is presented on a totally different plane as the choice between cultures. Yet in Peru the real choice is between cholification—Indian acceptance of coastal values—and preservation of Indian culture against the encroachments of criollo values. The third possibility, coastal acceptance of Indian culture, has never been a serious choice, and thus the analogy is not fully satisfactory.

With José Maria Arguedas the problem of female imagery is more difficult. On the one hand, Arguedas has had tremendous success in creating a form of dialogue which transmits directly an Indian world view. Like Alegría, he is deeply concerned with the implications of cultural conflict in Peru, but in contrast to Alegría his insights and writing technique dispel the feeling of being on the outside looking in. As Aldrich has said, in the past "the Indian has seemed largely 'inscrutable' because our vision has been largely external."¹⁵ But, as in Alegría's work, his images of women are positive in the Indian context only. Arguedas does not perceive the problem of women as in any way analogous to the problem of the Indian, and female characters are again used as symbols, although in a more subtle way and with ultimately more damaging effect.

Arguedas's final novel, written in 1969 when he was contemplating suicide, alternates between chapters of fiction and notes from a personal diary of his thoughts while he is writing. The theme is the conflict between two cultures (as indicated by the title, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo), but significantly the setting is not the sierra but a city on the coast, Chimbote, where the Indian is out of his own environment and under tremendous pressure. Arguedas successfully evokes the depressing atmosphere of Chimbote, a town that has expanded very rapidly due to the development of the fish-meal industry. It is a collection of cinder-block shacks hastily thrown up on the sand and strung along the desolate Pan-American Highway, reeking with the smell of fish meal and constantly illuminated by the red glow of the ovens, a city on the brink of hell.

We first come to know Chimbote through the "red-light district," a series of ill-built rooms very near the highway. Again, the function of the prostibulo is that of a men's house, the scene of fights and discussions. Rumors circulate, men are drawn together by their need to escape, and women have very little to do with what is going on. In the cheapest house, women lie on their backs with their legs spread, waiting for customers. Thus female is reduced to cunt, which gives Arguedas the opportunity to point out a play on words: the word for cunt is zorra, zorro—the zorro of the title, Chimbote, is the zorra of Peru, the stinking, garbage-hole zorra of capitalist penetration. It is interesting that the most shocking, repulsive description Arguedas can apply to Chimbote is to compare it to female genitalia and that the effect of such a description is to equate the vagina with a putrid wound. A comparable and well-known imagery is suggested by Octavio Paz's analysis of the verb chingar: "to injure, to lacerate, to violate. . . . The verb is masculine, active, cruel; it stings, wounds, gashes. . . . The person who suffers this action is passive, inert, and open."¹⁶

Within the novel the only woman who receives any attention is Jesusa, wife of an ex-miner, don Esteban, who is dying of lung disease. Jesusa, like don Esteban, is a migrant; she supports her husband and child by selling vegetables in the market. She cares for don Esteban when he is sick, and cooks for him and his black compadre, el loco Moncada. Moncada is the crazy man who is sane, and it is from Moncada's lips that we hear the truths about imperialism and exploitation in Chimbote.

In a scene that is repeated more than once, Arguedas writes of the relationship between Jesusa and don Esteban. Jesusa is trying to convince him to see a priest to save himself from death. However, don Esteban has his own solution: to cough up five ounces of carbon from his lungs and thus rid himself of the disease. Jesusa has just told him that he will surely die anyway, and don Esteban tries to kick her but fails:

His wife murmured to herself, she did not speak aloud, she moved her lips. Don Esteban knew, he understood, that when his wife spoke that way, for herself, she was speaking to him as though he were a corpse. "All the others from my town who went to the Cocalón Mine have died; you'll die that way too," she said. "Your kick is weaker than a chicken's. You are dead but you are alive, curse of God. The devil is in your body 'in all his power', and your mouth speaks, it spits carbon."

Don Esteban lies down; his chest rattles. Jesusa continues:

"Your eyelashes are like the feet of San Jorge Volador, witch-animal, your chest is the bellows of the Devil. You don't confess! You don't want to talk to the Brother," she thought.

"I will not speak of my filthiness with the Brother—ever!" said don Esteban with a weak and cavernous voice as though he had heard the woman's thoughts. "I'll speak with God directly."

The woman realized that the baby was crying. It had been crying monotonously for quite a while. The few buyers who still looked for things in that corner of the market saw a small man, extremely thin, with raised shoulder blades, they saw him try to kick the woman, then lie down. . . . They observed him with particular curiosity. Those who saw the quarrel through to the end were left calm, although surprised when they saw that the body of the man stretched out on the ground did not seem so small as it had when he was standing. "There are men like that one," said one, "made up of all there is that is human. Small, but with the outline of a man."¹⁷

On one level don Esteban is becoming "more human" by rejecting Jesusa—he is rejecting both religion and fatalism by rejecting her. But here too the woman is symbolic, one side of a philosophical conflict that occurs within male consciousness. By trying to kick his wife, then withdrawing to his own world, don Esteban is credited with becoming more human (!)—"Small, pero con traza de hombre."

The most interesting insights into Arguedas's views of women come not from the novel itself but from the accompanying diaries. Women are mentioned only briefly, but significantly, among discussions of Arguedas's attempt to climb out of his emotional abyss through writing, his disgust at the literary artifices of writers like Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar, his admiration for the Brazilian, Guimarães Rosa, and his search for life: "Muchas veces he conseguido jugar con los pueblos de los perros como perro con perro. Y asi la vida es más vida para uno" ("Many times I have played with the dogs in the towns, dog to dog. And thus is life made richer for one").¹⁸ Yet there is always the thought of suicide, the dream of the revolver. He begins the book by telling us that the desire to kill himself has occurred to him many times, and that once he was brought back to the zest of life by contact with a woman:

In April of 1966, a little more than two years ago, I tried to kill myself. In May of 1944 a psychological illness I contracted in childhood came to a head and I was unable to write for almost five years. A meeting with a plump zamba, young, a prostitute, returned me to what the doctors call "tono de vida. " The meeting with that happy woman was the subtle touch, very complex, that my body and soul needed to restore the broken link with the world. When this link became intense I was able to transmit to words the feeling of things. From that moment I have lived, with interruptions, somewhat mutilated.¹⁹

It is significant that a prostitute, with no claims on him, could restore Arguedas to health. His relationship to his wife appears much more complicated and more ambivalent, which may affect the way in which women are represented in his urban novel.

Arguedas refers to his wife (his second) twice in the diaries, once to say that he feels fortunate to be loved by good people, among them his wife, and that for her he has the greatest respect. The second time he is in Arequipa, trying to write:

I spent twelve days in Arequipa. There I wrote fifteen pages, the last ones of chapter three. For the first time I lived in a state of happy integration with my wife. For the first time I did not feel afraid of a loved woman, rather I felt a happiness that was only frightening at times.²⁰

Six months later, Arguedas shot himself. He left the following note:

I am choosing this day because it won't interfere with the university schedule. I believe that the term has closed. It is possible that my friends and the authorities will lose Saturday and Sunday, but it is their time and not that of the U. J.M.A.

Mario Vargas Llosa is representative of a new departure in Peruvian literature, the emergence of the urban novelist. In the work of Vargas Llosa, as in the short stories of Enrique Congrains Martin or Sebastián Salazar Bondy, the city becomes the focal point and in a sense the protagonist, as the jungle or nature has been the protagonist of so many Latin American novels. The "urban" novel goes beyond the limitations of the "local color" or "social protest" novel to touch more universal concerns, to treat, as Aldrich describes it, "moral and spiritual problems common to modern man." He continues:

The rejection or loss of tradition and the frantic quest for new values on the Peruvian scene are understood to be a reflection of modern civilization. Likewise, the confusion, misery and desperation which dominate contemporary Peruvian society are seen as but one example of a complex moral and spiritual bankruptcy that is universal.²¹

In addition, as Jean Franco has noted, the function of the modern Latin American novel has changed. In the social protest novel, the solution to the oppression of the Indians lies in the possibility of a mass uprising which will initiate an era of revolution and eventually bring social justice. "In the modern novel, revolution is no longer seen as a panacea; at best it is only an essential first step. The real battle, it is suggested, is in the human mind and particularly within the minds of the upper and middle classes, whose failure to construct a reasonable society is one of the tragedies of Latin America."²²

In La casa verde (1965) Vargas Llosa uses a technique of constantly changed time sequences to suggest the complexity and interdependence of human lives and human actions. The Green House is a brothel, but also suggests the jungle, an escape and a prison. Within these constraints, Vargas Llosa's characters, men and women, become less important than the action itself, less real than the situations they are caught in. In a sense they are victims of their expectations of one another, sets of interacting stereotypes. The complexity of time sequences and interdependencies avoids resolution and blurs moral judgment about individuals; it leaves the reader feeling that society itself must be condemned. One of the main characters, a Sergeant from Piura, decides to marry an Indian girl recently let out of a convent school for unlocking a gate and letting the other children escape. Bonifacia, the Indian girl, has been introduced to us in the convent as the "innocent" who reveals the hypocrisy of the nuns in her eager effort to be "good" in their terms. Outside the convent she is subject to a different set of conventions into which she is more readily drawn. When the Sergeant decides to propose, it sets off a series of reactions over which no one has control:

And when he got back they would be married, sweety, and his voice broke and he began to laugh like an idiot, while Lalita shouted and burst out onto the terrace, resplendent, her arms open, and Bonifacia went to meet her and they embraced. Nieves the pilot shook hands with the Sergeant whose voice was breaking with emotion. Don Adrián, he had gotten all shaken up: he wanted them to stand up with them, of course. She could see, Señorita Lalita, he'd fallen into her trap, and that was that, and Lalita had known from the beginning that the Sergeant was a proper Christian, he should let her embrace him. . . . Bonifacia, confused, was hugging the Sergeant, Lalita, she kissed the pilot's hand, she picked up the children and held them in the air, and they would be very glad to stand up with them, Sergeant, he should stay for dinner tonight. Her green eyes were sparkling, and Lalita they would build their house right here next door, they became sad, they would help them, they became happy, and the Sergeant she would have to take very good care of her, Ma'am, he didn't want her to see anybody while he was away on the trip, and Lalita of course, she wouldn't even let her out of the door, they'd tie her up.²³

What emerges in Vargas Llosa's writing is a set of stereotypes or expected behavior patterns, not characters. We never see what is happening inside people's heads; we never know what Bonifacia thinks about the nuns or about the Sergeant. Instead we see Bonifacia in certain roles for which we can fill in any missing details from our own experience. Bonifacia is the "innocent," Lalita the "mother," and the Sergeant is a "macho" type. But there is a twist: in La casa verde the stereotypes which apply to each character are often made to alternate with their opposites, leaving the reader in doubt as to which qualities to attribute to a single individual. What is more confusing is that opposing stereotypes of necessity evoke opposing judgments by the reader which further contribute to the tension the novel creates.

Ironically, the stereotypes are reinforced in this process as it is not the evaluation of the stereotyped behavior itself that is called into question, but the absence of consistency in behavior. Thus the reader can never quite decide about Lalita, the good mother type who has many children by serial husbands, each of whom finds her attractive and satisfying. The exception is her first husband, a leper escaping from the law, who is fleeing on a raft through most of the novel; he always describes Lalita as a "dirty whore"—split images that cannot be made to converge.

In the case of Bonifacia we have the child/woman of the convent who becomes a prostitute in the Green House in Piura, after her Sergeant-husband is sent off to jail for his involvement in a bar killing. The day comes, of course, when the Sergeant (Lituma) returns home and finds his wife (Wildflower) in the brothel:

"Lituma got in this afternoon," Josefino said, as if he were giving an order, "He's downstairs, with the Leon's."

A quick shudder passed through Wildflower's body, her hands were motionless, stuck between the bottonholes. But she did not turn or speak.²⁴

She dresses, forces her wide feet into the high heels that don't fit, and follows Josefino downstairs. Lituma is at the bar: "Good to see you, sweety, and a grimace came over his whole face, his small eyes showed unbearable uneasiness now, good to see you, Lituma, Wildflower said. . . . This is meeting night, old man,' Lituma said. 'Now you can see how I've behaved myself." Later Lituma and his cousins beat the shit out of Josefino and return to the Green House. Wildflower is being asked to dance by a fat man as the madam (Chunga) looks on:

"What's wrong with this one, Chunga?" the fat man asked, panting.

"What's wrong with you?" Chunga said. "They're inviting you to dance, don't be rude. Why don't you accept the gentleman's invitation?"

But Wildflower was still struggling.

"Lituma, tell him to let go of me."

"Don't let go of her, friend," Lituma said. "And you do your duty, whore."²⁵

Child-prophet in the jungle, whore in the city, and for Lituma a similar shift from nice guy-victim in the jungle to oppressor-victim in Piura on the coast. The city is unhealthy, and the jungle is better if only by comparison. A faint return to a familiar theme. But the Sergeant could never have stayed in the jungle. He missed the lights, the people, the action.

Traditions break down and conventional behavior patterns no longer hold people and no longer protect them. They seem part of a stabler, simpler past. Bonifacia/Wildflower, child/whore: when the dichotomies collapse and individuals must live out conflicting roles, it is very costly in human terms. In La casa verde the old stereotypes are rotting but the new forms of social relationships are inhuman and disgusting. Yet it seems that to debate the advantages of the past is pointless, for there is no going back.

By beginning with Alegría and the social protest novel I have ignored earlier trends in Peruvian literature. Before the social protest novel became central there was a "decadent" phase in Peruvian writing exemplified by Clemente Palma's Cuentos malévolos.²⁶ In the decadent novel, "boredom is the bane of the hero's existence, his constant companion, goading him into perversion and sadism; but since perversion and sadism, once experienced, lose their savor, he falls prey again to ennui."²⁷La Rifa, a novella by Katia Saks, is in part a return to the style of the decadents and in part a modern commentary on the existential alternatives open to women. The heroine is an upper-class Limeña; the scene is a peculiarly truncated Lima—the Lima of the Karamanduke restaurant, a villa at Ancón, the old suburb of Chorrillos. It is a Lima that seems unchanging and unchangeable, almost frozen in modern time, shimmering under the relentless brightness of the summer sun.

The theme is a triangle trying fairly ineffectually to become a quadrangle. Liliana, her husband Julyan, and her cousin Maya are the triangle, maintained by a love between Julyan and Maya that is compelling, often cruel, and pointless. Pablo is Liliana's lover, peripheral. The stifling ennui is broken by sex, violence, and eventually death. Its decadence lies in Liliana's masochism from which she is unable to break free and her role as accomplice to Julyan and Maya: she is the permanent spectator to the pain they inflict on one another. Maya, witch/child, sensuous, a spirit, dances before another man. Julyan decides to punish her for her boldness, for arousing another man in his presence. Liliana is witness:

She shrank away, suddenly on guard, and eyed him with mistrust. But the sense of defiance prevailed; she shrugged and continued to look at him with cold, impertinent eyes. He leaned over her, still smiling. He grasped her long shocks of hair and twisted them into a thick luxurious rope that he wound around her throat. She gasped. Her hands caught his wrists as she strained to free herself.

"Wicked little creature," Julyan said sweetly. "Wicked little bitch, isn't she, Liliana?"

"Please," I said.

"A bitch," he said, "among bitches."

Maya was struggling to push him away and free herself. She jerked her head from side to side in a violent effort to escape. I thought, the old instinct. She fought him with eyes wide open and teeth clenched. .. . He tightened the knot around her neck so brutally that she gasped for breath, and her hands flew to her sides, clutching the air.

She felt his urgency. His will. Hers was no longer existent. . . .

"Julyan," I cried, "she's suffering."

"Nonsense," he said placidly. "She needs someone to initiate her into the art of suffering."

"Her head!" I cried.

"Yes," he mused, "a rare, inscrutable head, isn't it?"

"Enough!"

I turned my head and saw his eyes. They were fixed upon her, bold, transparent, untroubled. I saw his face, a face that could be as rigidly ascetic as it could be charming, voluptuous. A naked face. Deeply stirring. I dropped my eyes.

There was silence and the glare of dawn. I lay back on the bed, quite still, my arms and legs stretched out on the white sheet. I thought, a stone effigy, alone, forgotten, eternal.

28

Yet the "decadence" of Katia Saks is a modern decadence, arising out of the rigor mortis of the old traditions, the absurdity of the old social controls. Tradition is represented by Liliana's mother; Liliana's response is not to fight it but to withdraw:

"I don't understand why you should insist upon exposing me to her society."

"Peruvian etiquette," I said. "She is our cousin, is she not?"

"It would not be the first time we excluded from our society a member of our own family. Her mother, as you will remember, was denied permission to visit the family."

I burst out laughing.

"Mother," I said, "you are an exemplary woman."

"I have a certain line of conduct," Mother said dryly, "and I adhere to it.

I simply cannot justify your tolerance. You behave toward her as though you were her—her accomplice."

A chill, A silence. A false peace. A false freedom. The loop of a rope. . . .

"What have I done to make this happen to me? That I should live to witness the moral disintegration of my own child, my own flesh and blood. What have I done to be punished so mercilessly? Again and again. First your father. Now you. Both of you. It's wicked. There's no pride left in this house. No dignity. God knows I have always conducted myself with honor and humility. Your father betrayed the high regard he enjoyed in this house. I endured. You were left to me. I bestowed upon you the dignity of our name. You have violated it."

"That makes me very wanton, doesn't it?" I said, and I smiled at Mother. . . .

"I pray that the good Lord will have mercy on your soul."

"Mother," I said, "the good Lord and I make no demands upon each other."

"It will not be long before I go," Mother said. "When I go your sins will be your own."

I looked at her eyes, her mouth. Her mouth was a thin, rigid line. I rested my forehead against the edge of the bathtub. The water was gray. Like ashes.

29

It is interesting that Katia Saks's novel, in contrast to those of the male novelists, is devoted exclusively to a concern about the nature and quality of the relations between men and women. The conflict in La Rifa is provided by Liliana's attempt to break through the traditional role alternatives; ironically, Pablo, her lover, offers her the least freedom from conventional expectations. Liliana has our sympathy for she has all the valued "modern" qualities: an analytical bent, detachment, tolerance. But in the end her sense of self is too weak, based as it is on the unlikely combination of confidence derived from her class position and a willingness to admit her sexual needs. It is hardly a strong enough foundation for the development of a new identity. She is trapped, and in the end she succumbs:

[Julyan] rose with a listless air. He walked away from the bed and began to undress with a dull look in his eyes and a distraught expression on his face, as though he were unable to shake off the fresh anxieties, the seed-bearing thoughts. I saw his dim, hesitant silhouette, the purity of his nakedness, his face, his wide-staring eyes.

I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes. Julyan crossed the room with his slow silent stride. He leaned over me and pressed me to him and kissed me lightly on the lips. A sudden thrill ran up my body, and I leaned against the narrow brass bed, breathless, dazzled, lost. . . . We lay outstretched on the narrow brass bed, inert, oppressed, our bodies barely touching.

30

The relative absence of female characters in Peruvian literature is itself an interesting commentary on the position of women in Peruvian society. However, it makes it very difficult to pursue the goal of this paper which is to compare literary images with some psychological and sociological generalizations about Latin American women, with the clichés we all recognize. In comparing Alegría and Arguedas to Vargas Llosa, it is possible to make the distinction between woman as symbol (e.g., of nature or of Indian culture) and woman as stereotype or archetype (woman behaving according to a recurring, predictable pattern of rules). In what follows I use the novel of Gabriel Garcia Márquez to develop three archetypes which I believe represent three alternative roles available to women within the "transitional" society of Latin America. Cien años de soledad is particularly suited to this purpose, first because it is an attempt to portray the uniqueness and variety of Latin American social experience as a distinct totality, as a culture, and second because, in contrast to Vargas Llosa, Garcia Márquez develops his male and female characters as positive "ideal types," rather than as the carriers of advanced social deterioration. In the literary sense, the use of archetypes is quite consistent with the epic form of the novel: as in the Chanson de Roland, characters represent values or qualities in conflict among themselves. Real characters could only result from having conflict occur within individuals, a distinction which separates most modern Western writing from the tradition of the epic. On the level of sociological interpretation, the use of archetypes and the relevance of the epic form in the modern Latin American novel may be due to the persistence of traditional patterns of social relations in conditions of political and economic "modernization."

The three archetypes I develop here are the roles of Mother, Witch, and Wife/Concubine. In dealing with the first two, I would like to stress the contrast between these roles and literary role images in North American writing and to discuss the implications of the availability of these roles for women in Latin America in terms of the prospects for a feminist movement there. The mutual dependence of the roles of wife and concubine (the opposite of the common view that they are mutually hostile) is relevant to our interpretation of the "double standard" and our concept of machismo.

Woman as Mother. It is perhaps not surprising that sociologists and political scientists raised in a culture with a Judeo-Protestant heritage, one which emphasizes patriarchal authority, bars women from certain religious roles, and has a male image of God, should fail to grasp the breadth of female influence and power in a society in which the Virgin is an important religious figure and where male resentment (e.g., Arguedas) of the link between women and religion is still an important literary theme. From the imagery in Cien años de soledad it is possible to describe certain patterns of female dominance which are not commonly available in North American culture. On the whole, women in Cien años de soledad represent the forces of stability as against the male characters who are always disrupting society by their futile military exploits, their misguided scientific adventures, and their total lack of common sense. The male principle of technology, which Lionel Trilling has characterized as "hard, resistant, unformed and unpleasant,"³² has not yet taken over in Latin America, as it has in so many other parts of the West, and Úrsula, the archetypical Mother of the novel, can still scoff at the scientific experiments of her husband as "impractical." Úrsula is the strongest, the only positive force in the novel. It is she who tries to keep the family together, who concerns herself about the daily needs such as a roof over their heads and food to eat, who fights off the encroachments of the ants and the cobwebs, and who tries to regulate social/sexual relations to avoid the event that will signify the end of the family line: the birth of a child with the tail of a pig.

Úrsula's strength is the force of her will: shortly after he establishes the town of Macondo, her husband, José Arcadio Buendía, decides that it is time to leave again.

"We will not leave," [Úrsula] said. "We will stay here, because we have had a son here."

"We have still not had a death," he said. "A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

Úrsula replied with a soft firmness:

"If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."

José Arcadio Buendia had not thought that his wife's will was so firm. He tried to seduce her with the charm of his fantasy, with the promise of a prodigious world where all one had to do was sprinkle some magic liquid on the ground and the plants would bear fruit whenever a man wished, and where all manner of instruments against pain were sold at bargain prices. But Úrsula was insensitive to his clairvoyance.

"Instead of going around thinking about your crazy inventions, you should be worrying about your sons," she replied. "Look at the state they're in, running wild just like donkeys."

José Arcadio Buendia took his wife's words literally. He looked out the window and saw his barefoot children in the sunny garden and he had the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Úrsula's spell. Something occurred inside of him then, something mysterious and definitive that uprooted him from his own time and carried him adrift through an unexplored region of his memory. While Úrsula continued sweeping the house, which was safe now from being abandoned, he stood there with an absorbed look, contemplating the children until his eyes became moist and he dried them with the back of his hand, exhaling a deep sigh of resignation.

"All right," he said. "Tell them to come help me take the things out of the boxes."³³

It would be possible to analyze the conversation between Úrsula and her husband at some length, to point out some of the interesting implications of the children coming to exist "by Úrsula's spell" and José Arcadio's "deep sigh of resignation." But for the sake of brevity let us concentrate on the importance of the family as an institution in Latin American society and the meaning of the phrase heard so often there, "woman rules in the home."

The prevalence of the extended family and of compadrazgo, the relative lack of geographical mobility, and the survival of the family as an important instrument of social regulation over a fairly broad range of activities give women who dominate their families a considerable degree of power and influence. The figure of the "matriarch" is a common one in Latin America. One sociologist has explained the prevalence of strong mother-figures as a carry-over from the old Spanish concept of "saintmother" who is the "focal personality around whom all members of the family group themselves, tied by spiritual and sentimental bonds."³⁴ The "saint-mother" preserves the family as a strong, united institution; "she keeps alive traditions, preserves memories dear to the heart, encourages everything that strengthens family unity, rejects everything that might threaten to weaken it. She is, as it were, the family priestess, who watches over the life of its members from cradle to grave."³⁵ Not the least of the personal relations a mother can rely upon is that between herself and her sons. Thus Ursula is the only person who can intervene against the arbitrary will of her son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía; she is the only one, he realizes, who "penetrates his misery." In La Rifa, Liliana no longer respects her mother's value system, but she still respects her mother's right to demand a degree of external conformity.

A significant factor in judging female influence is the scope and legitimacy of social sanctions emanating from the family itself, affecting prestige, marriage partners, inheritance, "acceptable" behavior, even political influence. Don Apolinar Moscote, the "magistrate sent by the government" to rule in Macondo, remains utterly powerless until his family is socially accepted by the Buendias.

Contrast the Latin American family with the institution which carries the same name in North America. There the woman who "rules the home" rules four walls, some household appliances, and two or three small children. She lacks access to the "male sphere" which the extended family and the matriarchal role make available to the Latin American woman. She cannot rely on the effectiveness of social sanctions to control behavior outside of the immediate nuclear family. In fact, I would argue that it is the severe decline in the prestige, size, and function of the family in the United States which has brought about the deep frustration with the female role which is the basis of modern feminism. I do not mean the decline of the family as an institution of "fulfillment" in the individual, psychological sense in which the term is used. I refer to the decline of the family as a source of power and influence for women. In the name of a false egalitarianism (false because it has never been achieved), the North American woman has been deprived of self-respect and the respect of others through the severe limitation of her role. Under the banner of the feminine mystique she has taken over the duties of a full-time maid, and it has been assumed that, in spite of her education, she has the intellectual capacities of a maid as well. She cannot rely on the role differentiation which is so obvious in Latin American society, which allows the woman (particularly the upper-class woman who can presumably afford household help) to maintain her image as a person of culture and of valid experience, to acquire wisdom and dignity with age (instead of obsolescence), and even to combine a career with marriage, an opportunity which is ironically much less available to her North American counterpart.

Insofar as the North American feminist movement is based on frustration with female powerlessness on the personal as well as the political level, and I think the obvious desire of women to break into the "male" world is clear evidence of this kind of frustration, then the feminist movement will not have the same appeal in Latin America nor can it expect "consciousness" on the part of Latin American women. This is not to say that accusations of "male chauvinism" are irrelevant to the dynamics of male-female relations in the Latin context: like the tradition of machismo it serves to increase the opportunities for "emotional blackmail" of males by females (see Wife/Concubine below). It is to say, however, that feminism will not be a healthy transplant. A whole generation of North American women have become convinced of their powerlessness relative to males and have moved to destroy the role differentiation they perceive as its cause. The Latin American woman correctly perceives role differentiation as the key to her power and influence. Even the notions of the "separateness" and "mystery" of women, which are viewed in the North American context as male propaganda chiefly used to discriminate against women, are seen in the Latin American context as images to be enhanced, not destroyed.

Woman as Witch. The image of the female as mysterious, unfathomable, somehow beyond men's rules, is the second significant archetype in Latin American literature. Because of man's mysterious and often frightening relationship with elements in his environment (e.g., the "jungle" or death), it is a pattern that often degenerates into a symbol: woman is the unknown personified. Yet it can be a true character type and is a recurring one, even in the Peruvian novel. Bonifacia and Maya are both "mysterious" in this sense; in Alegría's El mundo es ancho y ajeno there is the female figure of the curandera, literally a witch who possesses certain kinds of magic powers. While the role of curandera has survived in the urban areas,³⁶ it appears to be a lowerclass phenomenon. The intellectual particularly is too immersed in the Western view of "objective" reality³⁷ to take witchcraft seriously. What remains is the emphasis on female as "other" and/or the female who is living outside the ordinary social role expectations.

In Cien años de soledad a number of women have witchlike characteristics, among them Rebeca who eats earth and whitewash and has tremendous silent energy; she carries her parents' bones with her in a bag. The peculiar timelessness of the novel, and much of its wonder, comes from the powerful female images that García Márquez creates. His most extreme creation in this archetype is Remedios the Beauty, a ravishing simpleton. Like Bonifacia, she exposes the absurdity of human conventions:

She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties solved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home. They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head and used the hair to make wigs for the saints. The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion . . . the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she became to men.³⁸

A man once fell through the roof tiles watching Remedios the Beauty take a bath; she had a subtle, lingering odor that followed him to the grave. The end García Márquez provides for her is suitably incredible:

Remedios the Beauty stayed [in the family], wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda wanted to fold her brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had just begun when she noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over with an intense paleness.

"Don't you feel well?" she asked her.

Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

"Quite the opposite," she said. "I never felt better."

She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands . . . and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which⁴¹

Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning her environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o'clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest flying birds of memory could reach her.³⁹

There is another more sinister dimension to the stereotype of the "mysterious" woman, of the type who is unable to so fully leave the world of things, of social conventions, of the envy of men who may try to destroy her. A fascinating portrayal of this kind of woman is La Maga,⁴⁰ a female character in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela. Rayuela, if read from chapter 1, introduces the relationship of La Maga and Oliveira, meeting each other "by chance" in Paris: "We did not go around looking for one another, but we knew that we would meet just the same. . . . La Maga was fascinated with the strange mix-ups she had become involved in because of the breakdown of the laws governing her life. She was one of those people who could make a bridge collapse by simply walking on it, or who could sobbingly remember having seen in a shop window the lottery ticket which had just won five million."

Oliveira describes himself as a "searcher": "It was about this time that I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses."⁴² La Maga is the very opposite of a compass, but she will be destroyed just the same. She is out of logic, out of time: "It didn't take me long to understand that you didn't discuss reality with La Maga. Praise of disorder would have terrified her as much as criticism of it." And, with La Maga talking, "What do you call the past? As far as I'm concerned, everything happened yesterday, last night, no earlier."⁴³ Their relationship is a "play," one with frightening implications for male-female relationships.

Oliveira felt that La Maga wanted death from him, something in her which was not her awakened self, a dark form demanding annihilation, the slow wound which on its back breaks the stars at night and gives space back to questions and terrors. Only at that time, off center like a mythical matador for whom killing is returning the bull to the sea and the sea to the heavens, he bothered La Maga in a long night which they did not speak about much later. He turned her into a Pasiphaë, he bent her over and used her as if she were a young boy, he knew her and demanded the slavishness of the most abject whore, he magnified her into a constellation, he held her in his arms smelling of blood, he made her drink the semen which ran into her mouth like a challenge to the Logos, he sucked out the shadow from her womb and her rump and raised himself to her face to anoint her with herself in that ultimate work of knowledge which only a man can give to a woman. . . .

Later on Oliveira began to worry that she would think herself jaded, that their play would move on to sacrifice. Above all he feared that most subtle form of gratitude which turns itself into doglike love. He did not want freedom, the only suit that fit La Maga, to be lost in any strong femininity. He didn't have to worry. . . .

Since he did not love her, since desire would stop (because he did not love, desire would stop), he would have to avoid like the devil any kind of sacred ritualizing of their play. For days, for weeks, for some months, every hotel room, every square, every position of love and every dawn in a marketplace café; a savage circus, a subtle operation, and a rational balance. That's how it came to be known that La Maga was really waiting for Horacio to kill her and that hers would be a phoenix death, entry into the council of philosophers, that is to say, the discussions of the Serpent Club. La Maga wanted to learn, she wanted to be ed-youkay-ted. Horacio was the exalted, the chosen one, the one to fulfill the role of purifying priest.⁴⁴

La Maga wishes to be destroyed and Oliveira, it would seem, is only doing his duty. Only "for days, for weeks, for some months" it is a slow death, an eternal put-down.

As with Oliveira, so with Julyan. The mysterious, the nonrational in women is both desirable and deserving of punishment. As Octavio Paz has written:

Woman is a living symbol of the strangeness of the universe and its radical heterogeneity. As such, does she hide life within herself, or death? What does she think? Or does she think? Does she truly have feelings? Is she the same as we are? Sadism begins as a revenge against female hermeticism or as a desperate attempt to obtain a response from a body we fear is insensible.⁴⁵

It is possible for women to escape the conventional role expectations in Latin American society as the prevalence and variety of the female as "witch" reveals. But unless relationships with males are avoided altogether, the price is punishment and even death.

Woman as Wife/Concubine. Georgie Anne Geyer has written of machismo that it implies a fairly rigid set of behavioral rules in which males and females both have a stake: "It is probably true that many women preferred and today prefer the ordered, stable life of Latin society in which the family is sacrosanct and in dissolvable and where they know they will always be the respected, virginal wives and mothers, no matter what other women their husbands enjoy."⁴⁶ The truth of this statement lies less in the assumption of stability in family life and more in the insight it gives into the self-image of the woman in the family: women retain respect as wives and mothers in part from their ability to maintain their virginal image, and machismo is the mechanism by which this is accomplished. Without machismo the wife could not employ the emotional leverage on her husband and sons which is a result of her "moral superiority." Without the image (and reality) of the concubine, there would be no measure of sin against which the wife could contrast her purity and retain her traditional influence.

Cien años de soledad provides one of the clearest descriptions of the archetype in the character of Fernanda, the very beautiful, quite socially proper wife of Aureliano Segundo; a woman who uses a gilded chamberpot. Fernanda came to Macondo from "the highlands" to marry Aureliano; she views herself as the martyred carrier of the traditions of her family and class in this town in the sticks. To maintain her resolve and self-righteousness she attacks her husband's infidelity:

She had the right to expect a little more consideration from her husband because, for better or for worse, he was her consecrated spouse, her helpmate, her legal despoiler, who took it upon himself of his own free and sovereign will the grave responsibility of taking her away from her paternal home, where she never wanted or suffered from anything, and where she wove funeral wreaths as a pasttime, since her godfather had sent a letter with his signature and the stamp of his ring on the sealing wax simply to say that the hands of his goddaughter were not meant for tasks of this world except to play the clavichord, and nevertheless her insane husband had taken her from her home with all manner of admonitions and warnings and had brought her to that frying pan of hell where a person could not breathe because of the heat, and before she had completed her Pentecostal fast he had gone off with his wandering trunks and his wastrel's accordion to loaf in adultery with a wretch of whom it was only enough to see her behind, well, that's been said, to see her wiggle her mare's behind in order to guess that she was a, that she was a, just the opposite of her, who was a lady in a palace or a pigsty, at the table or in bed, a lady of breeding, Godfearing, obeying His laws and submissive to His wishes, and with whom he could not perform, naturally, the acrobatics and trampish antics that he did with the other one.⁴⁷

Lest this seem an exaggerated image of the "Wife," let us go back to the Western bourgeois novel and the so-called "Victorian" view of women in our own culture. Leslie Fiedler, in his Love and Death in the American Novel, describes the female heroines of the bourgeois novel as "feminist," a term he uses in a very special sense to describe female characters that are, for the first time since the Greek plays perhaps, as strong as their male competitors. The novel he uses as an illustration is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, written in the mid-eighteenth century. The standard theme of novels is seduction, and Lovelace, Clarissa's aristocratic, articulate suitor, is compared to Don Juan:

Don Juan .. . is essentially the impenitent; he can be damned but not persuaded, punished but not defeated. . . . Don Juan is unequivocally condemned, at least in the conscious judgments of the playwrights who evoke him; but he is the sole hero of the dramas through which he moves, and becomes easily .. . the sympathetic rebel loved by the Romantics. Lovelace, on the other hand, though equally courageous, equally irresistible in love, meets an opponent who is stronger than God—stronger, that is, than any religious scruple the seventeenth century had been able to set in the way of the principle of sexual conquest. The women who surround Don Juan .. . do not add up to one single Clarissa, a female force equal and opposite to the male force.⁴⁸

Against a force like Clarissa, the universal lover is transformed into the "monogamous Seducer" which "leads finally to submission to the lady and repentance before her, if not before God in whose name she speaks." Yet, this "feminist" principle rests on female chastity, a quality that has been dealt a strong blow in the West by the Freudian revolution: now orgasm is every woman's sacred duty. In Latin America, however, the persistence of machismo allows the bourgeois "feminist" principle to survive; it is significant that the severing of the tie between femininity and chastity has elsewhere coincided with a real decline in female prestige and power, a decline concealed by the myth of female equality.

Of course, as Katia Saks's novel indicates, Latin American women have not been immune to the Freudian "disease." Another Latin American writer, Carlos Fuentes, has treated the conflict between the social power of chastity and the post-Freudian awareness of human sexual drives as a literary theme. In two of his novels there are major female characters who are caught between their sexual desires and their desire to control men. Catalina, "bought" wife of Artemio Cruz (in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1964) struggles to achieve complete self-control, to deny her husband by denying herself:

I won't tell you: at night you conquer me, but I defeat you during the day. . . .

Why can't I accept it without feeling wrong, without reserve? I want it to be proof that he can't resist my body, but I take it as only proof that I have overcome him, that I can evoke love from him every night and freely deprecate it the next day with my coldness and distance. Why can't I decide? Why do I have to decide?

49

And there is doña Asunción, lying beside her dull and pompous husband, touching her own body, secretly attracted to her young nephew, in Las buenas consciencias (1961): "[N]othing must hint at her secret desires; they must remain so secret that she does not know them herself, covered, in the silence of dreams, by vague imagination and over that a black hood of suppression."

⁵⁰

In spite of the conflict, however, both doña Asunción and Catalina achieve something tangible for their self-denial: legitimate control over certain aspects of their social milieu, the reinforcement of social traditions which they accept. Contrast with this gain the lot of the concubine who is exploited by the wife and by the husband, as well, who has no security, not even the security of raising legitimate children. The treatment of prostitution in the novels we have discussed seems simplistic: in Vargas Llosa's novel, for example, Bonifacia is considered to be an economic and spiritual victim, an inevitable casualty, lacking in will. In Cien años de soledad there are two concubine figures, both of which are secure in their external sexual power over men, a power that in the real world, however, declines drastically with age.

Thus it is significant to find in Fuentes's Artemio Cruz a description of the frustrations of a kept woman that sounds almost like something out of a women's liberation journal. The woman is Lilia, Artemio's long-term companion, a woman who has superseded his own wife as his hostess, a woman who at one time was a stylish consumer good for Artemio. Lilia is childless, functionless, and climbing the walls:

Was it necessary for her to interrupt his meditation? Lilia's heels clicking indolently. Her unpainted fingernails scratching the salon door. Her greaseplastered face. She had come to inquire whether her rose dress would be appropriate for tonight? She didn't want to wear the wrong thing, like last year, and provoke his irritation and anger. Ah, he was already drinking! Why not invite her to join him? She was getting damn tired of the way he mistrusted her, keeping the bar locked. . . . Was she bored then? As if he didn't know! She almost wished she were old and ugly so he would throw her out once and for all and let her live as she wanted to. He wasn't stopping her? And then where would she have such luxury, this big house, his money? Plenty of money, almost too much luxury, and no happiness at all, no fun, not even free to have a little drink, if you please, damn it. Well: of course she loved him very much. Hadn't she said it a thousand times?⁵¹

And later, at the party, after a few drinks:

He went toward her with his difficult, faltering pace. With every step he took her voice fluted higher. "I'm sick of watching TV all day, little old manny-man! I already know all those cowboy stories. Bang-bang-bang! The marshal of Arizona, camp of redskins. Bang-bang! I dream about their damn voices, old man! Have a Pepsi. .. and that's all, old man. Security with comfort. Policies . . ."

His arthritic hand struck her and the dyed curls fell over her eyes.⁵²

Economic dependence, boredom, paternalism backed with the threat of physical force. Dyed curls and greased face. It sounds quite familiar, and yet there is little prospect for an alliance even here. The concubine owes her existence to one principle which the North American woman rejects: the bourgeois principle of power through chastity where the "wife" could not exist without the "concubine" and the concubine has influence in part due to the wife's self-control. Within the Latin American context, the availability of some strong female images and viable alternative roles is a sign of the continued health of the system. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the Latin American model of male-female relations offers no solutions to the North American feminist who rejects not only the principle of chastity as a means to power, but also the unchallenged principle of role differentiation between males and females on which the Latin American system rests.⁵³

¹ Earl M. Aldrich, Jr., The Modern Short Story in Peru (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 114-15.

² Ciro Alegría, The Golden Serpent (New York: Signet, 1963), p. 8 and p. 22. English translations were used for quotations where available.

³ Ibid., p. 23.

⁴ Ibid., p. 40.

⁵ Ibid., p. 41.

⁶ Ciro Alegría, Broad and Alien Is the World (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941), p. 5.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 39-40.

⁸ Ibid., p. 130.

⁹ Note symbolism in name: la Costeña not only comes from the coast, her role is coastal.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 69.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid., p. 70.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 73.

¹⁵ Aldrich, Modern Short Story in Peru, p. 130.

¹⁶ Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude; Life and Thought in Mexico, trans., Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 77 ff.

¹⁷ José Maria Arguedas, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1971), pp. 158-59.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 13.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 11.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 205-06.

²¹ Aldrich, Modern Short Story in Peru, p. 142.

²² Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), p. 255.

²³ Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House, trans., Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 195.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 149.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 173.

²⁶ Son of Ricardo Palma, author of the famous Tradiciones Peruanos.

²⁷ Aldrich, Modern Short Story in Peru, p. 17.

²⁸ Katia Saks, La Rifa (New York: William Morrow, 1968), pp. 49-50. Katia Saks lives currently in New York; the novel was not, to my knowledge, published in Peru.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 28-31.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 156.

³¹ The absence of real characters in the Latin American novel has been commented upon by others; it is hardly the transitional style throughout the Third World, however. Contrast modern African novels, for example.

³² Quoted in an essay by Peter Netti.

³³ Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Avon, 1971), pp. 22-23.

³⁴ Rosa Signorelli de Marti, "Spanish America," in Women in the Modern World, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 202.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 202.

³⁶ See, for example, the work of Oscar Lewis.

³⁷ As the most recent work by Carlos Castañeda attempts to challenge, an outstanding example of an alternative to the "myth of the objective consciousness."

³⁸ Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years, p. 217.

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 22-23.

⁴⁰ Note symbolism of names La Maga, Maya—they suggest magic; maya has a number of antirational possibilities.

⁴¹ Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 15.

⁴² Ibid., p. 15.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 56.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 32-33.

⁴⁵ Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, p. 44. Italics mine.

⁴⁶ Georgie Anne Geyer, The New Latins (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), p. 92.

⁴⁷ Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years, p. 301. Italics mine.

⁴⁸ Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Delta, 1966), p. 66. Italics mine.

⁴⁹ Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), p. 100.

⁵⁰ Carlos Fuentes, The Good Conscience (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), p. 83.

⁵¹ Fuentes, Death of Artemio Cruz, p. 245.

⁵² Ibid., p. 248.

⁵³ Some interesting corroboration of the gap between Latin American women and North American women is provided by Anne Steinmann and David J. Fox, "Specific Areas of Agreement and Conflict in Women's Self Perception and Their Perception of Men's Ideal Woman in Two South American Urban Communities and an Urban Community in the United States," Journal of Marriage and the Family, 31, no. 2 (May 1969), pp. 281-89.