BODY POLITICS:FEMALE DYNAMICS IN ’S THE STORIES OF

FARHAT IFTEKHARUDDIN

It is probably dangerous to claim that the short story captures the feminine better than the novel does. Arguably, the novel, with its luxury of time and space, is an effective medium to enunciate the largesse that femininity encompasses, the time and space that Isabel Allende herself used in developing all her characters, including the females, particularly Clara, in her epic novel The House of the Spirits. However, as a larger form, in offering the magnitude of exposition where everything is laid bare and developed, an aesthetically pleasing experience in itself, the novel must logically forgo the other aesthetic experience that is central to the short story: enigma. Eileen Baldeshwiler assigns the short story to the domain of the “lyrical” by pointing to the short story’s “concentrat[ion] on internal changes, moods, and feelings”.1 More than that, the enigmatic form of the genre and the structural compactness of the short story, which forces a near-complete reliance on symbolic and metaphoric vehicles to incorporate and convey meaning, creates avenues of multiplicity and a maze of variables at cognitive levels. It is this sense of multitudinous possibilities that the very form of the short story possesses in its composition that epistemologically complements the enigmatic nature of the feminine. The poetics of the short story potently captures the sublime within the female body and psyche. Also, through its symbolic and metaphoric dependency the short story, like the female, is dialogic, demanding the application of poetic sensibilities, making the short story an ideal form for incorporating the female body politics.

1 Eileen Baldeshwiler, “The Lyrical Short Story: The Sketch of a History”, in Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976, 202-13. 226 Farhat Iftekharuddin

The open-ended aspect of the short story that sets into motion the idea of multiplicity readily accommodates the open-ended characteristic within the female/male duality that is a central focus in “Two Words”, “Clarisa”, “Wicked Girl”, “Toad’s Mouth”, “Tosca”, and “Simple Maria”. In eschewing male dominance the females in these narratives re-establish the primal fact that the male is contained within the female – males are from and of females – and that the female/male duality is contained within the woman. This fundamental primacy of the female, which often occurs as an epiphanic realization in the male characters that helps mitigate subordination and diminution of women, reasserts the natural cyclicality embodied in the female. The critical organic feature of the short story – that by means of its physical linearity it promotes the concept of circularity – effectively serves to promote the cyclical within the female. The female oeuvre articulated, often in a tragicomic mode, in The Stories of Eva Luna elevate both the writer and the product beyond regional, national and even ethnic classification. Isabelle Allende uses the poetry of the short story as an effective form to incorporate feminine sensuality and explore the hermeneutics of the female condition. The female dynamics in her stories are not limited to a unique space, time or event. Through the delicacy of form that is inherent in the short story, Allende’s stories illuminate intellectually pathogenic gender disparities and parody patriarchal notions, and ultimately repudiate male hegemony. The enigma of the female, the illusive sensuality of the feminine, the mystery of the eternal conflict between the genders, and the incomprehensibility that marks the persistent masculine desire to impose gender superiority, born primarily of assumed sexual superiority, to the extent of influencing socio-economic and political behavior detrimental to the female occupy the time and space within the narratives in The Stories of Eva Luna. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz observes that the “inferiority” of women “is constitutional and resides in their sex”.2 Although he laments that the diminutive placement of the woman in Mexican culture derives from the “anatomical openness”3 of the

2 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, The Philanthropic Ogre, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos and Rachel Phillips Belash, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985, 9. 3 Ibid., 39.