Thinking Back Through Our Mothers : Virginia Woolf in the Spanish

THINKING BACK THROUGH OUR MOTHERS: VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN FEMININE IMAGINATION By MONICA AYUSO-VENTIMIGLIA A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1994 Copyright 1994 by Monica Ayuso-Ventimiglia Para mis padres, quienes alentaron el devenir de mi ambicidn aunque no siempre la comprendieron. Y para Juan Ignacio cuya presencia misma la mantiene viva. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In order to give thanks to the many who have helped me write this dissertation, I must go back a few years. Indeed, the process did not coincide with the day I started writing it but with a time when diverse circumstances made a vision clear to me. I am not exactly sure when or how I got the first glimpse of its emerging contour. Undoubtedly, I owe Jacksonville Sister Cities Association the materialization of my graduate school dream here in the United States. Under their auspices I had a home in Jacksonville, a presidential scholarship to the University of North Florida, jobs at Jacksonville University, and, later, a visiting professorship to Florida Community College at Jacksonville that afforded me financial momentum to continue my work—I am not exaggerating when I say—two full years. Their support, interest, and encouragement have been invaluable. I am completely indebted to my teachers at the University of Florida who served on my dissertation committee. Thanks go to Daniel Cottom for joining the project late, after Barry Ruth Straus left it. Thanks go to John Perlette for his advice that I work on the rhetorical -iv- , fuzziness of my first efforts. I hear his commands every time I write. Thanks go to Alistair Duckworth for providing one of the earliest positive role models of teaching and scholarship. Thanks go to Gregory Ulmer who, as a keen theorist and prior comparatist himself, expressed his enthusiasm as to the intertextual buttress of this work even at a time when "influence" did not have as negative a reception as it does today. Thanks go to Andres Avellaneda, who was the first to give a name—"philological"—to my obsession with language. And thanks especially to Brandon Kershner whose example as scholar, advisor, and teacher touched all aspects of my intellectual growth in the last few years. He intervened on my behalf a number of times, but most decisively, when acts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service threatened to jeopardize the completion of my project. I am equally indebted to those friends with whom I shared a six-year love of running (among other things) especially to John and Susan Duss as well as John and Linda Whitten. We have seen many dawns and storms together; we have tackled many bridges and beaches together. With them I learned that the world of athletics, like that of academics. -v- calls for discipline, endurance, schedules, and will-power so that somehow what I learned in one has dynamically helped me in the other. Finally, I thank a group of friends who feel like family now. Thanks go to Sherry 1 Wilson and her sons Langston, Jordan, and Griffin for giving Juan Ignacio a home always but especially in the summer of 1993. With their help Juan Ignacio could finish first grade in the school where he had begun it, and I could relocate in Gainesville to teach. Thanks go to Edna Stringer for her interest and for the use of her computer and printer. Thanks go to her daughter, Renee S. Bullard, for her enviable literacy in their use. Finally, I thank Sue W. Griffin, who saw potential in me first as a baffled international student and always relentlessly encouraged me to actualize it. She kept my vision alive and, when I was perilously close to losing it, she helped me regain it anew. For no less than fourteen years now, Mrs. Griffin has opened the doors of her home wide to Juan Ignacio and me. She pushed me to write; she read everything I ever wrote with the toughness of the purist; and she enlightened me—sometimes wordlessly—in ways only a bilingual octogenarian could. Most important, -vi- . she reassured me that Juan Ignacio would manage to grow and to thrive, too, in spite of living in the vertiginous ambient of a writer (and thrive he has) . This dissertation would have been literally inconceivable without her wise support -vii- PREFACE This project originates in a desire to unite the two halves of my background. Those two halves were artificially kept apart throughout my formative years in Argentina. Simultaneously, I learned two languages; I attended two different schools. The worlds of Spanish and English never intermingled. Translation had long been banned from my second-language classroom since the most successful learning conditions approximated real-life scenarios of language acquisition. As a result, Spanish was blocked. In one sense, the method succeeded: I became bilingual and bi- cultural. In another sense, in the process of gaining one language, I lost the other. I cannot count myself among those who, like Maria Granata, fell in love with their native language from the start (132) . Rather, I fall among the ranks of those who tarry. Not until many years later did I cultivate my Spanish-American heritage. Like any other lengthy undertaking, this one has had more than its fair share of false starts, halts, and swerves. If I had to draw its starting line, I would broadly designate a contemporary British literature class I took twenty-odd years ago when, as a senior in college, I -viii- read Virginia Woolf for the first time. Early she proved to be the writer on whom I wanted to concentrate my graduate efforts. I remember the puzzlement and the delight with which I first pored over her last and perhaps most challenging creation, The Waves . Narrowly speaking, I would call that the moment in which I chose a topic for this dissertation. At that time, both chair and co- chair—concurrently but separately—suggested I capitalize on a background I had by virtue of my birth. This veering of direction involved acguainting myself with a Latin- American canon paradoxically new to me. During the next few years I researched most of its emerging women's voices, not surprisingly bi-lingual and tri-lingual themselves. Then, I more finely adjusted the focus of my interest. I would position myself precisely at the nexus afforded by two linguistic worlds/perspectives. I would search for relationships between the British feminist and three or four of her Spanish-American daughters, a task never extensively attempted before, with the exception of sparse critical references to the impact of Woolf on this side of the Atlantic and a few essays by the novelists themselves who wrote on the importance of having read her. I hoped to -ix- I enlarge the dialogue between the two worlds, which was linear and unilateral until very recently. Even though the project was never met with less than enthusiasm from both inside and outside my committee, the choice of Spanish-American women was the most trying task. Trying but immensely rewarding since their texts, appearing in the mid-seventies, obviously pointed the direction— then believed and since then have confirmed—of things to come. For instance, their translations and adaptations were undertaken almost as I wrote. In a sense, these texts confronted me as much as I confronted them. To my knowledge only Brazilian-born Clarice Lispector and Argentine-born Victoria Ocampo had been the object of article-length studies linking them with Woolf. I combed the canon for justifications that would invite comparisons: lifetime exposure to Woolf's aesthetics; knowledge of her work; similarities of technique and subject; primary political interest in a female-centered world; a feminist persuasion. After a revitalizing immersion in texts of my time that spoke eloquently to me, reaffirming my experience as Latin- American woman, I chose a corpus of three writers, representing different countries: Rosario Ferre (Puerto -x- Rico) , Julieta Campos (Cuba/Mexico) , and Sylvia Molloy (Argentina) . I have chosen rather daringly. Ferre has serious reservations about Woolf's theories; there is sufficient reason to believe that Campos would cringe at being designated a feminist (Mujeres 125) , and Molloy has admitted to being captivated by the wit and intelligence of Woolf the essayist, but put off by the lyricism of Woolf the novelist. Ever since that moment (wherever it may have been is immaterial to the process) , when I first had a bilateral viewpoint I have learned that I was not running through the wilderness alone; my ambivalence over linguistic worlds and the values thereof has been fully shared by many Spanish- Americans before me. Leaving difficulties (theoretical and other) aside, the crossroad at which I stand this day is an open field in Women's Studies. Bilingual writers—such as all three—on whom I have chosen to focus are more frequently read. The days in which one could not teach writers other than those canonized by the "boom" (the authenticity of the phenomenon notwithstanding) , simply because their writing was not translated into English, are over. Now those writers, no longer ghettoized, often make -xi- their work available through their own translations. Through this gesture they transport the colonial text from the margins to the center of the cultural surroundings. Nobody is better suited to do that. As post-colonial subjects, their gaze is turned in two directions. They become the first interpreters of the profoundly ambiguous situation they find themselves in. On the critical front, a multiplicity of voices is heard.

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