A Genealogy of Resistance in Mexican Narrative Set During
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2010 Recreating the image of women in Mexico: a genealogy of resistance in Mexican narrative set during the Revolution Julia Maria Schneider Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Schneider, Julia Maria, "Recreating the image of women in Mexico: a genealogy of resistance in Mexican narrative set during the Revolution" (2010). LSU Master's Theses. 1481. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/1481 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RECREATING THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN MEXICO: A GENEALOGY OF RESISTANCE IN MEXICAN NARRATIVE SET DURING THE REVOLUTION A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures by Julia Maria Schneider Vordiplom, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, 2006 May 2010 Dedication To my mother and my father, and to my sister. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my major professor, Dr. Andrea E. Morris, for her support, insight, encouragement, and guidance. Her patience and motivation is more than appreciated and made writing this thesis a pleasant experience. Thank you also to Dr. Laura M. Martins and Dr. Margaret R. Parker for agreeing to be part of my thesis committee. I am grateful for their helpful comments and suggestions. iii Table of Contents DEDICATION………………………………………………………….…………………. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………….………………………….... iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………... v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….………. 1 1.1 Feminism, Essentialism, and Poststructuralism: Genealogy as an Alternative Approach……………………………………….………….. 11 2. THE IMAGE OF THE MEXICAN WOMAN IN NATION AND LITERATURE………………………………………………………………..... 19 2.1 The Situation of Women from the Colonial Period to the Feminist Movement of Today………………………………………………..…... 20 2.2 Malinchismo, Marianismo, and Machismo as Discursive Concepts in Mexico………………………………………………………….….…... 24 2.3 The Women‘s Voice in Mexican Literature and the Current Latin American Feminist Literary Debate……………………….…….. 30 2.4 Women in Literature of the Mexican Revolution……………….……... 43 3. THE WOMAN AND THE NATION IN ELENA PONIATOWSKA‘S HASTA NO VERTE JESÚS MÍO……………………………………….……… 49 3.1 Jesusa Palancares‘s Rebellions………………………………….……... 50 3.2 Elena Poniatowska‘s Literary Strategies…………………….………… 70 4. THE WOMAN AND THE FAMILY IN LAURA ESQUIVEL‘S COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE…………………….………....…………. 80 4.1 Tita‘s Rebellion Against Maternal Patriarchy………………….……… 82 4.2 Gertrudis and the Life as soldadera………………………….………… 96 4.3 Laura Esquivel‘s Literary Strategies………………………….………... 102 5. CONCLUSIONS …………………………………………….……………….. 115 WORKS CITED………………………………………….……………….……………….. 122 WORKS CONSULTED…………………………………………………………………… 132 VITA……………………………………………………………….………………………. 133 iv Abstract Traditionally, women have been relegated to the margins of society, history, and culture in male-dominated environments. Patriarchal systems have long denied women to play an appropriate role in nation building and to enter the public sphere, as is the case in Mexico. The female participation during one of the country‘s most critical periods, the Mexican Revolution, has largely been ignored. Through situating their narratives into the context of the Revolution and describing the obstacles and limiting conditions that women experience, Mexican writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Laura Esquivel criticize the status quo of social and gender politics in Mexico and attempt to re-inscribe the female experience into the nation‘s history. In this thesis, I use Alison Stone‘s approach of feminist genealogy to examine women‘s resistance in Hasta no verte Jesús mío by Elena Poniatowska and Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel. For this purpose, I examine the specific representations of feminine identity and analyze the similarities and differences between the women writers‘ and protagonists‘ modes of resistance both on intra- and extra-textual levels while taking into account the different contexts and settings in which female resistance against patriarchal oppression occurs. The investigation reveals the various overlaps of the resistance strategies that the women apply regardless of time and place. Furthermore, understanding their resistance in a genealogical context allows them to establish connections with each other in order to provide mutual support in a patriarchal environment. The analysis also shows that the feminist genealogical approach is useful for women in Mexico and Latin America in general as it helps them to perceive themselves as a coalitional group despite any social, cultural, and political differences and is therefore a constructive way of putting forth the women‘s movement in the region. v 1. Introduction The history of the socialization of Mexican women from the colonial period until present times demonstrates not only the discursive and guiding images with which women and men were to identify, but also the social factors which restricted the opportunities for women in their personal development. In Mexico, social phenomena such as machismo and marianismo, which exist throughout Latin America, are enhanced with a third component particular to the Mexican context, known as malinchismo. Throughout history, however, there have been women in Mexico who attempted, even if at least temporarily, to break away from the patriarchal environment and the social laws imposed on them despite the cultural and social attributions inscribed to femaleness and femininity. Ever since the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, women have been viewed as the source of evil and, in particular, betrayal. It was La Malinche who made the conquest of the Americas possible by becoming the conqueror‘s interpreter and companion, thus seemingly betraying her own people and allowing the colonization of an entire region by a foreign force. Women have since been blamed for any mischief for which the male-dominated society needed an origin, and were confined to subordination and to the life of the silent and inferior Other at the margin of society. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is regarded as the most prominent female figure in Mexican history, and some regard her as the first feminist of her time,1 who, in the 17th century, questioned her male dominated environment and raised her voice against the mechanisms of patriarchy that limited women‘s access to education and knowledge and condemned those who educated themselves to silence (Ludmer 48). More than three centuries later Rosario Castellanos still decried the lack of writing women and women who ‗think aloud‘ in Mexican literature and 1 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was rewarded the title of the first feminist of the New World in Mexico in 1974 (Merrim 11). 1 society. However, there has since been a rise of various women writers in contemporary times whose works contribute to and aim at the deconstruction of still existing models and images of masculinity and femininity in the Hispanic and, particularly Mexican, world. The often times fragmented structure of their stories about women and women‘s lives demonstrates that female history does not follow a linear pattern of development, in fact, the women writers rather depict the terms masculinity and especially femininity as social constructs in a flexible discourse. This opens up new possibilities of interpreting femininity and inscribing new forms of ―womanhood‖ in history. The works by such women writers foster communication and dialogue between women and a society embedded into a patriarchal mindset and norms, which is opposed to the institutionalized silence that women were and still are exposed to as a form of patriarchal violence and restriction of their personal freedom as (female) subject. In her study on Feminist Literary Criticism of Latin American Women’s Writing, LaGreca points out that the challenge for today‘s writers and literary feminist critics is to ―strive to make [the] feminist discourse sensitive to a demographically diverse feminist readership while continuing to modify patriarchal systems‖ (380). Women not only have been forced to refrain from participation in society and politics as individual subjects with their own voice and identity, they have been almost entirely restricted to the domestic sphere and the adoption of roles typically associated with the female sex. As mothers and wives, they are expected to follow cultural, social, and political norms and stereotypes in order to fulfill the role that is imposed on them by society and which affirms them in their femininity. Those stereotyped models prescribe that being a good woman equals being a good mother, wife, daughter, and vice versa. Attempting to break with society‘s norms and thus developing one‘s own understanding of ‗womanhood‘ and femininity means trading in social 2 acceptance and validation for becoming a political and social subject. Thus, a woman who raises her female voice and breaks her silence in order to enter the public sphere