Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2003 Mothers and Sons in Hispanic Short Fiction by Women: A Quarter Century of Erotic, Destructive Maternal Love Jennifer A. Colón Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES MOTHERS AND SONS IN HISPANIC SHORT FICTION BY WOMEN: A QUARTER CENTURY OF EROTIC, DESTRUCTIVE MATERNAL LOVE By Jennifer A. Colón A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2003 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Jennifer A. Colón defended on Monday, August 18, 2003. _____________________________ Brenda L. Cappuccio Professor Directing Dissertation _____________________________ Barry S. Sapolsky Outside Committee Member _____________________________ Delia Poey Committee Member _____________________________ Aimée Boutin Committee Member _____________________________ William Cloonan Committee Member _____________________________ Ernest Rehder Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.................................................................................................. v INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: KALI, MOTHER GODDESS ............................................... 11 “Omar, amor” by Cristina Fernández Cubas (Spain)........................ 14 “Viaje” by Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina)......................................... 29 “Ayer” by Herminia Paz (Spain) ...................................................... 46 CHAPTER 2: ECHO, VOICE OF NARCISSUS......................................... 59 “Historia de amor” by Cristina Peri Rossi (Exiled in Spain)............ 62 “Piel adentro” by Griselda López (Panama)..................................... 75 CHAPTER 3: JOCASTA, MOTHER OF OEDIPUS................................... 90 “Yokasta” by Liliana Heker (Argentina) .......................................... 93 “Yocasta” by Alejandra Basualto (Chile)......................................... 104 “Yocasta confiesa” by Ángelina Muñiz-Huberman (Mexico).......... 115 CONCLUSION............................................................................................. 125 APPENDICES .............................................................................................. 128 A: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS....... 128 B: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LUISA VALENZUELA......................... 129 C: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HERMINIA PAZ.................................... 131 D: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CRISTINA PERI ROSSI........................ 132 E: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GRISELDA LÓPEZ ............................... 134 iii F: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LILIANA HEKER .................................. 135 G: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALEJANDRA BASUALTO .................. 136 H: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ÁNGELINA MUÑIZ-HUBERMAN ..... 137 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................... 139 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................ 149 iv ABSTRACT During the last quarter century, the traditional division of works in Spanish into Peninsular versus Latin American has become obsolete. In a global literary market, increasing attention should be paid to themes or tendencies within genres. These short stories - “Omar, amor” by Cristina Fernández Cubas, “Viaje” by Luisa Valenzuela, “Ayer” by Herminia Paz, “Historia de amor” by Cristina Peri Rossi, “Piel adentro” by Griselda López, “Yokasta” by Liliana Heker, “Yocasta” by Alejandra Basualto, and “Yocasta confiesa” by Ángelina Muñiz-Huberman - are published between 1982 and 2000 and address the mother-son relationship in mythical contexts from the unique perspective of the mother, thus reversing the tendency to view them from the perspective of the emerging masculine identities. Drawing on the feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott, this eclectic approach shows the role of the mother as it relates to rearing a son. It recognizes that the female’s development as an individual continues to unfold as she experiences the stages of motherhood which culminate not in the physical separation at birth, but in the emotional separation of the child as he enters adulthood and is reborn as a separate and distinct entity from the mother. Her role as the mirror has ended. The mother desires to maintain her mirror status with her son and struggles with the greatest incest taboo: that between mother and son. If he fails to comply with his innate matricidal drive, described by Kristeva, the dutiful mother kills him so that he may be reborn as an individual. Thus the mother witnesses and even provokes a cycle of birth-death-rebirth in her son. This study explores the mother-son theme as written by both well-known and lesser-known women authors from a variety of countries. In fact, the chapters are organized by mythical theme rather than geographical origins of the authors. Chapter v One is “Kali, the Mother Goddess,” Chapter Two is “Echo, Voice of Narcissus,” and Chapter Three is “Yocasta, Mother of Oedipus.” The chapters expose the previously ignored mother’s perspective of the son’s transition into adulthood. vi INTRODUCTION Nearly one hundred years ago in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf asked why women have not published more. She determined that women, for the most part, were denied an education and lacked private space. She believed that history (reality) was a male domain and fiction (invention) a female domain and challenged women to rewrite history to include women. Furthermore, Woolf asserted that despite England’s patriarchy and the contemporary culture’s perpetuation of myths about women, there was no need to hate or to flatter men. Woolf conceded that one sex was no more to blame than the other for this problem, and her charge was simply for women to recognize their situation and make it better. In fact, her solution to ensure that women occupy a space in literary production was that they have “a room of [their] own” and sufficient money to subsidize their writing. Woolf pointed out that one cannot write well if one has not dined well,1 nor if one has not had an equal education. The veracity of Woolf’s one hundred year-old observations is amazing. Women today, however, are admitted to some of the finest universities around the globe. In the United States, even science and military academies such as Johns Hopkins University and The Citadel admit women to undergraduate studies. This better prepares women to achieve the same level of familiarity with and competency in literature as men. This progress for women in literary production is preceded by a recently uncovered lineage of women writers. Elaine Showalter’s groundbreaking study A Literature of Their Own (1977) established a literary history of women in England that had long been neglected and, 1 Woolf’s assertions predate Abraham Maslow hierarchy of needs which he developed between 1943-1954 and published in 1954 in Motivation and Personality. At that time he recognized five needs. In the second edition (1970) he enumerated seven needs. His basic premise is that each of us is motivated by needs which must be satisfied in order to progress to higher concerns within the hierarchy. 1 worse yet, unacknowledged. Showalter showed that women in England indeed had a “female literary tradition” but that their work lacked serious investigation.2 Hispanic women, however, and their literary tradition are still greatly unexplored. Jean Franco’s Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1988) traces the specific history of Mexican women from the religious narratives of the colonial period to contemporary feminist revisionary views of the family. In her text, she asks whether women are capable of telling their story saying: “The circulation of power is between males, while women are the objects of desire and the guardians of death” (148). Franco attempts to rebut Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge who “argue that the modern culture industry prevents individuals from interpreting the self and the world” and states that “In this chapter I offer a counter example, though an ambiguous one” (184). Thus, the evidence might point to women not being able to create their own realities within literature. Franco has a different interpretation of that “evidence.” Franco shows that even among the few women who have written literature, fewer still have seen publication of their work under their names, and she discusses biographical accounts of the lives of nuns, some published by men of the cloth and some by nuns using pseudonyms. Early on, mystic nuns: “were well aware of the danger of their words, since they constantly deny authorship. It was only by disappearing as authors and becoming mediums for the voice of God (or targets of the devil) that these women were able to speak of their experiences at all” (Franco 15). This is to say that these women recognized their position as outsiders in the written discourse and that they knowingly exposed themselves to grave danger in attempting to belong to the circles of writers. In addition, Franco also notes this marginalized status of females