Artigo Revisado por pares

THE BITCH OF PARADISE: THE REPRE SENTATION OF QUEEN ISABEL IN ABEL POSSE'S LOS PERROS DEL PARA?SO AND THE POLITICS OF GENDER IN HISTORIO GRAPHY METAFICTION

2009; CIESPAL; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

ISSN

2327-4247

Autores

Alejandro Enríquez-Marulanda,

Tópico(s)

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

Resumo

The attitude reflected by David Letterman in the epigraph above succinctly illustrates for U.S. television culture what I will be examining in the context of contemporary Latin American historical fiction. The underlying assumption in the punch line on the popular Top Ten List segment? underlying because the joke is more a misogynist comment about the successful television show Desperate Housewives and less on the long-dead queen of Spain?is that Isabel the Catholic, Columbus's patroness, was a whorish slut. An analysis of a 1983 novel about Columbus, Los perros del para?so, by Argentinean writer and career diplomat Abel Posse, will reveal the same attitude towards Queen Isabel of Castile and expose the underlying assumptions about gender and sexuality upon which the novel's critique of history rests. Scholars have overwhelmingly touted this novel as a progressive text that subverts colonial and imperial discourse. However, by deconstructing the gendered stereotypes and misogynous jokes upon which the narrative transgressions are founded, the politics of historiographie metafiction?however progressive they may be in other aspects?are shown to be compromised. Take, as an initial example, the first physical description of Queen Isabel to appear in the novel: [Isabel, still a child here,] est? vestida con una camisola Cortona que no oculta? horror para damas de compa??a y monjas de servicio?sus calzoncitos apretados con puntillas bordadas por las trinitarias de San Jos? de la Eterna Ansia. Un baby-doll, en realidad su famoso jitoniscos. El pelo recogido en cola de caballo. Pecosa, rubia, provocadora. (14) In this segment, the novel's omniscient narrator uses a contemporary Anglicism (baby doll, in reference to her lingerie) to create a hyper-sexualized, objectified image of the princess who would apparently be as provocative today as she was in the sixteenth century. But whereas this description hints at?if not reveals?Posse's attitude towards the figure of Isabel the Catholic, it does not explain it. For an explanation, one can turn to recent scholarship on the literary representation of Queen Isabel. In her Isabel Rules (2004), a study of the literary fashioning of the Catholic Queen, Barbara Weissberger shows that the perceived anomalous positioning of Isabel (her gender vis-?-vis her profoundly masculinist and patriarchal political program [xiv]) provoked in her male writing subjects an anxious masculinity that they sought to neutralize in two seemingly opposite ways: on

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