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Gender and Class Relations in De noche vienes by Elena Poniatowska

1995; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382952000372111

1469-3550

Deborah Shaw,

Latin American Literature Studies

Abstract Elena Poniatowska is best known for her novel, Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969), which provides a semi-fictional biography of a poor woman, struggling to survive in twentieth-century Mexico.Footnote1 She is less known for her more obviously fictional work, and De noche vienes in particular has received scant critical attention, despite its literary quality and its concern with what in feminist terms are highly political themes.Footnote2 In all her work she deconstructs the public/private dichotomy by examining the effects of power structures on people's everyday lives, and this is particularly the case in De noche vienes. In this collection of short stories she does precisely what she has praised in the work of Rosario Castellanos and transforms ‘las banalidades de la vida en materia memorable’.Footnote3 BSS Subject Index: PONIATOWSKA, ELENA (b. 1933)SOCIETY/SOCIAL CONDITIONS/SOCIAL HISTORY [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — LATIN AMERICA Notes 1. Her best known chronicles are La noche de Tlatelolco (1970) which chronicles the massacre of student protestors by government forces in 1968, and Fuerte es el silencio (Mexico City: Era, 1980) which examines the political repression in Mexico after the 1968 massacre and focuses on the dispossessed of Mexico City. 2. Elena Poniatowska, De noche vienes (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, 1985). All subsequent references will be to this edition. Other critical works which analyse some of the short stories in De noche vienes are: Katherine C. Richards, ‘A Note on Contrasts in Elena Poniatowska's De noche vienes' (Letras Femeninas, XVII [1991], Nos. 1-2, 107–11); Monica Flori, ‘Visions of Women: Symbolic Physical Portrayal as Social Commentary in the Short Fiction of Elena Poniatowska’ (Third Woman, II [1984], No. 2, 77–83); and Cynthia Steele, ‘The Other Within: Class and Ethnicity in Mexican Women's Literature’, in Cultural and Historical Grounding For Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Criticism, ed. Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: The Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1989), 297–327. 3. Elena Poniatowska, ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1990), 76. 4. Only ‘Castillo en Francia’ is not set in Mexico, although it too, with its analysis of the decay of the aristocracy, has class concerns at its centre. 5. For an analysis of the weaknesses of 1970s feminism and the potential of a later feminism influenced by postmodernism see: Destabilizing Theory Contemporary Feminist Debate, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) and Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990). 6. Bell Hooks, ‘A Conversation about Race and Class’, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. M. Hirsch and E. Fox Keller (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), 62. 7. Barrett and Phillips, Destabilizing Theory, 4. 8. See Magdalena García Pinto, ‘Entrevista con Elena Poniatowska’, in Historias íntimas. Conversaciones con diez escritoras latinoamericanas (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1988), 175–80. 9. Margarita García Flores, ‘-Entrevista a Elena Poniatowska’, Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, XXX (March 1976), 25. 10. Of this phenomenon Cynthia Steele has written: ‘both in fiction and history, female solidarity across lines of class and ethnicity at times has grown out of a common experience—from opposite ends of the power dialectic—of female exploitation’ (‘The Other Within’, 298). Poniatowska has shown her political commitment to domestic servants in a one hundred and sixty-page prologue to Ana Gutiérrez's book Se necesita muchacha (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económico, 1985). 11. Cited in Julia A. Kushigan, ‘Transgresión de la autobiografía y el Bildungsroman en Hasta no verte Jesús mío’, Revista Iberoamericana, CXL (1987), 677. 12. It is interesting to note that pistola is a synonym for penis in Spanish slang; see Cristina Peri Rosi, Fantasías eróticas (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1991), 46, for other words used for male and female sex organs. 13. There are clearly autobigraphical elements in this story; Poniatowska was a pupil at a convent school and of this experience she writes: ‘Los primeros meses [fui] un poco reticente pero luego me gustó, porque me gustaba hacer sacrificio. Toda esa cosa un poco masoquista que te hacen hacer’ in M. García Pinto, Historias íntimas, 184. 14. Luce Irigaray has explained women's collusion in ‘the enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies’ thus: ‘that she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. Not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will “take” her as his “object” when he seeks his own pleasure’ (extract from This Sex Which Is Not One in Feminisms, an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl [New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers U. P., 1991], 351). 15. There are clear echoes here of Don Juan and vampire myths born of the same repressive Christian sexual morality. 16. The reference to Eva suggests that all women are variations of the same and as such share the same desires. 17. Cynthia Steele has written of the historical context behind the large numbers of women in domestic service: ‘during the past three decades, massive, predominantly female, immigration from the countryside to Mexico City, along with the incorporation of middle-class women into the work force, has ensured the survival of this seemingly anachronistic institution, which is characterized by the exploitation of the peasantry by the urban upper and middle classes, of Indians by mestizos and whites, and of women by other women’ (The Other Within', 297). 18. Poniatowska has drawn attention to the autobiographical elements of the stories in an interview; she writes ‘yo siempre he hecho libros, salvo De noche vienes, que no tienen nada que ver conmigo’ (M. García Pinto, Historias íntimas, 183–84). 19. Guadalupe Loaeza has published her excellent satirical observations on the condition of the ‘niña bien’ in Mexico in two books: Las niñas bien (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1992) and Los reinas de Polanco (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1992). 20. The relationship of these two women at opposite ends of the social hierarchy corresponds to Luce Irigaray's analysis of women as men's mirrors; men, Irigaray argues, are only able to believe in their power, and in a unified self if their subordinate's reflection of them correponds to their idealized self-perception: Woman will be the foundation for this specular duplication, giving man back “his” image and repeating it as the “same”. If an other image, an other mirror were to intervene, this inevitably would entail the risk of mortal crisis' (extract from Speculum of the Other Woman [1974] in Feminisms, ed. R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl, 404).