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‘Dios anda en los pucheros’: Feminist Openings in Some Late Stories by Rosario Castellanos

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

10.1080/1475382952000372097

1469-3550

Evelyn Fishburn,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract ‘Dios anda en los pucheros’. Rosario Castellanos quoting Sta Teresa de Jesus.‘ For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man’(Corinthians, 11:7–8). ‘La femme, ce n'est jamais ça’ (Kristeva). ‘Dios anda en los pucheros’. Rosario Castellanos quoting Sta Teresa de Jesus.‘ For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man’(Corinthians, 11:7–8). ‘La femme, ce n'est jamais ça’ (Kristeva). BSS Subject Index: CASTELLANOS, ROSARIO (1925–1974)WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — LATIN AMERICA Notes 1. Rosario Castellanos, ‘Lección de cocina’, in Album de familia (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1971), 20. (Succeeding references appear parenthetically in the text; all emphases are added unless specified). This is an allusion to St Teresa's saying ‘Entended, que si es en la cocina, entre los pucheros anda el Señor’, generally considered the hallmark of her particular approach to religion. See Ángel Valbuena Prat, Historia de la literatura española, (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1963), I, 662. Castellanos' concern with feminism is briefly discussed in Naomi Lindstrom, ‘Rosario Castellanos: Pioneer of Feminist Criticism’, Homenaje a Rosario Castellanos, ed. Maureen Ahern and Mary Seale Vásquez, (Valencia: Albatross, 1980), 65–73, at p. 70. 2. For a discussion of race, class and gender relation in Castellanos' writings, with special attention to Oficio de tinieblas, see Jean Franco, Plotting Women (London: Verso, 1988), 138–46, 220, which contains a useful annotated bibliography of works dealing with Castellanos' feminism. See, too, Paul J. Smith, Representing the Other (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1992), 128–60. 3. The clearest and most concise introduction to Lacan's Symbolic Order is in Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), 99–101. For a fuller discussion, see Anika Lemaire, Jaques Lacan, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 4. A different reading of this metaphor was discussed by Stephen M. Hart, ‘Versions of the Political Unconscious: From Valenzuela to Castellanos’, paper delivered at a conference of ‘The Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland’, University of St. Andrews, March 1989. Hart draws attention to the roasting metaphor, but his optimistic conclusions are at variance with my own interpretation. For Hart, ‘It is through the instrument of her oppression—here the metaphor of the meat reasserts its centrality—that the female consciousness has become cognizant of its chains and finally broken free’ (p. 28 of his unpublished paper). 5. E. Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana Modern Masters, 1970), 34. 6. ‘La petite mort’ refers to the split second loss of consciousness during an orgasm; the term dates from the fifteenth century, when its meaning was frisson nerveux'. 7. Other examples of an insisting use of yo occur throughout the story, and particularly on p. 10. 8. Hart, op. cit. Hart has partly modified this reading in White Ink: Essays on Twentieth Century Fiction in Spain and Latin America (London/Madrid: Tamesis Books, 1993), 46–47. 9. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974). 10. For a discussion of phallogocentrism, see Jonathon Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 165–67. 11. Sandra M. Guilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1979). That ‘lápida’ and ‘lápiz’ share the same Latin root (lapis') further emphasizes this point. 12. Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Settlement’, from Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 176–77. 13. Irigaray, op. cit. 14. This association is made in ‘Lección de cocina’, 11. 15. This problem introduces the discussion in Judith Butler's highly stimulating essay ‘Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse’, in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 324–25, at. p. 325. 16. From ‘La femme, ce n'est jamais ça’ (‘Woman can never be defined’), an interview on ‘psychoanalysis and politics’ in Tel Quel, Autumn 1974, 19–24. 17. Chloe Furnival, ‘Confronting Myths of Oppression: The Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos’, Knives and Angels, ed. S. Bassnett-McGuire, (London: Zed, 1990), 52–73, at p. 62. The use of the word ‘masochistically’ implies perverted pleasure, but such a reading is not argued by Furnival and would fail to take account of the deflationary intent of the passage as a whole. 18. Butler, op. cit., 325. 19. See H. Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out; Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in The Newly Born Woman, ed. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1986), 63. 20. See Martha Paley Francescato, ‘Transgresión y apertura en los cuentos de Rosario Castellanos’, Homenaje, 115–20, and Alfonso González, ‘La soledad y los patrones del dominio en la cuentística de Rosario Castellanos’, Homenaje, 107–13, at pp. 102–03. 21. The story also demythologizes motherhood, a subject still awaiting serious study since present criticism relies largely upon biographical evidence. See Perla Shwartz, Rosario Castellanos, mujer que supo latín (Mexico: Katun, 1984) and Estela Franco, Rosario Castellanos: semblanzas psicoanalíticas (Mexico: Plaza y Janés, 1984). 22. Note the use of ‘la’ as a sign of naturalization of ‘la casa chica’.