"Books and Bad Company": Reading the Female Plot in Teresa de la Parra's Ifigenia

La pretendida autora de esa nueva Ifigenia . . . [c]ometió es cierto, la horrible indiscreción de hacer editar en París bajo su nombre, ese diario íntimo que yo había destinado a los ojos de las polillas y a las manos amarillentas del tiempo que se sienta a leer en el fondo de las viejas gavetas. . . . Indiscreta y piadosa, antes de lanzar mi diario a todos los juicios lo retocó con esmero.

[The supposed author of that new Iphigenia . . . committed, it is true, the horrible indiscretion of editing in Paris, under her name, that intimate diary that I had destined for the eyes of moths and for the yellow hands of time to sit down and read in the bottoms of old drawers. . . . Indiscreet and merciful, before casting my diary out for everyone to judge she touched it up with care.]

—María Eugenia Alonso

This epigraph, taken from a letter written in the voice of Teresa de la Parra's fictional heroine, reveals the extent of her play with the idea of literariness. In the tradition of Cervantes, Swift, and Austen, Parra calls attention to the boundaries between truth and fiction, sometimes transgressing them, at other times redefining them. Parra (1889-1936) published Diario de una señorita que se fastidia (part of Ifigenia) in serial form in the Caracas magazine La lectura semanalin 1922. The following year she moved to Paris, where she published Ifigenia in book form in 1924. The critical reaction varied, but in general the novel was vehemently attacked for its negative portrayal of Venezuelan society and, more important, for the Voltairian influence many feared it would have on young ladies. In response, Parra argued that the book was not revolutionary propaganda but "la exposición de un caso típico de nuestra enfermedad contemporánea, la del bovarismo hispanoamericano" [the exposition of a typical case of our contemporary disease, that of Spanish American bovarism]. ¹ Parra's allusion to Flaubert's Emma Bovary is interesting not solely for its invitation to examine María Eugenia alongside her nineteenth-century predecessor but also for what it tells us about reading the "female plot" in Parra's novel. ²

Born in Paris, Parra moved at the age of three to Venezuela, where her family were members of the landed gentry. Educated in Spain and France, she spent much of her adult life writing, lecturing, and traveling in Spanish America and Europe until her death from tuberculosis at forty-seven. Parra's work, and Ifigenia in particular, has helped shape a female Spanish American literary tradition conscious of the subversiveness of writing itself. Sonia Mattalía calls attention to Parra's denunciation of "the myopia of her critics who confused reality with fiction." ³ Indeed, the issue of reading the boundaries between fiction and reality, or "literature" and "real life," is at the core of Parra's novel. I argue that Ifigenia represents Parra's endeavor to "write beyond the ending," or what Rachel Blau DuPlessis defines as the "attempt by women writers to call narrative forms into question . . . to scrutinize the ideological character of the romance plot (and related conventions in narrative), and to change fiction so that it makes alternative statements about gender and its institutions" (x). ⁴ Parra does this through pastiche and parody of literary conventions, subversive rhetorical strategies adopted by her protagonist, and emphasis on the significance of reading and the female reader.

In Subject to Change Nancy K. Miller describes some of the problems that women's writing has faced:

The attack on female plots and plausibilities assumes that women writers cannot or will not obey the rules of fiction. It also assumes that the truth devolving from veri similitude is male. For sensibility, sensitivity, "extravagance"—so many code words for feminine in our culture that the attack is in...