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96Rocky Mountain Review of humanity, but, through the exercise of compassion, there is dignity and a kind of redemption. KRISTINA PASSMANN University of Maine at Orono EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN. The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. With his customary analytical depth and masterful pithiness, Edward Friedman explores the evolution of a female voice through narratives encoded in the cultural values of Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Friedman focuses on the female protagonist/narrator's emergence from the Spanish sixteenth- and seventeenth-century picaresque and her transformation through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in Defoe's Moll Flanders, Galdós' Tristana, Poniatowska's Hasta no verte Jesús mío, Amado's Tereza Batista, and Jong's Fanny. Approaching texts as "social analogues" (xiii), Friedman highlights the ironic interplay between story and discourse, narrator and implied author. A brief initial chapter on Juan Ruiz' Libro de buen amor notes its sharp contrast with another fourteenth-century narrative, Libro del conde Lucanor, where faith in the preconceived meaning ofwords generates compliance with narrative premise, much like Augustine's Confessions—the paradigm for the autobiographical mode. No longer subordinate to a specific message, Ruiz' text illustrates a growing conflict between philosophical and rhetorical ideals, "a wor(l)d in crisis" (chapter 1), which also informs the canonized Spanish picaresque. Its "variations" likewise have a precedent in Ruiz' narrative censorship ofthe female voice. The noble nun the archpriest courts is not free to say what she feels. Her rhetoric contradicts her feelings only to insinuate them through morally acceptable commonplaces. When she succumbs to passion, the narrative silences her for transgressing the social code. Like her picaresque successors in Spain's Golden Age, she exhibits authorial censorship in keeping with readers' mores. Before concentrating on these female rogues, Friedman attempts to trace "a model ofpicaresque discourse" with a close analysis ofthe narrative process in Lazarillo (1554), Guzman (1599, 1604), and Buscón (1626). This second and longest ofnine chapters closes with Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942). Though wisely avoiding constrictive definitions, Friedman does assert with aplomb: "This is the paradox and paradigm of the picaresque" (66): a confessional form whose male narrator/protagonist subverts a penitential premise. "Variations" from this model make up Friedman's central section on Spanish sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narratives with female protagonist/ narrators: La lozana andaluza (1528), La picara Justina (1605), La hija de Celestina (1612), Teresa de Manzanares (1632), and La garduña de Sevilla (1642). Book Reviews97 My only—yet quite fundamental—contention with Friedman centers on this construct of a male model and female variations which does not revise the sexist canon, as his introduction suggests. Feminist criticism does more than acknowledge the myth ofmale superiority. It aims to free us from its limitations precisely by rewording deceptive categories. Why are the faked female voices in Lozana, which predates Lazarillo, and in other texts produced around the same time as Guzman and Buscón considered "variations"? The fact that their number exceeds the triumvirate-archetype indicates that a mobile, though censored, female protagonist indeed is part and parcel of the carnivalesque vision of the picaresque. And why, despite Friedman's excellent diegesis of contemporary female voices in Mexican, Brazilian, and U. S. fiction, does Cela's European, male-centered narrative complete the "model"? Friedman is to be commended for his superb elucidation of the duplicity of discourse, however, in Renaissance and Baroque narratives authored by males who fail to substantiate the woman narrator's voice with a corresponding consciousness. This absence ofthe female behind the voice devised by her male author culminates in Castillo Solorzano's last narrative, whose shift to third person verifies the farce generating previous picaras. Such outright suppression ofthe female voice signifies not only her social subjugation but also a conscious subordination of discourse to story. Friedman's intertextual analysis foregrounds a change of direction in Moll Flanders where discourse supersedes story as the "reformed" narrator/protagonist revels in unconventional conduct, contradicting the narrative's purpose. Though Galdós' Tristana may be difficult to accept as a "transformation" of the picaresque, Friedman convincingly analyzes it as...

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