-
A Literary Prelude
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A Literary Prelude / 3 A Literary Prelude Music is a Woman. —Richard Wagner The logic of binary oppositions appears to have become an obsessive fatal attraction. —Henry Giroux, Border Crossings Whether or not we can in fact escape from the structuring imposed by language is one of the major questions facing feminist and non-feminist thinkers today. —Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms In 1975, when Rosario Ferré first published “When Women Love Men” in the journal Zona de carga y descarga, the story “caused a terrible scandal” because it honored the memory of Isabel “La Negra” Luberza, a famous or infamous black prostitute from Ponce, also Ferré’s hometown, who had been shot to death in a drug-related homicide. The black-and-white format of the journal highlighted the racial binary examined in the story as well as mourning for this controversial Afro–Puerto Rican woman. Because Ferré’s story contained “every obscene word in existence,” the Ramayo brothers, who had been partially financing the publication of Zona, decided to withdraw their support, a decision that ultimately led to the demise of this radical and historically significant journal.1 Prophetically, this scandal prefigured the continuing and profound impact that this short story has had on Puerto Rican letters and on Latin American feminism. Like “The Youngest Doll” and “Sleeping Beauty,” “When Women Love Men” has been one of Rosario Ferré’s most widely read and analyzed short stories.2 The author’s personal and revealing essays examining the genesis of this story—in Spanish titled “¿Por qué quiere Isabel a los hombres?” and in English, “Why I Wrote ‘When Women Love Men’”—evince its canonized status as one of the most representative texts of Puerto Rican feminist writing.3 “When Women Love Men” portrays the contradictions and desires of two socially opposed female characters: Isabel Luberza, a white aristocratic lady and wife to Ambrosio, and Isabel La Negra, a black prostitute. Both love Ambrosio, and after his death they have an encounter that is simultaneously competitive and mutually desirous . The ending, which has led critics to categorize the story as “fantastic ,” suggests a fusion of both women into one indivisible entity. In this light, most critics have read the story as an articulation of the common oppression of all women, regardless of their race or class status.4 This particular reading, informed by Elaine Showalter’s concept of a “woman’s culture,” erases the power differentials among women in diverse race and class locations and fails to show these gender(ed) identities as problematic constructs in Puerto Rican patriarchal discourse. It is now compelling to situate this story, as well as two other less-read stories from Papeles de Pandora (The youngest doll), within a tradition—and against the grain—of a white, Eurocentric patriarchal discourse in Puerto Rico that has historically constructed women within a racial binary: white ladies, black prostitutes. In this first part of this book I analyze how these sexual and racial iconographies have been imposed on the discourse of musicology and, more generally, on discussions of national and cultural identity within the Puerto Rican essay tradition. In her article “Papeles de Pandora: Devastación y ruptura,” Ivette López Jiménez alludes to the “paradigmatic” level of Rosario Ferré’s stories . This term, coined by Juri Lotman, refers to the presence of allusions, references, and borrowed discourse (intertexts) from cultural areas outside literature per se. Thus, the meaning of the text is structured around other systems of signs or cultural expressions, such as music, art, journalism , and the like.5 Like other stories in The Youngest Doll, “When Women Love Men” is indeed constituted by musical intertexts and subtexts (source texts) that refer the reader to the terrain of Puerto Rican popular culture, particularly to the Afro–Puerto Rican musical forms of plenas and bombas and to the European-derived danza. The integration of popular codes within the literary text, evidence of a postmodern poetics , possesses significant political, cultural, and literary repercussions. As Juan G. Gelpí and other critics have observed, the use of extraliterary references and allusions, particularly those regarding popular music and mass culture, has become since the early 1970s a countercanonical strategy that democratizes literature and destabilizes the patriarchal and elite ideologies that had characterized Puerto Rican literature since the end of the nineteenth century. This earlier patriarchal literary discourse is clearly represented in the writings of Salvador Brau, for example, and reaches its apex with the...