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franco 105 Jean Franco Self-Destructing Heroines To describe someone as a "public woman" in Latin America is simply not the same as describing someone as a public man—and therein hangs a tale. The public woman is a prostitute, the public man a prominent citizen. When a woman goes public, she leaves the protected spaces of home and convent and exposes her body on the street or in the promiscuity of the brothel. Blacks, mulattoes. mixtures of all kinds, drunks, somnolent or frightened halfbreeds , skinny Chinese, old men, small groups of young Spaniards and Italians walked through thepatios out ofcuriosity. They walked to and fro passing the open doors of the bedrooms, stopping to look in from time to time. The prostitues, dressed in cotton clothes, were sitting at the back of the rooms on low boxes. Most of them sat with their legs apart, showing their sex, the "fox" which sometimes they had shaved and sometimes they hadn't. (José Maria Arguedas, The Fox Above and the Fox Below) You have only to look at the gridiron plan of a traditional Hispanic town to know how important the distribution of space is and how completely public space—the cafes, the park benches, the civic buildings— are male preserves, places where they make speeches, run businesses and argue about literature. Women's space is far more privatized—the enclosed world of the home or the convent, both of which are turned away from the street to look inwards into a series of patios. Women and men meet in church or at the market but seldom casually. This division of the traditional city into public (male) spaces and private space where women's power derives from motherhood or virginity has deeply affected both political life and the imaginary repertoire on which literature draws. The Latin American novel came into being as a national endeavor programmed by masculine phalansteries and feminine marginality. More than poetry (which allowed for male erotic fantasy and hence "feeling"), the novel is centered on the drama of male enterprise or impotence, the search for male identity that depends on the allergorization of women characters in their virtually invariant positions of mother, prostitute or love object. Even the great historical novels of contemporary Latin America— Tierra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, G?.? War of the End ofthe World by Mario Vargas Llosa, 7"Ae Supreme I by Roa Bastos, 7"Ae Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, novels which are extraordinarily detailed models of societies with their histories, their social classes, their art and literature, their battles and deaths—take as given the contrast between male (activity and enterprise) and female (passivity and reproduction). These novels are such efficient 106 the minnesota review machines that we forget that there isn't an intelligent woman in any of them or that the most common form of male and female intercourse is rape. Obviously these are giant generalizations which do not take into account a certain "feminization of discourse" (notably in the novels of Manuel Puig). But exceptions do not alter the fact that women in reality as well as in literature are overwhelmingly identified with fixed terrorities . In one of his poems, for instance, Vallejo turns his mother's body into a building which is both house and temple. Father and son pass Between the colonnade of your bones that cannot be brought down even with lamentations and into whose side not even Destiny can place a single finger.1 In this poem, reproduction is valued; the mother takes the place of Christ who is invulnerable to the gesture of doubting Thomas. Yet her body does not speak. It is a mute vessel whose role is to offer the transient male his only security in life. The mother does not say. She is a place, a house and a temple. The mother's body offers a return to childhood before the entry into the symbolic order of language. Women are prior to language and therefore to literary creation. To sanctify motherhood, even ironically, as Vallejo does, only reinforces the taboo on creation, a creation that seems to involved risk, mobility and the male's alienation...

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