Family Affairs: Incest in Jorge Isaacs's María

Since its publication in 1867, María has enjoyed near-constant popularity throughout Latin America; indeed, it has never been out of print. Donald McGrady claims that "María [is] the widest-read novel in Hispanic America," having appeared in close to 140 editions in its first hundred years (139). Its popularity has been accompanied by critical attention focusing on topics ranging from the narrative structure, the character of María, and the role of Romanticism to patriarchy and nationalism in the novel's social structure. Of these, several critics have commented on the triangle formed by the narrator, Efraín, his father, and María herself. Yet one aspect of the novel has not been addressed in detail. That is the relationship between María and the father, a relationship that may provoke deeply disturbing implications for the careful reader. In this essay I will argue that a father-daughter relationship with incestuous overtones, whether realized or potential, results in the failure of María and Efraín's possible relationship and in the eventual destruction of the family unit. In this reading, it is the father's incestuous approaches toward María, not, as some critics have argued, María's love for Efraín, that cause her hysterical illness and eventually kill her.

Conditions are ripe in the household for the development of an incestuous relationship between the father and María. Although María is not the father's biological daughter, she does fulfill the role of a daughter within the household; while María is Efraín's second cousin by blood, she has been raised since the age of three as his sister and as the daughter of Efraín's mother and father. As Efraín comments, "Pocos eran entonces los que conociendo nuestra familia, pudiesen sospechar que María no era hija de mis padres" (13). Not only does María occupy the position of a daughter, but she does so in an exceptionally conventional—even overly so—patriarchal family. The women who might have protected her are absent, either literally or figuratively. Her biological mother, of course, is dead, and her adoptive mother accedes to her husband's wishes in almost all regards, either unable or unwilling to challenge him openly. When the adoptive mother does go against the father's desires, she does so secretly. Tellingly, when she conspires with her son, Efraín, against her husband, Efraín's father, it is to thwart the father's plans to prevent Efraín from declaring his love to María and from eventually marrying her, which would result in removing María from the father's possessive reach, as we shall see.

Efraín's father exerts a degree of control over his family unusual even by nineteenth-century standards. As many critics have commented, María depicts a rigidly patriarchal family structure. The father dominates the family and exercises a remarkable control over his wife and children; his decisions are unquestioned, even when they cause Efraín and María great unhappiness. Both Efraín and María are unfailingly obedient. At the same time, the father is a respected member of the community, commanding the respect and loyalty of his tenants and of the other landowners in the valley.

The father's dominance has repercussions not just for the personal relationships in the family, but for the family's economic circumstances as well. As Sylvia Molloy avers, underlying the novel's seemingly innocent plot of love lost is the story of a patriarchal control whose ultimate result is the loss not just of love but of paradise, the family home. Molloy notes, "Se observa en la conducta paterna presente . . . la intolerancia absoluta de la pérdida, la necesidad de controlarlo todo. Una férrea economía paterna—autoritaria, despótica—rige los destinos familiares y más precisamente el destino del hijo" (48). Similarly, Rodolfo Borello sees the father as the embodied representative of social control: "El padre no es solamente la autoridad; encarna, además, los intereses de la familia, la voluntad...