The Shattered Mirror: Representations of Women in Mexican Literature, and: The Other Mirror: Women's Narrative in Mexico, 1980-1995

Rosario Castellanos’ frequently-cited comments from Mujer que sabe latín that Latin American women look for their own images in literature as they would in a mirror and find only false images engenders the titles of two new works on the representations of women in Mexican literature and women writers in Mexico. Valdés and Ibsen share the desire to explore the changes in the literary representation of women in Mexico and to celebrate the growth of feminist writing in Mexico.

Presented as “a hermeneutic study of the literary representations of female identity in Mexico” (xi), The Shattered Mirror examines how women are represented in texts by a variety of Mexican (and, in one case, Mexican-American) authors. Aspiring to develop “a feminist critical approach that is a problem-oriented examination of literary texts as an expression of ideological considerations of women” (1), María Elena de Valdés mixes analysis of the literary texts with critiques of the Mexican social system. Her introduction proposes ten basic principles of social feminist criticism—points concerning the political nature of language, the distinctions between oral and written narrativity, the ways in which narrativity works to shape our temporal experience, the implicit sexism in the literary canon, and the differences between the social and gender paradigms in Mexico and in first world cultures. Valdés argues that the most pervasive pornography in Mexico is the pornography of power, one which offers “the submissive abused Mexican woman as an apt representation of the Mexican people” (8). Including a brief but interesting discussion of the female reading public in Mexico and the journalism directed to different segments of that population, Valdés asserts that it is through the newspaper press that the battle for a new Mexican woman is being fought.

Believing that feminist criticism should not address female-authored works exclusively, Valdés dedicates chapters to the works of Juan Rulfo, looking at Susana San Juan as a subject and object of desire in Pedro Páramo, and Carlos Fuentes, arguing—in my opinion, unconvincingly—that “Mother’s Day” and The Old Gringo are feminist works. With her chapter on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Octavio Paz, Valdés wants to introduce Sor Juana’s works to a wider audience and to explore Paz’s role in the historical revision of her work and her person.

The rest of The Shattered Mirror focuses on twentieth-century women writers, Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Josefina Hernández, María Luisa Puga, Elena Poniatowska, Cristina Pacheco, and Laura Esquivel. Valdés also includes a chapter on Sandra Cisneros, purportedly because Cisneros “represents marginalization in a way that no one writing in Spanish in Mexico today could” (23), but the chapter unfortunately makes no attempt to tie Cisneros’ work in with the Mexican authors previously discussed. Indeed, the origin of this book as a number of individual articles is still apparent. In the end, perhaps the best summary and analysis of what Valdés is doing in her book is one she provides herself at the end of Chapter Seven, when she states: “In my social literary criticism, I want above all to engage the reader in a discussion about what has happened to me in reading. I want to talk about the experience because ‘talking’ about it completes it for me” (160).

The Other Mirror, a collection of essays by different scholars, focuses more tightly on Mexican women’s narrative from 1980–1995. Kristine Ibsen’s introduction ably summarizes and ties together the thirteen articles, some on the same authors Valdés discusses. Ibsen sets her collection in the midst of the critical controversy created by the unprecedented commercial success of recent novels like Como agua para chocolate and Arráncame la...