Torture and Truth in Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella

La muerte y la doncella (1990) represents a watershed moment in Ariel Dorfman’s literary career for a number of reasons. It is his most internationally successful work, it is his first work after the end of Pinochet’s official rule, and it is his first published play. It is also an example of the way that his post-exile writing bridges the local and the global. Ambiguous, provocative, and driven by questions that have no easy answers, the play lends itself to numerous avenues of inquiry that relate to the social role of truth commissions, to the representation of a nation in crisis, to storytelling and human rights, and to themes of betrayal, trust, deceit, and redemption. This essay begins by situating the end of Dorfman’s exile within the larger critical context of the 1990s when three, often overlapping, social and critical shifts about globalization, about trauma, truth, and social justice, and about art and representation dominated intellectual debates. After tracing this panorama and Dorfman’s response to it, I then analyze how La muerte y la doncella addresses the problems of memory, history, justice, and trauma and thereby reflects a series of critical concerns that came to the fore in the 1990s.