terms to right the misappropriation of the reading woman as immoral, while reversing the negative charge on the accusation of superficiality:
When the Latin American woman takes a piece of literature between her hands she does it with the same gesture and the same intention with which she picks up a mirror: to contemplate her image. First the face appears…. Then the body…. The body is dressed in silk and velvet that are ornamented with precious metals and jewels, which changes her appearance like a snake changes its skin to express…What?
Latin American women novelists seem to have discovered long before Robbe-Grillet and the theoreticians of the nouveau roman that the universe is surface. And if it is surface, let us polish it so that it does not present any roughnesses to the touch, no shock to the gaze. So that it shines, so that it sparkles, in order to make us forget that desire, that need, that mania, of looking for what is beyond, on the other side of the veil, behind the curtain.
Let us remain, therefore, with what has been given us: not the develop-633- ment of an intimate structure but the unenveloping of a series of transformations.
Castellanos here confronts directly the rhetorical tradition that defines good prose as clear, straightforward, masculine, and bad taste in prose as a fondness for the excessively ornamented, and therefore effeminate. In her challenge to this ingrained metaphor Castellanos intuits the startling possibilities of a feminine aesthetics as a radically different model for feminist politics. She rejects the meek, tidy housewife and evokes instead the unmistakable image of the bored upperclass woman, filing her nails (sharpening her claws?), slipping, menacingly, out of her Eve-snake skin, creating herself affirmatively in the appropriation of the polished, superficial, adjectival existence allotted her, making the fiction yet more impenetrably fictive until it glows as the revolutionary recognition of an amoral forgotten truth. The mirror is her talisman, a weapon for dispelling, as it creates, illusion: aesthetics and politics brought home, as it were, from their travels, made homey, personal, private, quotidian.
In Castellanos's metaphorical history of language as an instrument for domination, she writes, 'La propiedad quizá se entendió, en un principio como corrección lingüística…. Hablar era una ocasión para exhibir los tesoros de los que se era propietario…. Pero se hablaba ¿a quién? ¿O con quién?' [Propriety/property was perhaps understood, in the beginning, as a linguistic correction…. To speak was an occasion to exhibit the treasures of which one was proprietor…. But to whom did one speak? Or with whom?]. To speak is to create a surface of propriety, of proprietary relationships that can be exploited in various directions. The works of these Latin American women novelists cited by Castellanos do not provide a model either to imitate or to appropriate nor do they provide a mimetic reflection to contemplate, but rather a polished surface to triangulate desire in which the apices of the triangle are (1) the adorned body of the text, (2) the implicitly male motivator and first recipient of this textual adornment, and (3) the female reader, a free space for self-invention. The cultivation of a polished superficiality suggests a willed, willful transvaluation of values that surpasses mere reversal. While leaving the surface of complacency available for the desiring eyes of those -634- whom Alicia Partnoy, based on her bitter experience as a disappeared poet in the 'little houses' of Argentina's prisons, calls 'el lector enemigo,' the woman writer produces a layered look for the discriminating eye of her 'lectora hembra' for whom the constructs of life as a staged aesthetic performance are not unfamiliar.
All of Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré's writings work explicitly with this conflict described by Castellanos, from her early stories and poems in Papeles de Pandora (1976; Pandora's Papers) to her more recent novella Maldito amor (1986; Sweet Diamond Dust, 1988). In the case of Rosario Ferré's short stories 'Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres' ('When Women Love Men') and 'I solda en el espejo' ('Isolda's Mirror'), the play of unreadability is posed in the text as a problem and as part of the project of the work, in which the issue of making- up for a particular audience becomes part of the message of the text. 'When Women Love Men' ostensibly addresses itself to an absent seducer — 'you, Ambrosio' — the man who oppresses the two women in his life, his wife and his mistress, in the most traditional and intimate ways. Now dead, Ambrosio in his will leaves his house to both women jointly, perhaps in revenge for unstated discomforts they have caused him, perhaps as a joke. Ultimately, elaborately, Isabel the wife and Isabel the mistress find their liberation from his presence and from his instructions in following his will (both senses) exactly, and thus subverting Ambrosio's intent. Rather than declaring war, the two women coalesce like two surfaces gliding over each other. The objective correlative for this process is, for each of them, a particular shade of violently red nail polish they both prefer, and this unexpected merging 'was our most sublime act of love.'
These women do resist, and they resist precisely at the textual level. By fixing the reading on the Cherries Jubilee nail polish (in 'When Women Love Men') or the 'Coty facial powder in the 'Alabaster' shade' (in 'Isolda'), Ferré unbalances conventional expectations: the tension is not buried deep within the women but displayed prominently and unexpectedly on the surface. Nail polish and facial powder are not even symbols to be decoded; because their function is decisively literal they are all the more potent. Cosmetics, then, along with race, serve as the fundamental visual clues of social class. It is with cosmetics and — as Castellanos intuited — with lan-635- guage that the process of emancipation must begin, and if the stories represent Ferré's verbal praxis, it is through a revolutionary use of make-up that her characters in 'When Women Love Men' and 'Isolda' stage their rebellion. Instead of making themselves up for a man, they are making themselves up as a form of emancipation that, along the way, serves as a potent demystification of the myth of everlasting love in its conventional forms. Ostensibly, all the women in Ferré's stories are making themselves up 'for' men. Ostensibly, the denunciation would be of a male power base that turns women into dolls and sensual playthings and mute works of art. That is part of it, of course. But the men in Ferré's stories are too defeated, too unmanned by other circumstances to bear the weight of a nuanced cultural critique. Her male characters, while seemingly prepotent, are curiously caricaturesque or easily discounted as forces of civic and political authority. The rum barons are drunken has-beens, Ambrosio is dead, Don Augusto is old and bankrupt. Likewise, while the Yankees loom on the horizon as the new masters of economic power, their power is still only distantly felt, and their impact on social interactions is minimal. We could even say that if the women are surfacing in these stories, the men are drowning. Evidently, too, Ferré's concern is as much with empowerment (of men as well as women) as with denunciation. It is in this respect that the author of these stories asks women to look at themselves, to see themselves making themselves up in the mirror of her text, to see their own complicity in and responsibility for their subjugation. It is here that the slipwise mediation of the male gaze (to use Jacques Lacan's term) allows the female reader to reflect upon the shifting dynamics of male-female relationships; it is in the mediation of the textualized male gaze that she is protected from a self-critique too devastating to be helpful. Rosario Castellanos suggests polishing the surface, making it shine, slipping in a space for an evolving, transformative self; Rosario Ferré offers a buffered (male-coded) space for mediation between the transformative surfaces of the female narrative and the constantly self-displacing, transforming surfaces of the female reader.
The particular form of this appropriative gesture has already been named, in the felicitous coinage of Clarice Lispector, a 'fac-simile.' 'I write you,' says the unnamed female artist of Agua viva to her lover, her interlocutor, her (male) literary audience, and implicitly the -636- gesture of homage is also a weapon of appropriation: I write (of myself) to you, and that which I write is constitutive of you. In writing — by definition 'like a man' — she creates a likeness of the man and a self-likeness, consciously manipulating a style sanctioned by tradition and undermining its pathological assumptions (when I say this I have in mind Eve Sedgwick's definition of one of the functions of tradition as 'to create a path-of-least-resistance (or at the last resort, a pathology-of-least- resistance).' Tradition can be most effectively subverted just along such welt-worn pathways. At first glance Lispector's narrator hints at an incomplete or distorted autobiographical account; at second, a kind of inept role- reversal Pygmalion to her sculpted lover: 'I write you this fac-simile of a book, the book of one who does not know how to write.' In fact, she is neither incomplete, distorted, nor inept. The appropriative gesture turns the knowledge of the other against the lover; she constitutes him as she deceptively inscribes a so-called constitution of the self. She appropriates, but with an injection of estrogen escapes the confinements of the model in her reconstituting of herself as a false copy, a simulacrum, the split simile, like and not like, that which affirms and negates the model in the same word. In so doing, Lispector — herself the author of a story with the resonant title of 'The
