{"id":129374,"date":"2018-09-17T12:34:47","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T16:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129374"},"modified":"2018-09-19T15:27:49","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T19:27:49","slug":"feminize-your-canon-rosario-castellanos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/17\/feminize-your-canon-rosario-castellanos\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Rosario Castellanos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.
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Solitude seeks fulfillment in my tears<\/em>
\nand awaits me in the depths of every mirror<\/em>
\nand closes the windows carefully<\/em>
\nso the sky will not come in.
\n<\/em>\u2014Rosario Castellanos, excerpt from an early untitled poem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Images of literal and emotional solitude haunt the work of Rosario Castellanos, the visionary Mexican feminist, poet, novelist, and essayist. It\u2019s a state she both cherished and mourned. From a young age, the act of writing was her bulwark against the pain of loneliness. \u201cIn order to feel \u2018accompanied,\u2019\u2009\u201d she says in a newspaper column toward the end of her too-short life, \u201cI almost never felt the need of the physical presence of another.\u201d She adds, however, that \u201cthere comes a time when I have to admit that I am a totally helpless creature, and my eyes fill with tears thinking about the fact that I am orphaned and divorced.\u201d<\/p>\n

These words epitomize the prose style\u2014vulnerable, revealing, self-searching\u2014that for Castellanos was a conscious feminist act, a way of carving out a female space in public intellectual life. Among the literati of postwar Mexico, her unembarrassed confessionalism incurred derision. But rather than emulating the default male modes of writing, Castellanos critiqued them. She satirized the articles that offered sweeping pronouncements on Mexican politics and culture; she taught her students that Hemingway\u2019s much-vaunted machismo was not a literary virtue; she took Graham Greene to task for what she viewed as his propagandism. In her own fiction, she foregrounded the perspectives and experiences of Mexican women who, whether white or indigenous, were otherwise denied a voice. And she engaged with the ideas of women writers from other nations, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Gabriela Mistral, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf, whom she viewed as kindred spirits. \u201cIt\u2019s not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own,\u201d a character says in Castellanos\u2019s 1973 play, The Eternal Feminine<\/em>. \u201cIt isn\u2019t even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born in Mexico City in 1925, Castellanos spent her childhood in the southern state of Chiapas on the Guatemalan border, where her father owned coffee plantations. Materially, the family wanted for nothing and were waited on hand and foot by servants. But Castellanos and her younger brother, Benjamin, witnessed no displays of love or affection between their parents, whose only common interest seemed to be antagonizing each other. Adriana Castellanos was from a modest, probably mixed background and had been a seamstress, while her much older husband, C\u00e9sar, was a scion of the oligarchy, went to university in the United States, and became involved in local politics. Castellanos characterizes their existence as \u201cphysical and spiritual decadence \u2026 I grew up in a family that had come to the end of its way, solitary, isolated, a family that had lost interest in living.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she was eight, a relative told Castellanos\u2019s mother of a vision in which one of her children died. \u201cBut not the boy!\u201d Adriana blurted out, in her daughter\u2019s earshot. A few weeks later, Benjamin did indeed die, of appendicitis, and Castellanos overheard her mother\u2019s lament: \u201cBut why was it the boy who died and not the little girl?\u201d Already a shy, anxious child, Castellanos was consumed with guilt over having survived and became more fearful and withdrawn. Her habit of crying quietly in the dark even led to suspicions that she was demonically possessed.<\/p>\n

In Castellanos\u2019s taut, eerie short story \u201cThree Knots in the Net,\u201d the young protagonist, \u00c1gueda, is considered unattractive and of dubious marriageability\u2014a particular cause for concern to her family, since there is no male heir to the \u201cbeautiful\u201d cane fields, cattle, and estates. At night, \u00c1gueda is woken by her parents fighting, from their separate beds, over whose side of the family is to blame for her strangeness.<\/p>\n

The child frequently dreamed that she had died and that her empty place was occupied by someone else, someone who really belonged there; that the gulp of air she had been stealing before now supplied strength to its rightful owner.<\/p>\n

Upon awakening, she would never altogether regain the certainty of being alive, nor did she want to. She slipped noiselessly through the corridors\u2014avoiding mirrors\u2014and hid in the far end of the back patio. There she would stay until someone brusquely came to get her at mealtime.<\/p>\n

In front of the adults there was no way to get her to speak, because she was not there.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00c1gueda takes solace in hurting lizards and birds, which confirms to her mother that \u201cwhatever evil and compulsion [the child] had within her was inherited from the former torturers of slaves and floggers of Indians\u201d\u2014in other words, from her husband\u2019s colonizer ancestors rather than her own more innocent bloodline.<\/p>\n

The injustice meted upon indigenous Mexicans is the subject of Castellanos\u2019s two novels, which depict the ruling class\u2019s barbaric subordination of the people\u2014women and Indians\u2014it deemed less than human. Her 1962 masterpiece, Oficio de tinieblas <\/em>(literally, \u201ctrade of darkness,\u201d translated by Esther Allen as The Book of Lamentations<\/em>), is a complex and panoramic reimagining of historical Mayan uprisings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, set in 1930s Chiapas and bookended by a rape and a child sacrifice. Amid the clash of Catholicism, secularism, and ancient magic and superstition, Castellanos suggests that no belief system or linguistic framework accommodates female realities. Marcela, a Tzotzil girl raped by a white landowner, lacks the words to explain or even understand her fate. When an ilol<\/em>\u2014a psychic\u2014intuits that \u201ca Caxl\u00e1n made ill-use of her,\u201d a surprised Marcela thinks: \u201cThis was what had happened. Something that could be said, that other people could hear and understand. Not madness, not vertigo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the rapist\u2019s stepdaughter, Idolina, lives in luxury yet is physically disabled by mental anguish she cannot express. Like one of Freud\u2019s hysterics, she chooses confinement to a single room, her legs paralyzed, over womanhood\u2014of which she can see no palatable model. Idolina\u2019s only real human connection is with her Indian nana<\/em>, Teresa, who soothes her with horror stories, reads prophesies in the fire ashes, and predicts that Idolina\u2019s mother and stepfather will die. \u201cIs that a promise?\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n

As a child, Castellanos was cared for by a Mayan woman, Rufina, in whose Tzotzil prayers and legends the future author discovered the joy of language. Their relationship is fictionalized in Castellanos\u2019s 1957 autobiographical debut novel, Bal\u00fan-Can\u00e1n<\/em> (translated by Irene Nicholson as The Nine Guardians<\/em>). The novel was written, Castellanos said, simply by \u201cletting myself be carried along by the flow of my memories.\u201d It is partly narrated by a naive seven-year-old girl, who bears witness to an indigenous Mexican rebellion against the brutal feudalism practiced by her father. The reorganization of society that ensues irrevocably alters her family\u2019s life and means a separation from the woman who\u2019d looked after her since birth. On the novel\u2019s final page, when she thinks she sees her nana<\/em> in the street, her thoughts go from touching hope, to disillusionment, and finally to bitter irony:<\/p>\n

As soon as I see her I \u2026 run towards her with open arms. It\u2019s my Nana! But the Indian watches me quite impassively, making no welcoming sign. I slow up\u2014slower and slower till I stop. I let my arms drop, altogether discouraged. Even if I see her, I\u2019ll never recognize her now. It\u2019s so long since we\u2019ve parted. Besides, all Indians look alike.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a child, Castellanos also had a paid playmate, a Mayan girl her own age. A then commonplace custom in Chiapas, Castellanos recalls, was for \u201cthe master\u2019s child\u201d to be given a cargadora<\/em> (a \u201ccarrier\u201d), whose job was to be a companion. Castellanos explains:<\/p>\n

Sometimes the child was a mere object on which the other child exercised frustration: a child\u2019s unending energy, boredom, anger, possessive jealousy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I was exceptionally capricious, arbitrary or cruel. But nobody had taught me to respect any but my equals and especially my elders \u2026 The day it was revealed to me, in a flash, that this thing I was using was a person, I made an instantaneous decision: to ask the pardon of the person I had offended. And I made another vow for the rest of my life: never to take advantage of my position of privilege to humiliate another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The land reform and indigenous emancipation policies brought in by President L\u00e1zaro C\u00e1rdenas diminished the Castellanos family\u2019s affluence and status, and in 1941, they swapped their aristocratic rural lifestyle for a regular middle-class home in Mexico City. The transformed political landscape, Castellanos writes in her unsparing way, \u201cdestroyed the certainty of my racial, social, and economic superiority,\u201d and she was forced \u201cto seek alternatives, values to conquer and make my own in order to feel worthy of living.\u201d A voracious reader with a daily routine of writing, she published her first poems while still in her teens. Although no one, \u201cnot even myself,\u201d she admitted, \u201cconsidered literature a profession a woman could practice. It was thought to be an activity no rational person would choose.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t long before she would be granted the autonomy to follow any path she liked, no matter how unorthodox.<\/p>\n

In a twist of fate all too apt to the gothic cast of Castellanos\u2019s life, in 1948, both her parents died. Her mother, who was in her forties, had cancer, and her father suffered a heart attack. Castellanos was only twenty-two. \u201cAbandoned to the resources of my imagination during adolescence,\u201d Castellanos later reflected, \u201cit seemed logical to me that I would suddenly be left utterly orphaned.\u201d Alone in the world, she was free to make an unprecedented decision for a young woman from Chiapas: to dedicate her life to literature. That year, she published two books of poetry, Trayectoria del polvo <\/em>(Trajectory of dust) and Apuntes para una declaraci\u00f3n de fe<\/em> (Annotations for a declaration of faith), both meditations on human aloneness and mortality.<\/p>\n

Though her writing was melancholy, around this time, Castellanos slowly began to come out of her shell. As a philosophy student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she joined the group of Latin American intellectuals later dubbed the Generation of \u201950, who would meet each Saturday to read and discuss one another\u2019s work. Members included the poets Jaime Sabines and Ernesto Cardenal, the short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, and Castellanos\u2019s lifelong friend, the now ninety-five-year-old author Dolores Castro. After their graduation, the Castellanos and Castro traveled to Europe together, visiting Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

The experience of being a foreigner, Castellanos found, gave her a new sense of what it meant to be Mexican. Influenced by the writings of Simone Weil, who devoted her brief and ascetic life to helping the poor and subjugated, she went to work for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, formed by the government to provide services and resources, including media in indigenous languages, to Native communities. She also signed over her inherited land to the laborers who tilled it and translated the Mexican constitution into Tzotzil. And with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, she wrote Bal\u00fan-Can\u00e1n<\/em>,\u00a0which brought her international acclaim. The novel won the Chiapas Prize and the Mexican Critics\u2019 Award and was translated into many other languages. \u201cIt is invigorating,\u201d the UK Observer<\/em>\u2019s reviewer writes, \u201cto find that a modern novel can still be a work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Castellanos\u2019s debut as a novelist was accompanied by another major life event: in 1957, she married Ricardo Guerra Tejada, an academic philosopher. She was thirty-two, \u201can age when I was already too accustomed to living alone, and with a demanding career.\u201d After two upsetting miscarriages, they had a child, Gabriel. But as Castellanos put it, the marriage was \u201cstrictly monogamous on my part and totally polygamous on my husband\u2019s.\u201d Eventually, they divorced over Guerra Tejada\u2019s infidelity. Their conflicted relationship is the focus of The Eternal Feminine<\/em> (original title: Los adioses<\/em>), a 2017 biopic directed by Natalia Berist\u00e1in and starring Tessa Ia and Karina Gidi as, respectively, the young and older Castellanos. The film, an acutely moving and intelligent portrayal of Castellanos\u2019s paradoxical strength and fragility, moves back and forth between her time at university and the peak of her career success, taking us to her final days as a divorced emissary in Israel.<\/p>\n

Castellanos was in her midforties when she was appointed Mexico\u2019s ambassador to Israel. After moving to Tel Aviv, she taught at the universities, learned to speak Hebrew, and continued publishing poetry and journalism. Ever candid and self-effacing, she writes in her newspaper column, \u201cI still feel as if I\u2019m in a dream world, wandering about in an unfamiliar country whose complexities both fascinate and paralyze me, carrying out a task I don\u2019t yet understand and that still seems somewhat abstract, remote, and impractical.\u201d In fact, she performed her diplomatic duties with skill and charm. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called her \u201cone of the most brilliant minds I have ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tragic accident that loomed was prefigured, her friend and biographer Oscar Bonifaz suggests, by a recurring motif in her poetry. \u201cThroughout her literary career,\u201d he observes, \u201cthere was a strange persistence in associating lamps with death, an obsessive reiteration.\u201d Two examples of many: \u201cShe was consumed entirely by heat \/ and by light, like a lamp\u201d (\u201cIn Memoriam\u201d); \u201cHer hair gives off a gentle air \/ of crushed flowers and burning lamps\u201d (Trayectoria del polvo<\/em>).<\/p>\n

In early August 1974, alone in her embassy apartment, Castellanos stepped out of the bathroom and tried to switch on a lamp. It gave off a powerful electric surge. Discovered unconscious by a maid, Castellanos died in an ambulance before it reached the hospital. She was forty-nine. Her reputation for sadness and depression, and her history of undergoing psychoanalysis and taking Valium, gave rise to speculation that she\u2019d committed suicide. But the author Elena Poniatowska, a friend, writes, \u201cIt strikes me as highly unlikely that Rosario would have known enough about voltage to have planned her electrocution so as to die exactly when she wished.\u201d<\/p>\n

Castellanos received a Mexican state funeral, and commemorations were held across the world. She left behind a prolific body of work, including many volumes of poetry, journalism, and short stories, much of which is untranslated. Though regarded as one of Latin America\u2019s most important women writers, she is less well known internationally than the European feminist intellectuals she admired, alongside whom she belongs in history. Nevertheless, her legacy is immeasurable. A few years before her death, she gave a speech at Mexico\u2019s National Museum of Anthropology and History. According to Poniatowska, that was the day the Mexican women\u2019s liberation movement properly took flight, thanks to Castellanos\u2019s forensic, unanswerable analysis of sexual inequality. Her most important lesson, one universal and timeless, is that nothing is more revolutionary than the right words.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable, <\/em>Longreads, <\/em>Newsweek, <\/em>The Daily Beast, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Awl, <\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0Read her previous Feminize Your Canon<\/a> columns, about Violette Leduc<\/a>,\u00a0Dorothy West<\/a>, and\u00a0Olivia Manning<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.     Solitude seeks fulfillment in my tears and awaits me in the depths of every mirror and closes the windows carefully so the sky will not come in. \u2014Rosario Castellanos, excerpt from an early untitled poem. Images of literal and emotional solitude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[37380,37378,33158,37382,37491,37381,7540,37384,37492,2229,37383,37377,165,37379,17722,37385,37490,37386],"class_list":["post-129374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon","tag-augusto-monterosso","tag-chiapas","tag-elena-poniatowska","tag-ernesto-cardenal","tag-generation-of-50","tag-jaime-sabines","tag-latin-american-literature","tag-los-adioses","tag-mexican-literature","tag-mexico-city","tag-natalia-beristain","tag-oficio-de-tinieblas","tag-poetry","tag-president-lazaro-cardenas","tag-spanish-literature","tag-the-eternal-feminine","tag-three-knots-in-the-net","tag-trayectoria-del-polvo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Rosario Castellanos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cIt isn\u2019t even enough to discover who we are. 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