Reading Gender

CHARACTERS

Whoever appears. But ten actors will be sufficient - seven women and three men - if and only if they are versatile and understand that this is a text, not of characters but of situations. (Ahern, p273)

One of the brilliant things about The Eternal Feminine is that in it Rosario Castellanos wrecks merry havoc with traditional narrative structure even as she also places under a very close lens the concept of what it is to be a woman, especially a Mexican one. The introduction as it appears above sets the stage for a truly surreal exploration of play structure and gender roles that I would expect out of a much more contemporary work. In the scene where Lupita discovers her husband's infidelity - I will be examining only this scene, to better illustrate my point - the stage business that Lupita herself undertakes and that happens around her, almost in a separate diagenetic space from Lupita herself, undercuts her dialogue with ruthless efficiency even as she proclaims herself a paragon of womanly virtue. I would expect this sort of undercutting from Buñuel, who himself worked in the 1970's and was considered very avant garde and ahead of his time, and I'm a little shocked to discover how resistant I was to the idea that a Mexican woman playwright from the same time could be just as powerful.

One of the things that I find most interesting is something that Baumgardner and Richards discuss in Manifesta, this naming of names, this decrying of allegiances that is conspicuously absent in the text of this part of The Eternal Feminine. It is not shocking because of its absence, which is in fact the norm not only in most works of art but in society as a whole, but because as each statement emerges from Lupita - about her children, her duties as a wife, her house, her gift from her husband - we are required by Castellanos' writing to ask ourselves: Is this something that I would do? Is this something that I think? Would someone looking into the flows and eddies of my mind be as offended as I am right now? By marrying unquestioning bourgeoisie characters and dialogue with harshly undercut stage direction and an almost absurdist plot device Castellanos positions us effectively to carry out a little discovery making of our own.

When Castellanos calls for actors who are versatile, who understand the importance of situation over character, she also asks us as an audience to be willing to open ourselves up enough to make of the situation we are presented a character study of our own. To see within the characters staged some aspect of ourselves, or of our society, that we might be at liberty to ignore if it were the character of Lupita herself that we were meant to connect with. The character of the betrayed wife is archetypal, pulling in all sorts of connotations that distract from the situation of uncaring assumption that leads Lupita herself to discover that her life has not been everything she expected it to be. Just as this work is not at all what I expected when I was told that we would be reading a Mexican play from the 1970's at the beginning of the semester. Thankfully my experience of discovery has been entirely more enjoyable than Lupita's.


Works Cited

Ahern, Maureen. 1988. A Rosario Castellanos Reader. Austin: U of T Press

Baumgardner, Jennifer and Richards, Amy. Manifesta.