Text and countertext in Rosario Ferre's "Sleeping Beauty."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Kathleen M. Glenn

Rosario Ferre is one of a group of angry young Puerto Rican women authors who have seized the pen and wielded it effectively. Educated on the island and the mainland, Ferre is the daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico and by birth a member of the upper-class, conservative society she satirizes in her fiction. She has acknowledged that writing is for her a destructive as well as a constructive endeavor and that she is driven by a need for vengeance and a desire to give permanence to what hurts and to what attracts her ("Writer's Kitchen" 215). The anger that impels much of her work is evident in her 1976 collection of stories and poems, Papeles de Pandora (Pandora's Papers or Pandora's Roles).(1) In Greek mythology, Pandora is identified as the first woman and is given by each of the gods some power that could bring about the ruin of man. According to certain accounts, her husband, Epimetheus, opens the vessel containing the gifts and thereby releases plagues, sorrow, and mischief upon mankind. The version that has prevailed, however, blames Pandora and her curiosity for the disaster. The first woman is thus identified as a dangerous creature having an evil nature and bent on doing evil to men. Ferre's book tells what Molly Hite has termed the other side of the story, the alternative version that gives events a different set of emphases and values (4). Ferre has spoken of the need to rewrite "history" as it should have occurred, with Desdemona killing Othello and Ariadne deserting Theseus ("Entrevista" 90), and in Papeles de Pandora she engages in revisionary mythopoesis (see DuPlessis). The stories (papers) show not only the roles in which women are often cast but also the attempts some women make to break out of those roles.

Ferre often images her female characters as dolls (decorative, passive, powerless, without voice or will), and the English translation of Papeles de Pandora is entitled The Youngest Doll, after one of the best known of the narratives. The one that concerns me here, "Sleeping Beauty" ("La bella durmiente") has been much discussed, but little attention has been focused upon its form and structure.(2) The story is a collage of opposing texts and countertexts that play off, rub against, and collide with one another. The resulting friction produces sparks. Discordant discourses and dissonant tones highlight conflicts. Different perspectives upon the same events throw into high relief the chasms that separate contrasting views. The structural fragmentation of the narrative and absence of dialogue underscore the lack of true communication among the characters. As Diana Velez has observed, Maria de los Angeles "has only private internal speech, the speech of dreams" (80n8). Others talk and write about her; she is reduced to silence and marginalized. The two letters she writes do not appear over her signature. The following pages examine how letters from the protagonist, the director of the convent school where she is educated, her father, and her husband clash with one another and with social columns, newspaper clippings, captions written in a photo album, a birth announcement, snatches of the protagonist's interior monologue, and comments by an omniscient narrator. Each of the three divisions of the story--"Coppelia," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Giselle"--takes its title from a famous ballet, a nonverbal text that draws inspiration from a written one: E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man," Charles Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty," and Heinrich Heine's De l'Allemagne. In 1987 Ferre commented on her ambivalence with respect to classical music, stating that while she recognized the beauty of compositions by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt--all men--she resented the fact that she was expected to listen silently, respectfully, to the old masters without being allowed to respond to what they were saying ("Una conciencia musical" 8-9). The role of passive, worshipful listener was alien to her. Equally alien, in all likelihood, was the role imposed by classical ballets, based upon male-authored librettos and music, traditionally choreographed by men and with male-designed sets and costumes. Ferre's protagonist improvises her own choreography, to the surprise and even consternation of certain members of her community.

Ronald Mendez-Clark has pointed out the frequency with which Ferre caricatures various types of discourse in her stories and poems, laying bare the social, cultural, and literary practices that underlie these discourses and the ways in which they (re)present--and misrepresent--women (121-22). Such exposure is essential to the destructive-constructive enterprise in which Ferre is engaged. Examples of exposure and self-exposure abound in epistolary fiction. The male protagonist of Miguel Delibes's Cartas de amor de un sexagenario voluptuoso (Love Letters from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian, 1983) unwittingly reveals himself to be an unprincipled social climber, self-centered hypocrite, and satyr. The main character of Javier Tomeo's El cazador de leones (The Lion Hunter, 1987) bares soul and body in a telephonic novel (one of the modern variants of the epistolary) that degenerates into an obscene phone call that is an assault upon its female listener. Paloma Diaz-Mas in "El viaje de Lord Aston-Howard" ("Lord Aston-Howard's Journey"), a chapter from El sueno de Venecia (The Dream of Venice, 1992), utilizes letters to expose the superciliousness, prejudice, duplicity, and dishonesty of a supposedly civilized English gentleman. Ferre too, capitalizes upon the possibilities for self-exposure that epistolary fiction affords, and several of her letter writers paint devastating portraits of themselves as well as of the social group or institution to which they belong. Janet Altman has demonstrated in Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form how the formal properties of epistles create meaning. The distribution and length of the letters written by different correspondents, their dates, and their juxtaposition communicate information, and the interplay between contiguous missives can be revealing. Epistolary texts tend to foreground acts of reading and rereading, and Altman stresses the importance of the internal reader (Genette's intradiegetic narratee) in shaping these narratives. Letters, after all, are customarily written to a specific person the writer wishes to influence in some way. We, the external readers (extradiegetic narratees), read from at least three points of view: that of the intended or actual recipient, that of the writer, and our own (Altman 111). Epistolary discourse, notes Altman, is marked by hiatuses of all sorts: "time lags between event and recording, between message transmission and reception; spatial separation between writer and addressee; blank spaces and lacunae in the manuscript" (140). These gaps serve to awaken our curiosity, stimulate our desire, and impel our acts of interpretation. Desire plays a crucial role in letter fiction, which often presents histories of rejection, betrayal, and abandonment, and which casts us in the role of voyeurs who peer through keyholes, listen behind doors, and read letters that, according to the conventions of the genre, are not intended for our eyes but instead form part of a private correspondence dealing with private affairs.