Benjamín Jarnés's Portrayal of Women Artists from "Andrómeda" to "La novia del viento"

Abstract

James's 1926 short story Andr?meda tells how protagonist Julio Aznar finds an abandoned exotic dancer in a secluded area and escorts her back to the city. Carmela, as the sole female character in Andr?meda, perpetuates the status of women as artistic, and often voiceless, objects of the pictorial manifestations of male sexual insecurities. La novia del viento (1940) complicates this view by presenting an assertive artist named who forces Julio to choose between the two women who seek his affection. novel can be read as a precursor to the feminist critique of the patriarchal domination of female portraiture that would become prevalent decades later when women experimented with different ways to reclaim authority over their identities in the arts. themes of art and sexuality have increasingly been the subject of studies of the novels of Benjam?n Jarn?s, but given the fact that Jarn?s himself claimed that el imperativo categ?rico del arte es (...) la sensualidad (ArielDisperso 105), their interdependence has not been adequately explored as a theme in his works. One work that deals with gender relations and the role of eroticism in artistic creativity is his 1940 La novia del viento. This novel, published while Jarn?s was in exile in Mexico, is divided into three parts. In the first part, Andr?meda, which is an adaptation of a 1926 story with the same title first published in the Revista del Occidente, we first meet Julio Aznar, a timid surveyor on vacation at a country resort near the fictitious city of Augusta. Julio becomes un h?roe a rega?adientes (Jarn?s1 59), when he stumbles upon a woman who some thieves leave naked and tied to a tree in the woods. Jarn?s makes no secret of the similarity with the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, as its polarized gender roles present a structural paradigm for an unequal distribution of power ostensibly favoring (Munich 13), but he does so through the filter of Rubens's visual portrayal of the rescue legend. In 1939, Jarn?s added a second part consisting of a brief series of philosophical reflections aptly entitled Digresi?n de Epitemeo and a third part, Brunilda en llamas, which, in an allusion to Wagner's operatic representations of the Valkyries, introduces the painter who uses her art to seduce Julio. In La novia del viento, Jarn?s cleverly intertwines two ancient myths in order to comment on the roles of men and women in both artistic creativity and reception. In an article, The Impossible Character: Allegorical Woman in Benjamin James's 'Andromeda,' Juli Highfill reads in the original 1926 story a commentary on the position of women in Western art (... ) as the repository, a dumping ground, for everything desired, feared, and loathed by Man (71). Yet Highfill's insightful analysis is limited to James's early text and sees little relationship between Brunilda en llamas and Adr?meda.2 But further analysis of the complete novel in general, and in particular, presents an implicit acknowledgement of the roles that women have played as creators of art. More notably, La novia del viento can be read as a precursor to the feminist critique of the patriarchal domination of female portraiture that would become prevalent decades later when women experimented with different ways to reclaim authority over their identity in the arts. novel opens as the protagonist discerns the cry of a woman, initially called Star3 or Elena,4 while wandering through the woods one night. After some searching, he finds her tied to