Is Women's Writing in Spanish America Gender-Specific?

Abstract

Is Women’s Writing in Spanish America Gender-Specific? Stephen M. Hart In this essay, I wish to address the question which constitutes its title in two ways. First of all, I want to take a synchronic approach and ask the question from the perspective of critical discourse which has argued about and defined what is meant by a gender-specific writing; and then, I want to take a more diachronic approach and look specifically at some representative examples of women’s writing in Spanish America and chart its evolution in broad terms from colonial times to the present day. There seem to be within gynocritics (as defined by Elaine Showalter), broadly speaking, four camps of opinion about the gender-specificity of women’s writing, which are: (i) the deprecatory, (ii) the universalist/individualist, (iii) the thematic/experiential, and (iv) the epistemological/structural. The first camp argues that there is a difference between men’s and women’s writing and that the latter is inferior (epitomized by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1855 reference to “a damned mob of scribbling women”; Hart 1992, 63–64). The second camp, which takes the universalist/individualist stance, argues that there is no intrinsic difference between a work written by a woman and another written by a man which can be ascribed to the gender difference (a good example of this approach is Isabel Allende for whom “la literatura no tiene sexo.” 1 According to this view the difference of the work is more likely to be due to individual genius. [End Page 335] The third camp, which takes the thematic/experiential approach, says that women’s writing is different because women’s lives are different (domesticity, child-rearing, menstrual cycles, etc.). When analyzing the literary work from this perspective the critic looks especially for these feminine themes and the different perspective they imply (excellent examples are the work by Maureen Ahern on Rosario Castellanos, and Sandra M. Cypess on La Malinche). The fourth group, which takes the epistemological/structural approach, argues that women’s writing is not only thematically but also structurally different from men’s writing. The view here is that authentic women’s writing must not only have a different subject matter but must also describe it in a different way; an excellent example of this approach is Debra Castillo’s recent Talking Back which studies the work of Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferré, Julieta Campos, Rosario Castellanos and María Luisa Puga, among others from a formal as well as a theoretical perspective. The inspiration for an approach of this kind can be traced back to the school of French high theory (Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, Wittig, Herrmann, etc.). 2 Key concepts in this approach range from “écriture féminine” (Cixous) to “parler femme” (Irigaray). Definitions of these terms are notoriously slippery; “écriture féminine” encompasses such diverse notions as feminine libido, the dissolution of identity, the act of giving, the deconstruction of gender, inter alia and this has led to their being either rejected by (notably Anglo-Saxon) critics or accepted as utopian. 3 This is not surprising since sociolinguistics tells us there is no quantifiable difference between the way a woman speaks and the way a man speaks in Standard Average European, which includes French, Spanish and English (Hart 1992, 67–67). While many critics hesitate before giving unqualified acceptance to the notion of a gender-specific writing, many are drawn by some of its more gnomic axioms, of which the following oft-quoted statement by Xavière Gautier is paradigmatic: “As long as women remain silent they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that, logically speaking, their speech should disrupt” (162–63). [End Page 336] There are at least two other terminological stumbling blocks which greet the researcher interested in the fourth avenue of investigation. Firstly, the author of “women’s writing” does not have to be a woman; indeed, Kristeva sees Joyce, Mallarmé and Artaud as epitomizing women’s writing (Kristeva, 132). What this statement does clarify is that Cixous and Kristeva are talking about a type of...