Abstract
In the chapters “The Kerenski Ballet School” and “Firebird” of Rosario Ferré's novel The House on the Lagoon, the allusions to the ballet Giselle and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of La Grande Odalisque are closely connected to patriarchal ideology and performance of gender. The allusion to Giselle reveals the nocive effects of a gender script that reinforces the romantic feminine paradigms of submission and self-sacrifice. The allusion to La Grande Odalisque plays a fundamental role in the construction of the specular image, which makes visible the loss of autonomy, the psychic fragmentation, and the subaltern position that Tamara Kerenski takes in the social structure of the Kerenski Ballet School after marrying André Kerenski. In contrast to Giselle's tragic ending and the perpetual objectification to which the odalisque is subjected in Ingres's painting, Tamara Kerenski overcomes her subordinated position. Through that resolution, Ferre's narrative texts stress the possibility of contesting the traditional scripts and performances of female gender.
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