Decapitated women, edible women, naked women. About La mujer desnuda of Armonía Somers and The Edible Woman of Margaret Atwood

Decapitated women, edible women, naked women

About La mujer desnuda of Armonía Somers and The Edible Woman of Margaret Atwood

Bringing together these two great writers in one place opens up a world of possibilities, a maze where wolves, flowers, recipes, monsters live. Her works also become a wonderful forest with trees with multiple branches that try to reveal and inquire about the feminine, the woman, her identity, her pressures and oppressions, the light and the dark.

Both have something that is so attractive, so unique, so wild that it becomes almost natural the desire to achieve an intersection in the reading of their works, in which, although at first sight so far away, they are voices that are sustained in their world as women, which is the same for all.

In the words of Deleuze and Guattari we would be talking about deterritorializing, moving from his hegemonic place to the masculine, which "is configured as the first fundamental term and the feminine as its negative derivation without specificity of its own." What the female voice must do is take "its own point of underdevelopment, its own jargon, its own third world, its own desert" and introduce it into the space of writing, rebelling before the dominant voice. The woman must write from her body, recover it as long as it has been usurped, and write it, above all, write it.

"The head rolled heavily like a fruit: Rebeca Linke saw that fall without joy or sorrow. From that moment on, the new state began to occur. Only a black stripe and already definitely stopped."

Armonía Somers, an uruguayan writer, born in Pando in 1914 and died in Montevideo in 1994, was the daughter of an anarchist merchant and a catholic mother. He wrote his first novel The Naked Woman in 1950. Then she published the series of stories El derrumbamiento (1953). Both La mujer desnuda and the tale El derrumbamiento were strongly criticized at that time for its subversive character and erotic content.

At the end of 1969, Somers fell ill with a strange ill called chylothorax, and hence the novel Only elephants find mandrakes.

Ángel Rama explains that with La mujer desnuda "a rough, ardent literature of a bold theme, a vision of love not usual coming from a woman" began. It could be seen as a way of assuming female identity.

Something happens with the protagonist, and with the men she meets at the moment in which she separates from "her head", from her rationality, something so typically feminine, when she separates herself from the discursive arguments, from the signifier. The particularity of its enjoyment drives it away from there.

"Rebeca Linke, thirty years old. She left her personal life behind, on a rare border without memory" (...) "And it was from that moment in the meadow that the woman's night began, her first possessed night"

The novel emphasizes the dimension of the naked woman, in clear reference to the biblical woman, Eve, that of temptation and desire, which is waking up in her wake. Well, what it is about her is the lurking of desire.

"To put or not to put the blood in desire, that was all."

"Already the privacy of all others must also be full of the same, a return to something with as many names as temperaments, and that seemed to have died in the simple life of always."

But why does Rebeca Linke walk naked? Perhaps to check "that everything was still in order. But in a meaningless order, because it hurt me equally. Life hurts because it does." That meaningless order that can be that of sexuality, but also that of life itself. Life has no meaning. He puts on his head "like who puts on a helmet" and goes on an adventure. Naked.

First to the forest, where he meets the lumberjack's house and his wife, and passes by leaving his trail, finding a man named Nathaniel.

"He gave (...) the simple dream of a man," with his head turned to the always lucid edge of the women awake. How could anyone dare, he thought, not even the owner of paradise, with that being loaded with wisdom and destiny through which so many causes were brought by such a remote guilt, to culminate after watching over sleeping men? "

It embodies with her name the feminine in her radical and absolute difference, when she responds to the sleeping man who confuses her with his wife, Antonia.

"The females should not bear names that turning them a letter are male. The truly feminine are those without reverse, like all mine"

Then you will reach the river, the twins in a field, to become on the lips of the whole town, in their rumors, in their minds, in their fantasies and desires, exploiting the almost brutal sensuality of men and making the docility of women, indeed, a justification also for their excess. The next morning, confessions arrive; one, revealing, that serves us well to illustrate the idea of ​​female enjoyment as that of an ineffable experience, out of speech, speechless, in a vacuum:

"-Father, I can't find words for my sin (...) it's useless, I can't"; "... others will know how to tell it, perhaps because it can be done. Mine has been different, I am sure. God condemn me for my silence, but I do not know what words one should name, recount certain things that have not existed before ..."

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He has even appeared in the dreams of the village pastor, in his sermon, to conclude that this woman, the naked woman, the Eva among men, does not exist and will never exist. The woman does not exist, what there is is the encounter with a woman.

"She was free to her own nude (...) But the individual freedom of the act itself dragged everyone to think about the impossibility of their own" (...)

"How not to condemn, then, that nakedness that forced his own"

The naked woman meets Juan, the love encounter for which she seemed predestined. Finally, they will end up being persecuted in the style of the most classic Gothic novel, like a monster that must be eliminated, but not before having had their love encounter, in which the signs of enjoyment are not lacking. Man falls into temptation like each of the men in front of the woman who awakens his desire.

It is often believed that a woman loses her head for love; Harmony Somers teaches us with this novel that sometimes to be able to love, so that the contingent encounter with love can take place, it is necessary to have lost our minds.

"Juan, I'm next to you, I love you, I exist."

The edible woman (1969) a novel by canadian writer Margaret Atwood tells the story of Marian MacAlpin, a young university student who begins to have a series of existential concerns due to the conjunction of three events in her life: her next marriage, the appearance of a subject with whom he begins to carry a somewhat strange relationship, and the gradual loss of appetite for all kinds of food.

Novel called "protofeminist", it is also a story about the doubts that concern us not only women but also men who, counting on what can be socially desired, realize that this is not enough to achieve the promised fullness, and the way in which the acceptance of these conditions can lead to the destruction of oneself.

The protagonist of The Edible Woman is Marian, an intelligent young woman who works as a pollster in the advertising area of ​​a canadian company. The 60s pass, and Marian shares a flat with Ainsley, who seems to be very different from her, is crazy, messy and obsessed with becoming pregnant. When Marian engages in marriage with her partner, she begins to experience strange changes in her body and in her behavior, within what Atwood calls "symbolic cannibalism."

"He advanced his bare arms to examine them in the mirror. They were the only part of his body that was not covered with clothes, nylon or makeup, but in the reflection they seemed to be false, as if they were rubber or plastic, with that tone pinkish, boneless, flexible. "

 Throughout the novel Marian will meet Duncan, a strange character who will accompany her throughout these changes, sharing and increasing the madness that the protagonist experiences. Marian works surrounded by women who dream of getting married and becoming housewives and mothers of many children.

Marriage is the only subterfuge to escape temporary employment, without future and poorly paid, despite being well prepared to exercise in positions of greater responsibility and quality.

The strength of Margaret Atwood's literature is found in the description of the female body as a stranger to women due to the pressure of societies to define "normal" and "deviant" femininity. The novels The Tale of the maid (1985) and Alias ​​Grace (1996) are good examples of that statement.In the first, Defred's body is for the rulers of the Republic of Gilead only a tool to procreate. In this dystopia, the EEUU has become in a theocratic nation that, in order to fight Islamic terrorism, suppresses the freedom of the press and the rights of women, if Defred refuses to collaborate, a public execution awaits him, but if he accepts but is incapable of conceiving, he is expected to be banished in colonies full of toxic waste where death awaits.

In the other novel, the problem of Grace Marks is not limited to her condition as a former servant imprisoned for her alleged complicity in a double murder, but to the look on her projected by a rural community of Canada in the nineteenth century, whose opinion is divided between considering her a witch or a saint.

The strong female characters of Grace and Defred have a history in Marian MacAlpin and are reflected in Rebeca Linke. The feminine is present in the works of Atwood and Somers, there is a feminine perspective that informs the anecdote and, in most cases, gives the voice to fiction.

Mutilated, naked, edible, these characters help us to reflect on our role as women in a society that slowly, awakens and questions.

"If this is a story I am telling, then I can decide the end. There will be an end to this story, and then real life will come. I can decide where to leave it."

  Alias Grace

Image: Preparation of a love charm by a youthful witch, anonymous