Feminist Bildungsroman in Las cuitas de Carlota and Prohibido salir a la calle

Por Julie Lirot

Las cuitas de Carlota, Helena Arajo (2003), and Prohibido salir a la calle, Consuelo Trivio
(1998), have primary themes related to the development of female identity through a re-writing of the
traditional male bildungsroman. Both authors are Colombian women currently residing in Europe.
Consuelo Trivio lives in Madrid and forms part of the Instituto Cervantes, while Helena Arajo resides in
Switzerland and works as a professor at a Swiss University. The individual development of the female
protagonists in these novels can inform our readings of both Colombian and European literary traditions
and female bildungsroman. Through the female protagonists journeys in the in-between spaces (Bhabha
1) these authors attempt to define their fictional alter egos against dominant ideological frameworks and
institutional practices.
The bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, is the narration of the struggle between individuation
and socialization processes, in which the protagonist must come to terms with various cultural discourses.
While a traditional vision of history focuses on famous figures, great men, the traditional male
bildungsroman is a hybrid narrative of male socialization, travel and exploration, and philosophical
speculation. The feminist adaptation of this hybrid genre has proved a particularly apt vehicle for conveying
and examining women's multifaceted, conflicting and conflicted experience in patriarchal culture. The desire
for self-improvement, self-expression, the need to adapt to varying social circumstances in a world of
change, and the ever-present aspiration for economic advancement, all lead to increasingly complex
characterizations that can be subsumed under the notion of development. The bildungsroman also readily
accommodates social critique while exploring different concepts of identity.
In the 1950s and 1960s the conventional bildungsroman was resuscitated. This is often attributed to
feminist movements and leftist political agendas. The genre became increasingly popular with those
ideologies and theories that claimed subject status for hitherto invisible or marginalized groups, such as
women, the working-class, gay men and lesbians, and non-whites. In his landmark article, The Death of the
Author, Roland Barthes powerfully contends that the author can not claim the absolute authority over his
writing because writing in itself substitutes language for the author who had been regarded to be its owner in
humanist criticism. According to Barthes, [w]riting is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our
subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing
(1129) However, the assertion of the death of the writing subject and its consequent valorization of
anonymous writing is not unproblematic. As stated by Elixabeth Fox Genoveses The death of the subject
and of the author may accurately reflect the perceived crisis of Western culture and the bottomless anxieties
of its most privileged subjectsthe white male authors who presumed to define it. Those subjects and those
authors may, as it were, be dying. But it remains to be demonstrated that their deaths constitute the collective
or generic deaths of the subject and author. There remain plenty of subjects and authors who, never having
had much opportunity to write in their own names or the names of their kind, much less in name of the
culture as a whole, are eager to seize the abandoned podium. (67)
Critic Maria Helena Lima analyses the traditional male Bildungsroman, pointing out the political
implications of its conventions and assumptions. Genres, however, like languages, function like prisms in a
mirror which impose their own shape on the reality they attempt to describe, the novel form itself may limit
the kinds of subjectivity that can be constituted within its generic boundaries (433). If one understands the
formal characteristics of the traditional male genre of Bildungsroman as the institutionalized matrix of
showing individual self-development in a social context, the female Bildungsroman contests those
characteristics as it constructs female subjectivity. This subjectivity exists to facilitate their understanding of
themselves in a process both within and against the cultural realities of the society both surrounding them
and of which they are part, realties directly resultant of the oppressive patriarchal situation in which they are
forced to participate.
Both novels analyzed here are first person narratives written by an older woman reflecting on her
past experiences. In Las cuitas de Carlota, in a pseudo epistolary style, the protagonist writes letters to her
cousin, which are then to be re-written in the form of a book, while in Prohibido, there is no mention of the
intended reader. While Prohibido focuses on the childhood of a girl growing up in Bogot in a family of
little means and a mother who struggles with a stereotypical dead-beat dad, Las cuitas begins with the upper
class protagonists marriage to another upper class business entrepreneur, her psychological difficulties
caused by her inability to accept her role as wife and mother in a patriarchal society which negates all
possibility for artistic and personal expression. The narrators in both novels present ironic and self-critical
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images of themselves and their development. If one does not consider the difference in social classes of the
protagonists, the one could be considered a continuation of the other. In which case, Prohibido would be the
recounting of the childhood experiences of the much older Carlota.
Prohibido focuses on the daily routines of a young girl as she relates to her family, especially her
mother, father, grandmother and siblings. Do to the point of view of innocence, she is able to provide a
much deeper critique of the family and social dynamics than an older protagonist and does not provide any
intellectual analysis of the processes that are affecting her directly. Her adoration of a problematic and
often absent father figure does not allow her to understand her mothers love hate relationship with him.
She sees only her mothers complaints, and not the social reasons behind them, which are left to the
interpretation of the reader. It is seen as socially acceptable that the father appears and disappears at his
convenience, with little or no warning, bringing financial instability and leaching away what little
economic advances the mother may have been able to achieve. This mindless adoration is a source of
conflict between Clara and her mother and leads to her ultimate destitution from the home, the underlying
cause of which is her maturation, and competition with her mother for her fathers love and the usurpation
of her role as caretaker of her younger siblings.
These novels chart the protagonist's actual or metaphorical journey from youth to maturity. Initially
the aim of this journey is reconciliation between the desire for individuation (self-fulfillment) and the
demands of socialization (adaptation to a given social reality). Nonetheless, the feminist versions of
bildungsroman presented in these novels do not result in a balance between individuation and socialization
and there is no presentation of a fully developed, stable or coherent character, but rather a continuing
questioning of the process and the limits of individuation in a patriarchal society. In Las cuitas, there exists
the possibility for self-fulfillment and reconciliation, probably through the exercise of writing. The end
remains much more open in Prohibido, due to the fact that Clara, the protagonist, ends her journey in a
boarding school, separated from her family, because she is no longer welcome in her own home, Era si de
repente una de las dos sobrara en la casa (231). The reason for this separation is also due to the burgeoning
sexual maturation of the protagonist, which, as Foucault has observes, must be disciplined and punished in
order to produce the docile body necessary for acceptance into society (Foucault, Discipline and Punish,
1380).
The stories told in these novels are important because they reflect on power, societal structures and
limits to womens individual freedom. W. H. New finds that "Power over speech controls the shape of the
past; power over the past controls the mind of the present and the kind of future that the present can
conceive" (292). The Bildungsroman has metamorphosized through its dynamic adaptation to changing
ideologies, developing from a didactic purpose of promoting patriarchal ideals to a vehicle for questioning
those ideals. Instead of promoting an example of the model citizen, the protagonists of these novels attempt
to move beyond sexually defined roles in order to discover true self-knowledge and achieve autonomy and
independence. The fact that these women are trapped in negative relationships in societies which limit them
through politics, medicine, commerce, religion, education, familial relationships and virtually every aspect
of society, is a worthy literary subject which can inform our understanding of womens experience within
the patriarchy. Authors like Trivio and Arajo enable women to reclaim the power of language by
foregrounding women's issues and experiences, thereby increasing the potential for rejection of patriarchal
expectations. They critique the recently established feminist bildungsroman conventions of spiritual and
intellectual journeys, self-realization and the recognition that the problem is social rather than individual
with plots that, too, depart from the standard. Rather than terminating with either of the usual choices of the
arrested or successful development of the protagonist, the plots remain open.
Las cuitas de Carlota also falls into the category of the Knstlerroman (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
a subgenre, initiated by Mrike's Maler Nolten, featuring an artist and his or her artistic and individual
development. Zola's L'uvre (1886) and Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947) also belong here. The novel details
the artistic development of Carlota as a painter.
The considerable influence of psychoanalysis on literature and culture in the early twentieth
century allows for the interpretation of development or Bildung, vis vis a psycho-sexual trajectory, and a
focus on the inscription of power upon the physical bodies of the protagonists. These novels present a
complex matrix of power relations that discursively and materially inscribe themselves on the body in an
institutional regime, a specific situation, and a historical context. Bodies become an inscribed surface of
events as interpreted through language, the locus of a dissociated self while creating a faade of unity, and
a volume in perpetual re/disintegration. A complex set of interrelated issues such as writing and the
continuous negotiation of post-colonial subjectivity; subversive bodily acts as the resistance to the
inscription of historical forces. (Foucault 38)

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Carlota is the obvious example of this phenomenon, going from sexual disaster in her marriage, and
wedding night rape yo no quera pero Esteban s y s y s, con todos los derechos, diablos, ya era legal y era
la norma y haba que abrir las piernas y levantarme el camisn de nylon Made in USA () me arda tanto
que me senta afiebrada y temblaba () cules seran los placeres de la carne?, que estafa. (15-16) to
disastrous affairs, none of which lead to a sexual freedom with the exception of an episode during her
recovery from a gunshot wound in a clinic in the Alps, episode which is undermined by the subsequent
recounting of yet another rape by one of her terrorist comrades. While the rape chronologically is anterior to
the clinic, the recounting inverts and subverts the order of what could otherwise be considered possible
liberation vis--vis the pursuit of sensual experience without love. The Freudian theory of psychosexual
development as repression and abuse continues to be deeply traumatic. In Las cuitas Carlotas mother
experiences similar events, each time that her husband returns from his many unfruitful business trips, she
becomes pregnant, only to be abandoned shortly after.
The physical body of the protagonists is symbolic of the texts themselves, which, as is common
among post-modern versions of the bildungsroman, are littered with allusions to the grand narratives of
famous precursors while radically disputing the possibility of wholeness or coherent subjectivity at the same
time. The narrator of Cuitas, often refers to her inability to comprehend the reality surrounding her and those
theorists, such as Kristeva, who attempt to interpret it, criticizing often the use of jargon, words which
cannot be understood but by a few select individuals (she refers as much to leftist, revolutionary ideology, as
to literary, feminist and sexual liberation texts.) The protagonists attempts to interpret and manipulate their
realities continuously focus on their relationships with the other characters in the novels. Following the
theories developed by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (1983) and Esther
Kleinbord Labovitz (1986), women's narratives of formation are defined as texts in which there is an
alternative development of the self, which may not be directed towards separation and autonomy but may be
conceived in terms of relationships, the rebellion against power relations, rather than in terms of pure and
utter individual achievement. These two novels focus on relationships of power in which they are
subjugated, these are relationships from which the protagonists cannot and do not wish to escape. In the case
of Carlota, the relationship is with her children and cousin and in the case of Clara with her siblings and
grandmother. The rebellion is against patriarchal authority and strictures, in the first novel, those which
require that women marry and be subservient in all aspects to her husband, even allowing physical abuse
para denunciar violencias conyugales se necesitaban un diagnstico mdico y dos testigos mayors de
edad con cdula de ciudadana. Habrase visto? Como la rabieta de Esteban sucedi cuando estbamos
solos, no tuve ms remedio que aguantar el magulle de los golpes y quedarme quietica. (110), and the
second case, in which it is not just patriarchal society in general, but rather the figure of the matriarch that
specifically upholds patriarchal standards as desirable.
Through its character representation and symbolism, both novels exemplify a variation of the
bildungsroman in its contemporary feminist state and offer an alternative to conventional notions of social
roles. They testify that a woman can successfully or unsuccessfully claim the right to be a self-determining
individual regardless of patriarchal constraints. They offer a model of resistance to women's oppression.
Through the contemporary western bildungsroman genre, these novels portray the self-development of a
female protagonist, while concurrently depicting the plight of women in a society plagued by the debilitating
forces of patriarchy and alternatives to that plight.
Some critics might interpret these novels from perspectives other than liberal feminist. Interpretation
is always at least in part subjective. Marxist feminists, for example, might convincingly argue that it is
Carlotas ultimate financial independence, which frees her, while radical feminists might just as
convincingly argue that it is her psychological (and oftentimes physical) separation from patriarchy, which
finally liberates her. Even some liberal feminists might dispute components of my theoretical standpoint.
Liberal feminists seek equality, focusing "their efforts on winning rights and equal opportunity for women
within the existing structures. . . . [Their] primary concern . . . is the fact that women have been excluded
from access to . . . power" (Adamson 174 - 75). Thus a few liberal feminists might argue that Carlotas lack
of effort to change institutions excludes her from their ranks. Although a positive point would be the novels
emphasis on the inadequacy of the legal system which enabled Carlotas husband, Esteban to maintain
control of Carlota and of her children, not just in spite of, but rather, because of their legal separation Acaso
que haba cambiado con la tal separacin? Segua siendo amo y seor. (113) Others might disagree with the
emphasis placed on Carlota's need to control her own body, made monstrous through descriptions of the
various medical treatments she undergoes, because these proponents, like their liberal forerunners, "do not
conceive one's body to be an essential part of oneself" (Jaggar 180). Carlota's pilgrimage however, is
individually focused: she moves toward and finally achieves self-realization through autonomy and
independence, or does she? The open-endedness of the novel calls this premise into question.

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Nonetheless, it is safe to say that those who control language can retard or advance the achievement
of the equality sought by feminists. Writers like Trivio and Arajo, then, can influence female destiny
through perception-changing literature to create what Frank Lentriccia calls a "collective will for change"
(Waxman 320). By changing perceptions, these authors encourage their readers to redistribute the control of
language, an essential task if self-awareness rather than biology is to determine destiny. The seemingly
simple act of telling their stories is subversive. By giving voice to the subaltern, the patriarchy is subverted,
whether or not the protagonist themselves benefit from the exercise is, in the final analysis, irrelevant. The
female protagonists destination is never as important as their journeys; their points of departure are their
identities in process, the on-going contestation of race, gender, class and territorial nationality in its social
contexts.
Obras Citadas
Adamson, Lynda G. Thematic guide to popular nonfiction. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006. Waxman,
Wayne. Kant and the empiricists: Understanding Understanding. Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Arajo, Helena. Las cuitas de Carlota. Barcelona: March Editor, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1992.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Nietzche, Genealogy, History. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women. The
Private Self: theory and practice of women's autobiographical writings. Ed. Shari Benstock.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1988.
Lima, Maria Helena. Decolonizing Genre: Jamaica Kincaid and the Bildungsroman. Genre 26 (winter
1993): 431-59.
Trivio, Consuelo. Prohibido salir a la calle. Bogota, Ministerio de la cultura / Planeta, 1998.

Immigrants path of hope. Diego Congrains

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