Centro Journal

ISSN: 1538-6279
centro-journal@hunter.cuny.edu
The City University of New York
Estados Unidos

Mueller, Rose Anna

Petra´s Kingdom: the cellar of the house on the lagoon
Centro Journal, vol. XIV, núm. 2, 2002, pp. 199-209
The City University of New York
New York, Estados Unidos

Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37711301010

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 CENTRO Journal
7
Volume xiv Number 2
fall 2002

Petra’s Kingdom:
The Cellar of The House
on the Lagoon

RoseAnna Mueller

ABSTRACT

In her first novel written in English, Puerto Rican writer

Rosario Ferré devotes two chapters to Petra Avilés,
a descendant of African slaves who plays an integral part
in the life of the Elite Puerto Rican family, who live in the
mansion on the Alemares Lagoon in San Juan. The house itself
is a character in the sprawling multigenerational novel,
in which Ferré plays out the saga of Puerto Rico through race,
gender, and national identity issues. Petra functions as the
matriarch and spiritual leader of the house. From the cellar,
through which a mysterious spring flows and where Elleguá
is worshipped, Petra functions as the spiritual heir to African
traditions, and she influences the fortunes and destinies of the
inhabitants of the house. [Key words: Latin American Women’s
writing, race/class/gender relations, Puerto Rican identity,
Black female protagonists, African religions, Women’s rights]

[ 199 ]
Rosario Ferré’s first novel written in English deals with the living, breathing, and
contentious aspect of Puerto Rican history and national identity.1 The fact that the
novel was first written in English and then translated into Spanish was a
groundmaking move on the author’s part, and caused an uproar in the Puerto Rican
literary community.2 The description on the cover of the paperback edition of
The House on the Lagoon (1996) compares her work with Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the broad dynastic theme of both works invites
comparison. Ferré’s novel is an autobiographical family saga of epic proportions,
a grand chronicle of Puerto Rico told through several voices. In The House on the
Lagoon, the magical realism readers have come to expect in contemporary Latin
American fiction emanates from the presence of African gods and goddesses.
This happens because the servants, who live in the lower level of the mansion, continue
to worship their ancestral deities. The real matriarch and spiritual leader of the house is
Petra Avilés, the black servant/confidant who can truly be considered the mistress of
the underground regions of the house through which a mysterious spring flows.
While some critics claim that feminist writing emerged in Latin America in the
‘70s, and that it was a middle class movement which opened the space for women’s
writing, there were women’s movements in Latin America prior to this time.
These movements helped to forge an alliance of middle class women with their
subalterns, and gave both classes the opportunity to tell their side of what Freud
termed the “family romance,” and it exposed the entrenched role of patriarchy and
nationalism in all facets of society (Franco, xxi). Rosario Ferré’s novel represents a
major contribution in the retelling of the family romance (perhaps the “national
romance” as well), continuing to enlarge a tradition of women’s voices and concerns.
She is one of the first Puerto Rican writers to integrate her art into a collective
Hispanic American culture and break away from literary insularity. The House on the
Lagoon continues the author’s mission to explore Puerto Rican’s women’s role in a
patriarchal society, and Puerto Rico’s own role as a colonial society, thus combining
feminist concerns with Puerto Rican social and cultural problems (Erro-Perarlta, 57).
This novel makes clear how articulations of gender and subjectivity in societies
formed by conquest and colonization play out in family life.
Through the alternating entries of husband and wife protagonists Quintín
Mendízabel and Isabel Monfort, The House on the Lagoon addresses issues of gender
and family, the interface between public, private, and political spaces, and the racial
differences inherent when white elites share a space with the people of color who run
their household. The text disrupts expectations of harmony or normality, which the
Puerto Rican elite wish to project. The essence of the manuscript Isabel
surreptitiously writes begs the following questions: Whose voice are we to believe?
Whose text is privileged? Whose opinion is to be valued? The husband-and-wife-
embedded narrative questions the role of history and the role of art, at once bringing
to the fore religious, colonial, national, and feminist issues and the roles they played
and continue to play in the modernization of Puerto Rico.3
As Isabel struggles for interpretive power in her effort to record her family and her
husband’s family history, her very right to write is questioned by her spouse, a right
which will be later defended by Petra, who will eventually inspire Isabel to break free
of the Mendízabel family secrets and finish the manuscript that will bear the name
The House on the Lagoon. The completion of this manuscript represents Isabel’s desire
to link the past with the present, and to connect the family’s ancestors with its
current descendants. Ironically, this is what Petra achieves on a daily basis, and she

[ 200 ]
achieves it almost effortlessly because communicating with spirits and ancestors
is part and parcel of Petra’s own religious practices. While Petra does not write the
novel, Isabel could never have finished the novel without her. Petra realizes that she
eventually has to switch alliances. Her loyalty to Quintín has to come to an end
as she encourages Isabel to complete the novel.
In Ferré’s previous stories, women of different social classes are often allied
in a muted and underground rebellion against a system that separated good women
from bad, white from black, pure from impure, but which exploited all of them in
different ways. White women were dependent on black and indigenous servants,
guardians of sacred and healing arts, who were at the heart of the home (Franco, xiv).
Petra Avilés, the African housekeeper descended from warrior chieftains and keeper
of secrets of the house on the Alamares Lagoon, lives in the subterranean level of the
house and acts as its guardian. The black and mulatto underclass lives underground,
close to the spring, in a shadowy mysterious world where Elleguá is worshipped. The
masters of the house descend to seek youth, cures, and in Isabel’s case, to get at the
truth: the cause of one family member’s suicide and the bankruptcy of the family
business. When Isabel voices her suspicions about the two events, Petra sits silent
and Sphinx-like, neither admitting nor denying anything: “There are secrets in the
Mendízabel family you know nothing about, my child. But I’m not the one to tell
you about them” (292).
The novel is prefaced by two quotations. And, as in Isabel Allende’s The House of
the Spirits, Ferré includes a family tree to help the reader sort out the characters.
Ferré’s first quote from The Odyssey, Book XI, “Any shade to whom you give access to
the blood will hold rational speech with you, while those whom you reject will leave
you and retire,” is followed by a quote from José Eustacio Rivera’s The Vortex: “Before
I ever loved a woman I wagered my heart on chance and violence won it over.”—
Homer’s quotation is related to Isabel’s opening line about the importance of
knowing one’s husband’s family history. Through her writing Isabel tries to make
sense of tangled relationships and its impact on her marriage. In effect, she is
attempting to contact the shades, asking for explanations for the past and
predictions for the future. In Book XI of The Odyssey, Odysseus communicates with
the shades in Hades, who, attracted by his blood-sacrifice, greedily drink the fresh
blood and eagerly ask him news of the living. But first, Odysseus has had to hold
these souls off because he wanted to hear Tiresias’ prophecy. After having listened
to the blind seer, Odysseus notices that his mother’s ghost has not noticed nor
spoken to him. Odysseus asks Tiresias how he can make Anticlea “come to know
my presence? To this he replies: ‘I shall make it clear in a few words and simply.
Any dead man whom you allow to enter where the blood is will speak to you, and
speak the truth: but those deprived will grow remote again and fade” (11.161-67).
Does Ferré choose this quote from Homer because she wants to point out that
communication with the dead requires acts of great sacrifice? That in Western
tradition, shades must drink living blood in order to communicate? In the Afro-
centric underworld, the subterranean cellar where Elleguá protects the descendants
of African slaves, communication with the ancestors is more easily accomplished
through the conch-shell sacred to the African god, the natural instrument that makes
contact with ancestors a daily and painless phenomenon.
Ferré’s story begins with the betrothal of Isabel and Quintín in Ponce and flashes
back to patriarch Buenaventura’s construction of the house on the Alamares Lagoon,
near a spring whose caretaker died from a mysterious blow to the head. This house

[ 201 ]
becomes the headquarters for Buenaventura’s illegal luxury food import business.
Buenaventura is aptly named, since his name in Spanish means “good fortune.”
It is this house that will later be expanded into a mansion, an art nouveau structure
in which the history of Puerto Rico will be reenacted, reconstructed, and retold in
microcosm through two distinctive voices, one male, one female.
This multigenerational novel traces the two main branches of the marriage,
Corsican and Spanish, and is written in alternating chapters. The heart of the novel
is written by Isabel Monfort, the rebellious wife of the wealthy importer and amateur
historian Quintín Mendízabel. Isabel begins to write the history of her own and her
husband’s families. When Quintín discovers his wife’s manuscript, he begins to
correct it, adding marginalia. Isabel explains how the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie all
descended from one family, how all families on the island were related in one way
or another, and how the grandmother was usually the keeper of the family tree.
Isabel’s grandmother, however, was a feminist and social crusader at a time when
men had money, power, and ruled absolutely. This value system was created and
upheld through unwritten colonial codes. In Puerto Rico Spanish colonialism ended
in 1898, only to have the United States start a new kind of colonialism. After the
island became a Commonwealth, the dispossessed rural population left the
hinterland to seek work in San Juan, New York, and throughout the United States,
while the children of the elite were expected to attend Ivy League colleges and return
to the island, where they became civic, cultural, and economic leaders. The plot of
Ferré’s novel is structured around elements of submissiveness, rebelliousness,
and women’s and the lower classes’ social impotence, which can only be alleviated
through ingenuity and perseverance in the face of hegemonic social institutions.4
At the heart of the house, and operating from her “site of power” in the underground
kitchen, is Petra Avilés, the black woman who uses her powers to effect changes that
have consequences for those living above.
The opening quotes of the novel shows the conflict between opening the channel
of communications with ancestors through rational speech, which in effect is Isabel’s
mission, and rejecting the past and its truths, thus foreshadowing the violence
(referenced in the quote from The Vortex) that will consume the family. While the
Puerto Rican protagonists must struggle and spill blood to communicate with their
ancestors, the descendants of the African slaves commune with their ancestors on
a daily basis, treating it as an ordinary activity.
Independista grandmother Rebecca was content and didn’t even notice when
Buenaventura brought Petra Avilés to work for them at the house. Brambón, Petra’s
husband, moved in with them, too, and the couple installed themselves in the cellar.
Petra worked as cook and Branbón became Buenaventura’s chauffeur. During one of
her descents to the cellar, Rebecca discovers that Petra and Branbón had been living
in sin for six years, and forces them to marry. Petra and Branbón go along with the
marriage and the festivities, “but the next morning they secretly went back to the
civil court and asked the judge to divorce them. They had been married a long time
ago, in a voodoo ceremony in Guayama, and were afraid the legal marriage might put
a hex on them” (120). Petra functions as a confident, self-assured, and fully realized
character in touch with her roots and her heritage, while Rebecca and Isabel must
struggle with gender roles in their marriages, their religion, and their connections
to their families.
We learn that Petra’s grandfather was an Angolan chief named Ndongo
Kumbundu. Portuguese traders took him prisoner, and he was shipped first to St.

[ 202 ]
Thomas, and eventually sold to a sugarcane hacienda owner in Guayama, where he
was renamed Bernabé Avilés. Petra herself was “six feet tall and her skin wasn’t
a watered-down chocolate but a deep onyx black... she was born in 1889 in Guayama,
a town famous for its sorcerers and medicine men, and her parents had been slaves.
As slavery was abolished in 1873, she was born free.” (58) Bernabé’s transition to
Puerto Rican hacienda life was a difficult one. Having prayed to Yemayá, Ogún, and
Elegguá, whose spirits he conjured for his healings, he had now been baptized and
was forbidden to speak Bantu.
Petra became Buenaventura’s personal servant. In the cellar she built an altar to
her favorite saint, Elleguá, known on the island as “He who is more than God.”
Petra propitiated this god with cigars (to please the man-god), a red ball (to please
the child-god), and a conch shell (to communicate with the ancestors who conveyed
their medicinal wisdom to her). In addition to performing all the household chores,
Petra also served as Rebecca’s midwife, praying to Olorún. After eleven years of
childlessness, and with Petra’s arrival, the dynasty begins.
The rebellious and artistic Rebecca becomes “pregnant again and surprisingly
submissive,” thanks to the effective brews Petra gives her to drink (68). Petra’s brews
are designed to bring those changes in Rebecca that will make Buenaventura happy,
and “Rebecca bore her frequent pregnancies patiently, seemingly reconciled to her
fate. But she was exhausted. She put away her dancing shoes and her poetry books
and slowly faded from view” (69).
From the moment she arrived at the house, Petra had wielded an inexplicable
power over Buenaventura. Being a Spaniard, he found African voodoo rites exotic.
He loved to hear Petra talk about embrujos, and Quintín himself joked about her
hocus-pocus with his friends at the San Juan Sports Club. But somehow those
embrujos had an effect on Buenaventura. Rebecca sensed this, and she tried to get rid
of Petra, but it was useless: “Petra had entrenched herself like a monstrous spider,
and from there spun a web of malicious rumor which eventually enveloped the whole
family” (75). Granted that Petra is composed of a number of stereotypical black
servant traits (e.g., her loyalty and devotion to her master), but Ferré manages to give
the stereotype a different reading and values the stereotypical characteristics in
a positive manner. She does not question the stereotype, nor does she shed negative
light on it. This is in keeping with her program and gives weight to certain aspects
of Puerto Rican social life: “Reconstruir él mundo de sus antepasados es tarea que
atrae a la escritora puertorriqueña, no sólo porque se encuentran en él las raíces del
presente, sino también porque cree que, a pesar de sus injusticias, ese mundo
desaparecido contenía valores que merecen rescatarse” (Chang-Rodríquez, 538).
Petra’s loyalty eventually shifts. Much later, when Quintín realizes that Petra and
Isabel are allies in the production of the manuscript, he threatens to find the novel
or kill his wife if she publishes it. Isabel moves to Florida, and a year later finishes her
work. “I know publishing it would have dire results, but a tale, like life itself, isn’t
finished until it is heard by someone with an understanding heart” (280). While the
understanding heart is the reader, the audience, all of us who are invited to share
in Isabel’s life narrative, it is clear that the first understanding heart is Petra’s.
Since domestic space is crucial in this novel, food and cleanliness serve as a
shorthand for some characters. Petra’s down-home kitchen lacks cleanliness, but
exudes warmth and vivacity. In her journal, Isabel contrasts her mother Madeline’s
kitchen with Petra’s: “In Madeline’s kitchen there was an electric stove and one could
eat off the floor...but the food had no taste at all. In Petra’s kitchen on the other

[ 203 ]
hand, there was a coal stove with burning cow dung, and cockroaches dove merrily
into the stew, but everything tasted like a pio nono, like a bishop’s fancy blessed with
a fresh sprig of basil” (93).
Although Petra is introduced to the family at a time when her mistress scarcely
notices her arrival, the black woman’s influence is crucial and pervasive. Petra’s first
task is to care for Buenaventura and prepare the hearty and greasy food of
Extremadura that he loved: ham shank, rice with sausage, and pig’s feet stewed with
chickpeas. After these filling meals, Buenaventura and Isabel drive through mangrove
swamps, arriving at Lucumí Beach, where several black women wait on the shore:
“Tall and strong, with onyx-black skin, they bore a striking resemblance to Petra...”
(212). During Isabel’s last foray to Lucumí, she discovers the Mendízabel Elementary
School, home to black children with Buenaventura’s gray-blue eyes. After being
pressed, “... Quintín confessed that his father sometimes liked taking the black
women of Lucumí to the beach, where he made love to them on the sand for a few
dollars” (213). Thus Isabel discovers that there is another branch in the Mendízabel
family tree, whose matriarch, in effect, is Petra.
After Buenaventura’s death, Rebecca is determined to remain youthful and enlists
Petra’s help. Petra was older than Rebecca, but she has aged gracefully, and Rebecca
wants to know her secret. “Ask your husband,” Petra replies, “It was Ponce de León,
a Spanish Conquistador like Buenaventura, who went to Florida looking for the
Fountain of Youth. We Africans never grow old” (215). Nevertheless, Petra enlists her
nieces to help Rebecca in her quest for youth and beauty, and every day a boat arrived
from Morass Lagoon with one of Petra’s female relatives on board. The boat
anchored at the small dock under the terrace, and the new servants would join the
others in the cellar. Petra had taught them their new jobs: one was to be Rebecca’s
masseuse; another would do her hair and nails; a third would see to her clothes.
In effect, and without meaning to, Petra, as the spiritual heir to the healing
traditions, helps to keep her masters youthful, healthy, and prosperous. Whereas her
prior ministrations were intended for Buenaventura, her services now extend to
preserving Rebecca’s health and beauty.
Chapter 23 of the novel, “Petra’s Kingdom,” reveals the power of the house—
in effect, a character in the novel—and its power to mesmerize Isabel. Things at the
house on the lagoon were often misleading, notes the narrator, but especially
mysterious is the terrace, a common room used by the servants, with its dirt floor
that juts out into the mangrove swamp. Seated on her wicker peacock throne,
wearing her bright clothes and beads and bracelets, Petra holds forth as the servants
come to complain or ask for advice. It is Petra who maintains order in the house,
and the servants consider her authority to be higher than Rebecca’s. A tunnel leads
to cells below, where two dozen servants, all related to Petra, live. A crab cage
provides crabs, considered “black people’s food” for the black inhabitants and an
aphrodisiac for the white inhabitants. Petra’s room at the end of the tunnel was
special: “The walls of her room were lined with bottles and jars filled with strange
potions and herbal unguents. She always knew what remedy to prescribe for each
ailment: orange leaf tea for nervous disorders, rue for menstrual pains, aloe for insect
bites, witch hazel for ear inflammations of sties” (238). Petra also prepared a special
bath perfumed with bay leaves for Buenaventura, and “once every three months she
boiled all kinds of roots which she said had magical powers and poured the liquid
into the grotto’s blue basin before he stepped into it. Buenaventura was convinced
Petra’s baths helped him do good business...” (238).

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 After the reversal of his business ventures, Buenaventura becomes ill, and Petra
cares for him by applying cow-udder unguent and magic snake oil and placing
Elleguá’s effigy near him. In his dying hours he confesses to Petra his sin of having
built his house over a public spring and begs her to ask God’s forgiveness. Rebecca,
however, forbids Petra to attend Buenaventura’s funeral so “she sat praying in the
cellar in her high-backed wicker chair, making sure that Buenaventura’s soul had
arrived safely in the Underworld, following the route of the spring to its source”(259).
While the Catholic Puerto Rican elites believe in the Christian concept of “ashes to
ashes and dust to dust,” Petra’s African beliefs link the spirit to water. Denying the
public its water was only one of Buenaventura’s crimes. He had, in addition, based his
business on smuggling, sold state secrets, and fathered numerous children out of
wedlock by black women.
Chapter 39 of The House on the Lagoon is called “Petra’s Threat.” It marks her
fiftieth year at the house. Petra wants to know if Quintín has disinherited his
illegitimate son Willie (whose mother is Petra’s granddaughter) and left his money to
a foundation. Quintín threatens to deny his paternity in court, and Petra prophecies,
“Go ahead and disinherit Willie, then, Petra said defiantly. But I swear to you by
Elleguá—he who is more than God—that one day you’ll be sorry!” (372).
When Quintín discovers that Petra has become Isabel’s ally, he tries to get rid of
the faithful and powerful family servant, convinced that Petra has Isabel under her
spell, and that Petra is the driving force behind Isabel’s novel. Quintín concludes,
“The three new chapters in the manuscript were all the result of Petra’s sorcery”(293).
He becomes obsessed with the novel, believing it is focused on him: “And behind
Isabel’s lens he felt Petra’s malevolent eye following his every step, listening to his
every word. As he read on, Quintín began to worry that he was in some kind of
danger. But it was all so absurd! What could Petra do to him?”(294).
Latin American women’s writing challenges gender and society as fixed categories.
Feminist criticism regards race, gender, and class as ideological or socially constructed.
Some works are parodies of socially accepted behaviors. While some show the
collaboration between rich or upper-class women and poor lower-class women, others
question the systems we use to compose and interpret reality, juxtaposing traditional
and revisionist views of history. These protagonists question the cherished myths of
motherhood, marriage, the family, the objectification of women, and the virtual
silence of their role in history. They rise to the challenge of using accepted literary and
new conventions to tell the story of oppressed groups. Latin American women writers
have revised genres, debunked essentialist notions of class, gender, and race, and
violated linear narrativity in allowing their subjects to create an alternative discourse,
one that questions agency and identity and seeks to reinterpret history. In reviewing
the reasons women write, Ferré posits that Emily Bronte wrote to show the
revolutionary aspect of passion; Virginia Woolf, in order to excorcise her terror against
madness and death; Joan Didion, to describe what she thinks and how she thinks; and
Clarisse Lispector, to love and be loved. “En mi caso, escribir es una voluntad a la vez
constructiva y desctructiva; una posibilidad de crecimiento y de cambio. Escribo para
edificarme palabra a palabra; para disipar mi terror a la inexistencia, como rostro
humano que habla” (Ferré quoted in González, 137).
In her preface to Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré reminisces about her native island:
“This mythical place in the country we always dream about never existed except for
a privileged few, the landed aristocracy of the nineteenth century whose praises were
sung by our poets and musicians” (viii). In The House on the Lagoon Ferré sings the

[ 205 ]
praises of the mythical places of the heart and hearth, the altars to the African gods
and goddesses fed and nourished by its contemporary priestesses. While in the past
a country’s history may have been told in a linear, rational fashion, women’s gift to
the telling of the “national romance” is a subjective, empathetic voice, telling the
story from within, speaking from the heart, and incorporating personal experience.5
In comparing writing to cooking, Ferré extends the conceit and shows how writing
is a way “de como salvar algunas cosas en medio del fuego,” and states, “Es ineludable
que mi visión del mundo tenga mucho que ver con la desigualidad que sufre todavía
la mujer en nuestra edad moderna” (González, 145).
Isabel Allende sums it up: Until very recently, Latin American literature was—with
very few exceptions—a man’s game. The world was run by men and written about by
men, who, consequently, wrote us, our role, and our place in their world. The result
was a crude patriarchal myth reinforced by separation, mutual ignorance, and
machismo. Only recently have women stormed the literary bastions en masse and
seized the right to write themselves, to define themselves. Women’s writing in Latin
America is characterized by a subversive kind of happiness. You have to read between
the lines, passing beyond the rage, the weariness, and frustration. It comes from
a newfound power of expression and the sheer joy of exercising it to denounce
ancient injustices and to clamor for changes (Allende quoted in Zapata, 5-6).
Ferré is carrying on the important work of chronicling the American experience,
its history, and its social structure, which has not been part of American (read U.S.)
general knowledge, and the ongoing concern of interpreting the Americas (and not
just the U.S. or, in this case, one of its territories) and its inhabitants by
understanding the different races and their cultures, maintaining the tension
between cosmopolitanism and indigenism, universalism and regionalism.
These issues are exacerbated in Puerto Rico because, unlike most colonies that
gained their independence and became republics in the 1820s, Puerto Rico belonged
to Spain until the Spanish American War. In their effort to affirm their nationalism,
the new American republics exaggerated their uniqueness through literature, but this
was not the case with Puerto Rico. Coral, one of the mixed-race characters in
The House on the Lagoon, sums up, states it succinctly: “Just think, we’re a country that
in five hundred years of existence has never been its own self ” (241). In fact, after the
Spanish American War, Puerto Rico had military rule for two years, which was
followed later by a series of U.S.-appointed governors, before becoming an
“Estado Libre Asociado” in 1952.
In devoting two chapters to Petra and allowing her to play a major role in this
sprawling family saga, Ferré acknowledges the important role a black woman servant
played in the history of one patrician family, whose destiny and blood merged with
the descendants of the black slaves brought to the island and forced to adapt.
While they were prohibited the use of their language and the practice of their
religion, their deep beliefs lived on, carried on through strong women like Petra,
who kept the old traditions and mysteries alive. Although Petra possesses
stereotypical black servant traits, Ferré gives this stereotype a different reading,
forcing us to look at and appreciate the positive values in Petra’s character.
There are several key protagonists in this novel. The house itself is a character
whose physical remodeling reflects the values and aspirations of its three
generations. The house is dynamic, and its cycles of construction, destruction,
and eventual blaze reflect family history. The reader glimpses the lot of the working-
class inhabitants who labor to make life pleasant for the moneyed owners who, at

[ 206 ]
odds with themselves and each other, seek out the secrets that will make them
healthy, wealthy, and connected to their past. The key to these secrets is Petra, who
participates in the discourse of the house and its inhabitants. It is Petra who helps
to birth, nurture, and heal its owners. Petra’s potions and spells are crucial to the
family’s well-being.
Petra also acts as midwife to the novel that Isabel writes against her husband’s
wishes, entering into a conspiracy with Isabel and providing her with her first reader,
the “understanding heart that needs to hear the tale.” Petra ultimately is the force
that allows the family history to be made public, and her power emanates from her
kingdom, the cellar of the house on the lagoon. She is a mythic figure of strength
and proves to be the shaping force whose powers remain enshrouded in the
mysterious rites of her African religion. As the spiritual heir to these traditions, she
rules the sacred subterranean spaces, the “spirit” of the house, whose physical demise
echoes the downfall of the family. Nothing prepares the reader with the violent
ending of the novel. The opening quotations prove prophetic: violence overtakes the
family, and blood-sacrifice must be offered in Isabel’s attempt to communicate with
the past. Through it all, Petra’s wisdom, her self-confidence, her moral values, and
her healing powers have guided the family. There is the assurance that her own blood
will live on through her great-grandson, the mulatto Willie.

()

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NOTES

1 Ferré’s first novel, Maldito amor (1986,) deals with the unresolved historical status of
the island in which women occupy a central role. This novel was self-translated into
English as Sweet Diamond Dust, and established Ferré as a bilingual writer. Ferré has said
that she translates her work into English so that it will reach her compatriots—who left
the island in the 1940s—to raise their consciousness and to educate them about the
political situation in Puerto Rico. At an appearance at Mary Washington College, she also
admitted that writing The House on the Lagoon in English was a “Machiavellian decision”:
“If I write in Spanish, no one would ever pay attention to the book outside of Puerto
Rico, maybe, Mexico. This way, I reach a larger audience, I sell more books” (Barak, 38).
2 For a lucid insight, see Amílcar Antonio Barreto, “Speaking English in Puerto Rico:
The Impact of Affluence, Education and Return Migration,” CENTRO: Journal of the
Center for Puerto Rican Studies, XII(2000): 5-17. This article sheds light on the connection
between cultural identity and language in Puerto Rico, issues of cultural and lingustic
resistance, and the development of a distinctive Puerto Rican cultural identity while the
island was being governed by Madrid’s legates.
3 Ferré herself is a bourgeois member of the class that descended from the landed
criollo aristocracy. Ferré mingled with the literary elite in Mexico City and published some
of her works, including poems, novels, essays, short stories, all written from a feminist
perspective, and all dealing with the lot of women living in Puerto Rico. From 1970-1974
she was editor of Zona de carga y descarga, a literary magazine that introduced inquiry into
the study of literature in the Spanish-speaking world. Although her work has been
described as baroque, portentous, savvy, and erudite, none of these descriptions fit The
House on the Lagoon, her first novel written in English.
4 Ilan Stavans calls Rosario Ferré the perfect embodiment of the Janus-like identity of
Puerto Rican literature today, an identity impossibly loyal to two fatherlands. Her literary
bilingualism can be read as emblematic of her island’s disjointed soul, and she has two
audiences, who have a different set of expectations and tastes. Until the ‘90s Ferré had a
Spanish audience. According to Stavans, her strategy is changing: “Her artistic breadth,
emotional ardor and intellectual appetite are direct descendants of the boom generation in
Latin America. In this novel, her prose is unadorned, there are early forms of realism,
echoes of Cortázar, but also of Balzac and Zola. This novel does evoke other family epics—
multigenerational adventures. In an attempt to reach a different audience, she simplifies the
complicated history. The distortions we get are the result of the multiple viewpoints” (641).
5 These are the themes of Papeles de Pandora (1976), Ferré’s first book of stories, which made a
great impact in Puerto Rico for its aggressive denunciation of the lifestyles of the upper classes,
for its irreverent language, and for its posture of militant feminism (Ramón Luís Acevedo in
Flores, 315). Acevedo continues, “The violation of middle-class mores characterizes Ferré’s
narrative work. This violation, which has autobiographical roots and is accomplished from within
her class, is manifested as a denunciation of the dominant stratum of the country, a dependent
bourgeoisie, motivated by lust for gain and the obsessive display of their privileges, as indifferent
and insensible to the misery and pain of their subordinates as they are dependent on the
economic and political power of North America. The hypocrisy of that class, their racist, sexist,
and class-ridden prejudices, and the occult oppression behind their facade of respectability and
culture emerge from Pandora’s box in her stories. Within this predominantly masculine world,
women, in spite of their enjoyment of wealth and access to education, occupy a subordinate
place. They become the “doll-women” of the domestic sphere, obliterating their personalities in
the restrictions of social codes; the negation of their human identity and autonomy implies
suppression or trivialization of their sexuality. Ferré’s women passively internalize their role,
dreaming of obscure means of vengeance or rebelling with tragic consequences” (Flores, 316).

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