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Abstract
Ángeles
Mastretta and Anne Enright:
Querying Masculine Histories
Coughlan,
Patricia
(University College Cork)
This
paper compares Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida
(1985) and Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
(2002). Both these successful women novelists write within a
tradition dominated by male figures political and literary
and devoted to strong national imperatives. Both focus on a
female protagonist placed – as consort of a violent,
dictatorial leader – at the heart of a significant and
tumultuous history. In Mastretta’s case, this is the
decades-long Mexican Revolution, and in Enright’s the
devastating War of the Three Kingdoms in 1860s Paraguay.
Others have discussed these writers’ framing of the
ethical problems of women’s agency and complicity with
violence. Instead this paper proposes a shared feminist aim:
to reveal and challenge hegemonic masculinity in Irish and
Mexican national literatures. Men's narrations of the
sacrosanct topic of the Mexican Revolution have been
dominant: Mastretta's female-centred fiction was adversely
received in some quarters, and her novel repudiated as
non-serious (citing its narrative imagery of popular songs,
film icons, clothes, and its exploration of emotional
experience). By the Paraguayan setting Enright gives a
quasi-allegorical distance to her nevertheless sharp
interrogation of equally masculinist Irish histories, with
their focus on rebellion, bloody sacrifice, and sacred
nationalist traditions.
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