Satirizing The Canons: Cecile Pineda's Love Queen Of The Amazon

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Jim Beggs ENGL 773 - Dr. Jiron-King The Love Queen of the Amazon: Satirizing the Canons

The Love Queen of the Amazon has a number of literary influences. Cecile Pineda’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography included a list of her diverse reading sources: “Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Isaak Babel, Kobo Abe, Eduardo Galeano, and J. M. Coetzee“ (205). However, Pineda herself noted that she was often not conscious of what really influenced her work (“Deracinated” 67). Francisco A. Lomeli further pointed out several ways in which Pineda’s novel directly parodied aspects of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Pineda clearly satirized the magical realist devices of chicano literature. In other ways, her work satirized her Anglo precedents in women’s literature, particularly the nascent English women’s literature that arose in the United States and England during the nineteenth century. Pineda set The Love Queen of the Amazon in early twentieth-century Peru, a nation that has absorbed the capitalist and colonial ideologies that kept it subservient. Marxism and Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class provide important concepts for the analysis of Pineda’s novel. Fancisco Lomeli pointed out that Pineda’s background was somewhat unusual for a chicana writer, having been born in Harlem and having her Hispanic heritage hidden from her for most of her life. Her satires of the chicano canon and the Anglo canon sought to establish her credibility in both and to bridge the gaps between the two. The clearest literary antecedent for Pineda’s novel is Jane Austen’s Northanger

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Abbey. Jane Austen’s Gothic satire played with the conventions of the Gothic genre, but also dealt with the themes that would interest her in later novels. The articulation of a “victim feminism” granted authority to Austen’s authorial voice--conditionally praised in literary reviews (Hoeveler 126). Pineda accomplished something similar, but she arose from a different context. The masculine American latino tradition influenced her magical realism, and she imagined ultra-traditional areas where women could exercise power. Ana was educated in a religious school, a matriarchal space. The early story of in a religious school alluded to Anna Murphy’s experience with the Saint Famille in Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices. In both novels, the discipline of the school domesticates the girls for a time, until the time hits when they can more freely express themselves. The purpose of the discipline was to produce docile female bodies, as Foucault might say (182). In O’Brien’s novel, it was the annual “Chaplain’s Concert” when the girls could barely contain their laughter as a priest belted the same song out of tune year after year. In Love Queen of the Amazon, the trip to the river allowed the girls to engage in horseplay, sexual self-gratification, and also exhibit their bodies to the boys across the river. Despite the coercion of discipline, girls and boys always seem find ways to express themselves. Later Ana exercises considerable authority in the running of the brothel, a woman-centered space. The two places usually oppose each other in moral terms, but the brothel is the more pleasurable place in the novel, particularly for the men who could smoke, drink and talk as it pleased them. Pineda also wanted to play with the theological concepts of the Madonna and the whore. Pineda collapsed the two archetypes in the character of Ana. “You’re still the queen of whores,“ Sergio Ballado told her. He mixed the idea of the “queen of heaven”

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and the whore. The arc of Ana’s story followed her from the convent to the brothel, and gave Ana the name of Magdalena, a somewhat controversial figure in Christian scripture. Some have considered her a prostitute, others a sinner that amended her ways in order to be faithful to Jesus Christ, and the more controversial possibility that she might have been the wife of Christ, a tradition carried on in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Like their experience with the biblical figure, readers have to continuously ask themselves what kind of woman Ana Magdalena was. Was she a whore for pursuing her girlhood fantasy of being with Sergio Ballado and consummating the fantasy on her wedding night? Some people, such as her father Hercules probably saw her that way. His judgment would be funny considering he is the compulsive heterosexual par excellence. Early on, Pineda established an antagonism between the culture of the indios, the indigenous people of South America, and the Anglo culture that the majority of people aspired to. As Ana prepared to leave for her friend’s wedding, her maid suggested that she place her clothes in a “hamper” or basket that the poorer indios used in order to carry items. The family could not afford proper luggage, so Ana’s means for carrying her clothes became a marker of her class. Marx pointed to the industrialization of England as the force that transformed the English economy from a feudal one where tradesmen specialized in small-scale production to the society regimented along the bourgeois and proletariat class distinctions. Ana Magdalena’s family attempted to maintain the illusion that they had the leisure time for pleasure. Embroidery was Andreina’s means of financially supporting her family, which otherwise should be a leisurely pursuit for a woman of her social station. Upon Ana’s return home to Malyerba from the convent, she had to dress herself like a servant in order to guard her mother from the gossip of the

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neighbors. The Figueroa retain a servant although she had not been properly paid in quite a while. The ability to conspicuously consume played an important role in maintaining social rank. To sell one’s labor to the bourgeois was the mark of a proletariat, so Andreina lied when she went to sell her embroidery work: “she pretended that it was Berta, her Indian servant, whose skill at embroidery had been acquired from the good missionary sisters, who was embroidering the monograms in her spare time” (24). Labor was acceptable to a lower ranked Indian such as Berta, but not to someone like Andreina putting on bourgeois airs. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class provided economic analysis to help make sense of the class stratification within The Love Queen of the Amazon. For Veblen, societies developed distinctions between desirable and menial labor first along gender lines. Men engaged in the “predatory” professions such as warfare, sports, religion, and government. Productive labor was “irksome,” so the man’s labor, which usually accumulated through force and aggression, was the more desirable method for the accumulation of wealth. The economic traits emerged early in each civilization’s “barbarian” stage before they became “civilized” (18) As ownership became a more accepted concept, cultural processes ossified the divisions of labor between men and women and ultimately the different labor classes. An important aspect of the Victorian nature of Pineda’s novel was the importance of manners and decorum as the labor of the leisure class. There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the cermonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can

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dissociate an offense against etiquette from a sense of the substantial unworthiness of the offender. (Veblen 48) As with the type of labor undertaken, the breach of etiquette, which the leisure class labors--takes the time and effort--to observe, maintain, and promulgate, became a quantitative measure of the individual’s worth. MacMillan first published Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, at the end of the century that in reference to the United Kingdom and the United States would be referred to as the Victorian era. The United States economy industrialized, the middle class grew, more people became literate, and women began the campaigns for their equal political enfranchisement. The time of discursive upheaval and advances in publication technology led to an increase in the publication of books and explosion in the publication of periodicals. An entire subset of periodicals and books dealt with conduct and manners explicitly. They addressed questions such as: “how should a woman act?” To have the time and energy to either investigate or discourse upon such lofty matters gave readers the anointing of the leisure class. Women’s poetry in the nineteenth century addressed similar concerns, such as the nature of the woman and how a mother should act. The poems required the following of certain stylistic markers that made the poems sentimental and genteel. Poets such as Sarah Piatt played with the markers and left me with the impresion that in some ways she was conventional in her thematic and others she was not. Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers sought to extol the virtues and pleasures of motherhood and also instruct women on how best to be a mother. Hence the importance of manners to Veblen’s economics and Pineda’s narrative. The specialized education of women in the novel illustrated the principles of Veblen’s division of labor

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between men and women. The savagery of the social and economic system forces the Figueroas to search for other economic means of survival. Ana’s education with the sisters pays off for the first time. The education specifically focused on “the feminine arts: music, dancing, embroidery, watercolor, sewing, lace making, washing, sweeping, and keeping accounts-in sum all the qualities that make a woman a woman. And not a man” (5). Despite the popular view of men as the “bread winner” women were expected to keep accounts and somehow manage the household finances and check their spendthrift husbands--a constant complaint of Andreina’s. In order to have the girls engage in unpleasant labor and also induce some thriftiness in them, they had the girls produce soap at the school. Ana tried to start soap production within the home in order to support the family. They make an admirable effort at it, but it comes with a number of problems for themselves and their surrounding community. The smell of melting suet produced some curiosity among the residents of the neighborhood who sent their servants to investigate what was happening at the Figueroa house. The inhaling of suet gave Andreina a headache--this was work that was even dangerous to her health, so certainly undesirable to the leisure class. After all the grueling work was done and Berta attempted to sell the soap, they failed to get rid of a single bar. The real solution for a woman’s financial security in the novel was to marry a man with money. This became the only viable option for Ana’s expelled classmate Aurora. She teaches the inevitability of the situation to Ana and treated it mostly as a social formality. The husband would provide her with pin money, hardly ever make an appearance at home, and she could pursue whatever she liked in her spare time. Aurora’s

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arrangement with her husband seemed to work out to her pleasure, but such marriages had the potential to go very wrong, as the examples of Andreina and Ana’s marriage showed. Matches between single men and women happened in a very specific way, and soon the vindictive matchmaker Doña Eduviges made her appearance in the Figueroa household. The economic marketplace relies on violence and domination to work properly, according to Veblen, and the temperaments of women were ill-suited to such activity, but led to mercenary arrangements such as the marriage contract. For a predetermined amount of money, the women would agree to marriage and provide whatever wifely duties were necessary to fulfill their end of the contract. While it might not be the ideal situation that Ana Magdalena hoped for, at least she did not have to buy suet and lye and slave away in a hot smelly kitchen stirring soap ingredients with a discarded oar. Pineda transformed Jane Austen’s naïve and clueless matchmaker Emma Woodhouse into a shrewd businesswoman who arranged legal contracts for the exchange of property, money, and wedding vows. Unconventionality and irreverence marked most of Ana and Frederico’s interaction with the courtship system in the novel. The first problem was the absence of Hercules, Ana’s father, although even Dona Eduviges acknowledged that the process was better for his absence. Ana also had the nerve to negotiate the terms of her virginity. The original clause stated “The bride is to present medical proof of her virginity.” After Doña Eduviges, the lawyer, and Andreina failed to persuade Ana, Eduviges produced the new language: “the bride is to provide evidence of her own choosing in proof of her clear and unimpeded virginity” (45). Eventually Frederico tired of Doña Eduviges’s meddling in his courtship with Ana Magdalena, and he dismissed her as their wedding planner. Such a breach of etiquette reflected poorly on

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Frederico’s character and certainly would have consequences. As Ana’s carriage travels past the statue of Simon Bolivar mounted on a horse, she noticed balloons tied to the genitals of the horse. When the wedding party arrived at the church for the wedding, they discovered that their wedding banns had not been published in the newspaper in the customary manner, so that the church was not prepared for the wedding. They encountered other problems at city hall as they attempted to arrange even a civil ceremony, all most likely due to the intervention of Doña Eduviges. Even with the minimal knowledge of chicano literature that I have, due to comic tone of most of the novel, I have trouble taking it seriously in relation to its chicano predecessors. Is the magical realism of the novel real magical realism, or does it merely play with the convention. I tend to agree with the latter. During Ana and Frederico’s courtship, she noticed strange coincidences between the narrative Frederico read her and the circumstances of her own life: For example, on Wednesday she had worried her fob watch so much she had disloged the winding button, and there on page 67 of Don Frederico’s manuscript the very same timepiece appeared. Or earlier in the week, Ana Magdalena had found her gold ring where Andreina had misplaced it months ago in the parrot’s cage, on page 33, although there was no mention of a parrot, there appeared a similar gold ring. There were other more startling and discomfiting revelations, but Andreina was too busy fitting the last lace to the wedding sheets to allow them much weight. (69) The coincidences between Ana’s life and Frederico’s narrative line up as if the text mirrored her life, yet they really do not. Borges produced prodigious amounts of work

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that forced the reader to think deeply about the text, the author, and their relationships to real life, but Pineda kind of pulls the rug out from under the literary fantasies. Again, Ana was so much occupied with her menial labor of sewing her bridal set in order to have some kind of financial security that she lacked the leisure time in which to further contemplate Frederico’s narrative and the philosophical implications of it being a mirror of her own life. The central story of The Love Queen of the Amazon closely resembled that of Jane Austen’s gothic satire Northanger Abbey. For Pineda’s novel, the overarching story was how Ana would end up in a relationship with her first love Sergio Ballado despite the social restrictions upon her. In Austen’s novel, the question was how Catherine Morland would end up with Henry Tilney, despite the pursuit of other suitors such as John Thorpe and the disapproval of Henry‘s father. Both novels dealt with women’s desires, although they are more fully articulated and fleshed out in Pineda’s narrative than Austen’s. In Austen’s narrative, invariably the man conducts the pursuit and the woman does what she can to ensure her most favorable outcome. The relationship between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney became problematic after General Tilney, Henry’s father, became aware that Catherine was not independently wealthy. Henry and Catherine marry at the end of the novel, but Austen leaves the moral of the story up in the air. Does the narrative advocate parental tyranny or does it reward filial disobedience? A careful reading of the gothic in the novel would be to reward filial disobedience as Austen indirectly wrote about the government censorship of publications. Much of the criticism of Northanger Abbey focused on General Tilney and his monstrous qualities or the lack thereof. Robert Hopkins offered the most helpful research

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into the General’s monstrous qualities. Rather than focus on Catherine’s misunderstandings of the General’s character, Hopkins looked into English attempts to monitor political dissent in pamphlets. The General, who spent his nights poring over political pamphlets for questionable material was part of the state’s apparatus to monitor political dissent. Austen’s point was that “the real world of the Gordon Riots is far more Gothic than the episodes of any Gothic romance “(217). The historical context of the novel became the main avenue for the consideration of the meaning of the gothic in Northanger Abbey, then. Hopkins speculated that Austen might have read the account of the Gordon Riots in The Annual Register before she wrote Henry’s dismissal of Eleanor’s flight of fancy that lawlessness might reign in England. Fortunately, power brokers such as General Tilney had his hands on the ropes and could enjoy his pineapples while others rioted due to lack of food. The threat of political violence followed closely from ambivalent attitudes toward the exploration of new ideas, mainly through reading. Having witnessed the French Revolution, the English “politicians, churchmen, teachers, authors, and journalists of the time anxiously weighted the benefits and the dangers. Should the prospect of a more informed population be welcomed as a liberation from ignorance?” (St. Clair 12). Hence the numerous critics in the literary world who attempted to filter the shelves and libraries full of literature so people would know which literature would edify rather than corrupt. Should it be any wonder that periodicals and conduct books appeared in order to show people what to read and how to act? The wane of the aristocracy, the growth of the bourgeoisie, and the education of the underclass came to influence literary value. Austen showed citizen’s complicity in state surveillance and exploitation in the

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character of General Tilney, who perused pamphlets for subversive material and enjoyed pineapples while other people rioted over their inability to purchase food for sustenance. In Austen’s time with the waning of the aristocracy and the growth of the bourgeoisie a contentious public debate over the effects of increased literacy and the growth of literature emerged. Reading could be a moral act in service of the state or it could serve immoral subversive purposes. Thus the necessity of someone like General Tilney to censor material and nip any dissent in the bud before it bloomed into any kind of movement. Because of the surveillance of literature, Austen only dealt with women’s social positions in a fairly indirect way. In linking the entrapped gothic heroines of romances with the situation of an unremarkable middle-class girl such as Catherine Morland, Austen showed the “everyday gothic.” The threat to Catherine Morland was not General Tilney as the “Bluebeard” figure--it was General Tilney the censor. John Thorpe’s ego and Mrs. Allen’s apathy did more to ruin her reputation than a wicked woman who actively sought to ruin her life in the third volume. Pineda attempted to expose a similar issue within chicano literature as well, so the adoption of the satire genre that worked for Jane Austen with Northanger Abbey made sense. While women have produced literature throughout history, the majority of authors published in most anthologies and included on most syllabi are men. Hence an emerging woman novelist faces challenges in being taken seriously as a writer, even in an emergent (at times) progressive literature such as chicano literature. To universally consider chicano literature as progressive seems a serious error to me, given the culture of machismo that pervades much chicano literature. Despite the interesting cultural mixing and boundary defying nature of Pocho, the protagonist’s misogynistic attitudes align with

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the best of the dead white males. Richard wanted to be an American, while his father did not want him to become fully Americanized. Despite his mother’s unhappiness, he did not feel she had a right to fight with him or leave him if she chose. The local tom boy, upon reaching sexual maturity, becomes a sexual plaything for the neighborhood boys and carefully observes the social code that she can no longer play freely with the boys due to the sexual attraction and the potential risks inherent with intercourse. Pocho showed the culture that many chicano writers and critics emerged from. Pineda’s adoption of Austen’s form attempted to provide legitimacy to the chicana voice just as Austen gave legitimacy to the woman who wrote in English. Compared with other chicano writers, Pineda has largely been ignored (Bruce-Novoa 72).The Orgaz literary soiree within Pineda’s novel, not surprisingly, was a patriarchal social arrangement where women only attended if they were in mourning, or more accurately, there to check out a potential suitor for an unmarried daughter. “Mourning” drew Andreina and Ana to the soiree where Frederico expounded on his Borgesian view of what literature should be: “I say to hell with white spaces! Fabulation! Fabulation is what is needed, the endless and obsessive elaboration of the narrative line to form labyrinthine arabesques, polyhedrons, dodecahedrons of astonishing and dizzying complexity” (58). In Muslim architecture, the arabesque was the doorway shape that would repeat and seem to repeat to infinite. In “The Garden of Forking Paths” Borges played with the idea a text that could be a never-ending labyrinth. Pineda directly parodied Broges’s confusing literary motifs in the character of Orgaz. Rather than a great philosopher himself, Borges borrowed from marginal sophist thinkers that intellectually intrigued him and worked their ideas into his stories (Bell-Villada 43). Here Pineda

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mastered one of the most monolithic writers in the chicano canon. Pineda’s narrative technique also imitated Austen’s in the use of free indirect discourse. Austen’s use of free indirect discourse and its refinement during the Victorian era produced the complex narratology and the infamous wordiness of the Victorian novel. A number of other factors influenced the length of novels, two being the business model of circulation libraries which maximized revenue with multi-volume novels and readers desiring to get the most value out of their rather expensive books. The more time people spent reading a book, the more value they gained from it. The exact effects of free indirect discourse were difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult for critics to talk about in-depth. Pineda used it mostly for comedic effect in The Love Queen of the Amazon, so an over analysis seems a disservice to the novel. Joe Bray’s study showed that to only a few readers, excerpts from Sense and Sensibility produced a “dual voice” where they heard both the voice of the character and the narrator, while roughly the same larger number heard only the voice of either the character or the narrator (43). Earlier I mentioned a passage where Pineda used free indirect discourse in an interesting way: “she could not fail to notice--as did the many wedding guests--that attached to the rearing horse’s private member was a collection of what she took to be balloons” (Pineda 72). The reader became privy to Ana’s thoughts through the narrator, but the moment remained certain until later the reader learned of how Dona Eduviges ruined the wedding arrangements. Were those actually balloons tied to the horse’s privates? It turns out, yes, there really were balloons, but the expression of doubt created a question within the reader’s mind about the reliability of the perception. Free indirect discourse, a technique perfected by women, would come to be adopted by male writers such as James Joyce.

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While Jane Austen has achieved critical notoriety, particularly in the last ten years or so, for the majority of people James Joyce’s genius will overshadow her. And what about Cecile Pineda. Who has had more value for literary critics and scholars? Pineda pointed out how men censored the press in Latin America as well “EL MAGNIFICO DEDICATES BORDELLO were not the words that headlined the morrow’s newspapers, for the simple reason that, except for a few presses owned by his friends, El Magnifico owned them all” (159). Pineda also played with the literary form that became an art in the Victorian era-the melodrama. Andreina was the stock hysterical female, who became bedridden and reclusive after Hercules left her at Ana’s wedding party in order to rendezvous with Ana’s friend from school Aurora. Her death, candied by bees, is so absurd it cannot be taken seriously by any measure, but it played with the magical realist conventions again. Berta, the servant in the Figueroa household, was lost fairly early in the narrative, but emerged again at the end of the novel. Aurora’s husband ran off where he became romantically entangled with a woman named Berta--the Figueroa’s old servant. Melodrama attempted to resolve all conflicts and other loose ends neatly by the end of the novel and this particular passage pointed to the absurdity of such a contrivance. Just as men have preyed upon women in the literary marketplace, The Love Queen of the Amazon contained numerous examples of how men preyed on women in the economic sphere. Although Frederico pontificated at literary soirees well, his literary masterpiece was several years overdue and he was in debt enough to steal jewels from his own mother. While Ofelia operated the La Nymphaea, Veblen’s law that the man fulfills a predatory role in the economy proved true. First, the police officer took payments from

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Ofelia in order to allow them to operate openly without facing legal repercussions that might lead to imprisonment. The policeman undertook the blackmail with business-like promptness and regularity, “making his monthly visit at a quarter of ten” (159-160). After the installment of the new president, he imprisoned the police officer for taking the payoffs from the brothel and then takes the kickbacks for himself. Along with the cash were documentary materials such as receipts written out longhand and tallied for ease of perusal. For Ofelia, she merely exchanged one blackmailer for another, but in the savage marketplace, the strongest, most violent, and mercenary of the actors reaped the most benefits. The economic exploitation of the brothel only expanded when it morphed into Ana’s Casa Orgaz-- a pun on “orgasm.” First, in order to finance expansion Ana signed a note with the International Fiduciary Fund (IFF), a clear pun on the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many people saw the IMF as the economic wing of United States imperialism, and Ana noted that the organization was headquartered in New York. The IFF tacked on charged and adjusted interest rates on Ana as it saw fit. When she objected, she was told that the IFF does not make mistakes. If it said that she owed the money, she owed it. When the IFF called for her note to be paid within thirty days, desperation drove her to seek some means to repay the note. Luckily, the Cardinal in charge of investigating her candied mother’s cause for sainthood, also came prepared to negotiate for the Holy See’s acquisition of the brothel. In the policeman, El Magnifico, the IFF, and the Cardinal, readers could see all the categories of predatory employment that men engaged in, according to Thorstein Veblen: government, warfare, and religion. They preyed upon the irksome productive labor of women in The Love Queen of the

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Amazon. The exploitation with in the text pointed to the literary exploitation and subordination that took place in literature. The text itself attempted to occlude the relationship between text and reality, but as Borges and Derrida noted, many times what the text attempted to exclude or what it omitted often was of central importance to understanding the literary work.

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Works Cited Bell-Villada, Gene. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Deconstructing the Dominant Patriarchal Text: Cecile Pineda’s Narratives.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Horno-Delgado, Asunción, et. al., Eds. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. Bray, Joe. “The ‘Dual-Voice’ of Free Indirect Discourse: An Experiment.” Language and Literature. 16.1 (2007): 37-52. Hoeveler, Diane. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. University Park: Penn State UP, 1998. Lomelí, Francisco A. “Cecile Pineda.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. 1999. Pineda, Cecile. “Deracinated: The Writer Re-Invents Her Sources.” Máscaras. Ed. Lucha Corpi. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997. --. The Love Queen of the Amazon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. NY: Cambridge UP, 2004. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Random, 1931.