Mother

FICTIONS OF MOTHERHOOD: THREE SHORT STORIES BY LUISA VALENZUELA Mary K. Addis The College of Wooster Both Luisa Valenzuela's narrative practice and her theorizing in several recent essays share with the linguistically radical French feminists a concern with the problems raised by women's relationship to language. Like Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, Valenzuela maintains that woman's experience, specifically woman's "desire," is what has been systematically repressed in the signifying practices of Western culture and that consequently, to quote Elaine Marks, "there has been only one voice, a male voice which women writers of the past obligatorily imitated" ("Women" 836). A felt need to resist and challenge these signifying practices, therefore, led the French feminists to search for a uniquely "feminine" mode of discourse outside or beyond the dominant discursive order. For Irigaray and Cixous, this would be an écriture féminine, a narrative or language of female desire (jouissance) whose power would derive from the female body and the mother's voice and that would therefore be radically disruptive and capable of seeing through and taking apart the structures and conventions of the phallocentric Symbolic order.1 Valenzuela also affirms the existence of a feminine writing, what she calls "un lenguaje hémbrico" ("Brujas" 91), and she too claims that it exists on the side of what has been repressed, "por el lado de las brujas," she writes in one essay ("Brujas" 88). As for the French feminists, this is a language that comes from the female body, for "language is sex" and "the word . . . is body . . . And we will be conscious of our bodies when it comes to the body of our writing" ("Word" 96-97). Moreover, this is a language that is disruptive in the French feminist sense because, as Valenzuela writes in "La mala palabra," "puede eventualmente decir lo que no debe ser dicho, revelar el oscuro deseo, desencadenar las diferencias amenazadoras que subvierten el cómodo...