In ‘prison-house of love’[i]: The Bad Girl and bad girls of Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract

Mario Vargas Llosa’s recent novel The Bad Girl centers around a sexually liberated woman who is in search of individual emancipation through transgressions of all social norms. The issue of female sexuality and its relation with woman liberation occupies an important and debatable position in Feminist discourse. Llosa’s own attitude to liberated female sexuality had been an ambivalent one. In this paper I would like analyse and explore the question of woman’s liberation in the novel of Mario Vargas Llosa, taking into account the major conflicting Feminist discourses as well as the presence and erasure of female sexuality in the history of Latin American novels. 

[Keywords: Sexuality, Transgression, Feminism, Identity, Emancipation, Oppression, Eroticism]

                          One must wear one’s vices like a royal mantle, with poise.
Like an aureole that one is unaware of, that one pretends not
to perceive.
It is only natures entirely given over to vice whose contours do
not grow blurred in the hyaline mire of the atmosphere.
Beauty is a marvelous vice of form.[ii]

The above representative fragment from a poem by Cesar Moro was used by Mario Vargas Llosa as an epigraph to his novel In Praise of the Stepmother (1988). The poem by Moro shows the poet’s personal obsession with two, “recurrent and related themes: a disdain for the rational elements and social conventions that censure the imagination and an exploration of forbidden experiences…” (Kristal, p.13). Lucrecia, the central character of the novel amply justifies, in her severe transgression of social norms and moral taboos, the inclusion of Moro’s lines as the epigraph of the novel. In the year 2007, Mario Vargas Llosa created the character of Lily, the Bad Girl in the novel The Bad Girl, who could easily have uttered those very words of Moro. Of course, the character as well as the whole plot pattern of the novel is quite familiar to us. “It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of Madame Bovary in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23.” (Harrison). In the year  1975, when, after the Padilla case and his rift with Cuba, Llosa was  coming in terms with his  gradually lessening faith in socialism, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary ( English trans.1986)  was published which reveals Llosa’s fascination for  Emma Bovary.

“Emma wants sexual pleasure…Emma wants to know other worlds, other people…and she also wants her existence to be different and exciting, to ensure that adventure and risk, the magnificent gestures of generosity and sacrifice, will play a role in it. Emma’s rebellion is born of one conviction, the root of all her acts: I am not resigned to my lot, the dubious compensation of the beyond doesn’t matter to me, I want my life to be wholly and completely fulfilled here and now. A chimera no doubt lies at the heart of the destiny to which Emma aspires, above all if it becomes a collective pattern, a common human goal.” ( Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy, pp.13-14).

 These words can  easily be stated about  the ‘Chilean Girl’ who, in her search for pleasure and power appears in diverse guises in most likely and unlikely places, but always to torment Ricardo Somocurcio, the simple boy of Miraflores who never manages to outgrow his obsession with the Bad Girl. As Emma transgressed the mores of a patriarchal society of the provincial life of 1930s, she had to complete her trajectory of yearning by poisoning herself with Arsenic. But, in case of the Bad Girl, the urban world of 1960s, 70s and 90s presented a much changed scenario for a sexually liberated woman.  Emancipatory feminism that took shape in the 60s and developed itself as a political movement in the later decades, already prepared the way for more diversified forms of women’s studies. The basic tenet of Radical Feminism, which asserts that “Heterosexuality is perceived to be primary sphere of male power, male control of female sexuality being foundational to patriarchal power” (Kemp and Squires, p.316), has been incessantly questioned as there has been increasing importance of pleasure. The Bad Girl appears to enjoy unto the death the intoxicating tension, about which Carole Vance remarks,

“The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in woman’s life. Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure and agency.”  (Vance, p.327)

But, at the end Llosa metes out a punishment, no less painful than what Flaubert offered to Emma. Could not Llosa have etched out  a slightly better fortune for our Bad Girl in this hour of post feminism, in which  women are led to believe that, “ they can have it all-a career, motherhood, beauty and a great sex life”? (Gamble, p.42.) In a broader and more problematized form the question can be whether this transgression of all moral and sexual norms by an individual woman offers a radical means to deconstruct oppressive identities or whether Llosa provided a glimpse into a strategy adopted in the highly hierarchical society to effectively legitimize the existing power imbalance?

Today, when most writers, women and men, write frequently about sex, it is difficult not to forget that sexuality, at least in Latin America has only recently become ubiquitous in literature; it is not too old a fashion. The cultural transformations of the last few decades have allowed the medium of fiction to grant freedom to Latin American writers especially the female writers to treat, without censorship, themes like infidelity, eroticism, sexual transgression, which were avoided by previous generations. Consequently, the figure of a sexually liberated woman cannot very regularly be found in Latin American novels. One obvious explanation is, of course, the novelists’ almost obsessive preoccupation with the politics of Latin America. Most of the novelists, including those of the Boom period of 60s and 70s believed that, “novel was and is an opportunity to make a difference, to take stand; they have worried that the chance might be squandered frivolously on tales of apolitical sexual pleasure or comfort.” (Marting, p.22). Llosa himself, at least in his socialist phase had time and again argued in the same vein. According to him,

“…In the USA, in Western Europe, to be a writer means generally, first (and usually only) to assume a personal responsibility. That is, the responsibility to achieve in the most rigorous and authentic way a work which, for its artistic values and originality, enriches the language and culture of one’s country. In Peru, in Bolivia, in Nicaragua  et cetera, on the contrary , to be a writer means ,at the same time, to assume a social responsibility: at the same time that you develop a personal literary work, you should serve, through your writing  but also through your actions, as an active participant in the solution of the economic, political and cultural problems of your society.” (Llosa, Social commitment. p.6)

However, it is interesting to note that sexual themes had been used in Latin American poetry much earlier than its prose counterpart, and erotic poetry, by both men and women poets was already an established practice. Only after the realization which came during the 60s that sexuality too could be discourse of social critique, sexual themes found their due importance in Latin American novels. One needs to remember that the relational nature of sexuality, love, and eroticism in prose fiction is, indeed, the structure that permits sexuality to become a metaphor of choice for other social and political relations. Sexual behavior, especially that of women as leading to self liberation exists as a theme in the Boom novels, but “only as a minority phenomenon, and even then it tends to be divorced from love” (Shaw,p.126). The characters of sexually liberated women waited for too long a time at the fringe of Latin American novels. Nancy LaGreca has given an analysis of the long survival of the image of El angel del hogar [iii] and has identified, among many reasons the supposed relation between national morality and female moral standard to be a crucial one. Print media, “portrayed women as the vessels of national morality; it was believed that through their high moral and religious standards the nation could aspire to future generations of good citizens” (LaGreca, p.11). During and after the 60s there was a gradual change in the fortune of sexually liberated woman in Latin American novels from prostitutes, adulteresses and fallen women, who lived a marginal existence; the focus shifted to women who have positive contributions to make to society. Mention should be made of Mulata (1967, Guatemala) by Miguel Angel Astrias, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1969, Brazil) by Jorge Amado, From Cuba with a Song (1972, Cuba) by Severo Sarduy, The Shade where Camila O’Gorman dreams (Argentina, 1973) by Enrique Molina. In all these novels female sexuality plays an important role either as resistance to violence or as a powerful life-force for the liberated individual. Argentine fiction writer Enrique Medina said, “he had feminist intentions when he wrote Conel trapo en la boca (1984) with an aggressively sexual, even murderous young female protagonist and narrator.” (Marting, p.41) However, the situation is not as rosy as it appears to be for the sexually liberated woman in Latin American novels as some of the major practitioners of the genre during the Boom and Post-Boom period, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes show an ambivalent attitude to the liberated woman. One Hundred years of Solitude (1968) by Marquez can be read as a cautionary tale against the new forms of female sexuality. In the final chapter of the novel, a newly sexed woman and her lover abandon their baby, who is devoured by ants. Carlos Fuentes’s novella Aura (1962, Mexico) centers around Aura’s plan to entrap Montero, the lover of her own daughter with her sexual attractiveness. The author seems to warn the reader of the danger of transgressing sexuality as he describes Montero’s stripping of his own identity. By the late 1980s, female sexuality is appreciated as a complex mode of pleasure and pain in serious literary works, transcending the simplistic binary oppositions. But, Mario Vargas llosa’s novels, at least the more recent ones do not seem to accommodate the complexity.

Llosa’s tryst with bad girl goes back as far as his first novel The Time of the Hero (1963). It is a highly acclaimed subversive novel which demolishes any trace of credibility the Peruvian military might have had in the 60s. But from feminist perspective it is a rather conservative work where, “women characters hardly appear and when they do they fall squarely on the categories of domesticated wife or whore…..the women characters are portrayed as little more than caricatures who collude with hegemonic masculinity, to the extent that the original cause of the misery depicted in the novel, the trigger for male violence, is the inconstancy of Teresa, the colorless woman at the center of the plot.” (Davies, pp.184-85) The Green House (1968), where the sexual relation between Anselmo and Antonia, inspired probably from Victor Hugo’s The Man who Laughs has an element of moral transgression as the girl is blind as well as mute. Of course Antonia is not too strong a human being, but still there remains an air of ambiguity regarding the question whether she was in love with Anselmo or used her sexuality to survive the gruesome world of the Green House.  Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1978), “which Vargas Llosa says he heard on one of his trips to Iquitos or Pacallpa, is the story of a well meaning, disciplined, efficient simple bureaucrat whose very qualities turn him into a ridiculous monster when in his passion to accomplish his secret mission, he devices the most ‘scientifically’ efficient means of providing the socially starved troops with ‘maximum opportunity of sexual gratification’,” (Klaren, p.14.) The humorous tone of the narrative hides the bitter equation of power-imbalance, regarding matters sexual in Latin American society. However, the story of Bonifacia of The Green House or Hortensia in Conversation in the Cathedral (1975) follows the pattern of the abused Latin American female who from the early days of Santa (1903) by Mexican Federico Gamboa works as a metaphor for the abusive, intimate relations between classes and ethnicities. It is Lucrecia in In Praise of My Stepmother who appears to be the first fully developed sexually liberated woman of Llosa. It is she, who after an intense sexual encounter with her stepson can wake up and experience emancipation from the oppressive mundane reality. For her, transgression of the norms is the means to intensely felt pleasure.

“She preferred to bow to this contradictory situation, in which her acts challenged and violated her principles as she pursued that intense, dangerous rapture that happiness had become for her. One morning on opening her eyes, the phrase “I have won sovereignty” came to her. She felt fortunate and emancipated, but could not have said what it was that she had been freed from.”(Llosa, Stepmother, p.109).

The Bad Girl did not utter anything on sovereignty but she certainly fought for it till her death. It is for this that the simple Peruvian girl, had taken up her first mask. In a wonderful summer of 1950 the life of Ricardo got intrinsically entwined with that of the Chilean girl, Lily. She was everything that the other girls of Miraflores wanted to be but never dared to be. The immense physicality of her existence was best revealed while she danced,

“Lily danced with a delicious rhythm and a good deal of grace, smiling and softly singing the words to the song, raising her arms, showing her knees, and moving her waist and shoulders so that her entire body, to which her skirts and blouses clung so perversely and with so many curves, seemed to shake, vibrate, and take part in the dance from the ends of her hair down to the feet.” (p.3-4)

Though she oozed out sexuality even in that tender age she already developed a way of her own to use it wisely. Ricardo found that in the Fridays when, “Lily let me kiss her on the cheek, the edge of her ears, the corner of her mouth, and sometimes, for just a second, she would touch her lips to mine and move them away with a melodramatic expression” (p.6) This firm control over her own sexual desire has been a trait that stayed with the Bad Girl for a long time and helped her in all her adventures and misadventures. Many years later when Ricardo met the same girl in Paris, now in the guise of a guerrilla fighter, she is much changed in her appearance but she still was in firm control of her sexuality. When Ricardo made love to her in the chilly attic of Hotel du Senat , “She let herself be kissed , caressed, undressed, always with that curious attitude of nonparticipation, not allowing me to lessen the invisible distance she kept from my kisses, embraces and affection even though she surrendered her body to me” (p.34)   The situation had  not changed much a few years later when , Ricardo once again made love to Madame Robert Arnoux, the new incarnation of the Bad Girl. The great flood of passion that surged out of Ricardo only met with a cold calculated response that can hardly be called emotion.

“As she did the last time, with total passivity she allowed herself to be caressed and listened silently, feigning an exaggerated attention or pretending she didn’t hear anything and was thinking about something else , to the intense hurried words I said into her ear or mouth as I struggled to spread her Labia.” (p.65)

But, on this occasion she demands her own desires be satisfied.  She shows every sign of unscrupulous authority in dictating the terms of her satisfaction. The day when Ricardo comes to know about the death of a close friend, he was a mess in bed and that angered the Bad Girl beyond rationality. The cold cruelty with which she declares,

“Make me come with your mouth. I have no reason to be in the mourning. I hardly knew your friend Paul…And just like that, as casually as she would have lit a cigarette, she spread her legs and lay back, her arm across her eyes, in that total immobility, that deep concentration into which, forgetting about me and the world around her, she sank to wait for her pleasure.” (p.78)

 It is this obsession with pleasure, erotic and others that works as the driving force behind the innumerable disguises that the Bad Girl wears and the innumerable crimes that she commits. The sexual pleasure is a metaphor for all the other things for which she strives. At the last part of the novel when the girl deserts Ricardo for one more time, she leaves a small piece of paper where she tries to explain her position, “I’m tired of playing the petit bourgeois house-wife you’d like me to be. That’s not what I am or what I’ll ever be” (p.297). She believes that she is destined to enjoy greater pleasure of life. The pleasure is all the more intoxicating to the Bad Girl as enjoying them involves deception and transgression. It is this close relation between pleasure and transgression of norms that allows us a peep into the great influence of George Bataille  on  Mario Vargas Llosa. In Llosa’s own words,

“Few people in our time have seen in such a penetrating way what life is, the life of the individual in society, the life of societies in their time, the impact of ideas on daily experience. There is a whole other dimension of man that does not appear in his vision, or does so in a furtive way: the dimension that George Bataille has described better than anyone else. This is the world of unreason, the world of the unconscious which, in ways that are always unverifiable and very difficult to detect, impregnates, directs and sometimes enslaves consciousness; the world of those obscure instincts that, in unexpected ways, suddenly emerge to compete with ideas and often replace them as a form of action and can even destroy what these ideas have built up” (Llosa, Isaiah Berlin ,p.147).

It is after reading Bataille that Llosa became fascinated by a claim that pleasure is not possible without transgression. As a kind of axiom, Bataille insisted on a paradox: human beings will be unhappy and will not experience true pleasure unless they transgress those very norms and taboos that make collective life possible ( Bataille, p.157). In this regard mention should also be made of Cesar Moro who was a big influence on Llosa and  whose works celebrated activities “with unforeseeable, dangerous and vertiginous consequences, such as soporiferous masturbation or luminous incest” (Moro, p.16) . Lucrecia in In Praise of My Stepmother is certainly one fine example of the great impact of Moro and Bataille on Llosa. The Bad Girl, with all her treacheries and disdain for moral righteousness certainly is no less an illustration of the spirit so vigorously celebrated by Bataille and Moro. The Bad Girl in her usual sarcastic manner, time and again calls Ricardo a dreamer, an incurable romantic. And she on the other hand takes one calculated step after another to seduce her way through all the difficulties. But, she herself is no less a dreamer who creates one illusion after another and chases that illusory, fantastical world with all the possible guiles in her possession. But, at the end Llosa brings her down to suffering of such proportion that all her masks fail to protect her from her own self. With her suffering we begin to ask the question whether Llosa has punished the Bad Girl, and if so, from what perspective we need to appreciate Llosa’s attitude to liberated sexuality and its possible relation with female emancipation.

One intriguing aspect of the pain and agonies of Bad Girl is that Llosa placed her in that very situation from which she always tried to run away and to do so she used her sexuality with an amazingly meticulous cunning. At the very first chapter of the novel we come to know that the girl does not want to belong to the ordinary Peruvians. The colourless, mundane fortune of the average mass is something the Bad Girl always abhors as Comrade Arlette does not want even to listen anything about her poor motherland. And Mrs. Richardson or Madame Robert Arnoux can make no compromise to their newly achieved financial well-being or social status. They all want to be in control of their situations as the Bad Girl was always in control of her sexual adventures. But, in her relation with Fukuda, the Japanese Yakuza boss there was a clear role reversal as Bad Girl degraded herself to the role of sexual slave. Kathleen Barry’s definition of female sexual slavery tells us that, “female sexual slavery is present in all situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation” (Barry,p.139). The Bad Girl’s condition as explained by Dr. Roullin at the last part of the novel lets us know that Fuduka not only had destroyed the vagina or the rectum of the girl but, he destroyed her personality, Everything in her that was worthy and decent” ( p.283). What shocks Ricardo as well as the reader all the more is that, “She was not deceived. She was a willing victim. She endured everything knowing very well what she was doing.” (p.283) This absolute annihilation of one’s own self  by those very transgressing  pleasure for which she had broken all the possible norms makes her situation if not tragic, at least tangibly pathetic. Why does Llosa allow the girl to be punished so brutally?

Is it because Llosa does not believe that even a courageous sexually liberated woman can grasp emancipation through heterosexuality? The idea itself is not a  recent one  as most of the arguments of second wave Radical feminism centered round the notion which, “castigate heterosexuality as an oppressive socially constructed patriarchal institution forcibly imposed upon women, Heterosexuality is perceived to be the primary sphere of male power, male control of female sexuality being foundational to patriarchal power.” (Kemp and Squires, p.316.). The argument is rather transparently stated by Catharine MacKinnon,  “the centrality of sexuality emerges not from Freudian conceptions but from feminist practice on diverse issues including abortion, birth control, sterilization, abuse, domestic battery, rape, incest, lesbianism, sexual harassment, prostitution, female sexual slavery and pornography…producing a feminist political theory centering on sexuality; its social determination, daily construction, birth to death expression, and ultimately male control.” (MacKinnon, p.526) Now, if one follows this argument, then the Bad Girl who uses and abuses all the tenets and norms of heterosexuality to fulfill her intoxicating desire for power cannot and should not reach her emancipation as she is vainly trying to use the very institution which always plays an agential role in oppression of women. One might say, from the perspective of Radical feminism that Llosa had done the right thing for the wrong reason. However, this perspective of Radical Feminisms itself has been challenged and criticized severely by another group of Feminists, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynne Segal and Wendy Brown. In this perspective importance is given to the notion that stresses the necessity of individual choice and sexual pleasure rather than structural oppression and sexual danger. Carole Vance has stated the question of choice , “For others, the positive possibilities of sexuality, explorations of the body, curiosity, intimacy, sensuality, adventure, excitement, human connection, basking in the infantile and non-rational are not only worthwhile but provide sustaining energy” (Vance,p.327). Lynne Segal sounds a cautionary note, “As feminists, we play into the hands of our enemies if we downplay, rather than seek fully to strengthen, ideas of women’s sexual liberation”, as the overemphasis on victimization of women allows the Rightists to stress on patriarchal structure in an ambience of anxiety and insecurity. This assertion on female pleasure including the sexual one, certainly had left no mark on Llosa as he punishes the Bad Girl for her reckless perusal of pleasure and power.

Actually, Llosa’s writing of sexually liberated woman only reinforces male desire and patriarchal dominance over women. In case of both Lucrecia, in In Praise of My Stepmother and the Bad Girl in The Bad Girl, their perusal of liberated sexuality does not play any agential role in bringing about emancipation, rather appears as destructive supplement. Michel Foucault, “maintains that to designate sexuality as the locus of our freedom– as if it stood outside and against power–is to fall victim to a ruse of power”( Woodhull,p.168). The Bad Girl, however independent she might appear as she begins her voyage is ultimately deceived by “ruse of power” that states repression is the only way power manifests itself in sexuality. In the pre feminist times, “the Sexual woman was a symptom of a “problem”, an illness in the social body. More than any other novel, Romulo Gallego’s extremely popular Dona Barbara (Venezuela,1929) engages ideologically with the kind of dangerous threat to Latin American society the sexual woman was thought to represent” (Marting,p.31)  Barbara’s sexuality looms large as a feared evil. In spite of all the sentimentalities that Ricardo utters for the Bad Girl, the nemesis, bereft of any grandeur undoubtedly makes Bad Girl a close relation of Barbara, only a little refined one. In the last few lines of the novel the Bad Girl requests Ricardo, in her usual playful tone to write a novel on her. “One afternoon, when we were sitting in the garden at twilight, she said that if it ever occurred to me one day to write our love story, I shouldn’t make her look too bad, because then her ghost would come and pull on my feet every night” (p,.403). The prayer was certainly not answered.

Notes