Heroines, Hierarchies, and Space: The Fiction of Cecilia Absatz

This examination of the fiction of Cecilia Absatz (Argentina, 1943), covers three novels: Feiguele (1976), the 1982 Te con canela ‘Tea with cinnamon’ and the 1985 Los anos pares ‘The Even-Numbered Years.’ The continuities between the three texts, and especially the similarity of their female protagonists, who age from adolescence to the threshold of middle age, allow these novels to be read as a series. The primary focus of this study is the maturation of the protagonists as they struggle for autonomy while navigating different types of space. These include space that is marked by gender; identified as Jewish; and dominated by members of various elites, whether defined by wealth and lineage, by celebrity, or by specialized cultural knowledge or skills. The protagonists are at a disadvantage in different environments: being female in a corporate workplace dominated by powerful males; craving individuality and solitude in a Jewish space in which community is the ideal; and being barely middle-class in milieux where money, accomplishments, and social connections are crucial. Though in many episodes the heroines, out of insecurity and inexperience, allow themselves to be intimidated and manipulated, they analyze their experiences, learn, and seek to strengthen their autonomy. Only in the third of the novels does the protagonist succeed in breaking the hold that more powerful and prestigious men hold over her and establishing a space for herself. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/2 Heroines, Hierarchies, and Space: The Fiction of Cecilia Absatz Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas at Austin The novels of Cecilia Absatz (Argentina, 1943), journalist, editor, and creative writer, stand out for the sardonic voices of their heroines and narrators, their casual frankness about sexuality and the body, their mordant satire, and their antiauthoritarian and feminist stance. Absatz lived through the repressive Argentine military regime of 1976-83, and the value of her writing lies partly in the insights it provides into that period. Rather than representing extreme violations of human rights, such as disappearances and torture, her fiction communicates the contradictions and anxieties of everyday existence in an Argentina under authoritarian rule. This essay examines her brief novel Feiguele, published in 1976 along with short stories as Feiguele y otras mujeres ‘Feiguele and other women,’ the first edition of which was suppressed by the military government,1 and two full-length novels, the 1982 Te con canela ‘Tea with cinnamon’ and the 1985 Los anos pares ‘The Even-Numbered Years.’2 Despite their differences—for example, Te, with its fragmented narrative structure, requires greater concentration on the reader’s part—the three novels exhibit significant commonalities. They center on the intimate experiences of protagonists who, while not the same character, have a number of features in common. In Feiguele the heroine is a young adolescent, while in the other two novels she is a sexually active woman. In each novel the protagonist is from Buenos Aires, from a Jewish family situated somewhere on the lower reaches of the middle class, outwardly bold, yet haunted by constant insecurity. The intimate experiences of these heroines are laid bare, whether in first or third person, with exceptional frank1 Lindstrom: Heroines, Hierarchies, and Space: The Fiction of Cecilia Absatz Published by New Prairie Press