Violent Acts of a Feminist Nature: Estela Portillo Trambley's Striking Short Fiction

Where I live as woman is to men a wilderness. But to me it is a home. --Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (162) I'm Bitch. Beast. Macha. iWachale! Ping! Ping! Ping! I break things. --Sandra Cisneros, "Loose Woman" in Loose Woman (115) Near the end of Estela Portillo Trambley's 1975 short story, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle," the protagonist Beatriz prepares to bury the man she has just killed: Robles, her abusive common law husband of more than twenty-five years. She debates this drastic decision with her reluctant accomplice Sofia, who, despite being another of Robles's victimized women, remains remorseful about their act. While Beatriz sees killing Robles as necessary to protecting their bodies and home, Sofia is unable to reconcile the violent ending to Robles's cruelties with the guilt that she feels. Repeatedly, she questions Beatriz's Christian faith, wondering aloud if Beatriz believes in God at all. In responding to Sofia's challenges, Beatriz confirms a spiritual connection, but of a different kind: Oh, Sofia, look at all the gladness God made. This house, this yard, is a piece of his heaven.... I believe in the greenness of the earth.... No, Sofia, [I am] not evil. I love order around me more than anything. Yes, there's a wildness in me from all the things that happened in our lives, the sadness, the loneliness, the violences. They grow inside us--mix--and become something I cannot explain. (69) (1) Drawing on this "mix" by suggesting that the female body's experience of patriarchal oppressions is consistent with the kinds of exploitation suffered by the environment, Trambley explores the imposed relationship between the two in "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle." Specifically, she justifies her protagonist's aberrant response to her desperate situation by manipulating the social implication that woman and nature are subordinate to the relationship that man and culture hold. In addition, Trambley addresses the unexamined violence toward women present in Chicano/Mexican culture by treating female sexuality as a central topic in her fiction. While ecofeminism and Chicana sexuality were typically not discussed together in the 1970s when Trambley was writing, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle" reveals a sophisticated deconstruction of the female as nature/male as culture dualism in order to address the gender politics underpinning the Chicano/Mexican community. This essay examines the ways in which Trambley challenges the gendering of this dualism and the physical and emotional violence inherent in maintaining its boundaries. If woman is nature, argues Trambley, it is a nature that has been exploited and commodified by men and male culture, and one that ultimately has the power to overwhelm, poison, and subsume its (male) human aggressors and their attempt to impose a false and one-sided sense of order. Trambley uses the trope of woman as nature to critique the violence, inequality, and exploitation underneath patriarchal concepts of nature. At the same time, "If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle" re-imagines the ways in which "home" has been understood and functioned politically and artistically. In response to experiences of social and political alienation, the Chicano Movement relied on a creative rearticulation of a home both within and outside the borders of the US (e.g., Aztlan), yet it also reinscribed a certain homelessness generally imposed on women within a patriarchal culture and, more specifically, within Chicano culture. Such marginalization has left Chicanas pressed to discover their own "sitio y lengua," as Emma Perez contends. Perez argues that the need for a distinct site and language of resistance arises in response to the hostile conditions that many Chicanas experience from within their community. Oppression, she asserts, gives way to an "intimate place where theory is born" ("Sexuality and Discourse" 166). …