6 - Hay que sonreír

Summary

A woman's place is in the wrong.

James Thurber

Disaffection

Although Hay que sonreír was published in 1966, it was actually written some years previously. As Valenzuela explains in an interview with Albalú Angel (1984: 3): ‘Me casé a los veinte años y me fui a vivir a Francia, y tuve una hija muy pronto. Y entonces las horas de la siesta de mi hija – tenía meses – yo escribía’ [I married at the age of twenty and went to live in France, and I had a daughter very early. And while she had her nap – she was only months old – I would write]. The novel was therefore written between 1959 and 1960. It was subsequently ‘polished up’ before publication.

The reason for which I emphasise the date that the novel was written is that it seems to me important to point out that it was written well before the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the latter part of the 1960s, and that for its time it shows a remarkably perceptive and disaffected view of the relationship between the sexes.

The fact that the main protagonist of the novel is a woman is already a step away from the mores of Argentine literature at that time, and that she should be that most marginalised of creatures, a prostitute, seems an even more radical step. It is true that there are many prostitutes to be found in the work of the post-Romantics from Baudelaire onwards, and also in Latin American Modernism, but these women are generally depicted as the rejects of society, often as objects rather than subjects. Valenzuela's approach is clearly quite different. First, because this prostitute is the central protagonist of the novel and secondly because there is a sense in which she takes on a certain archetypal value, she is a representative, albeit an extreme one, of woman under patriarchy.

Magnarelli (1984) posits a broader reading, one which would go beyond the idea of gender to a more universal view of the dynamics between the oppressor and the oppressed. However, I feel that this is too general, and in the course of this chapter, I shall attempt to show that the contradictions and questions raised in the novel are too specific to gender relations to be read as symbolising more universal notions.