Society of Spanish & Spanish-American Studies

Masks of Canvas and Stone in the Poetry of María Victoria Atencia

Author(s): Sharon Keefe Ugalde
Source: Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, Vol. 24, No. 1/2 (1999), pp. 227-242
Published by: Society of Spanish & Spanish-American Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27741405
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 MASKS OF CANVAS AND STONE IN THE
POETRY OF MAR?AVICTORIA ATENCIA

SHARON KEEFE UGALDE

Southwest Texas State University

Existe la frontera y es advertida siempre con tiza o

carboncillo o un atajo en el bosque
defendido con hilos altamente cargados, que una parte
y la otra conocen, cuerpo a cuerpo exigente
de un desnudo o registro en que la identidad se
averigua o declara.l MVA

In the poetry ofMar?a Victoria Atencia (M?laga, Spain 1931) a

cast of female personae culled from literary and cultural sources,
names like Eve, Ophelia and Paolina de Borghese, calls attention to
gender.2 Often these referents, primarily from nineteenth- and twen
tieth-century paintings and sculptures, serve as textual matrix, and
such female-figure poems are the focus of this paper.3Teresa De Lau
retis' recognition that inWestern culture the image ofwoman is the
starting point for any understanding of sexual difference and for the
construction of social subjects illuminates the magnitude of the cul
tural re-vision that the Spanish poet undertakes in her ekphrastic
poems (37-38). De Lauretis' distinction between woman and women
further clarifies the significance of Atencia's poetic venture. Woman
refers to "the other-from-man (nature and Mother, site of sexuality
and masculine desire, sign and object ofmen's social exchange)" and
women to real historical beings (5). It is precisely the lack of coin
cidence between women as historical subjects and woman as product
of "hegemonic discourses" that Atencia addresses.

227

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228 ALEC, 24 (1999)

The paradoxical relationship o?women towoman is evident inLa

se?al, Atencia's complete poetry from 1961-1989. Although in numer
ous poems the author recognizes and deconstructs women's depen
dence onman-made images (Spender 143), she includes eight photo
graphs ofherself in the volume?six ofwhich are orchestrated studio
sittings?that reaffirm a configuration offemininity dependent on the
male gaze. Woman as object ofmasculine desire inAtencia's work is
made more explicit ifwe juxtapose three images. One is Antonio
Canova's sculpture "Paolina Borghese," a referent in a poem of the
same title. The other two are portraits of the author reproduced inLa
se?al, a pen-and-ink sketch by Jes?s de Labrador that portrays from
the back the poet's drawn up hair and the nape of the neck, and an
early photograph that profiles the young author from the waist up.
These three images exemplify in a particularly vivid fashion the lin
gering presence ofpatriarchal femininity inLa se?al because in high
culture art and literature the female neck traditionally represents
woman as object of themasculine gaze. Garcilaso de la Vega's (1490
1550) "Soneto XXIII" provides a classic example from the Spanish
literary tradition:

y tanto que el cabello, que en la vena

del oro se escogi?, con vuelo presto,
por el hermoso cuello blanco, enhiesto,
el viento mueve, esparce y desordena: (Rivers 37)

Medieval predecessors and baroque descendants are equally enrap

tured by this piece of female anatomy. For the Arcipreste de Hita
(Juan Ruiz, 1283?-1350?), the worth of a woman increases propor
tionately to the length ofher neck: "para mientes / si tiene el cuello
alto, as? gusta a las gentes" (Libro 90), while Luis de Gong?ra (1561
1627) prefers to emphasize enthralling glimmer and fragility: "y
mientras triunfa con desd?n lozano / del luciente cristal tu gentil
cuello" (Rivers 163). It is important to recognize that in spite of re
peating man-made images of woman, Atencia's relationship to the
dominant (masculine) culture is not unambiguous. If, as images of
the neck illustrate, there is in some instances complicity in the ob
jectification ofwoman, in others the poet questions and subverts the
dominant artistic representation of woman as locus of sexuality and

sign of absolute beauty. In some poems, like "Paolina Borghese" and

"El mundo de Cristina," Atencia even specifically undermines the
lure of the neck.

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SHARONKEEFE UGALDE 229

In dismantling patriarchal constructs of femininity, Atencia per

forms an intricate dance with canonized literature and art, simulta
neously donning masks ofa feminine self fixedbymasculine concerns
and subverting the authority of the controlling gaze. Her double
voiced discourse "embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages
ofboth themuted and the dominant" (Showalter 31). Masks painted
on canvas, chiseled inmarble and cast in bronze?for example, the
Pre-Raphaelites' Ophelia, Canova's Paolina de Borghese and Maillol's
"La Nuit"?are unstable signs, expressing literary respectability, the
reaffirmation of the transcendence of art, gender opposition and self
inscribed difference.4 Like other nineteenth- and twentieth-century
literary women, Atencia produces palimpsestic works "whose surface

designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (less socially accept

able) levels ofmeaning ... achieving true female literary authority
by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary
standards" (Gilbert 73). From behind ekphrastic masks, the female
figure poems confront the traditional positing ofwomen as Other,
"constituted through a male gaze and thus endowed with themysteri
ousness of one whose objective status is seen as absolute and definite"
(Waugh 8), and search for the wholeness denied women in the past.
In one class of poems, those that represent canonized painted
images ofwoman, the verbal recreation of the beauty of the works of
art disguises an assault on the hegemonic discourse that created the
images. The poem "Ofelia" (Marta & Mar?a) illustrates how Atencia
dresses up the poetic word in artistically beautiful, sanctioned images
only to disrobe female subjugation:

Recorrer? los bosques, escuchar? el reclamo

en celo de la alondra, me llegar? a los r?os
y escoger? las piedras que blanquean sus cauces.
Al pie de la araucaria
descansar? un momento y encontrar? en su tronco
un apoyo m?s suave que todas las razones.

Prendida de sus ramas dejar? una corona

y el agua por mil veces repetir? su imagen.

Adornar? mi pelo la flor del rododendro,
inventar? canciones distintas de las m?as

y cubrir? mi cuerpo de lirios y amarilis

por si el frescor imprime templanza a mi locura. (38)5

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230 ALEC, 24 (1999)

The text conjures up a composite of Ophelia images. Well-known

paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites Arthur Hughes ("Ophelia" 1852)
and John Everett Millais ("Ophelia" 1851-52) and by the French
painter Delacroix ("The Death of Ophelia," 1838) come readily to
mind. The narrative imbedded in these paintings, an intertextfrom
Shakespeare's Hamlet, is retold in the poem, a story of a pathetic
young, innocent Ophelia, overwhelmed by events that she cannot con
trol. In her madness she wanders into thewoods and, bedecked with
flowers, drowns in a stream.6 Atencia does not read Ophelia exclu

sively as a sign of death and beauty meant to represent the limits of

masculinity and what cannot be known, as do many nineteenth
century artists (Bronfen xi). Defying convention and listening to the
character's silenced voice, Atencia subverts the beautiful dead body
as a sign ofalterity. The poet resurrects Ophelia's subjectivity, repre
senting with her image the experience ofwomen who, "can be driven
mad by having their inmost feelings misrepresented, not responded
to, or acknowledged only through chastisement and repression"
(Levernez 117).
The title of the poem suggests that the first-person speaker is
Ophelia herself, expressing a desperate need to seek refuge in the
forest. The rigidity of the logocentric realm ("las razones") has driven
her tomadness, which she hopes to temper in the softer ("suave")
more accommodating patterns of nature. There, she envisions re

covering her repressed sexuality ("escuchar? el reclamo /en celo de

la alondra"). By the second strophe Ophelia shares both her first-per
son pronoun and her new found voice with the poet-persona. This
permeability of boundaries between referent (Ophelia), persona
(Ophelia-poet), author (poet-Atencia), blurs the division between art
and lifewhile simultaneously foregrounding recent formulations of
the fluidity of female ego boundaries (Chodorow Chapt. 11).The can
ciones of 1. 10 may be the bawdy tunes sung by the character in her
mad scenes in Hamlet, but they also symbolize the author's desire to
formulate in her poetry a self distinct from one imbued in patriarchal
femininity ("inventar? canciones distintas de lasm?as"). Textualized,
the buried self can affirm and perpetuate its own image, like the
crown left by Ophelia that will repeatedly be reflected in the water
("dejar? una corona / y el agua por mil veces repetir? su imagen").
Ophelia enters Atencia's poem as mysterious Other: beauty, mad

ness, and death, but once there, abandons her absolute objective sta

tus, exiting with a voice?the poetic word?with which to tell her own
story of silent desperation.

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SHARONKEEFE UGALDE 231

The line, "La luz que se detiene en tu pecho," from the poem "Re
trato de una joven dormida" (Paulina o el libro de las aguas), is a
striking recreation of the focal point of two similar paintings by Goya,
"Dama adormecida" (1780?) and "El sue?o" (1800?). In both the
viewer's gaze is immediately drawn to the bright whites and yellows
of the figure's breast. It is a footnote by Victoria Le?n?the poet's
daughter?to an English prose translation of the poem that identifies
the specific intertext as "El sueno" (Mar?a 111). The Goya canvas and
other images of the sleeping woman, a frequent subject of turn-of-the
century European painting, are rendered translucent in "Retrato de
una joven dormida" because the poem makes visible the gender
underpinnings of artistic representation:

Si por la oculta noche retenida

me pudiese llegar a tu lienzo y velarte,
tan candida y cercana y tan ausente,
acaso
la luz que se detiene en tu pecho y lo alza
alcanzara a decirme si duermes a la vida,
si vives en la muerte, si puedo ser contigo
Ofelia de tu l?gamo, Desd?mona en tu almohada. (268)

In the majority of poems discussed here, the presence of an

artistic referent creates a metatext inwhich representation itself be
comes the focus. In "Retrato" three images, Goya's sleeping woman
and Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona, the wife ofOthello and
victim ofhis jealous rage, magnify this process. The poem opens with
the poet-speaker cast in a conventional role, that of viewing a work
of art. But almost immediately (1. 2) a confusion of limits, "the
conventions and lines of demarcation, according towhich the fiction
of art lies separate from the reality of life," is introduced (Debicki
163). The speaker addresses the fictional figure as if itwere a real
person. The unreliability of artistic representation is underscored in
the line, "tan candida y cercana y tan ausente," which makes the

image of the sleeping woman seem present and real and, simul

taneously, non-existent and absent. The speaker focuses next on a

physical aspect of the work of art, its light, and in the process the
viewing of the painting becomes a moment of self-exploration. In the
final verse the disturbance of the separation between art and life in
tensifies when the persona herself transformed into a
contemplates
fictional representation ("si puedo ser contigo /Ofelia de tu l?gamo,
Desd?mona en tu almohada").

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232 ALEC, 24 (1999)

The significance of the obfuscation of borders multiplies when

gender is foregrounded, as it is in this text: the image of a sleeping
woman and reference to two female dramatic characters. In this con
text the self-consciousness created by emphasis on intertextuality
challenges fundamental concepts of gender representation in
Western culture: the notion that the "surveyed" female body confirms
the power of the masculine gaze (Bronfen 102), that the dead or
sleeping feminine body in a passive, horizontal position signifies the
superiority of the masculine survivor, and that the feminine body
does not represent a female subject but ismerely a sign that stands
for being Other. According to Bram Dijkstra, the sleep-death repre
sentation of woman came to symbolize "the extreme form of woman's

compliance with the dualistic notion thatmake female-male relation

ships a simple matter of dominance and submission in an arena in
which a nineteenth-century male could live out and realize the
dreams of power which might have escaped his grasp in the actual
realm of worldly affairs" (61) Atencia's poem counters the artistic
formulation of femininity as passivity, subjugation and objectification
by revealing that (female) authors can represent the subjectivity of
women. In Atencia's poetic idiolect luz and noche suspendida signify
respectively artistic insight and themoment ofpoetic creation and in
"Retrato" highlight the poet's desire to see and reveal the veiled truth
of the painting: gender constraints that drown (Ophelia) and suffo
cate (Desdemona) female subjectivity. As the poem ends, it doubles
back to the title avoiding closure. Perhaps the word retrato has no
artistic referent after all but refers rather to the poet's self-portrait
or to that of a friend. This possibility highlights the female artist's
active role in creating her own vision of reality, her own images of
women.

The tension between self-conscious intertextuality and the

expression of personal emotive experience is characteristic ofAten
cia's female-figure poems, evident, for example, in "El mundo de Cris
tina" (Comp?s binario). In this poem Andrew Wyeth's painting
"Christina's World" (1948) serves as a point of departure forpersonal
reflection:

El mundo de Cristina
Museum ofModern Art
Nueva York
Tuve tambi?n su edad, y tendida en la hierba,
supe de un sol a plomo sobre el verde agostado,
de un ardiente silencio en el que me envolv?a,

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SHARONKEEFE UGALDE 233

y de una brisa s?bita?yerta quiz??de aviso,

hiri?ndome las sienes.
Tuve su edad. Me he vuelto

descompuesta sin duda, sobre m?,

para mirar mi casa alzada en la ladera

?la polilla royendo mi enagua en los armarios?
sin que siquiera a un ramo de glicinias pudiese
detraerle una gota de su zumo.
Me he vuelto,
confundido mi nombre, para salvar mi casa,
aunque siga en un cuadro donde tan s?lo espero
que ir?n a dar raz?n de mi nuca los ?nsares. (246)

The poet does not assume the voice of the painted figure nor address
her as t? but nonetheless, a fluidity of boundaries between the two
exists. Viewing theWyeth canvas evokes vivid memories in themind
of the speaker, who strongly identifies with the painted image of the
apparently young woman, "Tuve tambi?n su edad."7 In the final
strophe the division between the / of the speaker and the third-per
son object of her gaze, the portrait ofChristina, collapses, and with
it the demarcations that separate reality (the viewer of the painting)
from fiction (the painted figure). Is it Christina speaking? Is it the
poet-persona? Is itAtencia wearing Christina's canonized image as
a mask ofartistic respectability? Such indeterminacy foregrounds the
paradoxical relationship of art to life and female author to literary
tradition. It also reveals the paradigm of reading imbedded in the
text. The poet reads the image ofChristina not simply as an artistic
"
text, but as a 'subjectified object' : the lieart and mind' of another
woman" (Schweickart 52).
Looking at the canvas the poet-speaker is transported to the lost
green-world ("el verde agostado") ofher youth, an archetype found in
women writers' novels of development, described by Annis Pratt as
a place in nature, usually presented in retrospect, where women find

solace, companionship and independence. In the poem the focus is

not on the green-world itself, only its abrupt loss. The preterit of the
verb saber (supe) and the adjective s?bita convey the persona's mem

ory of her sudden, acute awareness ("un sol a plomo") of women's des

tiny. The painful warning ("de aviso, /hiri?ndome los sienes") fore
sees the anguish of the inability to speak one's self ("un ardiente
silencio") and relegation to a state ofpassivity ("yerta quiz?"). A shift
to present perfect tense in the second strophe links past to present,
and signals the persona's process of self-examination. The reference

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234 ALEC, 24 (1999)

to a confusion of one's own name (1. 13) precisely at the point of cli
max, synthesizes and intensifies the poem's polyvalent significance.
The speaker no longer recognizes herself because the passage of time
has transformed her into another and because gender norms are in
congruous with the self discovered through poetic exploration. The
desire to salvage in art the house of her youth (1. 12-13) is an
expression of the power of poetry to still time, but the presence of the
word house activates another reading, one focused on gender. Be
cause her back is turned, the viewer of the painting does not observe
Wythe's figure in the active role of looking, but her field of gaze is
expressly defined: a house, signifying domestic enclosure and stifled
female In this context "Me he vuelto ... salvar mi
subjectivity. para
casa" does not suggest the uplifting notion of poetry countering the
passage of time, but ofwomen trapped in gender prescriptions, re
signed to the role of "angel in the house."8 Entrapment, a condition
frequently portrayed in the female literary tradition since the nine
teenth-century, is reiterated in the physical qualities of the painting,
a clearly delimited space defined by the frame, as is immobility,
figures stilled by the artist's brush.9 The poem also addresses sexual
repression. Both moth-eaten underwear (1.9) and dried up flowers (1.
10-11) are what the persona finds upon her return. "Saving" her
house, to social means a depiction
conforming expectations, accepting
of female subjectivity that disallows sexual desire.
"El mundo de Cristina" ends on a note of irony that magnifies
both the value of art and art's role in enforcing gender perscriptions.
The last verse refers to a specific detail of hegemonic discourses' con
struction of woman: her neck as sexual lure, a representation, as
noted above, bolstered by centuries ofpoetry, painting and sculpture.
The speaker's final localization in a painting ("aunque siga en un
cuadro") ludically conveys both the power of art to transcend time
and the power of artistic images to subjugate women. The ironic
smile of the persona's final words recasts the recognition that art sur

passes life by returning our attention to gender. Hopefully other ar

tistic images ofwoman, specifically those long-necked renditions, will
confirm her (in)significance as an object of beauty.
Ekphrastic portrayals of statues like Antonio Canova's "Paolina
Borghese," Auguste Rodin's "Eve," and Aristides Maillol's "La Nuit"
foreground corporeality. In these poems Atencia, like other contem

porary women poets of Spain, Ana Rossetti (Los devaneos de Erato

1980), Juana Castro (Narcisia 1986), Clara Janes (Creciente f?rtil
1989), Pureza Canelo (Pasi?n in?dita 1990), affirms the female body
as a necessary first step in a process of autonomous self-inscription.10

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SHARONKEEFE UGALDE 235

As poetic personae in Atencia's texts statues represent rebellion

against immobilization, seemingly paramount for a heavy marble or
bronze-cast sculpture, flightfrom the control of the masculine gaze
that created them as beautiful, passive and, most notably,
objects,
the loss of false modesty and the embracement of the body.11 In the
canvas-mask poems, which question the demarcations between art
and reality and subvert woman as sign, there is an emphasis on the
instability ofdiscourse manifest in unstable points ofview, linguistic
play, and subtle irony. In the stone-mask poems, particularly those
found in the later, La pared contigua, there is greater insistence on
poetic transcendence and on the ability of female writers to inscribe
themselves.
The poem "Paolina Borghese" (Paulina o el libro de las aguas) has
as its referent a sculpture by Antonio Canova entitled "Paolina
Borghese Bonaparte" (1804-08):

Paolina Borghese
Canova
Hiende en la noche tu perfil egregio
ahora que el ciervo brama en el jard?n tan pr?ximo
y salva el cerco de laurel que abraza
tum?rmol desnudado: no hay un r?o
que anegue tu cintura, un agua c?lida.
Salta del lecho, caiga tu diadema,
huye al prado: Gesualdo di Venosa
suena en su clavic?mbalo.
Tiene la perfecci?n vocaci?n de desorden. (261)

Like Atencia's other ekphrastic poems "Paolina Borghese" is

positioned on the threshold between art, Canova's sculpture, and his

tory, the lives ofwomen, addressing the relationship between artistic

portrayals of femininity and female experience. In the opening line
the challenge to the female statue, a m?tonymie allusion to all
women artists, to "sculpt herself (Metzler 179) in the absence of a
tradition that represents female subjectivity is issued with new bold
ness and conviction. The speaker incites the reclining marble figure
to action. An urgent plea for mobilization and flight is sounded. The

repeated imperatives, "salva," "salta," "huye," convey a state of alarm.

The familiarity with which the speaker addresses Paolina, second

person singular (t?), suggests complicity, as if both understood the

need to break loose. The situation is critical; Paolina's suffocation
from selflessness is imminent. The final verse rings out a warning:

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236 ALEC, 24 (1999)

an impending rebellion ("desorden") against established limits and

angelic expectations ("perfecci?n"). The exhortation that Paolina let
her diadem fall culminates the plea for decisive action. Women's
ability to seize agency for themselves is associated with sexual desire,
expressed in the animal cry ("el ciervo brama") and inwater and body
imagery ("tu cintura", "un agua c?lida"). Reference to the historical
Paolina Bonaparte Borghese (1780-1826) reinforces this formulation
bringing to the text a model for female sexual behavior that defies
modesty and submissiveness. Paolina took pleasure in the company
ofnumerous lovers and, when confrontedwith having posed nude for
Canova, wryly stated: "There was a good fire in the studio" (Ortzen
83). Once and for all, the marble statue, the female author and
women collectively must leap clear ofprized, exquisite femininity ("el
cerco del laurel"), that places the objectified female body on a
pedestal. The urgency of reconstructing gender is forcefullyreiterated
with a closing allusion to Gesualdo di Venosa (1560?-1614?), the
Italian composer who, out of jealous rage, murdered his wife and her
lover.
" "
The final poem we examine, 'La Noche' (Lapared contigua) has
as its referent a bronze-cast statue by Aristides Maillol entitled "La
Nuit" (1902-9):

"La Noche"
Aristides Maillol

Despu?s de largo ensayo me dispuso sedente, abatida

la nuca,
los dos brazos avanzados para ce?ir las piernas
d?cilmente plegadas en su quietud contigua,
y desde entonces?bronce que por la gracia es leve?
en la noche prosigo
ojos adentro ajenos a vuestros ojos, vida interior ajena
a persuasi?n o examen:
en mi paisaje solo, yo, mi causa y destino. (356)
" "
'La Noche,' a brief, tightly-constructed text that opens to multi

ple significance, attests to the artistic mastery of Atencia's use of

polyvalent signs. In one possible reading the sign noche serves as

textual matrix synthesizing the artistic process. As the title of
Maillol's sculpture it refers overtly to a specific work of art and by
m?tonymie extension to the experience of viewing the statue. In
Atencia's idiolect, as mentioned above, noche also signifies the

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SHARONKEEFE UGALDE 237

moment of poetic creation. The poem is a meditation on art: produc

tion, text, and reception. The beauty and grace of the statue, achieved

through the sculptor's persistent efforts ("largo ensayo") communi

cates the possibility of transcendence through art. The image "bronce
que por la gracia es leve" suggests the artist's prerogative to trans
form a heavy material into ethereal weightlessness. The contempla
tion of an object of art or the act of artistic creation (1.6-9) opens the
realm of the imaginary. For the sculpture/writer and the viewer/
reader it is an exhilarating encounter with the power to create/
imagine an existence, to be the god of one's own destiny (1. 7-9).
" "
'La Noche' is a poem about art and imagination but also about

gender. Discovering the poet's subtlymasked insights into femininity

is not the results of nor a prescription for blindness to other signi
"
ficance generated by the text.A feminist reading of" 'La Noche' and
of other poems discussed is proposed as one way, not the way, of read

ing Atencia, and as such contributes to the unveiling of complex

textual strategies, dense layers of interrelated significance, and to
the enrichment of the pleasure of the text.When read from a feminist
perspective, the gender of Maillol's statue becomes significant, espe
cially because of the repetition of female ekphrastic images in the
poet's work. The matrix of the poem shiftsfrom noche to a paradigm
of references to the body introduced by la nuca: legs, arms, eyes. The
text's structural precision?two sections, the first four lines and the
last four, connected by a central transitional line?contrasts woman
as sign with women in control of their own destiny. In the poem the
figure breaks feminine silence, recognizing that over the centuries
("largo ensayo"), she has been created by another?the third person
subject of the verb disponer?not by herself.
The image presented in the initial section underscores sexual
purity and passivity, as did nineteenth-century art, but it also as
saults masculine discourse. Neck?Atencia's preferred sign of female

(mis)representation?is cleverly highlighted. It is introduced with an

encabalgamiento abrupto (Alonso 68-74), a division between lines
that ruptures normal syntaxis and heightens reader anticipation. In

addition, with the intensifying break between adjective and noun,

("abatida / la nuca"), la nuca appears dramatically visible in its
nakedness (1.2). The adjective abatida, in the sense of derribada,

derrocada, desarmada (DRAE) questions the validity and authority

of masculine discourse's overused image of woman as beautiful

object. But the condition of the neck also points to the state ofwomen
in patriarchy if the figurative meanings of abatir are considered:
humillar and also "hacer perder el ?nimo, las fuerzas, el vigor"

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238 ALEC, 24 (1999)

(DRAE). Another significance ofabatir, inclinar, objectively identifies

the position of the neck of Malliol's statue. The line "los brazos
avanzados para ce?ir las piernas" is similarly polyvalent, a simple

physical description of the cast bronze, but also a suggestion of sexual

repression. Passivity is expressed by the tranquil position of the
figure. She is seated (sedente) with her legs "d?cilmente plegadas en
su quietud contigua." The pose of contemplating an exquisite work of
art disguises the poet's re-visioning of gender. The masterful
transition highlighted by dashes, "?bronce que por la gracia es
leve?," strengthens the protective mask when understood as a refer
ence toMaillol's creative talent and to the power of art?as itwas in
our above reading. But the transitional phrase not only refers back
to the preceding lines which describe the French statue and the value
of art, but simultaneously to the subsequent lines which express the
sense offreedom that self-representation can bring towomen. It is as
if "La Nuit" had discovered how to escape the weight of her molded
metal and abandon passive immobility. In the final emphatic section
the polyvalence of theword noche?Maillol's statue, the transcendent
beauty of art, poets'/women's time of self-contemplation, Atencia's
creative power?contributes to the intricate textual design that
integrates insights into both art and gender. The poem acknowledges
that to create themselves, women inevitably begin in traditional
molds, but then must look inward, oblivious to how they have been
fashioned as man's Other (1. 7-8). An image emerges of the female
artist?indeed, of all women?as a self-sufficient subject, who, em

bracing her body and looking deep within, acquires the power to
imagine a self ofher own making (1. 9). In a retroactive reading nuca
is no longer a sign of the power of the masculine gaze to subjugate
the Other but ofwomen's freedom to enjoy the sensual pleasures of
their sexuality (Escaja 155).
The simultaneous exploration ofart and gender inAtencia's lyrics
is not by happenstance, but by design, bringing to the fore the con
ceptual association of femininity with imagery in Western culture.
Canonized artistic and literary images of woman are rendered trans

lucent, revealing insights into the gendered underpinnings of art and

life. In such texts the other side of the patriarchal story ofwoman
hood?captivity, stifled subjectivity, and sexual repression?is ingeni
ously made visible. When Maria Victoria Atencia dons masks of stone
and bronze, the significance of her texts moves beyond subversion to
envision images of women embracing the pleasures of sexuality,

exhibiting the independence of self-inscription and moving in a space

without rigid boundaries. This study underscores how Atencia sub

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SHARON KEEFE UGALDE 239

verts and re-envisions female gender with images that inhabit the
borderlands between art-woman and life-women, but it should be re
membered that themastery and originality ofher poetic voice resides
in its artfully crafted polyvalence which opens texts to multiple
significance. Ekphrastic recreations of woman communicate such
universal themes as the uncertainty of demarcations between fiction
and reality, the epiphany of art, and the power of the poetic word to
transcend time, while at the same time addressing the particular ex

perience of women.

NOTES

1. xFrom Atencia's poem "La frontera" (La intrusa 40).

2. Atencia published two plaquettes in the 1950s, "Tierra mojada" and
"Cuatro sonetos." In 1961 her first book, Arte y parte, appeared. After a fif

teen-year silence, she resumed publishing in 1976, and the following books
and anthologies have since appeared: Marta & Mar?a, El mundo de M.V., El

coleccionista, Ex libris, Comp?s binario, Paulina o el libro de las aguas,

Glorieta de Guillen, De la llama en que arde, La pared contigua, La se?al.
Poes?a La
1961-1989, intrusa, El puente, and Las contemplaciones.
3. The following aie among the poems which make up the body of female
figure texts: "Ofelia" (Marta & Mar?a), "Godiva en blue jeans" (El mundo de

M.V.); "Porcia," "Mujer de Lot,""El mundo de Cristina," "Marquesa de Lazan,"

"Condesa de Chinch?n," "Duquesa de Alba" (Comp?s binario); "Paolina
"Eva" "Retrato de una joven dormida" (Paulina o el libro de las
Borghese,"
the Virgin Mary in the collection of poems entitled "Trances de
aguas); " "" "
Nuestra Se?ora" (La se?al); 'Eva,' 'La Noche' (La pared contigua); "Re

proche a Hol?n" (El puente); "Jard?n du Luxembourg" (La intrusa).

4. Candelas Newton's excellent study ofAtencia's ekphrastic poems also em
revisionism, underscoring how artistic referents enable a
phasizes gender
strategy of female self-authorization, "sin caer en el confesionalismo y en la
trampa de la sinceridad generalmente asociados con una escritura femenina"
(225).
5. All citations of Atencia's poems are from La se?al.
6. See Showalter for an historical account of Ophelia's gender connotations.
7. Other "readers" of "Christina's World" have likewise tried to connect with
the person behind the image. Wyeth reported that many viewers of the paint
ing see themselves represented: "I get literally hundreds of letters every year
from people saying it's a portrait of themselves. And then they describe their
own life" (Hoving 134).
8. The notion o? saving the house relates to the nineteenth-century idea,
made popular by Coventry Patmore's The Angel in theHouse (1854), that the
virtuous, sexually pure wife guaranteed spiritual salvation forman (Djikstra
18-20).

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 240 ALEC, 24 (1999)

9. Pratt, for example, identifies the experience of entrapment as an arche

type in female-authored novels of development: "Each attribute of authen

ticity meets with its opposite: freedom to come
and go is abrogated; early,
ideal lovers are banished, to be replaced by a husband who resembles a gothic

villain; erotic freedom is severely limited; intelligence becomes a curse, and

too much consciousness of one's situation leads to punishment or madness"
(45).
10. Theorists and critics (Irigaray, Cixous, Suleiman, Ostriker, Rubio) are

largely in agreement that self-affirmation ofwomen's bodies and sexuality en

hances the authority of self-representation.
11. Persin's discussion of the poem "Museo" (La pared contigua), which in
cludes an analysis of the repositioning of the gaze and of woman as subject,
contributed greatly to my understanding of the poems that refer to sculp
tures. (Chapt. 6).

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