María Eugenia Alonso, Iphigenia: the diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored.

At a time when Venezuelan literature was concerned with criollismo, romanticism, and naturalism, Teresa de la Parra’s Iphigenia: The diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored (1924), burst upon the scene with its charming, literate, and unforgettable first person narrator, María Eugenia Alonso.

Although de la Parra (Ana Teresa Sanojo, 1898-1936) invented a character she claimed was a composite of several young women she knew in Caracas to whom she wanted to give voice, the novel’s readers and critics had difficulty keeping the opinions of the narrator and the author separate. Conservative Venezuelan critics attacked the novel’s author rather its heroine. Iphigenia won the “Concurso de Novelistas Americanos” Paris prize in 1924. De la Parra brought women subjects and feminine consciousness to center stage through her depiction María Eugenia Alonso’s restricted patriarchal world and her lack of choices. She gave depth, breadth, and intelligence to her character and broke new ground by articulating the unwritten and strict codes women lived by through “a young woman who wrote.”

Before eighteen-year-old María Eugenia returns to Caracas from her Catholic school in France when her father dies, she visits Paris, where she unknowingly spends the last of her fortune transforming herself from a schoolgirl to a stylish mademoiselle with the latest haircut, makeup, and couture clothes. When she arrives in Caracas, she learns that her paternal Uncle Eduardo has appropriated her inheritance, the Hacienda San Nicolás, depriving her of the money she was counting on to continue to live a life of travel and adventure. She is dependant on her family, penniless and trapped in a house she shares with her conservative maiden Aunt Clara and Grandmother Eugenia. She is bored and writes a long letter to her school friend Cristina, in which she describes her Parisian adventures, the restrictive life she is currently leading, and in which she makes fun of the outdated habits, mores and values of the Creole aristocracy in Caracas.

This letter, which takes María Eugenia four months to write, becomes Part I of the novel. In it, the narrator introduces the other characters. There is Uncle Eduardo, who appropriated María Eugenia’s inheritance, his mean-spirited wife María Antonia, who takes an instant dislike to her, and her double-named cousins. Her bohemian bachelor Uncle Pancho takes María Eugenia under his wings, but most of the time she stays home with the matriarch Eugenia and Clara, whose daily life consists of making lace and saying the rosary. The black laundress Gregoria becomes María Eugenia’s confidante, tells her family secrets, and secretly borrows books for her. Scent permeates the first pages of the novel as María Eugenia describes her grandmother’s house which smells of “jasmine, damp earth, wax candles and Elliman’s Embrocation” (8), and she sweeps us into her narrative as complicit readers of her letter. The letter, “In Which Things are Written as They are in Novels,” demonstrates the narrator’s literary self-consciousness. Cristina is the ideal reader to whom she can address her comments and her criticism. In this cathartic letter María Eugenia positions herself as the heroine of her own story, an intellectual and a romantic heroine who rebels against her restricted world. She writes that she is lonely, bored and poor, her desires stifled by her family, her wealth appropriated by her uncle. All she has left, as her grandmother reminds her, is the good family name and her irreproachable character. María Eugenia becomes aware of the patriarchal ideology that oppresses her, robbed her of her inheritance, and limited her choices to marrying a man who,” might do me the immense favor of placing himself beside me as a whole number, elevating me by an act and benefaction of his presence to a round and respectable sum that would acquire a certain real value before society and the world “(62).

In Part II (Juliet’s Balcony) María Eugenia has sent her letter, but since she is in the habit of writing, she decides to keep a diary, which becomes Chapter 1. We meet the exotic Mercedes Galindo, whom María Eugenia adores and wishes to emulate, and Gabriel Olmedo, who becomes the object of her affection in Chapter 2. Mercedes confesses her unhappiness to María Eugenia, who in turn becomes her confidante. Grandmother disapproves of Mercedes, and María Eugenia’s outings with Uncle Pancho, which precipitates her banishment to the hacienda San Nicolas, now in the hands of the scheming Uncle Eduardo, in Chapter 4. Her stay at the hacienda provides a pastoral interlude for María Eugenia, who flirts shamelessly with her 13-year old cousin Perucho, much to the chagrin of her Aunt María Antonia. In Chapter 6, Cristina finally responds with a terse letter in which she describes her newly-found love and impending marriage in reply to María Eugenia’s soul-baring letter. Cristina’s letter triggers memories of school life, secrets and shared experiences in the prize-winning short story originally published as Mama X in 1922 and later incorporated into the novel. In Chapter 7 a betrayed and heartbroken María Eugenia learns that Gabriel has married María Monasterios for her money.

Part III takes place two years later. María Eugenia has stopped writing, has mastered the domestic arts, and she comes upon her diary. The period of deep mourning over, she sits at the window to display herself, like an object for sale: “…my person acquired a notable likeness to those luxury items that are exhibited at night in store windows to tempt shoppers…, I am for sale!…Who will buy me? Who will buy me? I am for sale!… Who will buy me?” (218). She stops rebelling and agrees to marry César Leal, a wealthy lawyer, senator, and minister who drives a Packard. But when María Eugenia and Gabriel are reunited at the bedside of the dying Uncle Pancho, Gabriel confesses his love for her and his mistake in marrying a woman he doesn’t love. Gabriel begs María Eugenia to elope with him. After a bungled attempt to keep her tryst with Gabriel, María Eugenia realizes she has no choice but to marry Leal for the material comforts he can offer, a choice made because she lacks female role models other than her maiden aunt, the unhappily married Mercedes, and her conservative grandmother. María Eugenia identifies with Euripides’ tragic heroine as a sacrificial victim: like the Greek Iphigenia she is headed “Toward the Port of Aulis.”

By Part IV María Eugenia is the Greek heroine Iphigenia on her way to her sacrifice. Time speeds up in the last part of the novel, which consists of nine chapters spanning one week. By Monday night, after a drug-induced 24-hour sleep, María Eugenia’s fate is sealed and she is about to marry César Leal for convenience, security, and because her alternative would be to live like her Aunt Clara, a poor and dependent spinster. In the last few pages of the novel, María Eugenia returns to her room and realizes it’s too late to change her fate, which has been determined by society. She contemplates her sacrifice. When Aunt Clara asks her to try on her wedding dress, María Eugenia refuses. Instead, she sets the dress against a chair: “The chair seems like a sadistic lover embracing a dead woman” (353). María Eugenia becomes the bride of sacrifice, as she imagines the spirit of sacrifice becoming her lover. Readers are left to imagine her trudging to the altar, as she realizes the enormity of her compromise and her self-betrayal. “My behavior, my cowardly behavior, criminal to myself, was at the same time horribly disloyal to the man who in one week was going to give me a luxuriously appointed home, filled with everything I needed, and his name and his support, and a position in society, and a secure future sheltered from want and humiliating dependency.” (348).

Throughout the novel María Eugenia’s discourse assimilates, appropriates and reflects many genres, voices, and ideologies from French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian literature. There are many intertextual literary allusions, such as the Shakespearean reference to Juliet’s balcony, to Dante, Cervantes, and Bécquer. In the letter to Gabriel, María Eugenia casts herself as the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. She writes to Cristina that “You and I- all of us who, moving through the world, have some talents and some sorrows- are heroes and heroines in the novels of our own lives, which is nicer and a thousand times better than written novels “ (10). While the first part of the novel is funny, ironic, and satirical, the second part becomes more tragic and melancholy. At first María Eugenia ridicules the customs, thoughts and feelings of people she thinks are still living in a colonial time and mentality: her grandmother, Aunt Clara, Uncle Eduardo and his wife María Antonia. She thinks herself to be refined and educated, and living in Paris has exposed her to modern ways. As the novel progresses, she compromises her ideals and betrays herself.

María Eugenia is criticized for reading too much and too indiscriminately. César Leal, her husband- to- be believes, “ a woman’s head was a more or less a decorative object, completely empty inside, made to gladden men’s eyes, and equipped with two ears whose only function was to receive and collect the orders that men dictated to them” ( 250 ). Knowing she will live the rest of her life with this man, María Eugenia denies knowing who Dante is, stops reading novels in French and English, and claims that her writing consisted of copying recipes. Leal lays down the rules: after their marriage his wife will not wear low-cut dresses, nor attend balls, nor read novels or poetry.

Iphigenia can be read as a tragic-comedy, in which María Eugenia’s marriage to César Leal is seen as the tragic finale of the story. The narrator’s wry observations of characters, situations, scenes, and her insightful comments about life in a changing Venezuela bring the narrator to life and allow us to share her experiences. Some readers interpret the heroine’s identification with her sacrificial end as a mockery, and Edna Aizenberg treats the novel as a failed Bildungsroman, since the heroine does not achieve self-realization.

In the dedication to her mother in the copy of the first edition of Iphigenia, the author states she wrote her first novel based on people she knew and situations she was familiar with. Like her heroine, de la Parra was gifted with a refreshing sense of irony, humor, and acute observation, and astute in portraying a period in Venezuela’s history when it was being transformed from an agricultural landholding country into a semi-urban and petroleum exporting one, changing the nature of Venezuelan society and heralding the decline of its aristocracy. But unlike her heroine, de la Parra published, traveled, and never married. She wrote to a friend: “My character María Eugenia Alonso was really a synthesis, a living copy of several types of women I had seen suffering in silence all around me and whose true nature I wanted to reveal, ‘make talk’ as a protest against the pressure of social milieu” (my translation).

Through María Eugenia, de la Parra revealed a system that forced women to be in men’s economic thrall. All the women in the Alonso family are at the mercy of the men who spend their fortunes, as Uncle Pancho explains: Aunt Clara has nothing because she gave her money to her brother, a happy, wild, generous soul and a lady’s man. Grandmother has next to nothing because Eduardo lost her money on a mining venture. Mercedes is in an unhappy marriage with a libertine and a gambler who used up her fortune and treats her badly. María Eugenia recognizes the irony of her own situation: “the frightful fact: my absolute poverty, without any remission or hope other than the support of the same ones who perhaps had robbed me!” (59). Uncle Pancho points to the simple economic truth that troubles Venezuelan women: “For women without a dowry or a fortune of their own, as almost all women are in our society, it is always men who are obliged to totally support them” …and he concludes that “a woman’s worth is whatever value a man takes it into his head to place on her” (75). The solution is to find a man who will place a high value on María Eugenia, now her grandmother’s prized object: “You are her pride now, rather like what a new hat brought from Europe must have been in her youth.” (79).

While the members of her family are secure in their values, their roles, and their position in society, María Eugenia looks for answers and role models that will provide another way to live, but ultimately fails and succumbs to family and societal pressure. She is impressed by Mercedes’ outward trappings, but can’t see past the material and external aspects of her friend’s life and unhappy marriage. María Eugenia wants to play the piano and read books, but her grandmother and Aunt Clara pose obstacles. She looks for support from her Uncle Pancho, her accomplice who applauds her rebellious spirit, but turns against him when he objects to her marriage of convenience. Like his niece, Pancho depends on the family’s economic resources, but being a man gives him the freedom denied to María Eugenia, who wishes she had been born a man, because being a woman amounts to “the same thing as being a canary or a linnet. They lock you up in a cage, they take care of you, they feed you, and they don’t let you out;… How dreadful it is to be a woman; How dreadful, how dreadful “(80). On the other hand, female friendship and bonding are played out through María Eugenia’s relationships with Cristina, Mercedes, and Gregoria. While most readers sympathized with the heroine’s plight, one critic, Angélica Palma, suggested that instead of sighing “poor María Eugenia,” we should be thinking, “poor Leal.”

RoseAnna Mueller, PhD
Columbia College Chicago

(All translations from the Spanish are from Iphigenia: The diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored. trans. Bertie Acker. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

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