Pilar and Two Marys

Gloria “Dani” Steele

Hispanic Lit

Why Can’t It be Beautiful: Pilar’s Seduction and the marriage of the Marys

Spring 2007

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvois writes, “First we must ask: what is woman? ‘tota mulier in utero,’ says one, ‘woman is a womb.’ But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest…and yet femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a platonic essence, a product of philosophic imagination?” She continues, quoting Aristotle:

“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.”…Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being…Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’ Uriel: “The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself…Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.” And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called “the sex,” by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex-- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her…He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-- she is the Other.

And, indeed, in a patriarchal society as we are placed, women are given separate roles to follow-- that of a man’s mother, his conquest (as a virgin expected to succumb to him), and the whore (a mysterious being, unattainable, whom he never marries, but who awakens him sexually and whom he can never claim). Simone de Beauvois’ acquiescent claims echo Octavio Paz’s Freudian analysis of the Mexican identity in The Labyrinth of Solitude:

In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire. When passive, she becomes a goddess, a beloved one, a being who embodies the ancient, stable elements of the universe: the earth, motherhood, a receptacle and a channel. When active, she is always function and means, a receptacle and a channel. Womanhood, unlike manhood, is never an end in itself.

But, instinctively rejecting these theories that maintain woman can only be defined relative to men, the question must be put forth: what makes a woman? What is a woman? Simply a series of (different) physical attributes-- ovaries holding unborn seed, uterus to protect growing fetus, something between two thighs from which life, a being, is expelled, and breasts tools for feeding and nurturing? Yes, but one also knows that womb in which that child grows, had to have first been filled, in an act of love[-making], by a man. That vagina from which the child is pulled had to have been first penetrated by a man-- that same mother was once a virgin, was also once someone’s woman, someone’s love, something warm and inviting, something a man fever-dreamed about, shivering. The problem is most people never see the wife or mother as capable of sexuality, or in possession of sexuality. People seem to forget that the same woman at the alter in white, or rocking a cradle, was once sexual. Where, in the western patriarchy, can we find a whole woman?

Singer/songwriter Tori Amos, herself a minister’s daughter, extensively explores the division of Christian women and the consequences in her raw, honest, and cathertic music. As quoted in Dazed and Confused magazine, she makes her frustration with this system plain-- “There’s this denial that the Magdalene was as divine as the Virgin Mary.” Likewise, in an interview in Aquarian Weekly magazine, she confronts the limits of the Biblical archetypes western women, in one way or another, seem doomed to follow:

I looked inward for answers - and to find the female. I was looking for the blueprint of women that wasn’t in Christianity. You see, the Magdalene’s blueprint wasn’t passed down. The blueprint of the Virgin Mary-- and the Mother Mary-- was passed down, but not woman as independent prophet/priestess on her own. Strike the word prophet-- woman/priestess, passion, compassion-- that’s how I view the Magdalene, not the whore who wiped Jesus’ feet. ...Naturally, I think there’s a fragmentation in the Christian myth-- there is no myth of the woman without being associated through the man-- or through the sex-- whether she’s a virgin or a mother. She’s a virgin before the son of God is born and then she’s a mother after he’s born. Whether Mary Magdalene was the wife of the son - to me, Mary was truly the female representation of God.

In our western Christian partiarchial society, we've been given sexless archetypes to follow-- a supposedly sexless Jesus, and a Virgin Mary who becomes his mother, the story goes, without physical union with a man. We have the eternal son, Jesus, (we assume never reaching manhood or fatherhood as he is portrayed as having never touched a woman), it seems, and the eternal suffering mother. like la llorona, Mary the mother has watched her son die....but what about the weeping Magdalene at her side? This woman, demonized for her sexuality and passion-- who is she and why is she perceived as less legitimate than the mother Mary, the virgin Mary? why can she not have claim to Jesus's love?

In his One Hundred years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems to accomplish the unification of the two Mary archetypes in the character of fortune teller Pilar Ternera. Prostitute, priestess, prophetess, witch…these terms, applied in different circles to the Magdalene certainly apply to Marquez’s Pilar Ternera. But Pilar and the Magdalene, uncompromisingly sensual and shamelessly sexual, why can’t they be teachers, nurturers, mothers, claiming their shadow side without the shame? Why is the Magdalene representative of the dark, evil, base, corrupt side of love and why is the virgin and mother confined to a love without passion?

...and then he lost his memory, as during times of forgetfulness, and he recovered it on a strange dawn and in a room that was completely foreign, where Pilar Ternera stood in her slip, barefoot, her hair down, holding a lamp over him, startled with disbelief.
"Aureliano!"
Aureliano checked his feet and raised his head. he did not know how he had come there, but he knew what his aim was, because he had carried it hidden since infancy in an inviolable backwater of his heart.
"I've come to sleep with you," he said.
His clothes were covered with mud and vomit. Pilar...did not ask any questions. She took him to the bed. She cleaned his face with a damp cloth, took off his clothes, and then got completely undressed and lowered the mosquito netting so that her children would not see them if they woke up. She had become tired of waiting for the man who would stay, of the men who had left, of the countless men who missed the road to her house, confused by the uncertainty of the card. During the wait her skin had become wrinkled, her breasts had withered, the coals of her heart had gone out. She felt for Aureliano in the darkness, put her hand on his stomach and kissed him on the neck with maternal tenderness. "My poor child," she murmured. Aureliano shuddered. With a calm skill, without the slightest misstep, he left his accumulated grief behind and found Remedios changed into a swamp without horizons, smelling of a raw animal and recently ironed clothes.

Enchanted by Pilar, young Jose Arcadio Buedia certainly sees a nurturing part of her that exists as an inseperable part of and, perhaps, strengthens the sexual attreaction between them. Indeed, he wantes her to be his mother and, even while making love, he confuses her face with that of Ursula. The passages describing Pilar’s seduction of Jose Arcadio and his brother Aureliano are undeniably beautiful. Most importantly, however, they reveal the natural coexistence of the motherly, nurturing qualities of women and those of the so-called “sacred prostitute”, her sexual guidance an invaluable service. Pilar is her own woman, undivided, uncircumcised of either her sexuality of her divinity. That she exists, even as a fictional character, proves that it is possible for a woman to embody all female roles but the question then remains: how can one function safely as bother mother and lover without any conflict of interest, as Pilar does? But that, if it ever can be concretely answered, will not be answered here.