The historical pressure that women are subjected to, among other things, results in the systematic cancellation of their biographies. Mothers, wives, and daughters were all associated with an alien figure who was not necessarily masculine but always different from them. Even today it’s hard to think of men who identify as the husband of X, father of Y, or son of Z, but there are still plenty of women whose existence is without scandal ascribed to these derivative, secondary roles. . From this point of view, María Judite de Carvalho’s work, from which we have the opportunity to draw conclusions from the stories of many people named Mariana, contains as one of its cores the view of women as a secondary existence. Los Armariosempties, a novel considered by critics to be his most important text, takes on painful meaning.
The protagonist of the novel, Dora, is a widowed woman. Although her place in the world as a married woman is defined according to her husband, the continuity of her environment (family, work, friends) in the collective memory could not break with the original model. Absence does not liberate the biography; rather, it limits it to a new niche. If Dora is expected to be an exemplary mother, bride, and wife, this exemplary character must now be reinforced both in her renewed state as mother and bride and in her conquered widow. The terms of the emotional contract change (half a bed; a plate is missing on the table; war economy), but the constraints of will and identity do not. Dora’s new wings did not appear. On the contrary, what they now possessed was as if forged with a material of a special weight and weight: lead, bronze, the unbearable horror of work and days.
By now, one might think that another traditional narrative is hardly far from the list of hapless women the nineteenth-century novel has concocted, almost as costumers. What makes los armarios vacíos singular and often unsettling are two aspects that Carvalho treats with undoubted expertise. The first is the presence of a choir of women (mother-in-law, aunt and daughter) accompanying Dora in her death, the three figures (Ana, Julia and Lisa) skillfully drawn with admirable disposition. What Carvalho managed to present as a stark proof that less is more in literature. The second striking nuance of los armarios vacíos is the voice of the narrator, Manuela, another woman contending in this colorful display of personalities obliterated by life and circumstances. Carvalho’s remarkable use of a narrator who is simultaneously in and out of the action, and inevitably making one think of the uses of Henry James’s or Onetti’s Vedas, is a very accurate indication of the importance of the subject. In literature, which alone justifies the reading of a text that is inadequate on its continent, but whose content is terrible.