Table Of ContentTHINKING BACK THROUGH OUR MOTHERS:
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN
FEMININE IMAGINATION
By
MONICA AYUSO-VENTIMIGLIA
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1994
Copyright 1994
by
Monica Ayuso-Ventimiglia
Para mis padres,
quienes alentaron el devenir de
mi ambicidn aunque
no siempre la comprendieron.
Y para Juan Ignacio
cuya presencia misma
la mantiene viva.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In order to give thanks to the many who have helped me
write this dissertation, I must go back a few years.
Indeed, the process did not coincide with the day I started
writing it but with a time when diverse circumstances made a
vision clear to me. I am not exactly sure when or how I got
the first glimpse of its emerging contour.
Undoubtedly, I owe Jacksonville Sister Cities
Association the materialization of my graduate school dream
here in the United States. Under their auspices I had a
home in Jacksonville, a presidential scholarship to the
University of North Florida, jobs at Jacksonville
University, and, later, a visiting professorship to Florida
Community College at Jacksonville that afforded me financial
—
momentum to continue my work I am not exaggerating when I
—
say two full years. Their support, interest, and
encouragement have been invaluable.
I am completely indebted to my teachers at the
University of Florida who served on my dissertation
committee. Thanks go to Daniel Cottom for joining the
project late, after Barry Ruth Straus left it. Thanks go to
John Perlette for his advice that I work on the rhetorical
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,
fuzziness of my first efforts. I hear his commands every
time I write. Thanks go to Alistair Duckworth for providing
one of the earliest positive role models of teaching and
scholarship. Thanks go to Gregory Ulmer who, as a keen
theorist and prior comparatist himself, expressed his
enthusiasm as to the intertextual buttress of this work even
at a time when "influence" did not have as negative a
reception as it does today. Thanks go to Andres Avellaneda,
— —
who was the first to give a name "philological" to my
obsession with language. And thanks especially to Brandon
Kershner whose example as scholar, advisor, and teacher
touched all aspects of my intellectual growth in the last
few years. He intervened on my behalf a number of times,
but most decisively, when acts of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service threatened to jeopardize the
completion of my project.
I am equally indebted to those friends with whom I
shared a six-year love of running (among other things)
especially to John and Susan Duss as well as John and Linda
Whitten. We have seen many dawns and storms together; we
have tackled many bridges and beaches together. With them I
learned that the world of athletics, like that of academics.
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calls for discipline, endurance, schedules, and will-power
so that somehow what I learned in one has dynamically helped
me in the other.
Finally, I thank a group of friends who feel like
family now. Thanks go to Sherry1 Wilson and her sons
Langston, Jordan, and Griffin for giving Juan Ignacio a home
always but especially in the summer of 1993. With their
help Juan Ignacio could finish first grade in the school
where he had begun it, and I could relocate in Gainesville
to teach. Thanks go to Edna Stringer for her interest and
for the use of her computer and printer. Thanks go to her
daughter, Renee S. Bullard, for her enviable literacy in
their use. Finally, I thank Sue W. Griffin, who saw
potential in me first as a baffled international student and
always relentlessly encouraged me to actualize it. She kept
my vision alive and, when I was perilously close to losing
it, she helped me regain it anew. For no less than fourteen
years now, Mrs. Griffin has opened the doors of her home
wide to Juan Ignacio and me. She pushed me to write; she
read everything I ever wrote with the toughness of the
— —
purist; and she enlightened me sometimes wordlessly in
ways only a bilingual octogenarian could. Most important,
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.
she reassured me that Juan Ignacio would manage to grow and
to thrive, too, in spite of living in the vertiginous
ambient of a writer (and thrive he has). This dissertation
would have been literally inconceivable without her wise
support
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PREFACE
This project originates in a desire to unite the two
halves of my background. Those two halves were artificially
kept apart throughout my formative years in Argentina.
Simultaneously, I learned two languages; I attended two
different schools. The worlds of Spanish and English never
intermingled. Translation had long been banned from my
second-language classroom since the most successful learning
conditions approximated real-life scenarios of language
acquisition. As a result, Spanish was blocked. In one
sense, the method succeeded: I became bilingual and bi-
cultural. In another sense, in the process of gaining one
language, I lost the other. I cannot count myself among
those who, like Maria Granata, fell in love with their
native language from the start (132). Rather, I fall among
the ranks of those who tarry. Not until many years later
did I cultivate my Spanish-American heritage.
Like any other lengthy undertaking, this one has had
more than its fair share of false starts, halts, and
swerves. If I had to draw its starting line, I would
broadly designate a contemporary British literature class I
took twenty-odd years ago when, as a senior in college, I
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read Virginia Woolf for the first time. Early she proved to
be the writer on whom I wanted to concentrate my graduate
efforts. I remember the puzzlement and the delight with
which I first pored over her last and perhaps most
challenging creation, The Waves. Narrowly speaking, I would
call that the moment in which I chose a topic for this
dissertation. At that time, both chair and co-
— —
chair concurrently but separately suggested I capitalize
on a background I had by virtue of my birth. This veering
of direction involved acguainting myself with a Latin-
American canon paradoxically new to me. During the next few
years I researched most of its emerging women's voices, not
surprisingly bi-lingual and tri-lingual themselves. Then, I
more finely adjusted the focus of my interest. I would
position myself precisely at the nexus afforded by two
linguistic worlds/perspectives. I would search for
relationships between the British feminist and three or four
of her Spanish-American daughters, a task never extensively
attempted before, with the exception of sparse critical
references to the impact of Woolf on this side of the
Atlantic and a few essays by the novelists themselves who
wrote on the importance of having read her. I hoped to
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I
enlarge the dialogue between the two worlds, which was
linear and unilateral until very recently.
Even though the project was never met with less than
enthusiasm from both inside and outside my committee, the
choice of Spanish-American women was the most trying task.
Trying but immensely rewarding since their texts, appearing
—
in the mid-seventies, obviously pointed the direction
—
then believed and since then have confirmed of things to
come. For instance, their translations and adaptations were
undertaken almost as I wrote. In a sense, these texts
confronted me as much as I confronted them. To my knowledge
only Brazilian-born Clarice Lispector and Argentine-born
Victoria Ocampo had been the object of article-length
studies linking them with Woolf. I combed the canon for
justifications that would invite comparisons: lifetime
exposure to Woolf's aesthetics; knowledge of her work;
similarities of technique and subject; primary political
interest in a female-centered world; a feminist persuasion.
After a revitalizing immersion in texts of my time that
spoke eloquently to me, reaffirming my experience as Latin-
American woman, I chose a corpus of three writers,
representing different countries: Rosario Ferre (Puerto
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