ALFONSINA STORNI (1892 -1938)

Esta mañana, algo después de las 8 horas, varios muchachos que

transitaban por la playa La Perla, descubrieron junto al mar, flotando
en las aguas, un cadáver de mujer. Traído a la orilla se comprobó que
estaba perfectamente vestida y presentaba una expresión tranquila.
(Etchenique, 1958: 17).

[This morning, sometime after 8am, children crossing La Perla beach

discovered the body of a woman floating on the shore. When she was
brought onto the beach she was found to be perfectly dressed and
looked calm].

This description of a peaceful, well turned-out corpse was taken from an early

newspaper report of Alfonsina Storni’s suicide by drowning, in 1938. Cited in

Etchenique’s loving tribute, it is an image that has played a significant role in

subsequent mythologizing of Storni as a poète maudit.1 It is tempting to hope that

Storni would have approved of this image of her as ‘perfectly dressed and calm’, as

she was a shrewd commentator on fashion.2 And yet it is an image that also has more

abject connotations, linking Storni’s image to that of suicidal women writers like

Woolf or Plath and to the literary iconography of the doomed Ophelia who recurs in

the watery ‘Jane-Does’ of Carver’s ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ (1981),

Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), and Lawrence’s Jindabyne (2006). It is not my intention

in this introduction to Storni’s work to examine whether the popularity of this

particular image of female abjection is an indictment of, or an effect of the kind of

misogyny that galvanised Storni’s own work and divided her critics, but it does

highlight the contradiction I want to examine in this essay between the romantic

image of Storni as a doomed poète maudit(e) and the image of her that the two-

1
Kirkpatrick (1990: 105) discusses the ‘creation of a mythic Storni’ and in the unpaginated preface to
her 1979 study, Jones describes the tendency to mythologize Storni as ‘something more than a little
pernicious’.
2
For more on Storni and fashion, see Unruh, 2006: 30-51.

1
volume collected works published by Muschietti in 1999 and 2002 has made more

widely available.

Early critical response to Storni emphasizes her suicide and her abjection,

portraying her as a fragile outsider in a male-dominated world, who was prone to

mood swings and amorous disappointment (Etchenique, 1958: 59; Roxlo and Mármol,

1964: 50). Bemused perhaps by her satirical insights into the social façade of

heterosexual relationships, this school of criticism tends to approach her poems as a

by-product of her appearance. Even an admirer like Etchenique allows his opinion

that she ‘wasn’t beautiful’ to account for the theme of thwarted love in her poetry

(1958: 31). He describes in minute detail the facial expressions and gestures that

betray what he refers to as her ‘nerviosismo constante, mudable y contradictoria’

[constant, mobile, contradictory state of nervous tension] (1958: 30-31). Roxlo and

Mármol devote three pages to Storni’s appearance before deferring to Gabriela

Mistral who met her in 1926. Having being warned Storni was ugly, Mistral says she

was surprised to find she had the most beautiful silver hair she had ever seen and a

face that looked a decade younger than her real age (Roxlo and Mármol, 1964: 54).

This image of Storni as the victim of traumatic circumstance (and even Mistral’s

description conjures up a suffering ingénue) has now been redressed and the ‘Storni-

maudite’ figure has been revised by scholars more attuned to questions of gender.

Phillips’ ground-breaking 1975 monograph offers the most detailed textual analysis to

date and remains a key text for Storni scholars that paved the way for those who

regard Storni as a woman who exerted no small degree of control over her public

image and as ‘one of the first and foremost Latin-American feminist poets’ (Fishburn,

2
1991: 121). Drawing on her journalism, lectures, poetry readings and plays, critics

and biographers such as Jones (1979), Delgado (1990), Galán and Gliemmo (2002),

Kirkpatrick (1990), Muschietti (1999; 2002) and Unruh (2006) provide a more

rounded image of Storni’s life and work, and Unruh draws particular attention to the

key aspect of theatricality that ‘saturates not only Storni’s public persona but also her

writing and gives consistency to her intellectual project’(Unruh, 2006; see also

Kirkpatrick, 1995). Unruh takes the short story ‘Historia sinética de un traje tailleur’

[Kinetic tale of a tailored dress]3 as a point of departure for an illuminating account of

Storni’s appreciation of fashion. Storni was highly aware of the gap between self and

self-image, as can be seen in the poem ‘Soneto a la mujer que aparece en mis retratos’

[Sonnet to the woman who appears in my photographs] and in numerous of her short

stories, plays and poetry, and where the image of the suicidal Storni hovers over her

early critical commentators, more recent scholarship has been galvanised by the witty,

ironic Storni who replies, when asked what she would do if she were a man:

‘comportarme como la mejor mujer’ [behave like the best of women] (Delgado, 1990:

109). Storni’s contemporaries were also too discreet to mention the fact that, by the

age of twenty, she was an unmarried mother who had recently moved to the capital in

search of financial support for herself and her son. This life-defining event, glossed

over and/or disavowed by both Storni and her early commentators may well account

for her acute insight into sexual inequality, her highly developed sense of irony, and

her unique position in a largely male, well-educated, middle class literary world, a

position summed up nicely by Storni herself after the publication of her first

collection of poetry, La inquietud del rosal [The Anxious Rosebush], in 1916:

3
Originally published in La Nota, 30 May 1919 and reprinted in Muschietti, 2002: 749-752.

3
 Many people have accused me of being influenced by poets I have never met.

Even Lugones […] told me that he had noticed a very obvious influence from

the most fashionable French poets. So as not to appear ignorant, I did not ask

him who they were, but the truth is that I work nine hours a day locked up in an

office.4

She was born in Sala Capriasca, a small village in Switzerland, on the 29 May 1892

(for detailed biographies see Delgado, 1990; Roxlo and Mármol, 1964; Galán and

Gliemmo, 2002). Her Italian-Swiss parents had been popular residents of San Juan,

Argentina, where her mother ran a small private school. Her mother was well-

educated and a locally renowned singer, but her father’s alcoholism had led them to

Switzerland in search of a cure. They returned to San Juan in 1896 and her father died

in 1906. Storni attributes to this her unusual independence in a society accustomed to

rigid notions of gender difference and feminine dependence:

You can understand that a person like me, who came in contact with life in such

a direct way, in such a masculine way, let us say, could not live, suffer, or

behave like a child protected by the four walls of her house. And my writing has

inevitably reflected this, which is my personal truth: I have had to live as a man,

so I demand to live by male standards. (Jones, 1979: 23).5

She spent a year touring Argentina with José Tallavi's theatre company in 1907 during

4
Cited in translation by Jones (1979: 56), who notes the source as a letter written by Storni to Juan
Julián Lastra and subsequently published by León Benarós in an article on Storni ‘Vida entre dos
cartas’, published in La Nación, 6 August, 1972 (Jones, 1979: 138).
5
Jones’ translation, originally published in Pedro Alcazar Civit’s article ‘Las grandes figuras
nacionales: Alfonsina Storni’ (‘Great National Figures: Alfonsina Storni’) El Hogar 11 September
1931, p.8 (Jones, 1979: 135).

4
which time her mother remarried, opened another private school and had a daughter

(See Roxlo and Mármol,1964: 36; Delgado,1990: 31; Unruh, 2006: 33; Muschietti,

1999: 35). Storni qualified as a teacher in 1910 and began teaching in Rosario,

becoming vice-president of the Comité Feminista de Santa Fe [Santa Fé Feminist

Committee] by the time she was nineteen (Kirkpatrick, 1990: 114). A relationship

with a married man led to her pregnancy and resignation from her teaching post.

Delgado notes:

La medida de este episodio trascendente la da el hecho mismo de que durante la

vida de Alfonsina nunca apareció mencionado el hijo, ni mucho menos entre las

causas que pudieron haber motivado el viaje a Buenos Aires. (Delgado, 1990:

40)

[The implications of this life-changing event can be measured in the fact that

during her lifetime her son was never mentioned and certainly never as a factor

in her move to Buenos Aires]

Storni moved to the capital, and gave birth to her son, Alejandro Alfonso, there in

1912, earning her living where possible as a teacher, journalist and poet, and

publishing in numerous popular and literary magazines and newspapers.6 Her articles

on immigration, marriage, divorce, female suffrage and the need for better and more

widespread education reflect the rapidly changing social climate and the work of the

increasingly effective trans-American women’s movement that developed between

6
For more detail see Roxlo and Mármol, 1964: 58; Delgado, 1990: 49; Jones,1979: 2. Kirpatrick
(1990: 112) notes that although around ‘22 per cent of the children born in Argentina between 1914
and 1919 were born to single mothers, with the rate being much higher in the provinces […] it was not
common in the circles in which Storni moved’.

5
the turn of the century and the Second World War (for more detail, see Millar, 1990

and Queirolo, 2004).

The active criticism of gender roles in her journalism is not reflected in her early

poetry, and this has affected the very different impressions of Storni provided by her

early and later critics. The prologue to her two-volume collected works notes the

‘rara discrepencia’ [odd discrepancy] between Storni’s self-abnegating poetic voice

and the more confident tone of her journalism (Muschietti, 1999: 9). Storni herself

came to regret the romanticism of her first collection, La inquietud del rosal (1916)

[The Anxious Rosebush] although the poem, ‘La loba’ (‘She-wolf’) has been singled

out as early evidence of her critical attitude to the traditionally passive feminine role.

Her second collection, El dulce daño (1918) [Sweet Pain] echoes the romantic

tradition in poems such as ‘Transfusión’ [‘Transfusion’] and explores more cynical

reflections on love in the sinister imagery of ‘Viaje finido’ [‘Journey’s End’] and in

her now iconic denunciation of the double standards applied to male and female

lovers, ‘Tú me quieres blanca’ [‘You love me white’].7 The theme of ‘She-wolf’ is

reprised in ‘Oveja descarriada’ [‘Lost sheep’] which celebrates the alienation of the

female poetic voice, while the poem ‘Cuadros y ángulos’ [‘Squares and Angles’]

anticipates her later work in its depiction of alienation in the modern city.

Irremediablemente (1919) [Incurably] continues this parallel exploration of the

romantic tradition in ‘Melancolía’ [‘Melancholy’], ‘Silencio’ [‘Silence’], and ‘Un día

estaré muerta’ [‘One day I’ll be dead’], and its deconstruction in ‘Hombre pequeñito’

[‘Little Man’], ‘Peso Ancestral’ [‘Ancestral Weight’], and ‘Bien pudiera ser’ [‘It May

Well Be’]. The now famous lines of ‘Bien pudiera ser’ suggest that Storni saw her
7
For a discussion of this poem in relation to ‘Carta lírica a otra mujer’ [‘A lyrical letter to the other
woman’] and Sylvia Plath see Evans (1994). Unruh (2006: 42) also analyses the ‘life-defying’ effects
of idealisation in the short story ‘La fina crueldad’ [‘Subtle cruelty’]. See also Morelleo-Frosch (1990).

6
poetry as a release from, as well as an expression of, an inherited legacy of female

silence that was: ‘algo vedado y reprimido /De familia en familia, de mujer en mujer’

[forbidden and repressed, (passed down) from family to family, from woman to

woman], and the importance of this image for Storni can be seen in the fact that she

recited this poem unabridged in a talk she would give about her development as a poet

shortly before she died. 8

Storni’s divided poetic and journalistic voices may also reflect the divided critical

responses to her work. Borges was particularly scathing (see Kirkpatrick, 1990: 108),

and one commentator likened her poetry to a ‘serpiente insaciada con sacudimientos

de epilepsia’ [an insatiable serpent with epileptic convulsions], warning that it should

not be read by young women, but by men with more experience of life (Muschietti,

1999: 12, 17). Nonetheless, her reputation was secured by the award of the Buenos

Aires Municipal First Prize to her fourth collection, Languidez (1920) [Languor],

despite the fact that the collection begins with a poem in which the female voice

aligns itself with a caged female lion separated by bars from a male observer. Adela

García Salaberry complained that Storni was refusing ‘deliberadamente a deleitarnos

con las intimidades de su neurosis […], con las sinuosidades de su interior inquieto y

vibrante’ (Muschietti, 1999: 30) [deliberately refusing to entertain us with her

neurotic confessions […], her sinuous, febrile, vibrant inner world]. However, despite

disappointing readers who preferred her expression of romantic female malaise and

continuing to provoke ‘escándalo entre hombres y mujeres’ (Muschietti, 1999: 35)

[scandal among men and women] Storni’s growing stature can be measured in the re-

editions of her poetry, the literary groups she joined, her recitals and lectures, her

8
Phillips (1975: 37) claims that in this collection ‘Storni is slowly and painfully breaking form the
chrysalis of “poetisa” to emerge as “poeta”’.

7
increasing prestige as a journalist and the teaching posts created for her in 1921 at the

Teatro Municipal Labardén and at the Escuela Normal de Lenguas Vivas in 1923

(Roxlo and Mármol, 1964: 10-11; Phillips, 1975: 10-11; Muschietti, 1999: 35).

Storni set up an annual poetry festival in Mar del Plata in 1925, the year her fourth

collection, Ocre (Ochre) was published (Roxlo and Mármol, 1964: 109). This has

been seen as a turning point: for Muschietti it is ‘un libro emblemático’ [an

emblematic book] and for Phillips a ‘Janus-volume in Storni’s oeuvre’. It continues to

explore problematic gender relationships, often in sonnet form with romantic and

modernista [modernist] imagery (Muschietti, 1999: 21; Phillips, 1975, 51). Reversing

the gender of the Courtly Love tradition, men in ‘Olvido’ (‘Oblivion’) are

unattainable and cold. The ideal lover is a dream in ‘El engaño’ (‘Delusion’) that

enslaves women in poems like ‘Inútil soy’ (‘I’m worthless’), a poem which describes

the woman in love as an insect condemned to return the ‘oscuro pozo’ [dark well] of

love. These romantic and mildly surreal images of love as a dangerous passion are

tempered by the ironic tone of ‘Divertidas estancias a Don Juan’ [‘Comic verse for

Don Juan’], ‘El tímido amante’ [‘Shy lover’] and the light-hearted ‘Epitafio a mi

tumba’ [‘My epitaph’] which suggest the development of a more confident, if

disenchanted, poetic voice.

Storni’s first play, El amo del mundo [Master of the World] was performed

unsuccessfully two years later in 1927, and is still of interest as a didactic portrayal of

sexual inequality and as ‘una transposición escénica de “Tú me quieres Blanca”’ [a

theatrical version of the poem ‘You love me white’] (Roxlo and Mármol, 1964: 115).

The heroine, Márgara, is a single woman in her thirties who is increasingly convinced

8
of the ‘abismo mental’ [mental abyss] that separates the sexes (Phillips, 1975: 64-65).

She is pursued romantically by Claudio, but remains sceptical about his romantic

protestations of love that she proves to be just ‘literature’ when she confesses she has

an illegitimate son: ‘Ve usted? He pulverizado la blanca mujer que usted había soñado

en mí’ [You see? I’ve just smashed the image of the white woman you imagined me

to be]. Claudio marries the manipulative young Zarcillo, who has also had an affair,

but manages to hide the incriminating evidence of this by retrieving a love letter with

the help of Márgara. (See Unruh, 2006: 37 for more detail)

Around this time, Storni suffered health problems and her friend Blanca de la Vega

suggested a trip to Europe (Delgado, 1990: 131-32). In 1930 they traveled to Spain

where Storni gave a number of successful lectures, then spent time in Paris and in her

native village in Switzerland. After a second trip to Europe with her son in 1932,9 she

published her Dos farsas pirotécnicas [Two Pyrotechnical Farces]. These

experimental plays are influenced by the Spanish avant-garde: Gómez de la Serna’s

greguerías, Valle-Inclán’s esperpentos and Lorca’s surrealism, and they pay original

and ironic attention to the male literary canon. In Cimbelina en 1900 y pico

[Cymbeline in 1900 and a bit] characters emerge from a giant book representing

Shakespeare’s play to stage a parallel production of a modern farce with ambivalent

gender stereotyping. Storni’s body-building contemporary men echo Lorca’s

muscular Football Player in Así que pasen cinco años [When Five Years Pass], and in

an ironic aside not only to gender but presumably to product-placement, Storni’s

heroine gives her Gillette razor as a love token to the hero who says he will treasure it

because it has touched: ‘la dulzura de tu cuello, la perfección de tus brazos, la

9
Storni’s friend Berta Singerman says this was the first time she realized Storni had ‘un hijo natural’
[an illegitimate son]. (See Delgado, 1990: 136)

9
pelusilla de melocotón de tu cara’ [your soft neck, your perfect arms, your peach-

down face).10 The second of these farces is Polixema y la cocinerita [Polyxena and

the Little Cook) a one-act spoof on Euripides and a sinister reflection of the way

politics is all too often ‘acted out’, in life and art, on the bodies of women.11 In the

epilogue an enormous fish tells Euripides there is a plague of poetisas in modern-day

Argentina, one of whom has replaced his heroine, sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles,

with a cook who stabs herself to death on a kitchen table surrounded by vegetables.

Horrified, Euripides throws himself to his death in the mouth of the fish while his

wife, draped over a rock by the sea behind him, yawns and sleeps on undisturbed

(Phillips, 1975: 68).12

After a break of almost ten years, Storni returned to poetry with two experimental

collections influenced by Spanish ultraismo13 and the ‘Generation of 1927’. In 1933

Lorca and Neruda had visited Buenos Aires, and apparently Storni was at her happiest

around this time, both with her work and her reputation with her peers.14 Phillips

(1975: 84) notes the ‘cinematografic close-up of monstrous proportions’ in the title

poem of Mundo de siete pozos [World of Seven Wells, 1934], which clarifies the

metaphorical title as a surreal reference to the human head with the seven orifices

10
Jones (1979: 98) is fairly damning of this play and, although well received by critics, she links this to
its production ‘in homage two months after her suicide’. (Unruh, 2006: 36) notes that Storni’s women
increasingly ‘display an androgynous turn’ and discusses the play in more detail (39-40).
11
‘Throughout history women have always been raped in war. The very nature of motherhood, the very
basis of femininity, has always been used as a weapon of war’. (See Rigoberta Menchú, 2003: 131)
12
Polyxena appears in Hecuba, where, in Euripides’ version, the ghost of Achilles demands she is
sacrificed on his tomb. In other versions of the myth Polyxena commits suicide after Achilles is
murdered by her brother Paris. Storni is updating a tradition begun by Aristophanes, who mocked
theatrical versions of Euripides in a number of plays.
13
Ultraísmo is the name given to an avant-garde literary movement that began in Spain in 1918 and
was influenced by Futurism. It is particularly associated with poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gerardo
Diego and Lucía Sánchez Saornil.
14
Unruh (2006: 32) notes her ‘relationship to vanguard groups was awkward’ and that ‘her candid
attacks on gender inequities ran counter in spirit to the habitat for fraternity forged by male
vanguardists’. Muschietti (1999: 30) also discusses the increasing evidence of avant-garde influence,
despite the fact that Borges had denied the avant-garde ‘como espacio posible para la escritura de las
mujeres’ [as a space for women writers].

10
being the eyes, ears, nose, mouth.15 ‘Danza irregular’ [‘Irregular Dance’] shows

evidence of a more liberated, avant-garde approach to the barbed delights of love in

the lines ‘En la punta de un látigo/ mi corazón/ danza una danza/ en tirabuzón’ [On

the tip of a whip my heart dances a corkscrew dance] (Jones, 1979: 80). ‘Canción de

la mujer astuta’ [Smart woman's song], describes menstruation, radically, as a siren

call to fugitive love; ‘Retrato de García Lorca’ [‘Portrait of García Lorca’] opens with

a particularly evocative impression of Lorca’s well-known forehead, and the influence

of surrealism can be seen in the Lacanian eye of ‘Calle’ [Street] where ‘Todo ojo que

me mira/ me multiplica y dispersa’ [Every watching eye/ multiplies and scatters

me].16

Storni had surgery for breast cancer in 1935. Cancer was a subject, like the

illegitimacy of her son, that was recognized but not openly discussed in the 1930s,

and Storni isolated herself from all but close friends. Her final collection Mascarilla y

trébol [Mask and Clover] was published posthumously in 1938 and is a collection of

fifty-two unrhymed sonnets that Storni considered her most successful work. She

refers in the prologue only obliquely to her illness, mentioning the ‘cambios psíquicos

fundamentales’ [fundamental psychic changes] she had undergone, and claims they

were written rapidly in a trance-like state that suggests she was identifying more

closely with surrealism. She calls them ‘anti-sonnets’ and is aware they will represent

a challenge to fans of her more popular earlier verse.17 Phillips analyses the

15
See Phillips (1975) for an analysis of the progression in her work from simile to metaphor, p. 24 and
for a detailed examination of the Spanish influence on Storni, pp. 89-92.
16
Storni’s image predates Lacan, of course, and his psychoanalytical insights into ‘the field of the
gaze’ first published in the 1950s are more commonly associated with post-structuralism and film
theory than with surrealism, but he knew Dalí and Picasso, and his metaphor for human identity
constructed from a reciprocal gaze in the context of a more abstract ‘field of the gaze’ has strong links
with the theme of the eye in Surrealism.
17
Fishburn (1991: 122) notes that they keep ‘some of the formal characteristics of the sonnet such as
fourteen endecasyllabic lines, but not the sonnet’s rhyming pattern’.

11
implications of the title in detail, noting the ‘ominous evocation of death conjoined

with the regenerative quality of Nature’ and that ‘the “mascarilla” is more than an

image of death, for it implies the utter disappearance of human flesh, and the survival

of only a haunting likeness of inanimate features’ (Phillips, 1975: 102-03). The

theme of death appears in ‘Ultrateléfono’ [‘Ultratelephone’], in the image of a phone

call to her dead friend and mentor Quiroga and to her father, while ‘El sueño’ [‘The

Dream’] is no longer a romantic fantasy, but a prelude to death: ‘Máscara tibia de otra

más helada’ [A lukewarm mask of another one more frozen].

This collection could be seen as Storni’s equivalent to Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva

York. In the first poem, ‘A Eros’, a sadistic god of love is dissected, found to be a

useless collection of rags, and thrown back into the waves. Her growing interest in

film can be seen in ‘Mar de pantalla’ [Sea screen], while ‘Dibujos animados’

[Cartoons], and poems like ‘Una oreja’ [‘Ear’] and ‘Una lágrima’ [‘Tear’] devote

Góngora-esque attention to detail that Phillips notes and links to Ortega y Gasset’s

notion of modernist ‘infrarrealismo’ (Phillips, 1975: 117-19). But where Lorca’s

poetic voice is both affected by and alienated from the sterile modern environment of

New York, avant-garde representations of sterility have an additional factor for the

female voice: Fishburn notes the radical fusion of sexuality and maternity in ‘Pie de

árbol’ [‘Foot of a tree’] (Fishburn, 1991: 122) and Storni’s poetic voice is described

as a rocking crib in ‘El hijo’ [‘The son’) that marks ageing in numbers leading

towards menopause in ‘Tiempo de esterilidad’ [‘Sterile Time’].

On January 27, 1938, Storni was invited to give a public lecture with Mistral and

Ibarourou at the University of Montevideo. Shortly afterwards, in severe pain when

12
her cancer returned, she went to the coast and wrote her last poem ‘Voy a dormir’

[‘I’m going to sleep’], which she sent to La Nación, the leading Argentine daily

newspaper at that time, a couple of days before she drowned herself in the sea on 25

October 1938. Acceptance is the predominant tone in the gentle irony of this last

poem, which concludes by dismissing the silent male other who has recurred in her

work. Nearly a decade later, on September 27, 1947, the Cámara de Diputados

[Chamber of Deputies, or House of Representatives] approved construction of a

monument to Storni by sculptor Luis Perlotti to be placed looking out over the sea.

Storni’s last lecture ‘Entre un par de maletas a medio abrir y las manecillas del

reloj’ [Between a couple of half-open suitcases and the hands of a ticking clock) tells

the story, now quoted in numerous studies, of how she was mocked, aged four, for

pretending to read a book upside down and how she stole the book, El Nene [The

Child], when she was six, by tricking a shopkeeper (an event now immortalized in

cartoon-version).18 She talks about how she sublimated in her writing her love of

telling outrageous lies, and says that although she hopes her audience will never have

to read her ‘dreadful’ first volume of poems, she wrote it to avoid dying of boredom.

She recites the poem ‘Bien pudiera ser’ about female silence, then describes herself,

on the contrary, as a person ‘bubbling’ with words: ‘Venía de la playa, agitada,

corriendo, echando pompas de jabón verbales según mi costumbre’ (Muschietti, 2002:

1082) [I came from the beach, excited, running, blowing word-bubbles as usual].

This image of a young Storni running back from the beach, ‘bubbling over’ with

words, could not be further removed from the silent and melancholy association
18
Storni’s lecture was delivered in Montevideo on 27 January, 1938, and is reprinted in Muschietti,
2002: 1075- 85. The cartoon is reproduced among the unpaginated illustrations that appear in Galán
and Gliemmo, 2002: 192-93.

13
with the sea than would be projected onto her as a result of her decision to take her

own life rather than undergo more treatment for cancer, and this lecture has

contributed enormously to the celebrity-legend of Storni that she discusses in an

interview with Pedro Alcázar Civit.19 She talks about the myth that she was a

‘telefonista’ and how one of her jobs involved gearing adverts to different markets in

the ‘sección de psicología commercial’ [commercial psychology section]; she also

considers the question whether she is a ‘verdadera “self-made woman” [a real ‘self-

made woman’]’. Civit portrays her as fatigued: ‘me contesta con un poco de tristeza.

Una tristeza que se va convirtiendo en rabia a medida que avanza el discurso’ [She

answers me somewhat sadly. A sadness that turns to anger as the discussion

progresses], and her anger, it seems, is linked to the following comment:

Yo sé perfectamente que carezco del don de crear formas, y no es porque no

sepa cómo se crean, sino porque me repugna crearlas. Y así he vivido y vivo

como un cardo al viento, sin nada que me resguarde. Muy malo es esto en un

medio que vive de apariencias. (Muschietti, 2002: 1110)

[I’m well aware I have no gift for ‘playing the game’, and it’s not because I

don’t know how to do it, but because I hate doing it. I’ve lived like this, and I

still live like it, like a thistle blowing in the wind, with no support. This is a very

bad thing in a society where so much depends on appearances]

Everything we now know about Storni suggests that although her status as a single

mother could have been regarded as not ‘playing the game’, she was not so inept at

19
Published in El Hogar, 11 September, 1931 and reprinted in Muschietti, 2002: 1104-1110.

14
manipulating the ‘formas’ as this comment would suggest. Unruh (2006: 32) notes

that her ‘versatile movement through multiple cultural signs constituted a signature

quality of her career’, and suggests that Storni colluded in her own mythology by

sending her last poem to La Nación before committing suicide: ‘this was certainly not

the first time that Storni, in the spirit of the artful Zarcillo, had self-consciously

enacted a particular version of her public persona’. For Unruh (2006: 50), Storni

colluded in her own mythology by transmuting ‘a suicidal liberation from terminal

cancer into the escape of a victimized woman, à la poetisa, from the pain of love lost’.

Although this is perhaps harsh, the fact that Storni delivered her own poetic epigraph

is certainly impressive. Her life was undeniably difficult. Unlike her few

contemporary female peers, she was single and self-financing, and if she came late to

the avant-garde in her writing, this is because she was living it. Questions have been

raised about the ‘problematic status of gender hidden in the texts of the canonical

avant-garde’ (Masiello, 1990: 44), and while her surrealist contemporaries theorized

‘amour fou’, Storni was supporting her son and contributing actively to the most

avant-garde debates about gender. Queirolo (2004: 199-200) notes that the

accelerated modernisation and enormous social changes that took place in turn-of-

century Argentina had a significant effect on gender relationships, and Latin

American feminists were in many ways ahead of their European counterparts. The

Inter-American Commission of Women established in 1928 was the first organization

working for women’s rights in the world (Millar, 1990: 16) and Storni shares with

contemporary anarchist women’s groups based in Buenos Aires her promotion of

women’s civil rights and her questioning of the traditional structure of the family in

ways that anticipate the work of more privileged contemporaries like Virginia Woolf

(Masiello, 1990: 41).

15
 Jones regards some of Storni’s writing as ‘fifty years ahead’ of her time (1979: 91).

Her straw-filled ‘ideal’ woman in the short story Cuca en seis episodios [Cuca in Six

Episodes] (published in La Nación, 11, April, 1926) is a prototype ‘Stepford Wife’,

and the cynical partnering of Claudio and Zarcilla in El amo del mundo [Master of the

World] is a precursor of the ‘X-ray wives’ and ‘Masters of the Universe’ of Tom

Wolfe’s Bonfires of the Vanities (1990). Her ironic exploration of hypocritical and

gendered double-standards in her various representations of marriage have now been

popularized in comedies such as the film version of Olivia Goldsmith’s The First

Wives Club (Hugh Wilson, 1996), and she would no doubt have been amused, if

disappointed to find that her satirical description of how to construct ‘La perfecta

dactilógrafa’ [‘The perfect typist’, 1920) has not dated even though the job itself is

now virtually obsolete:

Píntesele discretamente los ojos.

Oxigénesele el cabello.

Púlasele las uñas.

Córtesele un trajecito a la moda, bien corto […]

Póngasele un pájaro dentro de la cabeza (si es azul, mejor) (Muschietti,

2002: 911).

[Discreetly paint her eyes / Bleach her hair / File her nails / Tailor her a

fashionable little suit, quite short /. Put a bird inside her head (preferably a

blue one)] (Translated by Kirkpatrick, 1995: 139)

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Storni’s comment to Civit about her unwillingness to ‘play the game’ remains

pertinent to a twenty-first century world increasingly accustomed to the role of plastic

surgery in the relationship between female success and costly attention to one’s

‘forma’ [outward appearance]. Her early critics were right to emphasize the difficulty

she had establishing a female voice in a male-dominated tradition, but they exaggerate

the image of her as a victim. Franco says of this period that ‘all over Latin America

women seemed torn between contradictory demands. We think of the suicide of

Alfonsina Storni in Argentina, the murder of Delmira Agustini in Uruguay and the

paranoia of Gabriela Mistral in Chile’ (1989: 105). And yet, while it is clear from

Storni’s writing that she was affected by the contradictions between her role as a

mother and her role as a writer, despite her single parent status, her illness, her

adversarial, sometimes misogynist critics, she never relinquished control of her own

image. Her articles on female labour and economic dependency anticipate Virginia

Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), and, although she may not have been

familiar with the term, her representation of ‘feminine masquerade’ exploited by

Zarcilla and personified by the straw-filled ‘perfect woman’, Cuca, echoes the

conclusions drawn by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere in ‘Womanliness as

masquerade’, also published in 1929. Like the rebellious dolls in her children’s play,

Los degolladores de estatuas [Beheaders of Statues]20 who successfully trick their

owners, Storni never lost her mischievous disregard for, nor her courageous

willingness to dissect, the tyrannical ‘formas’ of gender-divided masquerade.21 And

although the title of one of the articles she published in La Nota, [Note], 18 April,

1919, refers to feminism as ‘Un tema viejo’ [An old story), I should like to

conclude this introduction to Storni’s work with a comment from this article: it is a
20
Published in Teatro infantile. Buenos Aires: Editorial Ramón J. Roggero y Cía, 1950 and reprinted in
Muschietti, 2002:1497-1511.
21
These plays were published in 1950. (See Jones, 1979: 105-06) and Phillips, 1975:80).

17
simple comment that sheds light on the on-going need for women to manipulate

their own masquerade, and that remains as relevant today, almost a century later, as

it was at the time Storni wrote it:

Creo que el feminismo merece mucho más que una bondadosa galantería,

porque es tan importante como toda una transformación colectiva […]. Si

cada jefe de Estado y cada jefe de familia fueran capaces de reconocer y

llenar todas las necesidades de sus sometidos, se habrían acabado todos los

problemas modernos, entre ellos el ya famoso feminista. (Muschietti, 2002:

815)

[I believe feminism deserves far more than benign gallantry, because it is as

important as any other collective transformation […]. If every Head of

State, every pater familias were to recognise and meet the needs of their

subjects, all our modern problems, including the already famous feminist

one, would be resolved]

Jo Evans

Works by Alfonsina Storni

Storni, Alfonsina. 1916. La inquietud del rosal. Buenos Aires: La Facultad.

--------------------- 1918 El dulce daño. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial

Limitada.

--------------------- 1919. Irremediablemente. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa

Editorial Limitada.

--------------------- 1920. Languidez. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial

Limitada.

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--------------------- 1925. Ocre. Buenos Aires: Babel.

--------------------- 1927. El amo del mundo. Bambalinas, year 9, no. 470, Buenos Aires,
16 April.

--------------------- 1932. Dos farsas pirotécnicas. Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Editorial

“Buenos Aires”.

--------------------- 1934. Mundo de siete pozos. Buenos Aires: Tor.

--------------------- 1938. Mascarilla y trébol. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo.

Works Cited

Altman, Robert (dir). Short Cuts (1993)

Carver, Raymond. 1981. ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ in What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love. Library of America.

Delgado, Josefina. 1990. Alfonsina Storni. Una biografía. Buenos Aires: Planeta.

Etchenique, Nira. 1958. Alfonsina Storni. Buenos Aires: la Mandrágora, 17.

Evans, Jo.1994. ‘White Women, Idealization and Death in Two Poems by Alfonsina
Storni’, Journal of Hispanic Research, 2.1, 110-123.

Fishburn, Evelyn. 1991. ‘Alfonsina Storni: A Feminist Reading of her Poetry’ in L.P.
Condé and S. M. Hart (eds.). Feminist Readings on Spanish and Latin-American
Literature. New York, Ontario: Edwin Mellen, 121-36

Franco, Jean. 1989. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. London:
Verso.

Galán, Ana Silvia and Graciela Gliemmo. 2002. La otra Alfonsina. Buenos
Aires: Aguilar.

Kirkpatrick, Gwen. 1990. ‘The Journalism of Alfonsina Storni: A New Approach to

Women’s History in Argentina’ in Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America:
Seminar of Feminism and Culture in Latin America, ed. Bergman et. al. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 105-129.

--------------------- 1995.
‘Alfonsina Storni as “Tao Lao”: Journalism’s Roving Eye
and Poetry’s Confessional “I”’, in Reinterpreting the Spanish American
Essay, ed. Doris Meyer. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 135-147.

Jones, Sonia. 1979. Alfonsina Storni. Boston: Twayne.

Lawrence, Ray (dir.) Jindabyne (2006).

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Masiello, Francine. 1990. ‘Women, State and the Family in Latin American
Literature of the 1920s’, in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and
the Caribbean, ed. Jennifer Browdy de Hernández. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South
End Press, pp. 27-47.

Menchú, Rigoberta. 2003. ‘The Quincentenary Conference and the Earth Summit,
1992’, in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean,
ed. Jennifer Browdy de Hernández. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, pp.
117–38.

Millar, Francesca. 1990. ‘Latin American Feminism and the Transnational Arena’, in
Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America: Seminar of Feminism and Culture in
Latin America, ed. Bergman et. al. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 10-
26.

Morelleo-Frosch, Marta. 1990. ‘Alfonsina Storni: the Tradition of the Feminine

Subject’ in Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America: Seminar of Feminism and
Culture in Latin America, ed. Bergman et. al. Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 90-104.

Muschietti, Delfina.1999. Obras completa:. Poesía. Tomo I. Buenos Aires:

Losada.

Muschietti, Delfina.2002. Obras completas: Prosa. Tomo I. Buenos Aires:

Losada.

Phillips, Rachel. 1975. Alfonsina Storni: from Poetess to Poet. London:

Tamesis.

Queirolo, Graciela. 2004. ‘Imágenes del trabajo femenino en Buenos Aires

(1910-1930): La novela semanal, Roberto Arlt y Alfonsina Storni’, in
Modernidad en otro tono. Escritura de mujeres latinoamericanas: 1920-1950,
eds Alicia N. Salomone et. al. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, pp. 199-218.

Riviere, Joan. 1929. ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of

Psychoanalysis, 10, 303-313.

Roxlo, Conrado Nalé and Mabel Mármol. 1964. Genio y figura de Alfonsina Storni.
Buenos Aires: Eudeba.

Unruh, Vicky. 2006. Intervening Acts: Performing Women and Modern Literary
Culture in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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