Reception 8 1 0045

Detecting a Feminist Reading Model: Clues in Marcela Serrano's Nuestra Señora de la
Soledad and in Responses from her Women Readers

Author(s): Alma Kuhlemann
Source: Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History , 2016, Vol. 8 (2016), pp. 45-72
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/reception.8.1.0045
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Detecting a Feminist
Reading Model
clues in marcela serrano’s nuestra señora de la
soledad and in responses from her women readers
alma abstract: This article demonstrates how Chilean Marcela

kuhlemann Serrano’s fiction posits a political value for women readers
in bonding through texts. It argues there is clear evidence
of a project to model text-mediated relationships with
and among her readers that can encourage women to
construct more rewarding self-definitions. This project’s
logistical hub resides in Serrano’s Nuestra Señora de la
Soledad (1999), a novel that features a female detective
and exhibits for women readers a step-by-step approach
toward establishing empowering connections. This
article examines this process of reading-to-connect as
instantiating the feminist model of reading based on
intersubjective encounters among woman reader, text,
and woman writer discussed in Schweickart (1986),
drawing on Adrienne Rich’s search for connection with
Emily Dickinson. To provide insight into the dynamics
of cultivating reading-based bonds, both within and
beyond Serrano’s text, this articles uses conceptual tools
from Italian feminism’s practice of relations. To assess
Serrano’s putative project of connecting women through
the writing and reading of female characters’ life stories,
reception it adduces results from a reader response questionnaire
vol. 8, 2016 conducted with a sample of Serrano’s readers. Their
Copyright © 2016 responses indicate that reading Serrano’s fiction can open
The Pennsylvania State
up for women readers a space of female sociality that
University, University
Park, PA validates and encourages female desires.

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Chilean crime fiction has been in evidence since the beginning of the twentieth
century, particularly in the form of classic puzzle-driven detective stories. There
was, however, a noticeable upsurge of writers, beginning in the mid-eighties
and the nineties, who have taken up U.S. hard-boiled fiction as a means of
investigating a society in crisis.1 The noir genre—with its scrutiny of societies
assailed by deeply traumatic events, populated by brutal thugs and white-collar
criminals, and led to hopelessness by corrupt legal systems that abet both these
types of menace—is a telling tool with which to ponder the socio-economic and
political consequences that affected a vast majority of working-class Chileans
after General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist
government of Salvador Allende and imposed in its place a right-wing military
dictatorship (1973–1990) that was propped up by an entourage of civilian
collaborators from the economic elites. Given the systematic political repression
carried out in Chile by state security forces and the extreme social inequalities
brought about by market-oriented economic policies first introduced during
the military regime, but sustained in the uneasy transition to democracy
that followed, crime novelists from among the “Generation of the 80s” have
appropriated and reworked precisely the hard-boiled format to interrogate the
climate of generalized fear, social marginality, and institutionalized injustice
in the context of a neoliberal project which aimed at the depoliticization and
disciplining of subjects.2 In the hands of these novelists, the noir idiom has
also been used to decry the loss of traditional values such as solidarity and
community to the forces of individualism and the obsession with success in
consumer society.3
From among those who have tapped the potential of the hard-boiled as
a political weapon to probe into aspects of social oppression and cultural
change, bestselling writer Marcela Serrano stands out with her Nuestra
Señora de la Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude).4 Born in Santiago de Chile in
1951, Serrano has become a prolific voice in Chilean literature, publishing
another eight novels, two collections of short stories, as well as a storybook for
children (co-authored with her daughter Margarita Maira Serrano), between
1991 and 2013.5 In 1994, her first novel, Nosotras que nos queremos tanto, won
the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, awarded by the Guadalajara International
Book Fair. Also in 1994, Para que no me olvides won the Municipal Prize for
Literature, awarded by the Municipality of Santiago de Chile, and in 2001, Lo
que está en mi corazón was runner-up for the Planeta Prize.6 Serrano enjoys
a broad fan base not only in her home country but also in other Spanish-
speaking countries, particularly in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Spain.7
In addition, a growing body of translations has been making her writing
accessible to readers from Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, and other
language backgrounds.
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At one level, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad touches upon the socio-economic
conditions of life in post-dictatorship Chile: Serrano’s novel briefly remarks
on how neoliberalism’s focus on increased efficiency has pervaded the lives
of Chileans, transforming citizens into automatons of labor and breaking up
the fabric of community.8 Nuestra Señora also makes a comment as to how
the governments of the transition to democracy have fallen short both in
prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations during dictatorship
and in facilitating debate among the citizenry over the issues of historic memory
and social oblivion, all in the interest of preserving public order.9 Serrano’s
experiment with the noir, however, does not focus on unveiling the underside
of Chilean (post-)dictatorship state politics vis-à-vis its citizens. Rather more
interestingly, the political in Serrano’s detective novel lies in its calling a middle-
to upper-class transnational female readership to action by making visible to
women readers the potential for transformation that exists in the practice of
female relations.10
The strength of Nuestra Señora to attract readers toward exploring new
avenues of female agency resides in the curiously strong desire for interpersonal
connection experienced by its female detective protagonist with regard to a
well-known woman writer of detective fiction whose whereabouts she has been
commissioned to find. This endeavor to relate plays out within the boundaries
of fiction through the detective’s act of reading for traces of the missing writer
in her books as well as in her life. It furthermore transcends the limits of
Nuestra Señora, as the novel itself implicitly calls upon the women readers who
engage it to establish their own bonds of reading with its woman writer Serrano,
during the experience of taking in the life stories of its female characters. In
the following section, I examine the different facets of the investigation process
undertaken by Nuestra Señora’s detective to track down the woman writer as the
instantiation of a model of reading based precisely on such a dialogic encounter
among women readers, text, and woman writer. It is my contention that the
model crystallized in Serrano’s text articulates a safe space in which women
readers are not only invited to perceive the harmful potential that traditional
definitions of womanhood have for constraining their personal and professional
development. These readers are also encouraged to consider the significance
that lending their support to other women’s projects of self-expression, and
drawing inspiration from other women as well, may have for their own “real
world” successes. The last section of this article examines reflections gathered
by means of a survey questionnaire from a sample of women readers of Serrano
residing in Uruguay, in order to analyze whether the reading of Serrano’s fiction
can actually open up a relational space of female sociality where women readers
feel encouraged to construct self-definitions on the basis of reading bonds that
connect them to the text/woman writer as well as to other women readers.
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Creating a Bond of Reading: A Model for Female Agency
Looking to other women for guidance in order to transform into a knowledge

of one’s own reality the pain derived from being born within a social system
that negates female subjectivity is instrumental for women to be able to
judge and to work toward changing the conditions of their lives, with the
goal of better matching their desires. Italian feminists have recognized and
theorized the strategic value of establishing gendered bonds among women,
making these connections the centerpiece of their political practice of sexual
difference. Given that sexual difference is defined in Italian feminism as
“an existential principle which concerns the modes of being human, the
peculiarity of one’s own experiences, goals, possibilities, and one’s sense
of existence in a given situation and in the situation one wants to create
for oneself,”11 then, because for women this difference is realized in the
consciousness of being born in a female sexed body, the subject must first
take herself as a starting point for reflection, and then expose that self to other
women, mainly through the telling of her life story. This act of biographical
narrative exposition on the basis of relationality generates meaning both from
and for the teller’s existence.12 It is the insistence upon the particular here and
now of each woman’s life—born and living in a given society and at a certain
historical moment—that keeps this feminism of difference from being an
essentialist paradigm.
According to those Italian feminists centered around the Milan Women’s
Bookstore Collective, the politics of relations is best lived out as a practice of
female genealogy, that is, a practice of legitimation whereby women signify
their female origin by searching for reference points furnished by other
women.13 Acting in a framework of female sociality allows women to derive the
personal strength and social self-confidence they need to fulfill their potential
without resorting to male mediation, a traditional option that carries the risk
for women of jeopardizing their kinship with other women.14 These woman-
affirming-woman interactions have been further theorized by the Milan
Collective as relationships of affidamento (“entrustment”) between women,
whereby exchanges between a “mother,” or mentor, and a “daughter,” or
mentee, are governed by the principle of female disparity—a recognition of
differences between two fellow women regarding their levels of experience and
competence in a given social situation.15 An interaction of this sort, which is
based on the very willingness of the daughter to voluntarily acknowledge the
disparity that exists between her and her mother, permits such an exchange
to be of benefit to both participants. The symbolic mother offers the daughter
“the measure of what she [the daughter] can do and in her wants to come into
existence,” and in turn receives from her mentee public acknowledgment for
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the act of female mediation she has rendered.16 Acts of this kind enable women
to become subjects—rather than being objects—of exchange.17
Not surprisingly, the Milan Collective first stumbled upon the notion of
female disparity when its members, in an effort to articulate sexual difference,
embarked on a project of collectively reading works by their favorite women
authors—following the lead of Emily Dickinson (herself a major reference point
for Italian feminism), who would read and reread the works of such English
and US writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Helen Hunt
Jackson, and Rebecca Harding Davis, and learn about their lives, as if they
were her mentors.18 In the course of arguing for their literary preferences and
interpretations, the Collective came to understand that they themselves were not
equal to each other within the group, that some made their voices heard more
forcefully than others, and that acknowledging the existing inequality among
them would help them to set free “the symbolic power of the maternal figure” in
this as well as in other personal or professional contexts of women relating with
each other.19
In considering how gendered mediation can operate as a powerful source
of validation for and encouragement of female desire through the reading of
other women’s writings, it is relevant to take into account Serrano’s response in
an interview with Cecilia Mafla-Bustamante when asked whether she sought to
promote social change by means of her novels: “[S]i un libro determinado—en
este caso las novelas mías, por ejemplo—pudiera ayudar a una mujer a tener
un poquito más de fuerza, a atreverse un poco más de lo que se atrevió el día
anterior, . . . yo creo que estaría cumplida la tarea.” ([I]f a certain book—in this
case my novels, for example—could help a woman to have a little bit more
strength, to dare a bit beyond what she did the day before, . . . I’d consider the
job’s been done.)20 In conversation with another critic, Serrano also points out
that these acts of female mediation are not just one-sided: “Los libros escritos
por mujeres que he leído me han dado luces frente a mis propios problemas.
Y tengo entendido que hay otras mujeres a quienes les ocurre lo mismo con
mis obras” (The books written by women that I have read have given me
insights into my own problems. And I gather that there are other women who
have had the same experience with my works).21 This comment seems to uphold
the Milan Collective’s theory of establishing connections through reading
because these bonds can help women to reflect on their personal situations and
to begin to explore other ways of being in the world through their reliance on
the symbolic authority of other women. Serrano lived in Rome from 1973 to
1977, during which time she could quite plausibly have come into contact with
ideas relating to sexual difference, practiced by Italian feminist groups starting
in the late sixties.22 Throughout her career, Serrano has maintained a close
connection with Italy, as may be witnessed by the release of Italian-language
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translations of ten of her twelve works as imprints of the Feltrinelli publishing
house and by the inclusion of interviews and reviews of Serrano on the Libreria
delle donne di Milano website.23 Of all the languages into which Serrano’s
works have been translated (seventeen languages to date), Italian is the best
represented; Portuguese is the only language that comes close, with five titles.
The case for the applicability of Italian feminism in examining reading bonds
established through the practice of relations in Nuestra Señora, however, is
ultimately to be made on evidence derived from the text itself, and in dialogue
with Serrano’s readers.
By invoking both her readers and the women writers she herself reads,
Serrano is situating herself as a node in a network of women personally bound
by reading.24 According to Serrano, feedback regarding the impact that works
written by women can have on women in terms of empowering insights has
come to her in the form of multiple letters sent by women readers from all
over Latin America and Spain. The Chilean author maintains that these written
communications have strengthened her belief in the existence of a strong
connection among women from these areas, arising from a sense of recognition
of what living in a sexed body entails.25 Serrano’s claim that such a link among
women exists can be attested by the voice of a Uruguayan reader. On April 24,
1997, journalist Diego Barnabé conducted an interview with Marcela Serrano on
Radio El Espectador in Montevideo. The basis for this interview was comments
and questions Barnabé had previously collected and recorded from listeners
who were readers of Serrano. In the course of this program, one female listener
stated that “[a] través de sus libros [Serrano] es una gran amiga mía. . . . al
haberla leído, al haberla entendido, al sentir realmente lo que transmite, se
hace amiga de cualquier mujer.” (Through her books, [Serrano] is a great friend
of mine. . . . having read her, having understood her, really feeling what she
transmits, she becomes a friend of any woman.)26 The relational potential of
reading that surfaces through this comment, which not only reflects a perceived
intimacy with and gratitude for the woman writer, but also points to a potential
for kinship with other women readers, opens a space in which women’s reading
practices and experiences may engender and support virtual or actual networks
of women motivated to examine and improve the conditions of their lives. Such
a political dimension to connection-building is useful in framing the textual
praxis of consciousness-raising that can be discerned in Nuestra Señora—and
likewise in Serrano’s other works—as an enactment of a bond of reading
informed by feminist goals.
When considered against the backdrop of Serrano’s entire oeuvre, Nuestra
Señora acquires particular relevance because it foregrounds the process
by which connections between woman writer and women readers can be
cultivated, modeling for the readers a step-by-step approach toward establishing
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these bonds. Its originality also lies in adopting—and adapting—the hard-boiled
format to showcase textual strategies of how to read or “detect” within a woman-
affirming-woman framework formed, in this case, by a woman private detective
and a bestselling woman author of detective fiction who has gone missing.27
Nuestra Señora follows the search undertaken by private detective Rosa
Alvallay for Carmen Lewis Ávila or C. L. Ávila, as she is known to her fans.
C. L. Ávila had traveled to the Miami International Book Fair, never to return to
her home in Santiago de Chile, where her husband Tomás Rojas, a university
rector, awaits her. Whereas the prototypical search in detective scenarios is one
intended to locate and bring under control a disruptive element, in the hands of
this woman detective, the quest is transformed from one of control of a fugitive
into one of connection with a fellow woman who is seeking to reclaim self-
determination.
In the process of pursuing leads, Rosa, the first-person narrator, interviews a
range of C. L. Ávila’s associates and intimates, such as the writer’s philandering
husband, her jealous stepdaughter, their maid, and a number of friends. All
of these produce information on the missing writer that is potentially useful,
yet compromised by differing viewpoints and personal agendas. Key to Rosa’s
success in finding Ávila, however, is the detective’s decision to read for clues to
the interiority of the missing woman writer in other sources as well.
One of these sources is a recent photograph of C. L. Ávila, which is included
with the file Rosa receives from her supervisor at the detective agency. Rosa
starts to develop a sense of how affectively detached the famous writer is from
her daily existence as she observes that Ávila’s posture in the picture grants
her “una apariencia distante, perdida, inmersa en algún mundo propio. . . .
Como si no estuviera ahí.” (a distant appearance, lost, absorbed in some world
of her own. . . . As if she weren’t there.)28 This state of affairs is confirmed
when the detective begins her search for clues on the writer’s own premises.
Ávila’s spacious walk-in closet, specially designed by her husband to support
Ávila’s growing obligations as the wife of a well-to-do university rector, reveals
a profound split between her public and private personas. On one side
“[e]l traje occidental rígido” ([t]he stiff western-style suit),29 “[e]l disfraz” ([t]he
disguise),30 which the writer takes off the minute she returns from her social
responsibilities, in order to change into “la túnica suelta y vaporosa” (the light
and loose-fitting gown),31 “la libertad” (freedom),32 which finds its home on the
other side of the closet.33 The maid’s comments regarding Ávila’s preference
for an informal style, and how “a la señora Carmen la ponían en la cabecera
[de la mesa del comedor] como un adorno, porque los invitados siempre querían
conocerla . . . [y] a don Tomás le gustaba mostrarla” (Mrs. Carmen would be
placed at the head [of the dining table] like an ornament, because guests were
always wanting to meet her . . . [and] Mr. Rojas liked to show her off), verify
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Rosa’s intuition that the missing woman is emotionally at odds with her
husband.34
In order to determine what has happened to the famous detective story
writer, Rosa also seeks insight from C. L. Ávila’s writings. To this end, Rosa
invests her own money in compiling a complete collection of the author’s works
and sets about reading them, because she feels the need to understand how
Ávila’s mind functions.35 As she sifts for clues in C. L. Ávila’s works, Rosa is
aware that it would be highly unlikely for a male colleague to adopt her modus
operandi: “si Exequiel—mi compañero de trabajo—estuviese a cargo del Archivo
C. L. Ávila, en este momento se dispondría a dormir, o a darse una ducha para
salir con la novia de turno y jamás se tumbaría en la cama a repasar una novela
de la escritora desaparecida pues no supondría que podría encontrar claves allí.”
(if Exequiel—my co-worker—were in charge of the C. L. Ávila File, right now
he would be getting ready to go to sleep, or to take a shower in order to go out
with the girlfriend of the moment, and he would never lie down on his bed to go
over a novel by the missing writer because he would not suppose that he could
find any clues there.)36 In this way, Rosa models an alternative epistemological
approach to mainstream investigative practice, one in which a woman detective
deliberately puts herself in relation to her subject of investigation so as to
initiate a connection that aims to recover that subject’s missing voice, rather
than distancing herself and casting Ávila as a mere object, in order that Rosa
may maintain the idealized position of detached observer.37
Rosa decides to focus on Ávila’s latest crime novel, Un mundo raro, in her
belief that fiction can help her find the missing link to the writer’s unique life
story and the reasons for her disappearance: “¿Cuánto hay de propio en lo
que escribe un autor? . . . El personaje de C. L. Ávila es una investigadora y se
dedica al crimen. ¿Tiene algo que ver con ella? La respuesta más obvia sería:
aparentemente nada. Sin embargo, es su alter ego, es la voz que ella no tiene por
sí misma.” (How much of the self is in what an author writes? . . . C. L. Ávila’s
protagonist is an investigator and she deals with serious criminal cases. Does
this character have anything to do with her? The most obvious answer would be:
apparently not. However, she is her alter ego, the voice that she does not have for
herself.)38 This belief has been sparked in part by Ávila’s comments to a fellow
writer that writers do not merely recreate events and situations that have already
happened, but rather anticipate them.39 Rosa’s reading of Un mundo raro, on
the assumption that Ávila’s chosen plots, characters, and locations in her novels
are too specific to be without significance, offers the detective important clues
which, together with Ávila’s own research notes and an extended published
interview given by the famous writer, help Rosa to intuit and understand what
Ávila’s motives for disappearing might be, as well as the place to which she has
removed herself.40 These texts do indeed lead the detective through a biography
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and geography of the author, ultimately bringing her within sight of C. L. Ávila
who, completely made-over, is now posing as a Colombian citizen in the
Mexican city of Oaxaca. Through Rosa’s intake of Ávila’s biographical narrative
exposition, the writer’s life can be seen as the trace of a meaningful pattern or
design, instead of “a mere empirical existence, or rather an intolerable sequence
of events.”41
Before Rosa’s eyes appears a woman who seems contented and at ease in her
new environment. As the detective slips into the writer’s new home and surveys
her workspace, she assesses how C. L. Ávila has succeeded in crafting a “room
of one’s own,” beholding—not without a pang of envy—the details that make
this office the comfortable and stimulating place she so much covets for herself:
[E]s un espacio tan acogedor, enteramente rodeado

por estantes de madera cuya mitad están vacíos
como si se preparasen para ser llenados de a poco;
conviviendo en él libros, un equipo de música y tantos
discos. . . . Al centro parece rugir una pesada mesa
de trabajo. . . . Sobre ella, un computador portátil está
encendido, conectado a una impresora, y muchos
papeles repartidos en desorden dan la inmediata
impresión de trabajo.
([I]t is such an inviting space, entirely surrounded
by wooden shelves, half empty as if getting ready to be
filled little by little; books, a stereo system, and so many
records in cohabitation. . . . In the center of the room
a heavy work table seems to roar. . . . On the table,
a laptop is switched on and connected to a printer,
and lots of papers, all spread out, give the immediate
impression of activity.)42
Rosa realizes that in this space C. L. Ávila is finally free to exercise her “férrea
y solitaria vocación” (her resolute and solitary vocation)43 without the social
demands of her husband’s lifestyle; Ávila’s is a productive place that resonates
with Adrienne Rich’s description of Emily Dickinson’s workroom in Amherst,
a sunny corner room, “the best bedroom in the house . . . with its window-light,
its potted plants and work-table,” where the poet had the freedom she needed to
devote herself to creation by her own criteria.44
In addition to “reading” C. L. Ávila by means of her physical and
metaphorical premises, Rosa also draws on the affinities that she has with
C. L. Ávila to delve more intimately into the writer’s mind and the motivations
that have driven her to reinvent herself. Taking a more literal sense of reading,
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Rosa had already begun to perceive a connection with C. L. Ávila during her tour
of the writer’s Santiago home. The walls of Ávila’s workspace there were lined
with shelves containing, on the one hand, some of the same Mexican titles that
had sustained Rosa’s spirit at the time of her political exile in Ávila’s new-found
country of refuge, and on the other hand, novels from some of Rosa’s preferred
writers of detective fiction, including Patricia Highsmith and P. D. James.45 This
common appreciation of literature certainly contributes to helping the detective
come closer to Ávila’s subjectivity, as does the women’s shared experience of
living under patriarchy in sexed bodies. The detective knows in her own flesh
and blood, for instance, the heavy price women have to pay when they choose
to articulate their own criteria for self-definition and explore their potential
accordingly.46 A divorced mother of two children who still live with her, but
whose ex-husband remained in Mexico, Rosa not only struggles to make ends
meet, but also to succeed professionally in a career which is traditionally the
domain of men.47 Rosa is aware, however, of the difference in contexts between
herself and the writer, and she acknowledges the limitations that arise from her
attempt to relate, admitting to herself that all she is really left with is trying to
imagine the other woman “desde esta mujer que soy” (from this woman that
I am), namely, a middle-aged, middle-class, undistinguished-looking, average
woman.48
Interestingly enough, as the detective gets closer to Ávila’s life and to
developing a sense of this writer’s motivations, her account and interpretation of
C. L. Ávila’s story and reinvention of herself become a testimony on the woman’s
behalf. Although initially hired, one might say, as a witness for the prosecution,
the detective gradually transforms into a witness for the defense. In the end,
Rosa seeks to uphold Ávila’s choice to remove herself from the patriarchal
constraints that weigh on her psyche and limit her actions. Supporting Ávila’s
option implies justifying, as well, her own decision as a detective to betray her
mission of “restoring order” to the system, rather than to betray the writer’s
new life. In this spirit Rosa invokes—both for herself and for the readers—how
crucial it is for women to support other women’s life-sustaining enterprises:
“Me pregunto acongojada quién soy yo para interrumpir sus pasos. . . . yo no
quisiera que algún día otra mujer me delatara si en mí se llegara a aventurar
la esperanza.” (Distressed, I ask myself who am I to disrupt her steps? . . . .
I wouldn’t want another woman to betray me some day, if hope would dare to
venture in me.)49 To carry out the investigation as Ávila’s husband Tomás Rojas
had commissioned it, Rosa would be forced to impose her own career interests to
the detriment of the other woman. The detective refuses, however, to unilaterally
invalidate Ávila’s hard-won escape. Rosa’s actions reveal a measure of respect
for and solidarity with a woman whom she has come to understand through the
dialogic process of “reading” her texts and the traces of her life.
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Rosa’s attitude toward C. L. Ávila allows her to form a bond with the woman
writer by bringing together her own context of reading with Ávila’s context
of writing, converting the reading experience into what may be termed an
intersubjective encounter between woman reader and woman writer by means of
the text: as she reads Ávila’s writings, the detective is seeking the voice of the
missing writer. Such a model of reading-as-dialogue, one that foregrounds
the value of “constru[ing] the text [of a woman writer] not as an object, but as
the manifestation of the subjectivity of the absent author,” is to be found in
Patrocinio P. Schweickart’s “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory
of Reading.”50 In developing her model of reading, Schweickart revisits the
encounter of Adrienne Rich with Emily Dickinson’s subjectivity, as reported
in Rich’s 1975 essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” in
order to lay out her paradigm of what a feminist theory of reading should strive
toward. To this end, Schweickart looks to Rich’s approach to Dickinson, her
fellow woman poet, identifying in that essay three very plastic metaphors, born
out of the vivid imagery which permeates Rich’s piece and which serves to
highlight her sensitive and honest recovery of Dickinson’s work.
Among the images alluded to above, the metaphor of visiting is enacted in
Rich’s journey to Dickinson’s mind, as she travels from her own time and space
to those of Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts. This visit is undertaken, as
Schweickart recounts, “on [Dickinson’s] own premises.”51 In trying to understand
Dickinson’s personal and aesthetic choices, the woman poet in Rich makes
sense of this other woman poet not only through her works and personal
correspondence, but also within the very walls where she opted to seclude
herself since, in the light of feminist criticism, “a literary work cannot be
understood apart from the social, historical, and cultural context within which
it was written.”52 From within that bright corner room, in which the poet would
consort with the works of U.S. and English women writers of her time and
practice her art, Rich claims that Dickinson derived the power to select her own
society and lead “a life deliberately organized in her own terms,” a life devoted to
giving expression to her talent.53
Rich understands that a visit of the sort she has practiced to Dickinson’s
premises entails limits, and thus uses a second metaphor, that of “an insect,
vibrating at the frames of windows, clinging to panes of glass, trying to
connect,”54 to describe her attempts, as a contemporary woman writer finding
her poetic stance within patriarchal society, to discern where the sources of
Dickinson’s powerful expression lie. But understanding that these limitations
exist allows Rich a much more humble and nuanced engagement with
Dickinson’s work and context of experience, one that grows from the affinities
she perceives herself to have with her fellow poet, and not from simplistic
identification.55 What is more, Rich’s quest to connect makes her realize that she
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could have served Dickinson as “witness in her defense” against a patriarchy
that encases the genius of this woman’s writing and belittles the soundness and
deeply rooted autonomy of her choices.56 This courtroom metaphor, together
with the others mentioned above—seeking to visit Dickinson’s mind on her
own premises and acknowledging the imperfect nature of these attempts—
embodies Rich’s personal yet respectful approach to a female mentor who has
helped her through time and space to find herself in the métier they both share.
Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home” could be read as the public recognition given by
a daughter to her symbolic mother for showing her what poetry can be about,
and would therefore instantiate the final exchange that gracefully seals the act
of trusting the disparities in female expertise that affidamento requires.57 Such
tribute is akin to the visible acknowledgment that the Milan Collective themselves
offer to Dickinson for her signification of female origin by populating her
room—and her mind—with the spirits of the women writers she admired.58 It
also resembles the unequivocal recognition that these Italian feminists likewise
give to Rich for speaking about the need for the creation of networks of female
reference.59
As the examination of Rosa’s mode of detection in Nuestra Señora has
revealed, the detective’s pursuit of C. L. Ávila’s interiority converges and
meshes with the very same guidelines for the reading of women authors
articulated and practiced by Rich in her “Vesuvius at Home,” and upheld
by Schweickart as a feminist model for reading women’s writings. In this
paradigm, “[t]he [woman] reader encounters not simply a text, but a ‘subjectified
object’ . . . an interiority—a power, a creativity, a suffering, a vision—that is
not identical with her own,”60 in a meeting of minds that aims to re-examine
and reclaim women’s points of view and to promote their survival.61 Although
Schweickart couches her discussion in terms of assumed sex-based differences
in the conceptualization of the self and of its relations to others, her model
nevertheless has at its core a seeking after and a nurturing of connections
among women, enacted through reading women’s writings and enabled by the
fact of women readers also writing.62 The bonds between woman reader and
woman writer that can be thus engendered through intersubjective reading
practices give the act of reading literature a political dimension, insofar as these
relations are able to “chang[e] the consciousness of those who read and their
relation to what they read”63 via the exploration of women’s texts that underscore
and validate women’s life stories and their resistance to oppression.64
In the context of Nuestra Señora, the sense of appreciation and sympathy
that develops in Rosa as she investigates Ávila’s disappearance instantiates
an empowering bond of just this sort. The solidity of this connection may be
appreciated when the detective chooses to destroy some key notes she had
collected for the report she is to submit to her supervisor at the detective agency,
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in which it is confirmed that the Colombian woman living in Oaxaca is, in
fact, C. L. Ávila. In destroying these notes, Rosa is protecting the connection
that she has built.65 At the novel’s end, as she flies home from Mexico, Rosa
considers what she will do next. During this long flight, she intends to write
up the transcript of an interview she had conducted with a fellow writer and
former lover of Ávila’s, Santiago Blanco, for which Rosa had posed as an
arts and culture journalist, in order to obtain information about C. L. Ávila’s
disappearance. Blanco had in fact been instrumental in helping Ávila enter into
her new life, and so, as a cover for her, he had claimed during the interview
that she must surely now be dead.66 Rosa’s remark, which closes the novel,
“No debo inquietarme, tengo siete horas por delante—no sólo para escribir de
verdad la primera entrevista a Santiago Blanco—sino para inventar yo esta vez
una novela negra. Y después. Después, lo que sea” (I don’t need to worry, I have
seven hours in front of me—not only to actually write up my first interview
with Santiago Blanco—but also to create, myself this time, a hard-boiled novel.
And then. Then, whatever may be),67 indicates that she will use Blanco’s false
testimony, that is, that Ávila had died, in composing the official report that she
will submit to her employer. Furthermore, it alludes to the fact that Rosa will
have to fabricate some details in finalizing this report, entailing on her part an
act of de facto fiction writing.68
The last sentence of Rosa’s final remark, “Y después. Después lo que sea,”
takes up Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni’s “La loba” (The She-Wolf),69
echoing the radical determination found in that poem’s call to break with
hegemonic mandates that restrict women’s voices and the flourishing of their
talents. The choice of another woman’s words in this moment of decision
bespeaks a new vista for a woman who had become a detective not because of a
deeply-felt vocation, but rather “por una cadena de fracasos consecutivos” (due
to a string of consecutive failures), allowing for the conjecture that Rosa will
attempt to transform her life and explore writing, especially in view of how life-
sustaining literature had been for her during her years in exile.70
The importance of women engaging with creative expression in its broadest
sense, of sharing in the communication of life stories through whatever
medium they may exercise, is a recurrent theme explored in Serrano’s works
as a grounding force for women’s definitions of themselves, opening up
an array of options for what “in [them] wants to come into existence,”71 and
this theme is addressed very directly in Nuestra Señora. Through reading the
extended interview that C. L. Ávila had given to a literary journal, Rosa comes
to understand this woman’s need to write in order to be “dueña de algo. De
algo legítimamente mío.” (owner of something. Of something legitimately
mine.)72 As a young adult Ávila, who had experienced orphanhood at the hands
of parents that abandoned her as a child,73 and who had sought in her ill-fated
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relationships with men an antidote against this feeling of abandonment,74
discovered that “[c]ualquier cosa bien hecha, desde escribir hasta bordar, cantar
o cocinar, puede cambiarte la vida” ([a]nything done properly, from writing to
embroidering, singing or cooking, can change your life), as long as she found
“una pasión que actuara de motor” (a passion that would drive her onward).75 As
a mature woman, Rosa may find in Ávila’s life story the inspiration necessary to
reinvent her own life, perhaps as a creative writer, drawing from this symbolic
mother, who has “the consciousness that comes with the experience of defeat,”
the strength, courage, and wisdom she needs to succeed in the process.76 In
recognition for what she has learned, Rosa closes the loop of gratitude that
affidamento entails by sharing this narrative of self-determination—Ávila’s and
her own—with a female audience that Rosa believes will appreciate and sustain
their life-affirming (and expectation-defying) choices.
Rosa Alvallay’s judicious investigation of C. L. Ávila results, then, in the
preservation of the writer’s hard-fought reinvention of herself and, at the same
time, in the possibility of a new avenue of professional development for Rosa.
The bond that arises between the woman reader and the woman writer in
the story is accomplished without any particular invitation extended by the
writer, that is, the initiative for building this specific woman-affirming-woman
connection is taken by the reader herself. If, however, Nuestra Señora is
situated within a putative oeuvre-wide project of fostering connections between
Marcela Serrano and her woman readers, this novel in particular, with its
clear modeling of how to read “properly,” that is, how to read as a feminist,
can be regarded as a virtual operator’s manual for how Serrano’s women
readers should read her other writings as well. If a reader follows this model
in her own reading practice, heeding the textual invitations to connect, a bond
of reading between woman reader and woman writer may be established
through the texts, from which the reader can profit. By entrusting herself
to the woman-affirming-woman model of reading supported by the novels,
she is in turn shown an array of personal and professional possibilities in a
context of female sociality that are demonstrated through the life stories and
transformational acts of the female characters.
But, what do women readers themselves have to say about these alleged
invitations to connect extended within Serrano’s texts and the social goods that
heeding such offers might bring them? This is a relevant question to answer,
not only because the inclusion of readers’ voices allows for an empirical
counterbalance to my theoretical assessment of Serrano’s feminist praxis,
but also because the “popular” aspect of this writer’s work obscures for many
critics the potential merit that her books may have for women’s empowerment.
An initial response to this question came to me in the form of a handwritten
personal dedication, from one woman to another, that I found in a friend’s
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copy of Antigua vida mía, Serrano’s third novel. I was genuinely struck by
the careful crafting of this dedication, in particular because of how the writer
takes in Serrano’s text through the lens of her own experience, reworking the
words and thoughts from the novel that spoke to her and her life story into a
piece that is meaningful for her and worthy of passing along to someone she
loves. For this woman, Antigua vida mía “es un libro de mujeres, de amigas y
de lugares. Hemos intentado iluminar lo cotidiano con nuestro soplo de luz y
con lo pequeño, poco a poco, armar un todo que tenga sentido” (is a book about
women, about female friends, and about places. We have tried to brighten the
day-to-day with our puff of light, and with the little things, bit by bit, to piece
together a meaningful whole). Perceiving a bond between her own life and
the pages of Serrano’s book, the writer of this dedication offers Antigua vida
mía to her friend so that she too may find validation for her desires in another
woman’s writings.
On the Receiving End: A Survey to Tap Bonds of Reading and Women’s

Empowerment
My research regarding how Serrano’s books have been received among women
indicates that the tenor of the reader’s response mentioned just above is not
atypical.77 In order to tap the degree to which reading the female life stories
present in Serrano’s works can encourage women to construct self-definitions
on the basis of reading bonds, I gathered reflections from a sample of thirteen
adult female native Spanish-speaking readers of Serrano residing in Uruguay
concerning their reading practices through an e-mail survey questionnaire
consisting of ten open-ended questions.78 The responses I received from my
survey participants suggest that the practice of female genealogy that can be
discerned in Serrano’s texts is indeed considered and even taken up by some of
the readers in the sample.
“[N]o me imagino en un diálogo con Marcela Serrano, . . . sin embargo con
sus libros estoy con ell[a]” (I do not imagine myself as being in a conversation
with Marcela Serrano, . . . however with her books I am with her) is a comment
by respondent H.79 This reflects how closely connected some women readers
feel to the writers they admire, a perspective which resonates with Schweickart’s
intersubjective encounter between the reader and the “‘heart and mind’ of
another woman.”80 This sense of kinship is grounded, in the view of four
other participants (B, D, F, K), in the particular sensibility of the author. As
respondent D summarizes, “Marcela Serrano tiene un magnífico conocimiento
del mundo femenino. Leyendo sus libros se nota cómo ha estudiado y
comprendido el alma, la conducta, los sentimientos femeninos” (Serrano has
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a tremendous knowledge of the feminine world. When you read her books you
can see how much she has studied and understood the female soul, behavior,
and feelings). The traces of essentialism evident in responses that refer to
Serrano’s comprehension of the female soul do indicate a potential to install a
naturalization and replication of traditional gender valuations.81 That such an
outcome is not inevitable, however, may be detected in the following statement,
which concludes this respondent’s answer: “Presenta mujeres extremadamente
interesantes con diversos tipos de vida en los cuales se expresan justamente esas
diferencias de sentimientos y conductas” (She presents extremely interesting
women with diverse types of lives through which exactly those differences in
feelings and behaviors are expressed), and likewise in respondent B’s clarifying
elaboration: “[Los] libros [de Serrano] apelan al alma femenina, a compartir
experiencias que solo nosotras podemos entender” (Serrano’s books appeal to
the female soul, to sharing experiences that only we women can understand).
Visible in the latter portion of this comment is the originary sexual difference
posited in Italian feminism, the fundamental fact of being born a woman (or a
man) and living in a sexed body.82 The participants’ responses not only reveal an
appreciation of Serrano’s efforts as a woman writer to engage issues they likely
confront as women, but also provide a basis for understanding these readers’
motivations to entrust themselves, in the spirit of affidamento, to the model of
reading laid out in her books.
Some participants seek a connection with Serrano the author at a more
distinctly interpersonal level, one that is related to her writing practice of
embedding indicators of her own personal tastes, such as names of artists
and their works (for example, in the fields of literature, music, film, visual
arts), whereby readers may learn from this mother’s cultural knowledge.
Serrano’s insertions apparently serve as invitations to readers to join her in
creating shared experiences, a process which is characteristic of friendship
relations. In this regard, respondent M dwells on the strategic value of these
references, viewing them as “elementos que ayudan a que el lector se interne
en la obra” (elements that help the reader to get into the work), which points
to the relevance of deploying comprehensible signposts in lieu of avant-garde
destabilizations of meaning in getting some readers on board. The value of such
insertions does not end here. Respondent D detects and further processes these
names, accepting, in a manner of speaking, Serrano’s invitations: “los registro [a
los nombres] cuando son conocidos y comparo su opinión con la mía. Cuando
es alguien o algo desconocido trato de averiguar quién o qué es” (I take note
of them [the names] when they are familiar to me, and I compare her opinion
with mine. When it is someone or something unfamiliar, I try to find out who
or what they are). This frame of mind is shared by respondent I, who comments
on how Serrano’s use of literary references spur her on to further reading
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and learning experiences: “L[a]s integra [a las citas] muy bien al texto dando
la oportunidad de leer frases conceptuales dentro de una lectura amena. Esta
característica suya me despierta el interés por conocer y aprender más” (She
works them [the quotes] into the text very well, providing the opportunity to read
thought-provoking conceptualizations within the context of a pleasant read. This
characteristic of hers awakens my interest to know and learn more). Comments
of this sort point out that Serrano’s readers see in her books incentives to
acquire further knowledge on the basis of a desired intimate connection with
this woman writer.
The responses I received from my survey participants also indicate that for
Serrano’s readers, an alternative epistemological source lies in the connections
the readers are able to establish with the (predominantly) female characters
present in her texts, because these characters model behaviors that can furnish
readers with fresh insights about themselves. Despite being fictional, the
biographical expositions of Serrano’s characters are valuable because they are
plausible as women’s life stories in the eyes of these women readers. This
personal relation to female characters has been explored by Erin A. Smith in
her reader-response study of the interactions of women readers with characters
found in detective fiction written by women. Smith’s findings suggest that these
women approach reading the lives of female characters as if this act were a
praxis of rehearsal, since it allows them to mentally play out ways of responding
to uncharted situations, an aspect likewise taken up by Anne G. Berggren,
whose interviews with women readers reveal that women find encouragement
in female characters to challenge patriarchal gender roles and to articulate more
holistic meanings of life for themselves.83 In this spirit, respondent E answered
the question of whether Serrano’s books have led her to modify her outlook on
life when she expressed how her reading has helped her to perceive options
that had not previously been visible to her: “A través de la lectura he visto y
entendido diferentes posturas ante la vida, ante la familia y ante la sociedad.
Se me abre un abanico de opciones” (As a result of reading I have seen and
understood different approaches to life, to family, and to society. A range of
options is opened up for me). In this reader’s case, learning has taken place
through the spaces of discrepancy that behaviors different from hers can bring
into focus.
On the whole, however, the answers to my survey have revealed that the
basis for these readers’ initial connection with Serrano’s texts lies rather in
the similarities they perceive between the female characters they find in these
works and elements of their own life stories.84 Participants comment on how
Serrano’s protagonists remind them of themselves (C, E, G, K, L) and of people
they may find in their own families (E, H), in their circle of friends (E, K), in
their places of employment (E, K), at the fitness center (K), or in their own
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society (B, D, E, K, L). Drawing on perceived affinities with certain characters,
for instance, respondent D claims to be able to profit from these connections
by obtaining insights regarding herself. As she explains, “[s]e tiene una
visión externa sobre esta identificación que a veces puede llevar luz a algo no
comprendido o conocido de uno mismo” (You get an outsider’s perspective
concerning this identification that can sometimes shed light on something you
do not understand or know about yourself). At times, the respondent continues,
these insights may come out when, too quick to judge certain behaviors
displayed by characters, she realizes that she herself would perhaps engage in
comparable behaviors without the mediation of reflection, thus bringing this
double-standard into sharp relief: “También es fácil juzgar alguna conducta y
ese juicio puede sorprendernos comparado con alguna conducta propia” (It is
also easy to judge someone’s behavior and that opinion may surprise us when
we compare it with some behavior of our own). The process of working from
similarity to open up a space of self-knowledge demonstrates how this reader
is not necessarily manipulated by objects of mass culture such as bestsellers,
but rather interacts with them in a potentially complex manner. This point
has been elaborated by Janice Radway in “Reading Is Not Eating,” where she
examines—and debunks—the metaphor that likens the process of reading
popular literature to processes of consumption, a comparison that raises the
implications that the text is fully used up in an act of personal consumption,
ingested, incorporated, and absorbed as “‘predigested’ ‘pap’ or ‘gruel’ which
is easily and commonly swallowed whole.”85 Such an approach to artifacts of
popular culture denies the agency that readers, such as the survey participants
mentioned above, exhibit.
Radway also argues how the reading of popular literature can lead to the
formation of communities of women engaged in collective reflection on
fictional characters. According to Radway, these reading collectives—both
formal and informal—can enable women readers to derive, via the circulation of
books among the members of the group, strategies to cope with issues affecting
their personal, and perhaps even professional, existence.86 In this respect, my
participants’ answers have likewise brought to the forefront the establishment
of connections among women readers themselves in the act of sharing the
written word. These interactions reveal that far from being used up in a single
reading, Serrano’s books continue to have value for subsequent readers as these
women deliberately and enthusiastically seek to offer their own invitations to
create shared reading experiences with women they know and care about.
A perceived naturalness of engaging in a circulation of personally valued
reading material surfaces as a subtext in the answers of many of my survey
participants when asked whether anybody had recommended that they read
Serrano’s books, or whether they themselves ever recommend her works to
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others. The forms that these invitations to a common reading experience take
vary from verbal recommendations (A, G, H, I) to lending (B, C, D, E, G, I, J,
K, M) to personal gift-giving (H, I, M), but in nearly every case, the giver had
herself already read the work and made a decision to attempt to connect the
known work to a known woman or women, be they daughters (B, E, G, I, M),
mothers (E, M), other relatives (A, B, K), friends (A, B, C, G, H, I, K, M), or
coworkers (I). The reasons adduced for extending these invitations to connect
are many, and range from a personal desire to strengthen and enrich relations
with other women (A, B, H, I, K, M) to an attempt at making connections
across generations (B, E, G, M) to a more ideological link of feminist awareness
(G, I, M), the latter two motives reflecting more of the mentorship dynamic
in affidamento. As a result of this selective act of sharing Serrano’s books, her
works can provide an opportunity for intersubjective exchanges, this time
among women readers with similar interests, who see their feelings, opinions,
and insights on the reading as knowledge worthy of being discussed.87
“[V]arias amigas [me recomendaron a Serrano] y en general la recomendación
viene con comentarios como . . . ‘leelo y después me contás’” ([S]everal female
friends [recommended Serrano to me] and usually the recommendation comes
with comments like . . . “read it and afterwards tell me [what you think]”) is
a response from participant K that shows an approach of women readers to
ensuring that some kind of follow-up discussion ensues on issues that matter
to them.
Dyads of the sort alluded to by the respondent above may or may not remain
dyads. Respondent M recounts the development of her own collective of women
readers, as she comments on how she got to “meet” Serrano in the first place:
En realidad yo conocí a Serrano en mi paseo por las

librerías. Luego me regalaron Nosotras que nos queremos
tanto. Me gustó mucho. Días más tarde a mi hija le
prestaron El albergue de las mujeres tristes. Las dos lo
leímos, mi hija María Eugenia primero, y coincidimos
que era una buena escritora. Compramos después
Antigua vida mía y lejos de defraudarnos, como pasa
a veces después de leer varios libros de un mismo
escritor, nos encantó. Luego fue común entre conocidos
compartir sus escritos: Ximena, mi hija mayor, Ana,
una amiga íntima, . . . y otros.
(The truth is I got to know Serrano by browsing in
bookstores. Afterwards somebody gave me Nosotras que
nos queremos tanto as a gift. I liked it a lot. Days later
someone lent my daughter El albergue de las mujeres
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tristes. We both read it, my daughter María Eugenia
first, and we agreed that she was a good writer. Then
we bought Antigua vida mía and far from disappointing
us, as sometimes happens after reading several books
by the same writer, we loved it. It became common to
share her writings among the people I know: Ximena,
my eldest daughter, Ana, a close friend, . . . and others.)
The journey of discovery enacted in this respondent’s words points to a

community of women reading together, in a sense, that is growing both in size
and cohesiveness. This community’s life story, albeit abbreviated, prompts
the following examination of the advantages women readers can derive from a
practice of relations among women.
The importance of connections among women readers may be appreciated
in respondent H’s answer, when asked in which ways Serrano’s books have
influenced her relationships with other women: “He nacido en un mundo
familiar de mujeres y M[arcela] S[errano] me ha ayudado a revisar y valorar mis
relaciones con ellas. Las quiero y las necesito” (I was born into a family that
was mostly women and M[arcela] S[errano] has helped me to reconsider and
value my relationships with them. I love them and I need them). Whereas this
response underscores the female continuum in relation to the biological mother,
other responses appear to focus on the worth of connections among women
more widely as a source of knowledge.88 For respondent A, “[Los libros de
Serrano m]e han hecho reflexionar mucho sobre mis conceptos de la amistad,
de las relaciones profesionales, me han hecho ver el valor del encuentro con
mujeres, cuánto tenemos en común” (They [Serrano’s books] have made me
reflect a lot on my concepts of friendship and of professional relationships, they
have made me see the value of connections with women, how much we have in
common). The strategic value of practicing female genealogies also emerges in
respondent I’s answer, together with the ability of the text to function as a safe
space where readers can garner a sense of validation for their own experiences,
to the degree to which they feel that these are corroborated by the experiences
that the work presents, as her following comment reveals: “Leyéndola [a
Serrano] confirmo mi punto de vista sobre lo que ya he visto y vivido. Quizás
por eso me gusta tanto y me confirma la necesidad del apoyo que las mujeres
debemos darnos entre nosotras” (Reading her [Serrano] I confirm my point of
view on what I have previously seen and experienced. Perhaps that is why I like
her so much, and she confirms for me the need for the support that we women
should lend to each other).89 As a result of such validation, this very reader
appears to obtain from the reading of Serrano the encouragement she needs to
confront the uneven division of labor inside the home into which many women
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have been socialized: “Sus libros me confirman que he evolucionado. . . . Para
mí lo más importante es sentir que soy libre pues me siento responsable de lo
que hago. Es una lucha diaria pues muchas veces en pequeñas cosas siento que
en el hogar la mujer es la que cumple la mayor parte de las tareas y a mi edad
es difícil romper con esas rutinas. Sin embargo no me doy de baja” (Her books
confirm for me that I have evolved. . . . For me the most important thing is to
feel that I am free because I feel responsible for what I do. It is a daily struggle
because often in little things I feel that the woman is the one who carries out
most of the housework and at my age it is difficult to break with these patterns.
However, I won’t go down without a fight). Although it would seem that the
respondent’s involvement with the text through experiences of legitimation is a
necessary precondition for the possible formation of reading bonds, validation
in itself is not the end of the road, for her answer reveals an awareness of
hegemonic dynamics and a desire to engage with them critically, a position that
other participants (E, G, M) also echoed in their responses.90
The benefits that the woman writer, namely, Marcela Serrano, may derive
from a bond with her readers are perhaps conflicted, owing to the fact that
because her novels uphold for women readers the importance of offering
assistance to projects of female self-determination, these novels would then
serve to advance Serrano’s marketing interests. It is true that Serrano’s financial
stake in building a loyal, paying readership in today’s bestseller climate
cannot be overlooked. It is equally true, however, that Serrano’s customary
practice of signifying female origin constitutes a genuine contribution toward
advancing the politics of relationality among women, as can also be appreciated
in other novels of hers, wherein she cultivates the links in her network of
women bonded by reading through explicitly incorporating and blending into
their texture epigraphs and other citations of an international selection of
women writers, counting among these both Dickinson and Rich themselves,
as reference points for women readers.91 Forging connections in this way,
Serrano’s praxis of consciousness-raising speaks to and energizes her readers,
showing us how affinities and disparities among women can truly make a
difference.
notes
1. Rodrigo Cánovas E., ed., Novela chilena, nuevas generaciones. El abordaje de los
huérfanos (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1997), 41;
Clemens A. Franken Kurzen, Crimen y verdad en la novela policial chilena actual
(Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 2003), 56; and Kate Quinn,
“Chilean Writers and neopolicial latinoamericano,” in Latin American Detective Fiction:
New Readings, ed. Shelley Godsland and Jacky Collins (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 52.
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2. Gustavo González, “Política-Chile: Históricas reformas ponen fin a transición,”
Inter Press Service, July 14, 2005, http://ipsnoticias.net/print.asp?idnews=34483.
The “transition to democracy” denotes a period in Chilean history that started in
March 1990, with the taking of office of Patricio Aylwin as the first constitutional
president following Pinochet’s dictatorship, and ended in 2005, with the
constitutional reforms undertaken by Ricardo Lago’s government. These reforms
include the elimination of such positions as designated senators-for-life and confer
upon the president the sole authority to remove from office the respective branch
commanders of the armed forces; Cánovas, Novela chilena, 9, 39–42. According to
Cánovas, the “Generation of the 80s” includes Chilean writers born between 1950
and 1964, whose subject is the orphan, a being whose lack has been triggered by
the historical event of Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Within this generation of authors,
Cánovas identifies a subset of novelists who opted for hard-boiled fiction in order to
enact a rescue of socialist utopia, thus giving rise to the Chilean version of the noir.
3. Cánovas, Novela chilena, 41–42, 82–87; Franken Kurzen, Crimen y verdad, 55–63. For
an extended treatment of Chilean writers and their assimilation of primarily hard-
boiled—but also classic puzzle-driven—Anglo- and Latin-American crime fiction
models during the last two decades of the twentieth century, see Franken Kurzen.
4. Marcela Serrano, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara, 1999).
5. Serrano’s titles comprise Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (We who love each other
so much, 1991), Para que no me olvides (So that you don’t forget me, 1993), Antigua
vida mía (1995; translated as Antigua and My Life Before, 2001), El albergue de las
mujeres tristes (The refuge for sad women, 1997), Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Our
Lady of Solitude, 1999), Un mundo raro (A strange world, 2000), Lo que está en mi
corazón (What is in my heart, 2001), El cristal del miedo (The crystal of fear, 2002),
Hasta siempre, mujercitas (Farewell, Little Women, 2004), La llorona (The weeping
woman, 2008), Diez mujeres (2011; translated as Ten Women, 2014), and Dulce
enemiga mía (Sweet enemy of mine, 2013). Translations of book titles are my own,
with the exception of Antigua vida mía and Diez mujeres.
6. Marisa Pereyra, “Sobre orfandad y utopías: Entrevista a Marcela Serrano,” Hispanic
Journal 24, no. 1–2 (2003): 232.
7. Carlos Ossa Budge, “Seminario nueva narrativa,” in Nueva narrativa chilena, ed.
Carlos Olivárez (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 1997), 54.
8. Serrano, Nuestra Señora, 14, 170.
9. Serrano, Nuestra Señora, 105–6; cf. Gina M. Waldman, “Violence and Silence in
Dictatorial and Postdictatorial Chile: The Noir Genre as a Restitution of the Memory
and History of the Present,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 5 (2009): 122–23.
10. Alma B. Kuhlemann, “Bonded by Reading: An Interrogation of Feminist Praxis
in the Works of Marcela Serrano in the Light of Its Reception by a Sample of
Women Readers” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2009), 87–97, 217–18.
A demographic survey of Serrano’s works with reference to female characters
reveals a predominance of middle- to upper-class women, mostly Chilean but nearly
all Latin American, many of them married urban professionals with children, facing
pressure to focus on the domestic sphere, and facing discrimination in their efforts
to engage the public world. These patterns, together with frequent references to
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the names of international artists and their works that can be found in Serrano’s
writings, serve to construct a recognizable world for her woman readers and allow
us to infer the kind of readership that the writer believes she can speak to.
11. Carla Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” trans. Veronica Newman, in Italian Feminist
Thought: A Reader, ed. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1991), 41.
12. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A.
Kottman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 55–65; Adriana Cavarero, “Who Engenders
Politics?” in Italian Feminist Theory and Practice: Equality and Sexual Difference, ed.
Graziella Parati and Rebecca West (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2002), 91, 99–102.
13. Henceforth abbreviated as Milan Collective. Founded in 1975, the Milan Collective
is more than a bookstore. It is a meeting place where gender-marked activities
among women (e.g., meetings, discussions, film viewings) can be undertaken from
a political perspective. Its body of writings, which comprises a theory both of sexual
difference and of social practice, has played an important role in shaping the debate
within Italian feminism. “Chi siamo,” Libreria delle donne di Milano, August 14,
2014, http://www.libreriadelledonne.it/chi-siamo/; Teresa de Lauretis, “The Practice
of Sexual Difference and Feminist Thought in Italy: An Introductory Essay,” in Sexual
Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, by the Milan Women’s Bookstore
Collective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 5–19; and Paola Bono
and Sandra Kemp, introduction to chapter 5, in Bono and Kemp, Italian Feminist
Thought, 109–10; Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 25–34.
14. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 29–32, 147–50.
15. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 121–31; Mirna Cicioni, “‘Love and Respect,
Together’: The Theory and Practice of Affidamento in Italian Feminism,” Australian
Feminist Studies 10 (1989): 76–77.
16. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 130, 149.
17. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 112; cf. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not
One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985), 170–97. Italian feminism of sexual difference is heavily indebted to the
work of Luce Irigaray, particularly regarding the theme of female genealogies,
which initially appears in Irigaray’s 1980 Montreal lecture “Body against Body:
In Relation to the Mother,” collected in her Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian
C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); see Luisa Muraro, “Female
Genealogies,” Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European
Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 319–20. In her lecture, Irigaray raises the need
for women to assert the relation to the mother, and thus to their own subjectivity, in
two regards: (1) with respect to the body of the mother—underscoring the existence
and relevance of a female continuum that links the bodies of daughters, mothers,
and grandmothers to the origins of culture, a female genealogy that women have
been taught to suppress in order to enter a relation with the father and the husband;
and (2) with respect to history—emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the
women who have preceded them and have made an impact on the world in spite
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of the obstacles they have had to deal with. Beyond this vertical dimension, Irigaray
also brings up a horizontal connection, the need for women to value their relations
with and love for “sister-women,” in order to stop being competing commodities
circulated by men in exchange operations. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 18–21;
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 108–9.
18. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 26–27.
19. Ibid., 110–11.
20. All translations are my own. Cecilia Mafla-Bustamante, “Palabra del escritor: Fin de
milenio en la mitad del mundo,” Mester 29 (2000): 162.
21. Carolina Andonie Dracos, “El drama de ser mujer,” El Mercurio (Santiago de Chile),
October 12, 1997, C11.
22. Ernesto Ayala, “La metamorfosis,” El Mercurio (Santiago de Chile), November 23,
1997, Revista del Domingo, 23; Gloria Gálvez-Carlisle, “Marcela Serrano (1951),” in
Escritoras chilenas, III: Novela y cuento, ed. Patricia Rubio (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto
Propio, 1999), 553.
23. Translations of Serrano’s works into Italian include neither her storybook for
children nor Un mundo raro, a collection of two short stories; “Marcela Serrano,”
Feltrinelli Editore, August 6, 2014, http://www.feltrinellieditore.it/autori/autore/
serrano-marcela/; “Arrivederci Piccole Donne,” Libreria delle donne di Milano,
August 6, 2014, http://www.libreriadelledonne.it/oldsite/news/libri/serrano.
htm; “L’anima delle donne è un grande romanzo,” Libreria delle donne di
Milano, August 6, 2014, http://www.libreriadelledonne.it/oldsite/news/articoli/
Repubblica_290811.htm.
24. For considerations on the growth of dyads into networks of women and the
potential for female empowerment this transformation implies, see Milan Collective,
Sexual Difference, 149; see also Luisa Muraro, “The Passion of Feminine Difference
beyond Equality,” in Parati and West, Italian Feminist Theory and Practice, 80.
25. Guillermo García-Corales, “Nostalgia versus modernidad: Entrevista a Marcela
Serrano,” Confluencia: Revista hispánica de cultura y literatura 13, no. 1 (1997): 232.
26. Diego Barnabé, transcript of “Las mujeres, la pareja y la política según la escritora
chilena Marcela Serrano,” En Perspectiva, Radio El Espectador (Montevideo,
Uruguay), April 24, 1997, http://www.espectador.com/text/pglobal/serrano1.htm.
27. During an interview in support of the release of Nuestra Señora, Serrano offers that
this novel is still “un coqueteo con la novela negra, porque no hay ni un puñete ni
un pistolazo. Pero la protagonista tiene esa cosa desencantada, fracasada, de lo
negro” (A flirtation with the hard-boiled novel, because no punches or gunshots
are involved. But the protagonist gives off that disenchanted, loser feeling of the
hard-boiled). Margarita Serrano, interview with Marcela Serrano, Reflexiones, ensayos
sobre escritoras hispanoamericanas, August 14, 2014, http://bluehawk.monmouth.
edu/~pgacarti/SERRANO_la_Tercera.htm; for a range of studies that focus on
Serrano’s appropriation and reworking of crime fiction in terms of the modes of
detection, the subversion of genre expectations, and the concept of truth that
Nuestra Señora upholds, see Franken Kurzen, Crimen y verdad; P. Eric Henager,
“Rewriting Truth: The End of the Narrative Act in Two Southern Cone Detective
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Novels,” Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica, no. 61–62 (2005); Kate Quinn, “Private
Detectives, Private Lives: The Detective Fiction of Sergio Gómez and Marcela
Serrano,” in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction: Essays on the Género Negro
Tradition, ed. Renée W. Craig-Odders, Jacky Collins, and Glen S. Close (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2006); Kate Quinn, “Cases of Identity Concealed and Revealed
in Chilean Detective Fiction,” in Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in
Contemporary International Crime Fiction, ed. Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate M.
Quinn (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); Melvy Portocarrero, “Rompiendo barreras:
Marcela Serrano y lo detectivesco en la novela latinoamericana,” in Encuentros de
viejos y nuevos mundos, ed. Enrique Herrera and Cecilia Moreano (Lima, Perú: H &
G, 2003); Sara Rosell, “La detectivesca femenina posmoderna: El caso de ‘Pasión
de historia’ y Nuestra Señora de la Soledad,” Explicación de textos literarios 30, no. 1–2
(2001–2002); and Silvana Serafin, “Giallo il colore della verità: Nuestra Señora de la
Soledad di Marcela Serrano,” Quaderni ibero-americani 92 (December 2002).
28. Serrano, Nuestra Señora, 17–18.
29. Ibid., 64.
30. Ibid., 65.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 64.
33. For a discussion of Nuestra Señora in terms of the feminization of physical spaces,
see Shalisa M. Collins, “Feminizing the Detective Novel: Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra
Señora de la Soledad, the Neo-Policial and the Creation of Feminine Spatial Poetics,”
Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 41, no. 1 (2012).
35. Ibid., 34–36, 37.
36. Ibid., 71.
37. Cf. Serafin, “Giallo il colore della verità,” 155.
38. Serrano, Nuestra Señora, 90.
39. Ibid., 53.
40. Ibid., 89–90.
41. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 55–65.
43. Ibid., 223.
44. Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” in Adrienne
Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, ed. Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: Norton, 1993), 180–82.
46. Ibid., 127–28.
47. Ibid., 13–15, 34–38, 195–96, 224–25.
48. Ibid., 125–27, 128.
49. Ibid., 246.
50. Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of
Reading,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth
A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1986), 47.
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51. Ibid., 46.
52. Ibid.
53. Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” 180–81.
54. Ibid., 180 (emphasis added).
55. Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” 178–79; Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 54.
56. Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” 178.
57. Cf. Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” 185.
58. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 26–27.
59. Libreria delle donne di Milano, “More Women than Men,” trans. Rosalind Delmar,
in Bono and Kemp, Italian Feminist Thought, 119. In this 1983 piece, the Milan
Collective makes reference to Rich’s essay “Conditions for Work: The Common
World of Women” as they build on Rich’s invitation in her piece to create a
“common world of women,” that is, networks of women working together to
“challenge and inspirit each other, throw light on one another’s blind spots, stand
by and give courage at the birth throes of one another’s insights.” Adrienne Rich,
“Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in On Lies, Secrets, and
Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 208–9. In this essay
Rich did not explicitly theorize that these communities should be based on the
recognition of difference between women as a source of female empowerment, a
concept that is developed by the Milan Collective and which forms the core of their
politics of relations. Cicioni, “‘Love and Respect, Together,’” 75.
60. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 52.
61. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 51; cf. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 26,
28–29.
62. Schweickart bases her model of reading on the works of Nancy Chodorow, Carol
Gilligan, and Jean Baker Miller, whose works suggest that women and men differ
systematically in the ways they define themselves and relate to others. In this
respect, because women’s more flexible ego boundaries would allow them to
conceive of themselves in terms of their relationships with others, this would
lead them to favor negotiation when their needs differ from the needs of those
surrounding them, rather than interactions of control. In terms of the interaction
between reader and text, this means that in a dialogic model of reading,
characterized by this need to connect of which Rich spoke, the issues of control
prevalent in mainstream reader-response criticism are replaced by a “dialectic of
communication,” whereby the woman reader seeks to relate to the woman writer in
the text within a framework of careful navigation between the desire to connect and
the desire to maintain autonomy. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 54–55.
63. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), viii.
64. Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading: ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ ‘The Murders in the
Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” in Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and
Reading, 150–54.
66. Ibid., 175.
67. Ibid., 247.
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68. For a contrasting view on Rosa’s reliability as a narrator and the significance of her
official report for readers, see Henager, “Rewriting Truth.”
69. Alfonsina Storni, “La loba,” in Alfonsina Storni: Argentina’s Feminist Poet, ed.
Florence Williams Talamantes (Los Cerrillos, NM: San Marcos, 1975), 20–21.
70. Serrano, Nuestra Señora, 36, 38.
71. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 149.
73. Ibid., 110–16.
74. Ibid., 230–39.
75. Ibid., 60.
76. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 123.
77. Kuhlemann, “Bonded by Reading,” 205–32.
78. The survey instrument was designed and administered in accordance with the
standards and requirements of The Ohio State University’s Behavioral and Social
Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB Protocol #2008B0128). This survey was
intended to elicit qualitative opinion and anecdotal material for analysis. Subjects
took the survey once only, proceeding at their own pace, answering only those
questions they chose to answer, and completing these to the degree that they
desired.
79. Each respondent was assigned a particular letter (A through M), which allowed
for her answers to be mapped onto her throughout the survey analysis while
maintaining her anonymity.
80. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” 52.
81. For all the convergence that Serrano’s praxis bears with the politics of relations
in Italian feminism, it must be said that in her characterization, she nevertheless
resorts to familiar gender-based stereotypes, both masculine and feminine, which
may compromise a work’s ability to empower readers. A broader examination of
this issue in Serrano’s writings can be found in Kuhlemann, “Bonded by Reading,”
232–50.
82. Milan Collective, Sexual Difference, 32; Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, “Introduction:
Coming from the South,” in Bono and Kemp, Italian Feminist Thought, 17.
83. Erin A. Smith, “‘Both a Woman and a Complete Professional’: Women Readers
and Women’s Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction,” in Reading Sites: Social Difference and
Reader Response, ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn (New York:
MLA, 2004), 206–210; Anne G. Berggren, “Reading Like a Woman,” in Schweickart
and Flynn, Reading Sites, 172–81.
84. Cf. Smith, “‘Both a Woman and a Complete Professional,’” 209.
85. Janice A. Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the
Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book
Research Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1986): 10.
86. Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating,” 21–27.
87. Cf. David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism
(Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975), 80–95; cf. David Bleich,
“Intersubjective Reading,” New Literary History 17, no. 3 (1986): 418–20.
88. See note 17 above.
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89. Cf. Bleich, Readings and Feelings, 33–48.
90. In this very respect, the genuine appreciation of a book as a treasured companion
revealed in the responses of the women readers who participated in my survey
bring me back to my own reading practices. Bracketing out readings performed in
academic spaces, I also have reached out for a book as I have to a friend: I lived a
relationship with it, I got involved with its characters, especially those female ones
who I felt validated my own thoughts and decisions when a part of the world around
me would perhaps not, and I came to new insights that allowed me to explore
paths of life, both personal and professional, that were not always in line with the
more conventional ones available in the culture. In short, the texts and my personal
experiences are interwoven in my reading processes in such a way that I read for
a rich, living encounter with my books, just as my survey respondents do. It is
perhaps this shared understanding of reading as an act of sustenance, which they
could sense through the nature of my questions, that led these generous women to
relate their reflections and experiences to me in order to critically support my growth
as a woman researcher. I do not know. What I do know, however, is that I would be
very much remiss if I did not take the opportunity to recognize and give thanks, in
the spirit of affidamento, for the political act inherent in their affirmation of me, their
symbolic daughter, and of the work I am attempting in focusing on and examining
actual women readers’ choices and practices, as well as exploring the efficacy of
their intersubjective encounters for encouraging women to renegotiate and improve
the conditions of their lives.
91. Dickinson in Para que no me olvides, Antigua vida mía, and Lo que está en mi corazón;
and Rich in Antigua vida mía.
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Detecting a Feminist Reading Model: Clues in Marcela Serrano's Nuestra Señora de la

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Looking to other women for guidance in order to transform into a knowledge

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[E]s un espacio tan acogedor, enteramente rodeado

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On the Receiving End: A Survey to Tap Bonds of Reading and Women’s

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En realidad yo conocí a Serrano en mi paseo por las

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