"The death of the living and the death of the dead": an exploration of self in Maria Luisa Bombal's La Amortajada and Maria Zambrano's La Tumba de Antigona.

THERE is a marked difference between a death that is imposed upon a living being and a life that is surrendered. In the former, images of murder or dying before one's time dominate the inescapable understanding that we are all objects at the mercy of some macabre grim reaper. In the latter, the living being gains subjectivity and control over his or her life and in turn takes death as its object. Such objectification of death almost assumes that it is no longer feared--it has come to be accepted as a natural and normal course. This objectification is essential to Maria Luisa Bombal's La amortajada (1938) as the work explores death as an opportunity for lucid reflection. As she lies in her coffin, Ana Maria reflects upon her life and generates a dialogue between her two selves: the self that she was in life, and the one who she is in death. The very nature of this dialogue welcomes death as a requisite element in the narrative, and the two deaths that she describes--the death of the living and the death of the dead--unify Bombal's Ana Maria with the figure of Antigone as she is portrayed in Maria Zambrano's La tumba de Antigona (1967). Because of Zambrano's work the reader can make the connection between the dialogue that Antigone entertained in her period of living death (the time she spent concealed in her tomb and prior to her suicide) and the reflections of Bombal's protagonist. I argue that La amortajada explores death as a necessary experience in the process of self-exploration and conceives it as a creative (and even generative) space.

Death is central to the classical myth of Antigone: the death of her brother prompts Antigone's actions, she is sentenced to sure death in her entombment, and it is ironically by death at her own hand that she emancipates herself from her traditionally submissive role. La amortajada provides a definition for the twofold death that is first presented in my reading of the classical Antigone. The twofold death refers first to Antigone's social death, a death unaccepted by her when she is banished to her tomb, and second to her emotional and accepted death in her choice of suicide. Bombal's Ana Maria takes advantage of the living death generated by her author as a space for exploration and expression, rather than one of resignation and defeat. Like Antigone before her, Ana Maria authors her own death in her acceptance of the earth's embrace. Zambrano's Antigone and Bombal's Ana Maria rewrite life in death.

A stream of consciousness guides the amortajada's reflections and dialogues. This particular way of "assembling" pieces of past events from a space of separation, darkness and confusion echoes Zambrano's Antigone. La tumba de Antigona consists of a series of dramatic dialogues that take place within Antigone's tomb. Zambrano's Antigone makes a last attempt to resolve her life by engaging in conversations that were impossible during her lifetime. These dialogues are both active discussions and projections of the voices of her interlocutors. A few of these conversations are monologues, indicating that even in an imaginary exchange Antigone is denied the ability to interact with the language and history of someone whose life has been an integral part of her own. What is significant is that Antigone is aware, she is conversant. Zambrano's prologue tells the reader the importance of such lucidity: "Lo mas humano del hombre, al menos como se nos sigue apareciendo hoy, es la conciencia" (23).

Ana Maria's thoughts and experiences create a dialogue between the self that lies in her coffin and her past. As each mourner who visits the casket triggers different memories and feelings, Ana Maria (from her newly objective position) examines her past and present perceptions of those experiences. She tries to understand how the motivations and actions of others have determined her own. These reflections allow a dialogue with the past and it is by visiting past events that she finally appropriates her life's experiences as her own. Naomi Lindstrom notes that the narrator looks for opportunities to let the other characters speak, to give voice to Ana Maria and the other characters (151). Through these voices, Ana Maria puts words to suppressed emotions and unifies her life's experiences. She objectively examines passion as well as pain and loss.

Her first memories are inspired by Ricardo as he looks into her coffin during her wake. Ricardo was the boy-next-door, her childhood playmate. It is also with Ricardo that she experienced her first and most passionate love. They grew up on adjoining properties, their families so close that they referred to each other's parents as "uncle" and "aunt." The issues that plague this quasi-incestuous relationship mark the rest of her romantic relationships. Her submission to men finds its roots in her childhood fascination with Ricardo, "Eras un espantoso verdugo. Y, sin embargo, ejercias sobre nosotras una especie de fascinacion. Creo que te admirabamos" (15). As a young woman she was validated by his abusive attentions. She learns to rely on possessive masculine strength and is in fact much comforted by being physically overpowered by acts such as his ability to grab her from behind and pull her up onto his saddle (21). Ana Maria admits her complete submission to Ricardo, "Durante tres vacaciones fui tuya" (23). Her submission is complementary to her investment in the gender roles of her time and place. Gloria Galvez Lira's specifically discusses the practice of machista behaviors in Bombal's contemporary Chile. Galvez Lira states that machismo is not exclusive to Mexico, and in accordance with Octavio Paz's work is based on power, on a man's complete domination of others (18). Male domination was not only actively practiced in daily life but reinforced by law--up until 1953 a husband had the right to beat or even kill his wife if he walked in on her committing adultery (there is no mention of any consequences if the opposite were to occur) (21). Under such conditions women are socialized to expect and admire such overt displays of domination, to submit to them and to feel validated in their roles as objects of male power.

At the end of their affair Ana Maria is devastated by Ricardo's unexpected abandonment. She did not realize how dependant she had become on his affirmation of her. Validation in Ana Maria's understanding can only come from an outside source. She explores this dependency by considering various other relationships throughout the novella as dependence is a major component of her failed relationship with her husband; she deduces that while men can and do redirect their passion into other activities, "el destino de las mujeres es remover una pena de amor en una casa ordenada, ante una tapiceria inconclusa" (78). She hints here at the ease with which Ricardo leaves her and the many changes that occur in his life while she remains close to home, eternally searching for attention and for someone to fulfill the void that his abandonment creates in her.

Ricardo's desertion is necessary for the introduction of various metaphors in the novella. Throughout the work, Ana Maria displays a romantic connection with nature and its elements of wind, rain, temperature and other meteorological happenings. Her character is intimately tied to the figure of mother earth, the cycle of life and to these things as female elements. This connection and identification with nature is necessary for the symbolic suicide she commits following Ricardo's rejection of her. She steals a revolver and takes it with her into the forest yet loses her strength as she holds the revolver up first to her temple, then to her heart. Finally, she fires the gun at a tree. This gesture is a symbolic suicide for her: when she fires at the tree, she fires at her youthful and passionate self.

   Fue un chasquido, un insignificante chasquido como el que descarga
   una sabana azotada por el viento. Pero, oh Ricardo, alla en el
   tronco del arbol quedo un horrendo boquete disparejo y negro de
   polvora.

   Mi pecho desgarrado asi, mi carne, mis venas dispersas ...  Ay, no,
   nunca tendria ese valor! (24)

With this gesture Ana Maria indicates that she is incapable of two things: First, of performing such a decisive act as actual suicide. Second, of accepting death. The Ana Maria that lies in her coffin remembering this event is still this same indecisive and unaccepting girl.

The wounding of the tree is a very close rewriting of the story of Tancred and his lover that Freud cites in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." (1) The gaping wound here is her own emotional wound, one that will continue to cry out in her future relationships. Later, in her married life with Antonio she grows dependent upon him only after his rejection of her. With Antonio she feels the same type of wound, "'Sufro, sufro de ti como de una herida constantemente abierta'" (81). As she repeats this phrase over and over to herself, the reader is aware of her inability to know the actual wound, a blockage that impedes the healing process. She can only see the wound as something outside of herself, the wound belongs to the tree, not to her. Her own words deny her ability to accept such pain as her own. Because of her denial of such pain, the healing is retarded and accompanies her into her coffin.

Ana Maria is compelled to repeat the cycle of submission and rejection that Ricardo initiated. This compulsion to repetition again complements Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"; immediately after recounting the story of Tancred and Clorinda, he asserts that "there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle" (605). It is Ana Maria who prompts Antonio's rejection of her: he had adored her, but her constant unhappiness and her flight to her parent's home generates a fissure in their relationship that only widens with time. Later she makes Fernando her confidant, and by doing so becomes reliant on him to keep her feelings a secret, something which he in turn manipulates in order to keep her dependent upon him.

Shortly after her "murder" of the tree, Ana Maria discovers that she is pregnant with Ricardo's child. Her narration never explicitly states her condition, rather she describes it as "esa dulce fatiga" (24). Relying on descriptions that align her body and pregnancy with natural symbols, she describes how her body and her child blossom with the coming spring. The broken-hearted Ana Maria clings to this pregnancy for comfort. Rather than seeing the unborn child as something that is hers, or some part of Ricardo that is left to her, she sees the child as something which will forever mark her as Ricardo's. Again she feels that she can only be validated if she is marked as something of his. The reality of her situation, as an abandoned single woman carrying a child who can only bring disgrace upon her and her family, escapes her. Barbara Ichiishi and Donna Cece both read Ana Maria's experience of pregnancy as a continued sexual relationship with Ricardo. This reading assumes Ana Maria's submission to her passions, as well as a denial of his rejection of her. For the young and passionate Ana Maria, this experience of sensuality is more important than the social customs that shun the sexual woman (Cece 43). The reader must decipher Ana Maria's miscarriage. In her confused and highly emotional state she tumbles down a flight of stairs, triggering the miscarriage. When she refers to the miscarriage as "el rio de sangre en que se disgregaba esa carne tuya mezclada a la mia ..." (32). Her response, to knit furiously "como si en ello me fuera la vida" is an act by which she tries to grasp that unity, tries to re-assemble the relationship (and the child) that has been lost (32).

Knitting has historically--mythologically--been considered a feminine activity and its use as both an escape mechanism and a method of transference for emotional loss, repressed desire and latent frustrations complement this act as a feminine pastime. Penelope's weaving and Mme DeFarge's knitting occupy the daytime hours of these characters, but more importantly serve as outlets by which their losses and desires are channeled. Barbara Ichiishi affirms that, "As an activity which in western culture has been associated with femininity, knitting here expresses the repressed desire of Ana Maria. In the absence of the real object of desire, she can be fertile only in the imaginary realm, recreating again and again in her knitting the text of her life and love" (21).

References to the "feminine" act of weaving pepper Ana Maria's final reflections as she awaits burial. This craft is also a metaphor for the complementary act of spinning that Ana Maria, the narrator, and Bombal all participate in. The stories they spin are not independent strands but integral parts of the fabric of Ana Maria's life. Ana Maria's narrative is a weave because she is bringing together various threads and reconstructing her memories as all the persons who have affected her life file by her coffin. Her death, something presented to the reader as a time of rest, is her only opportunity for an objective reflection on who she was and what happened during her time as one of the living. It is undeniable that Ana Maria's life has been affected, and has affected the lives of the other characters. In her attempt to make peace with her life, all of its events must be examined and her life understood as a whole, rather than as a series of unrelated events or a remembering of emotions long buried in her unconscious as Ichiishi suggests. (2) Her knitting, the weaving of persons and events, makes up the completed fabric. This interpretation of memory and experience is supported by Marjorie Agosin's work that presents Bombal's writing as complementary to memory and embodiment. It is through this narrative that Ana Maria's life takes form. Experience is translated into a tangible medium that is embodied by the novella. As a result, all of Ana Maria's passions, loves and losses become equally integral parts of the fabric of the narrative. It is only upon completing this fabric that Ana Maria can look back objectively at the sum of her experiences, accept them, and prepare to accept death--the second death, "la muerte de los muertos" (107).

Ricardo Gutierrez Mouat suggests that to read Bombal is to establish a dialogue with absence, nostalgia and memory that assimilates them with eroticism and death (99). For Ana Maria, death is a rest "que se convierte en otra forma de placer" (Agosin "lenguaje" 97). I posit that this pleasure is derived from the sense of fulfillment and completion that results from her reflections. Pleasure is attainted with the completion of her weaving. Only once this has been accomplished is she fulfilled enough to accept her life, and by extension, her death. Death, like life, is a journey through the self, but in death she can reflect and recuperate the past and her memory: "La amortajada es feliz en su muerte porque es tan solo a traves de ella que parece lograr poseer su propio cuerpo: 'No recuerda haber gozado, haber agotado nunca asi su emocion'" (97).

Ana Maria's knitting and her narrative both reinforce the function of Bombal's text to unify and work through the constraints of linear thought and expression. Ana Maria and her reader must both enter the weave and find their way through it in order to reconcile their losses and attain the pleasure of a whole experience. As Ana Maria sifts through the experiences of her unfulfilled life and creates a whole image out of what were up until that point episodic events, she fulfills the void that is essential to her incomplete death. Her self, this void, must be filled in order for her to accept death. Fulfillment and pleasure will allow her to accept her life and death as these elements unify her bodily experiences.

It is only in her coffin that Ana Maria's expression is allowed a release. Prior to the explorations allowed in this post-mortem narrative, Ana Maria has led a life of silence--or quiet resolution. Ricardo Gutierrez Mouat reads silence in Bombal as death, as nothingness (100). Following this interpretation, Ana Maria's silence indicates that the years of her life were actually a period of physical and emotional entombment, a time during which she was really one of the living dead. The most remarkable irony of this novella is that Ana Maria is most alive--life paralleled by expression--in her death. The literal silence of death gives Ana Maria the opportunity to see herself without all of the social and emotional expectations and labels that have heretofore defined her. Emma Sepulveda-Pulvirenti reads silence as an element that distances the protagonist from the others, allowing for the creation of an existence within her own "espacios" (232). Ana Maria's distance from life also allows for a manipulation of events. This technique is compounded by the spaces between the dialogues. The spaces between the passing by of each mourner are deliberate. Similar spaces also occur in La ultima niebla, where the blank spaces that divide the sections are well-calculated so the reader must acknowledge silence as an agent that manipulates the narration (235). Silence is ultimately a highly expressive space for Bombal's women and her works.

The silence of the tomb becomes the essential expressive space for both Bombal's and Zambrano's protagonists. Rather than mark death, the coffin and the tomb are merely holding places, waiting rooms if you will, in which these women find their expression through reflection not merely upon their lives, but upon the other lives that are inextricably a part of their own. Ana Maria waits in her coffin as Antigone waited in her tomb. They both suffered from premature deaths after having their desires and expression suppressed in life. The second death, "the death of the dead" that Ana Maria mentions is the death that she willingly accepts, a death that she is ready for; this is the death that Antigone elects with her suicide. The second death is not only a death that they welcome, but a return to the self, a place for communion with nature and her feminine elements.

Unlike more common examples wherein the protagonist faces the uncanny when confronted with an Other, an object or person that represents his or her own mortality, Maria Luisa Bombal's character lives the uncanny. Ana Maria's narrative presents an extended moment of her experience with the immediacy of death, as she has already passed through physical death and faces the task of accepting her emotional death. Ana Maria's thoughts as she reflects upon her life while awaiting burial directly reference the primary fear that Freud discusses in "The Uncanny": "To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all" (145). Freud elaborates by indicating that the fear of death is at the genesis of all fears. Ana Maria dies prematurely, is robbed of life with many relationship still in need of resolution. I suggest that her attempt to find closure on her life's experiences prior to the burial of her casket is her attempt to avoid being buried alive. Antigone also lives the uncanny when she is quite literally buried alive. In Maria Zambrano's interpretation however, Antigone appropriates this space between the worlds of the living and the dead. This appropriation indicates that she has overcome the primal fear of death, and because of that all other fears are unfounded. In this space where fear no longer exists, both characters are able to reflect upon their lives and the situations and persons that have affected them with newfound lucidity.

The actions and events of Ana Maria's life are no longer tainted with the emotional involvement and stress of the present. She is able to recount events and convey her past emotions objectively. It is almost as if she recounts the events of someone else's life. Death becomes a place that keeps her safe from the problems and pains that life inflicts. She can experience life and death fully, as indicated by the embrace with which she greets the process of death. Barbara Ichiishi argues as such that "Death thereby provides the means to arrive at an understanding of her own vital experience" (18).

I suggest that this "understanding of her own vital experience" indicates that death allows her to put events and emotions in order. As Catherine Boyle reads Ana Maria's narrative, the reader "becomes acquainted with layer upon layer of the protagonist's imagination, each layer, though hidden beneath the weight of subsequent years, reaping its own life. So, while the protagonist may be able, on one level, to mourn the losses in her life, in her death every memory, every experience had its own place, a place now awarded in a ruthless process of equalizing" (36). This balance is order, and order allows for Ana Maria to process events, time and emotions at her own pace, rather than as she had to face these elements in life where everything was hurled at her, overlapping and jumbled by the emotions of the moment.

The order and lucidity of her reflections permit Ana Maria to see herself for the first time. Only in her coffin is she not first someone else's daughter, lover, wife or mother. Her body is for once her own. In this way, death allows her a first communion with the self, transforming the "self " that she was in life into the Other. Most discussion on Bombal's address of the Other is written in regards to the protagonist of La ultima niebla in which Other allows for an exploration of sexuality as transgression as well as a "preoccupation with death and suicide" (Levine 142). Bombal's fascination with death and its constant appearance as a primary element in her work segues into my reading of La amortajada. The Other for Ana Maria is the young, passionate and sexual woman of her youth, of her affair with Ricardo, of the miscarriage. In all of those instances her body was not her own--it belonged to her passion, to Ricardo, to the fetus. Through these experiences Bombal explores the alienation of the Other--or the socialized, gendered woman, the woman who is object and womb and no more. Through Ana Maria she claims expression and self in the space that is the most intangible to self, the alternate space of death. Catherine Boyle suggests an interpretation of this space as feminine, a space of experience and expression:

The fascination that death held for her [Bombal] was not only a fascination with its mystery, but with the mysteries of its literary expression; perhaps it is the fight against the dead woman in literature, woman as muse and inspiration, rather than as producer, creator. Total passivity, in this, the only stage of Maria Luisa Bombal's writing--for she wrote no more--becomes a goal, because it is the space for the release of the self. The dynamic of death is the dynamic of the space where an experience peculiar to the female meets the word. (Boyle 42)

As a haven, death is accepted by Ana Maria as a natural part of life. It affords the same amount of possibility and hope as a life does. For Ana Maria and the narrator, death is not tainted by fear. The time in her coffin is a period of reflection, of understanding and of peace. This is the space that she has longed for throughout her physical life yet was never able to find. Barbara Ichiishi explains death in this novella "as the necessary complement to life, a state which binds together and makes whole all the discontinuities of earthly experience, thereby allowing for the final appeasement of desire, at the same time that it effects the dissolution of the human body, its dispersion and fusion into the cosmos. Thus death is depicted as a positive experience of beauty and meaning, which in a real sense 'completes' life" (18).

The "completion" of life in death complements the romantic elements of Ana Maria's experience. Throughout the text she aligns her emotions with natural elements that culminate with the symbolic suicide when she shoots a tree instead of herself. Death is part of the life cycle, a part that most cannot accept--a part which she in fact did not accept and is struggling against throughout her narration. As she is lowered into the ground and finds herself amongst the earth, mosses and roots that embrace her coffin, "La amortajada finally establishes a new relationship with her death: she associates it definitively with her life. This is one of the great narrative successes of the novel, linking life and death through the threads of central vital images, her hair, the roots of the trees in the earth where she will be buried" (Boyle 35). The act of burial returns the shrouded woman to "la fuente de origen, donde todo regresa para renacer y purificarse" (Agosin desterradas 71). The physical process of burial inverts the birth process and unites woman and earth inextricably.

As Ana Maria's coffin descends into the earth, the reader knows that the earth's embrace is welcome and she willingly submits to the second death. This "death of the dead" is in this interpretation the soul's embrace of death, its willing passage into that other realm. In Marjorie Agosin's readings, the death of the dead is a liberation (desterradas 67). I assert that this liberation spawns from Bombal's interpretation of the earth as a female element. The literal embrace of Mother Earth alludes to the mythological Sita who after her trials and tribulations on earth (including a literal trial by fire) chooses to return to the embrace of her Mother Earth rather than continue the life she is living. This descent into the earth is a communion for Ana Maria as she returns to her essence, to the female earth, to the security of the womb. This reading remains in accordance with Freud's writing on the uncanny and the fear of death that "is only a transformation of another fantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness--of fantasy, I mean of intrauterine existence" (145).

Freud bases the fear of the uncanny on a presupposed fear of death which he aligns with intrauterine existence. This reading, however, only considers a primarily masculine fear of intrauterine existence, of the uterus, or the unknown. For the female personality as she is represented in this novella, a return to the uterus is a communion with the self, a return to her generative essence. I suggest that she welcomes the embrace of earth as the embrace of the mother who never comforted her in life. Ana Maria was alone, even in her loves, and isolated from deep emotional attachment. Her love affairs were always marked by some sort of limitation or ultimatum that restricted even her passions. Her best friend, Sofia, betrayed her with her own husband. Her relationships with her children are strained at best. The only motherly figure that the reader knows is her nanny, Zoila. Only in her literal burial into the earth can she rest among female elements, as a woman.

The time that Ana Maria spends in her coffin awaiting burial should certainly not be considered a part of her living life, but neither can it be considered a part of the death that does not really begin until she embraces and is embraced by the earth. The intermediary space created by her narration is simply "not life." This period of "not life" is not infinite--Bombal concedes to the traditional limits of the living and the dead, but death cannot be forced. Bombal's text violates the assumed union of the body and the spirit with her suggestion that the dead still need to die. Life in this interpretation is not something that can be taken, but rather something that is given up, surrendered. This surrender is active, participatory. Ana Maria comes to her own terms and gives herself up to the earth. This suggestion likens her to Antigone: her burial is an act of body, her hanging is a surrender on her own terms.

I suggested earlier that Ana Maria can only attain pleasure, a true satisfaction by completing the weave of her life experiences. These experiences are fulfilled for her in the experience of death. Barbara Ichiishi reads Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in Bombal's presentation of the death and burial of Ana Maria. Ichiishi states that Freud's work intersects the sexual, pleasure-seeking instincts with the "seemingly contrary" death drive (17). This reading complements the discussion of death as an inextricable part of life, and of Ana Maria's narrative as a step in the completion of the cyclical and complementary processes. Inextricably linked to one another, death not only follows life, but precedes it. Death is a period of genesis; it is the experience of the womb, of the feminine space of creation.

When Ana Maria accepts death she is for once whole as a woman. The labels that limited her throughout life no longer apply as she is all of the traditional female roles and none of them at once. She is all of them as she is viewed by each of the passers-by, they each think of and address the shrouded woman by the label she carried for them in life: wife, mother, daughter, friend, lover. She is none because they see her as a dead woman who can no longer be any of these things. At this moment she is all women--the essential feminine.

Because Bombal so successfully links life and death as cyclical elements, she is also able to pair elements traditionally restricted to "life" with the newly defined experience of death. Passion, sensuality and generation are essential aspects of death as Bombal describes it. Death not only encompasses the totality of life's experiences, it is the ultimate experience. As such it cannot be outdone, she can never find a greater opportunity for freedom, pleasure and a welcome embrace: "For Death is Ana Maria's final lover, in whose arms she will experience eternal loss of self and union with the cosmos" (Ichiishi 26). This lover is the lover that welcomed Antigone as well--her burial chamber and bridal chamber were one and the same. Pleasure, self-actualization and freedom are found in the embrace of the same lover. This "union with the cosmos" unites Ana Maria with a feminine experience that Bombal presents as universal.

WORKS CITED

Agosin, Marjorie. Las desterradas del paraiso, protagonistas en la narrativa de Maria Luisa Bombal. New York: Senda Nueva de ediciones, 1983.

--. "Maria Luisa Bombal o el lenguaje alucinado. (Latin American Women's Voices: 500 Years After)." Symposium 48.4 (1995): 251-256.

Bombal, Maria Luisa. La amortajada. 1938. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1962.

Boyle, Catherine. "The Fragile Perfection of the Shrouded Rebellion (Re-Reading Passivity in Maria Luisa Bombal)." Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Spain and Spanish America. Ed. Catherine Davies and Montserrat Ordonez. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993. 27-42.

Cece, Donna. "El aislamiento femenino en La amortajada de Maria Luisa Bombal." Chiricu 4.1 (1985): 41-53.

Freud, Sigmund. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." The Freud Reader. 1920. Ed. Peter Gay. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989. 594-626.

--. "The Uncanny." Trans. Alix Strachey. Psychological Writings and Letters. 1919. Ed. Sander L. Gilman. New York: Continuum, 1991. 120-54.

Guerra-Cunningham, Lucia. "Funcion y sentido de la muerte en La amortajada de Maria Luisa Bombal." Explicacion de Textos literarios 7.2 (1978): 123-8.

Gutierrez Mouat, Ricardo. "Construccion y represion del deseo en las novelas de Maria Luisa Bombal." Maria Luisa Bombal: apreciaciones criticas. Ed. Elena Gascon-Vera, Joy Renjilian-Burgy and Marjorie Agosin. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1987. 99-118.

Ichiishi, Barbara F. "Death and Desire in the Shrouded Woman by Maria Luisa Bombal." Latin American Literary Review 17.33 (1989): 17-28. Levine, Suzanne Jill. "House of Mist: House of Mirrors." Maria Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones criticas. Ed. Elena Gascon-Vera, Joy Renjilian-Burgy and Marjorie Agosin. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1987. 136-46.

Lindstrom, Naomi. "El discurso de La amortajada: Convencion burguesa vs. conciencia cuestionadora." Maria Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones criticas. Ed. Elena Gascon-Vera, Joy Renjilian-Burgy and Marjorie Agosin. Tempe: Bilingual Press, 1987. 147-61.

Lira, Gloria Galvez. Maria Luisa Bombal: Realidad y fantasia. Potomoc, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1986.

Sepulveda-Pulvirenti, Emma. "Maria Luisa Bombal y el silencio." Maria Luisa Bombal: apreciaciones criticas. Ed. Elena Gascon-Vera, Joy Renjilian-Burgy and Marjorie Agosin. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1987. 230-36.

Zambrano, Maria. La tumba de Antigona. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno editores s.a., 1967.

--. "Prologue." La tumba de Antigona. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno editores s.a., 1967. 3-27.

by Marta Wilkinson

Wilmington College

NOTES

(1) "Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again" (Freud 605).

(2) Ichiishi states, "She [Ana Maria] has access to thoughts and feelings which during her lifetime were buried in the depths of her unconscious, and in some cases is also able to penetrate the secret emotions of those who weep at her bedside" (18).