The Never-ending Quest

Characterized by the postmodern techniques of parody and collage, Silvina Ocampo's extensive narrative production (1937–88) is often structured as a rewriting of well-known fairy tales. This rewriting is almost always anomalous because it derives from the superimposition of different narrative structures. For example, in “La casa de azúcar” [The house made of sugar] (from La furia, 1959), Hansel and Gretel's attractive house, as suggested by the story's title, contaminates the space inhabited by the newlywed couple and projects onto the protagonist Cristina the character of the witch. The presence of a feminine double can be found in other stories from the same collection, such as “La continuación” [The continuation] or “Carta perdida en un cajón” [Letter lost in a drawer], in which the angel/monster dialectic appears, as Patricia Klingenberg has suggested in the figures of Snow White and her stepmother. Years later it will be Artemia, the protagonist of “Las vestiduras peligrosas” [Dangerous dresses] (Los días de la noche, 1970), who will become a modern-day Cinderella, destined to find with her succession of increasingly indecent outfits, not love, as in Perrault's story, but rather a dramatic and violent death.

The notions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the angel in the house and the dissolute woman, all form part of Ocampo's incessant quest to bring to light feminine fantasies and unconfessed drives. This quest led to her last short story collections, Y así sucesivamente (1987) and Cornelia frente al espejo (1988), which are marked by an accentuated lyricism and an increasing sense of nostalgia. It is in the context of this dense and distilled prose that the archetypes of the simplest (and most ancient) form of narrating will reappear. These stories are no longer about modern-day Cinderellas or resuscitated Snow Whites, and woman is no longer represented as a double, rival, and counterfigure. Ocampo's gaze now appears to direct itself at an intimate feminine subject, one pervaded by the insoluble mysteries of Eros. Thus it is no surprise that, along with a rewriting of the classics of fantastic literature, the author challenges herself to revive symbols from a well-known repertoire learned during childhood, a time when, as we know, she studied French and English before Spanish.