Madres heroicas y padres ausentes en Ana Isabel, una niña decente por Antonia Palacios

Abstract

Antonia Palacios's (Venezuela, 1904-2001), first prose work was published in Buenos Aires in 1949. In 1950 the novel reached Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and other Latin American countries. In 1952 it arrived in Europe: Spain, Portugal, Holland and France. Palacios, a renowned poet and social activist lived during the repressive dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935). The novel deftly exposes the contradictions and complexities of Venezuela's colonial and patriarchal legacy during the country's expansion and Venezuela's transition to an oil economy. The young narrator questions the strict gender roles and awakens to the reality of the dictatorial legacy and its consequences for women. Palacios combines her ability as a poet with the ability to narrate the experiences of a young woman living in a rigidly structured society with her life monitored and enclosed.

Women are part of a domestic economy creating sweets, sewing, selling milk, washing clothes, or, as in the case of Ana Isabel's mother, making boxes of cigarettes and sewing uniforms for soldiers. The mothers of the novel must fend for themselves, while the fathers are absent or ineffective. Ana Isabel's father is sick and unemployed. Pepe's absent father, Ana Isabel's friend, shows up one day and expects his son to be "male" like him. Her friend Otilia's father simply disappears. Fathers leave and mothers and children must take care of themselves. While the new political order in Venezuela is being redefined by dictatorship and the new economic order is being redefined by the discovery of oil, the old patriarchal order with its rigid and sometimes opaque conventions that Ana Isabel questions endures. The novel displays a diversity of female voices while it reexamines gender roles.