Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

civilized folk marry the barbarians 205
Doña Bárbara offers semioticians the opportunity to demonstrate dead
authorship. For example, Gómez liked the novel even though Gallegos intended
it as a criticism of his government. And the fi lm version made in
Mexico in 1943 had the ironic effect of turning María Félix, the actress who
played Doña Bárbara into a sort of feminist hero because she was the fi rst
woman in Mexican cinema to wear pants, or to wield a whip.
As they do with the nationalism in Sarmiento’s Facundo, semiotic readings
of Gallegos recognize the spiritualism and neoromanticism that infl
uenced his ideas of the nation. Whether Gallegos realized it or not, he
cast Venezuela’s identity according to discursive patterns typical of Latin
American nationalistic authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thus, a semiotician might suggest that the novel reveals more about
the intellectual patterns of these early twentieth-century nationalists than
it does about Venezuela.
Doña Bárbara is a long work (roughly fi ve hundred pages). What follows
are fi ve brief excerpts dedicated mostly to character development. In order,
the excerpts depict Santos Luzardo, Doña Bárbara, Señor Danger, Lorenzo
Barquero, and Marisela.
Rómulo Gallegos, DOÑA BÁRBARA 2
[On Santos Luzardo]
The sudden transplantation from the midst of the Plain, rude, yet full of intense,
character-forming emotional life, to the smooth, lulling atmosphere
of the city existence between four walls in the society of a mother broken
by terror, produced a peculiar slumber of his [Santos Luzardo’s] faculties.
He had been a boy of spirit, keenly intelligent, full of high courage; the
pride of his father, who enjoyed watching him break a wild horse or retrieve
himself with dexterity and assurance from amidst the constantly recurring
dangers of the cattleman’s life; a worthy representative of the fearless race
that had furnished more than one epic with its centaur and the Plain with
many a lord. His mother, with another concept of life, had placed so many
hopes in him when she heard him express ideas revealing a subtle and refl
ective mind; he now became dull and procrastinating, and changed into a
misanthrope.
But in the end, the city conquered the exiled soul of Santos Luzardo.
Coming to himself after the sorceress nostalgia had lost her power, he realized
that he was in his nineteenth year and not much richer in knowledge
than he had been when he fi rst came from the Arauca [the plains]. He resolved
to make up for the time he had lost, and plunged eagerly into his
studies.