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Author
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Comment
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sara lindsey
Unregistered User
(2/4/04 3:14 pm)
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La Malinche and Snow White
Hi everyone! I am in a Contemporary Chicana Lit class and I've been noticing some similarities between interpretations of the story of La Malinche and Snow White. La Malinche (also known as Dona Marina and Malintzin) was the lover/interpretor of Cortes during the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. What is known of her background comes primarily from the romanticized contemporary account of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. According to Díaz, Malinche was the noble first-born child of a lord. In her youth her father died and her mother remarried and bore a son. Now an inconvenient stepchild, the girl was sold or given to Mayan slave-traders. Her mother and step-father proclaimed that she had died. At some point, she was given or sold again, and was ultimately given to the Spaniards. Her value as a translator was quickly discovered and she soon became indispensible to the expedition. As Adelaida del Castillo writes, "We can begin to understand that la Malinche, the young Aztec princess, was, in fact, betrayed, dethroned, and sold into slavery by her own mother - it all had the simplicity of an evil fairy tale." In the poem "Malinche" by Rosario Castellanos, the titular character is described as "Cast out, expelled/from the kingdom, the palace, and the warm belly/of the woman who bore me in legitimate marriage bed/who hated me because I was her equal/in stature and in rank,/who saw herself in me and hating her image/dashed the mirror against the ground." Malinche is also described by Díaz as being very beautiful and bearing a strong physical resemblance to her mother. I don't know if the similarities are coincidental - sprung from the archetypal construction of the mother/daughter relationship - or if modern Chicana writers have been influenced by the feminist revisioning of fairy tales such as Snow White. It is also quite possible that, due to my obsession with fairy tales, I am reading into these texts something that is not really there... Any ideas/comments would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Sara
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Carolyn
Dunn
Registered User
(2/17/04 1:05 am)
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Re: La Malinche and Snow White
Hi Sara-
I'm not too familiar with the Malinche myth, but Paula Gunn Allen has a wonderful Malinche poem in her collected works, Life Is A Fatal Disease: Poems. If you can't find it, try via PGA's website www.hanksville.org/storytellers/paula. (If that isn;t right, then just try the address w/out the '/paula'. I will also ask some of my colleagues in Chicana lit about the similarities.
Carolyn
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sara lindsey
Unregistered User
(2/20/04 11:29 am)
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poem
Thanks, Carolyn. What a great poem!
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Danielle Throneberry
Unregistered User
(2/24/04 11:50 pm)
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la malinche
Sara - it is interesting to note that the idea of the trinity of female "goddesses" in Chicana lit is similar to the naming of Snow White - white for purity (lady of guadalupe, the virgin), red for womanhood (Malinche, the whore) and black for the "crone" or the mourning woman (La Llorona, the mourning mother). I was struck by this similarity before I read your post, and I think that it's interesting & completely valid!
it's awesome to look at the splitting of different aspects of the female personality, esp. in chicana lit - I assume that you've read Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek? the title story of that collection tells the story of La Llorona.
check out the idea of the female trinity of those three aspcts - you might get a good paper from it! enjoy your class!
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sara lindsey
Unregistered User
(2/26/04 2:25 pm)
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malinche
Wow, Danielle, thanks so much - I'm actually reading Woman Hollering Creek right now! The class is actually focused on analyzing archetypal figures in Chicana literature - La Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Llorona, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and the bruja/curandera. I am definitely going to work all of this into a paper - the color symbolism was a great idea!
Thanks again,
Sara
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