Iphigenia
(The diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored)
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Harvey L. Johnson Award, Southwest Council on Latin American Studies, 1994
“...I didn’t want to tell you the truth for anything in the world, because it seemed very humiliating to me...” The truth is that Iphigenia is bored and, more than bored, buried alive in her grandmother’s house in Caracas, Venezuela. After the excitement of being a beautiful, unchaperoned young woman in Paris, her father’s death has sent her back to a forgotten homeland, where rigid decorum governs. Two men—the married man she adores and the wealthy fiancé she abhors—offer her escape from her prison. Which of these impossible suitors will she choose?
Iphigenia was first published in 1924 in Venezuela, where it hit patriarchal society like a bomb. Teresa de la Parra was accused of undermining the morals of young women with this tale of a passionate woman who lacks the money to establish herself in the liberated, bohemian society she craves. Yet readers have kept the novel alive for decades, and this first English translation now introduces its heroine to a wider audience.
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Here in its first English translation, this accomplished 1924 novel by de la Parra, a Venezuelan, follows Maria Eugenia Alonso as she makes the rocky transition from her youth in fashionable France to adulthood in Venezuela, where women's existence is circumscribed by propriety and financial dependence. After her father's death, she returns to her native Caracas to live with her grandmother and maiden aunt. Since she is poor (her inheritance stolen by an uncle), her grandmother is determined to barter her beauty and respectability for a desirable marriage. In the privacy of her room, with its barred window, Maria Eugenia writes of her friendship with a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage; her own ill-fated love (her suitor ultimately marries for money and advancement); her participation in an old-fashioned courtship ritual in which a marriageable woman sits in the window of her home like ``luxury items that are exhibited . . . to tempt shoppers''; and her engagement to an insensitive and narcissistic man. In the process, Maria Eugenia's own youthful vanity and frivolity are crushed by a culture that sacrifices its women to the greater glory and comfort of its men.
