With the Sacredness of a Priest
The Body as Ritual Site of Feminist Knowledge in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Moths”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272292 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christina Garcia Lopez (University of San Francisco, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 175-193 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mly039 |
| OpenAlex | W2896218548 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
In this essay, I revisit Helena María Viramontes’s classic short story, “The Moths” (1985). Focusing on the story’s representation of spirituality as related to ritual and ancestral knowledge, I argue that Viramontes uses sensory elements of embodied interaction, centering the body as a site of feminist knowledge, connecting both reader and protagonist to a sacred epistemology. Awareness of conscious interconnection emerges through collaborative, creative ritual between a girl and her grandmother; these ritual engagements take place in alternative sacred spaces—the garden, the kitchen, and rooms of the home—in contrast to the isolation and domination of patriarchal rule and its spaces. Further, through scenes of ritual caretaking, embodied acts of reciprocity are figured as epistemologically and ontologically transformative, vital to the development of Chicana subjectivity and, most significantly, intersubjectivity. Finally, in the narrator’s culminating and figurative appropriation of the role of priestess, she honors her grandmother’s inevitable passage into death through a washing of the body. The resulting ritual time-space enables a crossing, transformation, and release through which embodied experience, and witnessing to the body, precipitates conscious connection to a larger intergenerational story of suffering, possibility, and renewal. Learning to understand oneself as both loving and loved is correlated to the processual development of a spiritual awareness of one’s link to generations past, present, and future. “The Moths” ultimately demonstrates that the connection between body, spirit, and knowledge, as expressed through ritual, offers a positionality from which to confront and heal from patriarchy’s generational trauma.
Art · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |