Andrej Gregus

There are not so many explicit prohibitions as there are tacit and supposedly unquestionable expectations that circumscribe the position of women in society. In Rosario Castellanos’s poetic work, the punishment for not meeting social expectations—of how women should behave and how they should feel—is manifested above all in the attitude that women have towards themselves. Therefore, the conflict between women and patriarchal society is above all an internal conflict , related to self- disapproval and feelings of self -hatred. This essay will examine this internal conflict in Castellanos’ poem called “Jornada de la soltera” (Single Day), which originally comes from the collection Lívida luz (1960).[1] We will explore how the experiences of suffering, circularity, bodily nonexistence, and sensations of emptiness that are raised in the text develop the theme of singleness and outline the situation of women within a patriarchal system. However, I will argue that there is also a latent optimistic aspect in the poem: the unprecedented attention that Castellanos gives to the single woman contributes in a performative way to the visibility and legitimization of all unmarried and childless women.

The “Jornada” presents us with a single woman who is suffering. From the first stanza we can see words with negative connotations, such as “shame,” “burn,” and “terrible” (Castellanos 146-147, verse 1-2), which are later combined with visual images (“ash,” 4) and auditory images (“scream,” 8) in the second stanza to generate an atmosphere of sadness and desolation. It is obvious that the single woman is suffering, which we can relate to a lack of being married. Let us consider the strong images that the poet presents to us: “the bed of agony” (15), “a sweat of anguish” that “damps the sheets” (16). The bed, a traditional symbol of marriage, is here marked by loneliness and pain. It is significant that Castellanos uses metaphor (rather than a weaker figure of speech such as, say, a simile) to describe the melancholic state of the spinster: the use of metaphor establishes a fundamental relationship, an intrinsic and inextricable relationship, between the empty bed without a husband and emotional torture. Failure to meet the social expectations of having a husband is not like agony (a simile): it is agony (a metaphor). Indeed, Gloria Vergara proposes that Castellanos “sees in metaphor” as such “the principle of identity” (15). If we consider the anguish that the spinster experiences in her empty bed without a husband as the principle of her identity, the position of a spinster in the patriarchal system—which demands that women have husbands—is inevitably accompanied by suffering. Suffering constitutes the existence of the spinster.

So far we have talked about the spinster. However, we can say that the theme of suffering developed in the poem can be generalized to all spinsters. If we treat the title of the poem as a synecdoche, then the day, full of sadness and social punishment, is not just the situation of one person — it is the reality that haunts all women without a husband. The worst thing is that this reality is seen in the poem as something omnipresent, recurring, reproduced behind an oppressive cultural logic that condemns spinsterhood. We can see it in the preponderance of figures of repetition that dominate the poem, for example, the multiple epizeuxis: “ sin remedio y sin fin” (Castellanos, verse 5); “alrededor del fuego, del relato” (7); “ cada peña, cada tronco [...] cada rama” (10); “await, await, await” (19). And also in the anaphoric parallelism of the conjunction “and” in the fourth and fifth stanzas. Both stylistic devices evoke a sense of seemingly endless repetition, of eternal recurrence, almost as if the single women were trapped in a cycle of life from which they cannot escape. This is all the clearer when we realize the narrative time of the poem: we begin in the morning and go through the day, the night, and back to the morning again. In this way, the formal aspects of the poem suggest that the social stigma of being unmarried imprisons women in a circular trajectory, without progress, development, or end. All it presents to them is the same thing over and over again.

Some argue that this cyclical way of life is not unique to celibate women, but is representative of all women in general. Feminist theorist Julia Kristeva in particular argues that being trapped in a recursive way of life is intimately related to “female subjectivity.” According to her, being a woman is “essentially [about] repetition and eternity” (346). Having children means reproducing life and caring for them day after day, through all the repetitive activities like cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family. So what the repetitive way of life imposes on women, Kristeva suggests, is conforming to social expectations.

But in Castellanos' poem, we can see an example of a woman who does not meet societal expectations, but still has a rhythm of life that moves in a circle. This shows us a very interesting aspect of the “Jornada”: the poem affirms Kristeva's theory of circularity and at the same time develops and extends it to propose that woman is doomed again and again, whether she marries or does not marry, whether she has children or does not have them. Although circularity is based on reproduction as a biological destiny, it is not necessary to fulfill this destiny to find oneself trapped in a cyclical life. As Elena Poniatowska says, woman "remains trapped by her female condition" (20) as such. 

Aside from circularity, the single woman in the poem is also characterized by her lack of bodily reality. In the penultimate stanza of “Jornada,” the poetic voice describes the single woman’s body as something “remote, unexplored / planet that the astronomer calculates / that exists even though he has not seen” (Castellanos, lines 22-24). The epithets “remote” and “unexplored” imply that her body is something far away to be found and explored, conquered and colonized. By whom? By a man, or at least this is suggested by the masculine gender of the noun “astronomer.” This is reminiscent of Freudian discourse on women, which labels them a “dark continent” (Martija), that is, a space that presents difficulties for theorists. It should be noted that this conception presupposes a masculine point of view: what matters is not whether the woman understands herself, because she has no autonomous status. What gives women validity is the recognition of a man. In a patriarchal system, single women either do not exist, like an “extinguished star” (Castellanos, verse 26), or their existence is reduced to something nebulous and barely real, like a planet that no one has seen. 

This notion of the single woman as a ghost also connects with the influential thinking of the French theorist Simone de Beauvoir. In her feminist treatise The Second Sex , de Beauvoir describes the relationship between the sexes as full of asymmetry. Quoting Monsieur Benda, she says: “The body of man has a meaning in itself, abstracted from the woman, while the latter appears naked if the male is not evoked.” In short, “she is nothing outside of what the man decides” (3). The existence of the woman depends entirely on the man. If the man decides that the woman does not exist, then she does not exist. This can be seen in Castellanos’ poem when the poetic voice says that the single woman “cannot die” (line 21) — the man does not take her into account, so, according to patriarchal logic, she can neither begin to exist nor cease to exist. As Fiona Mackintosh sums up, “in order to die one must first exist, and society does not recognize the existence of a woman without children.” 

So we can conclude that a single woman has no power from the point of view of society. When her relatives surround her with all their expectations in the second stanza, all she can do is scream and wait for the verdict of a system that is both “a judge” (line 12) and “a witness without mercy” (13). The single woman finds herself totally disempowered by the expectations of marriage and pregnancy. Particularly significant is the great impact that these patriarchal expectations and attitudes have on the woman’s thinking: she is so concerned with social norms that she internalizes them and transforms them into her own desires. In fact, when she is in her bed, all she can think about are “dialogues and invented men” (19), that is, she is desiring what society wants her to desire. The double repetition of “not being able” in the fifth stanza underlines once again the disempowerment of the single woman at the hands of a patriarchal ideology that pressures her to align her desires about her own future with the ideal of marriage.

And this space—without power, without self-determination—becomes a profoundly empty space, an invalid space. The dream of having a husband was not her own thought, but was transmitted to her by society. This is clearly indicated by the use of impersonal “se” in the phrase “el vacío se poebla” (17). Furthermore, in the syntactical construction a semantic agent is missing, as if the verbal action were carried out by itself, in a way that the spinster cannot control. This emptiness is also a “tragic” emptiness, as the critic Nuela Finnegan points out, because it delineates “a society in which marriage is considered the only option for women” (118). The formulation of the “Jornada” in the third person also expresses a profound truth about the spinster: she has no control over her own story. The third person of the poem, as much as third persons in society, robs the spinster of her own autonomous voice, absorbing her into a collective consciousness. With all this in mind, we can detect in the last line of the poem a note of irony: her smile at the reality of a new day is a smile that reveals sadness and a deep loneliness. In this poem, the social stigma of being single is transformed into a personal loneliness and disability.

Does this mean that the spinster’s situation is a dead end? Some criticize Castellanos’s “horrible” poem for its overly polemical tone that “makes us wonder what the purpose of the poem was” (“The Horrible Poem”). Although the reality captured by Castellanos is rather sad, we must acknowledge that there is also some latent optimism in the poem. As we have already shown, the spinster’s story is an everyday reality that is not talked about and is not recorded in public discourse, but is actively erased from social consciousness. The poem, by capturing the spinster’s journey with all the inconvenient details that pertain to it, fights against the erasure of the spinster subject. Castellanos makes visible the problems that women without husbands must face, indicating to them that she understands them, that their concerns matter to her, that their daily struggles and challenges are indeed noticeable. In that sense, there is hope that by reading the poem, more people will recognize how toxic societal expectations can be and we can all try to take a step forward. 

The most important thing that “Jornada” highlights is that being single is not just a (non) loving situation, but a social marker of shame, desolation and helplessness. Through a subtle use of rhetorical figures and metaphors full of provocative connotations, Castellanos brings to light a type of woman who does not conform to the norms, who suffers from the prejudice of society, whose life is written by the expectations and stigmas of the patriarchal system that surrounds her. Although her situation is lamentable, there is still hope. By making marginalized women visible, Castellanos finally gives them a type of legitimacy, dignity and validation that they deserve, and of which they have unfortunately been deprived for too long.

[1] According to some critics, this work marks a transition in Rosario Castellanos' poetry towards a deeper focus on social issues. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer for this observation.