Neruda is from Mars, Mistral is from Venus



“I believe in prophetic speech… still.  I believe in Cassandra, I believe in Elektra and the charming Antigone… for me they’re more alive than the intellectual co-operation and its choice group of old men.”

 –Mistral.

Although as a rule I try my best to avoid gender issues, I think that the identity of women is a huge theme in both of the authors’ works, and it needs to be discussed.

Mistral was a successful woman living in a male-controlled literary and political culture, and because of this had trouble with her own identity as well as the role of women in society.  Raised in poverty in a rural setting, she somehow broke free from the traditional fate of marriage and housekeeping and rose to the public life of poet, ambassador, and Nobel Prize winner.   Mistral was a paradox- maternal yet bore no children, an unwavering spirituality but deranged though grief and suffering, she loved her homeland deeply and yet she always lived abroad-and her issues with self-identity are evident in her work.   She wrote about women in history considered outsiders and related to them.  The characters she created-Through Hebrew Scriptures and Greek tragedies- are self-portraits, or spiritual states through which she was passing, and contain hallucination, prophecy, raving, and altered physic states.  Through these traits of “locura”, Mistral questions the possibility that a woman is not crazy in the face of extreme conditions, but merely conflicted as she attempts to break the gender molds in which she in encased.

Neruda-also a poet, ambassador and Nobel Prize winner- didn’t seem to have an issue with being a man.  He is very up-front in his poetry about his needs and feelings, and expresses love and lust and the manly emotions that come with it.  Although he idolizes the women in his poems, he also refers to them as possessions, a doll without a voice, an object.   His description of women is mainly physical: body parts compared to mountains or fruit, with lots of nudity.   Love is repeatedly described as a violent thing with negative condemnations, and the women in the poems are constantly subject to his scorn, desire, and despair.  There is little intellect in 20 poemas (one will not hear of Orestes from Elektra, for example) however the feelings are so vivid that the reader feels physically there with Neruda as he embarks on his erotic and sensual adventures with beautiful Chilean women.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.