Doña Bárbara Unleashed: From Venezuelan Plains to International Screen

By Jenni M. Lehtinen

Since its publication in 1929, the story of Doña Bárbara has haunted the collective Latin-American imagination, and has been adapted variously both for the small and big screen. Doña Bárbara Unleashed explores how Rómulo Gallegos’s original story has been kept alive yet altered by subsequent screen adaptations; the book illustrates how film and telenovela adaptations have reinterpreted Doña Bárbara in order to mirror changes in societal norms, such as the role of women in Latin American societies, and audience expectations. Particular attention is given to how spectators in the twenty-first century have played a crucial role influencing the alterations to which Gallegos’s original plot has been subjected. Now Doña Bárbara Unleashed offers an original way of studying screen adaptations by engaging several adaptations of the same source text in dialogue with each other, rather than simply comparing adaptations to the source text. This is a ground-breaking study that further develops readings through more traditional theories of screen adaptations with approaches emerging from fandom studies and audience responses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786836885

Book preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Doña Bárbara Unleashed

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St. Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology

Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-Pellisa

Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and Space

Ester Bautista Botello

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

Robert Mason

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and therelationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Doña Bárbara Unleashed

From Venezuelan Plains to International Screen

JENNI M. LEHTINEN

© Jenni M. Lehtinen, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University of Wales Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-686-1

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-688-5

The right of Jenni M. Lehtinen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, anddoes not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Cattallina/Shutterstock.com

To Fosco, Marisela and Pavlusha

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction: Doña Bárbara, Her Critics, Her Story and Her Fans

1‘The Legend of María Transformed into the Doña’ – Fernando de Fuentes’s Launching of a Legend on Screen (1943)

2‘From the Point of View of the Woman’ – Doña Bárbara as Seen by Betty Kaplan (1998)

3Doña Bárbara Reborn – Entering the New Millennium on the Small Screen (2008)

4Simply La Doña (2016)

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

I first came across the idea of writing a book on screen adaptations of Doña Bárbara years ago when finishing my doctoral studies at Oxford University. The potential value of such a project was initially brought to my attention by Edwin Williamson and Clive Griffin. Years after graduating, I remain grateful to Oxford’s Spanish Sub-faculty, and above all to Robin Fiddian, for providing me with such an excellent foundation in academia.

Since exchanging the ‘dreaming spires’ of Oxford for the steppes of Northern Kazakhstan, I have been equally lucky in terms of receiving support from a wider academic community. The Department of Languages, Linguistics and Literatures at Nazarbayev University has provided a collegial working environment that has helped greatly my research and writing endeavours at all times. I would like to thank Nazarbayev University in particular for awarding me a generous grant for funding my research trips to Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago, without which this project would not have been possible. I am once again especially grateful to Lancelot Cowie for hosting me at the University of West Indies, where I carried out much of my research on secondary literature. A further, very special expression of gratitude goes to Raúl Miranda López, José Alberto Rodríguez, David Israel Ramírez and David Ornelas at the Cineteca Nacional de Mexico, who not only provided invaluable assistance in facilitating my access to the necessary research materials during my trips to Mexico City, but further offered continued assistance from the other side of the globe. I would also like to thank Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore, John Mercer and Paul Long at Birmingham City University for introducing me to the fascinating world of fandom and media studies, a world that helped me to shape my research on the twenty-first-century telenovelas based on the story of Doña Bárbara.

A handful of colleagues have also left very specific marks in the actual manuscript. My long-term friend and colleague Tyler Fisher provided constructive feedback on my project at various points and helped me to formulate attractive titles. David Hammerbeck helped me perceive the theatricality of the 1943 film adaptation, whilst María Donapetry drew my attention to the fact that the character of Doña Bárbara can be interpreted as an archetype of the Venezuelan nation. Stein Trotman and Kris Harthoorn provided me with some indispensable help with formatting issues. Karie Pieczynski meticulously proofread my final draft, and Roza Zhakhina contributed to editing the images included in this book.

Also, my parents, Maijaliisa Lehtinen and Harri Lehtinen deserve a special, heartfelt mention for their continued, untiring support. I would like to further express my gratitude for the excellent and consistent research assistance provided by Fosco and Marisela at home. The Tulpar Equestrian Club community has kept me sane throughout the many years of research and writing, and I would like to extend my gratefulness to my trainer Valera Starodubov and Pavlusha, my own Cabos Negros, both of whom have taught me to be a bit more like Doña Bárbara.

Jenni M. Lehtinen

17 May 2020

List of Figures

Figure 1 María Félix’s Doña Bárbara and María Elena Marqués’s Marisela recognize themselves in each other during a violent altercation.

Figure 2 Esther Goris’s Doña Bárbara bares her body and soul to Jorge Perugorría’s Santos only in order to be rejected.

Figure 3 The twenty-first-century Doña Bárbara (Edith González) and Santos’s (Christian Meir) passionate love story unravels against the backdrop of an undefined Latin American landscape.

Figure 4 Altagracia Sandoval (Aracely Arámbula) admires her urban empire from the rooftop of one of her construction sites in the opening scene of La Doña .

Introduction

Doña Bárbara, Her Critics, Her Story and Her Fans

Tocante a amores, ya ni siquiera [sic] aquella mezcla salvaje de apetitos y odio de la devoradora de hombres. Inhibida la sensualidad por la pasión de la codicia y atrofiadas hasta las últimas fibras femeniles de su ser por los hábitos del marimacho – que dirigía personalmente las peonadas, manejaba el lazo y derribaba un toro en plena sabana como el más hábil de sus vaqueros y no se quitaba de la cintura la lanza y el revólver, ni los cargaba por encima sólo para intimidar – si por alguna razón de pura conveniencia … la movía a prodigar caricias, más era hombruno tomar que femenino entregarse. Un profundo desdén por el hombre había reemplazado al rencor implacable.

No obstante este género de vida y el haber traspuesto ya los cuarenta, era todavía una mujer apetecible, pues si carecía en absoluto de delicadezas femeniles, en cambio el imponente aspecto del marimacho le imprimía un sello original a su hermosura: algo de salvaje, bello y terrible a la vez.¹

Rómulo Gallegos, Doña Bárbara (1929)

In the matter of love, the ogress was no longer the wild mixture of lust and hatred. Her appetites were strangled by her greed, and the last fibres of her femininity in her being were atrophied by the habits of the virago – she personally directed the labour of the peons, tossed the lasso, and could bring down a bull out in the open as well as her most skillful cowboy. She was never without her lance-head dagger and her revolver, nor did she carry them in her belt for mere threat. If reasons of pure expediency … moved her to be generous with her caresses, she was so more as a man who takes than a woman who gives. A deep disdain for men had replaced her implacable hatred for them.

In spite of this sort of life and the fact that she was over forty, she was still an alluring woman, and if she was entirely lacking in womanly delicacy, the imposing appearance of this Amazon put, in exchange, the stamp of originality on her beauty: there was something about her at once wild, beautiful, and terrible.²

Sensual, mysterious, beautiful, untamable, unscrupulous and violent, Gallegos’s androgynous heroine is danger incarnate yet seductive beyond reason. Despite her rejection of traditional femininity, as implied by her notoriously masculine attitude towards the rituals of love making, Doña Bárbara appears sometimes irresistible even to the novel’s morally righteous hero Santos Luzardo and the very narrator who condemns her barbarity. No doubt, this appealing combination of seductive sensuality and disrespect for traditional gender roles is a powerful reason why Gallegos’s heroine has survived changing social, political and cultural climates, adopting new camouflages whilst further successfully conquering the silver and small screens.

Gallegos has revealed the origins of his notorious ‘devoradora de hombres’ (‘devourer of men’) in his essay ‘La pura mujer sobre la tierra’, originally delivered as a lecture in 1949 at the Cultural Centre for the Cuban Woman, as well as in ‘Como conocí a Doña Bárbara’, the prologue to the twenty-fifth anniversary commemorative edition of the novel. As Gallegos explains in both sources, Doña Bárbara is not a fictional character, but closely based on a female cacique he encountered during a research trip to the llanos, the expansive Venezuelan plains. Gallegos narrates how, in 1927, he arrived at the Apure state for the first time with the specific purpose of collecting material for a book that he was writing, as one of the chapters would be set on the llanos. Yet all his writing plans changed completely as he encountered what he himself described as ‘personajes en busca de autor’ (‘characters in search of an author’).³ One evening during his trip, a plainsman – or to use the Venezuelan designation, llanero – called Rodríguez told Gallegos the story of Lorenzo Barquero, an educated city man who was destroyed by the relentless environment of the llanos and alcoholism, as well as about an avaricious, superstitious and lewd female cacique, who was terrorizing the region. Gallegos admits that he was enthralled immediately and went on to enquire further, specifically about this mysterious female cacique:

¿Y devoradora de hombres, no es cierto? – pregunté con la emoción de un hallazgo, pues habiendo mujer simbolizadora de aquella naturaleza bravía ya había novela. Como por lo contrario parece que no puede haberlas [novelas] sin ellas – ¿Bella entonces, también, como la llanura?⁴

And a devourer of men, is it not so? – I asked with the emotion arising from a discovery, because if there was a woman that symbolized that untamed nature, there was already a novel. Just like it seems that there can be none [novels] without them – Beautiful also like the plains?

Whereas Rodríguez never went on to affirm or deny the terms of Gallegos’s striking characterization of the female cacique as a beautiful ‘devoradora de hombres’ (‘devourer of men’), the author’s mind was already made up. Gallegos abandoned for good the novel that he was working on because Doña Bárbara had cast her spell on him, just as she had on Lorenzo Barquero and the other men who had fallen into her fatal web of seductions. Yet, Gallegos admits that with his keen eye for aesthetic beauty, he was unable to leave the questions that he had asked Rodríguez unanswered, and he added his account of ‘hermosura atrayente’ (‘alluring beauty’) to his doña.⁵ Gallegos further explains that although many of the novel’s secondary characters are also based on individuals that he met during his trip, he invented the characters of Marisela and Santos, as he could not contemplate finishing his story with the victory of barbarism, personified by the moral and physical ruin of Barquero. Despite his fascination with the individuals that he learned about and encountered on the llanos, as an author, educator and politician with an acute concern for the problems of his country, Gallegos wanted to embed a solid agenda for socio-political progress and improvement in Doña Bárbara, as he had done and would do in his other novels.⁶

In fact, Gallegos’s discussion of the origins of the story of Doña Bárbara betrays his conflicting feelings towards his heroine and casts light on the story’s persistent appeal to Latin American audiences.⁷ As Gallegos himself acknowledges, Doña Bárbara is an inseparable part of him because he essentially owes his ‘fortuna literaria’ (‘literary fortune’) to her ‘espantosa maldad’ (‘frightening evilness’).⁸ He also confesses that for him personally, the monstrous and androgynous Doña Bárbara is a figure that ‘debería ser abominable y, sin embargo interesa y seduce’ (‘should be repulsive, and yet she evokes interest and seduces’).⁹ Although Gallegos bluntly condemns Doña Bárbara’s barbarism as expressed in her acts of violence and corruption, he reminds his readership that initially the doña was also a victim of her ruthless environment. According to Gallegos, Doña Bárbara’s rape as a young, innocent woman, as well as the subsequent painful memories that haunt and destroy her entire life, tell ‘el drama de dimensiones nacionales’ (‘the drama of national scale’); they stand for ‘las memorias dolorosas en Venezuela de aquel buen comienzo brutal-mente interrumpido por … las guerras fratricidas’ (‘the painful memories in Venezuela of that good start brutally interrupted … by fratricidal wars’).¹⁰ Gallegos makes a further attempt to soften and subsequently atone for his brutal doña by drawing attention to ‘la repentina iluminación de la madre frustrada y reprimida’ (‘the sudden awakening of the frustrated and repressed mother’), which Doña Bárbara experiences when she is about to shoot Marisela, her daughter.¹¹ After emphasizing Doña Bárbara’s dormant gentleness, Gallegos goes on to discuss the mysterious circumstances of Doña Bárbara’s disappearance, which he explores in the novel by alluding to two potential, different endings met by his heroine:

Se supone que se haya arrojado al tremedal, porque hacia allá la vieron dirigirse, con la sombra de una trágica resolución en el rostro; pero también se habla de un bongo que bajaba por el Arauca y en el cual alguien creyó ver una mujer.¹²

It was supposed that she had drowned herself in the quagmire, because she had been seen going in that direction with the shadow of a tragic resolve on her face; but people also spoke of a boat descending the Arauca, on which someone or other thought he had seen a woman.¹³

Of course, as an archetype of the Venezuelan nation, and especially of the unconstrained barbarism that according to Gallegos characterizes Venezuela’s national life, Doña Bárbara is unable to die in the normal, mortal sense.¹⁴ Yet the mystery behind Doña Bárbara’s disappearance has tormented literary critics. As Stephen Henighan pinpoints in his insightful article on femininity in Doña Bárbara, ‘critics debate where Doña Bárbara goes at the end of the novel … and whether she lives or dies’.¹⁵ Critics have considered in particular Gallegos’s inability to kill off Doña Bárbara – an act which would have highlighted the defeat of barbarism – as yet another sign of Gallegos’s indisputable attraction to his ruthless heroine. By further specifying that ‘[y]o mismo no sé hacia dónde cogió camino entre los innumerables de la sabana’ (‘I do not even myself know which of the countless paths of the plains she followed’), Gallegos seems at first glance to go as far as to shake off any responsibility for the monstress that he has created and set loose.¹⁶ Yet by accompanying his confession regarding the unclear destiny of Doña Bárbara with the insinuation that she has been redeemed in his later female characters ‘en quien lo femenil no es todo suavidad y dulzura’ (‘in whom femininity is not all about softness and sweetness’), Gallegos creates the reassuring impression that Doña Bárbara’s disappearance forms part of a larger socio-political agenda. Her disappearance does not mark her death, as she re-emerges under various, more softened, and thus more socially acceptable disguises, throughout Gallegos’s literary oeuvre. The notion that Doña Bárbara lives on to different degrees in Gallegos’s subsequent female characters also portends Doña Bárbara’s chameleonic ability to change with the times, personifying the fantasies, fears and passions of different generations of television and film audiences.

From Page to Screen: Theories of Adaptation

Gallegos’s legendary heroine Doña Bárbara lives on in numerous film and telenovela adaptations, as exemplified by Fernando de Fuentes’s 1943 and Betty Kaplan’s 1998 film adaptations, and the two Telemundo telenovelas (2008; 2016) based on the story of Doña Bárbara, all of which function as the main case studies of this book. Yet, despite the wealth of secondary literature on the novel, the very few academic studies on the screen adaptations focus exclusively on the 1943 Mexican film adaptation, leaving plenty of scope for further exploration.¹⁷ Likewise, scholarship on adaptation theory itself remains surprisingly porous. Apart from Sarah Cardwell’s Adaptation Revisited (2002), which explores television adaptations of classic English-language novels, scholarship on adaptations concentrates predominantly on film adaptations. As Cardwell also highlights in her work, adaptation scholarship has traditionally been extremely limited in its techniques of analysing screen adaptations and obsessed with defining the methodology and theoretical framework being used to carry out these analyses. Cardwell identifies in particular three ‘paradigmatic approaches to adaptation’ that have over the years shaped the field of adaptation studies: ‘the medium-specific approach, the comparative approach and the pluralist approach’.¹⁸ Whilst the ‘medium-specific approach’ has tended to divorce the film adaptation from the original text, treating the two as separate mediums, the ‘comparative approach’ consistently compared the film adaptation to the original text, most often to the disadvantage of the former. The most recent, ‘pluralist approach’, which draws heavily on ‘cultural studies, continental philosophy, [and] traditional film theory’, has moved beyond simply exploring the relationship between the text and adaptation.¹⁹ Unlike its predecessors, the pluralist approach pays specific attention to the contextual factors, such as conditions of production and social norms, that influence the content and style of the adaptation. Yet the prejudices that date back to the comparative approach still influence much of the thinking behind adaptation scholarship. Consequently, many studies on adaptations are fixated primarily on the question of ‘fidelity’, with the screen version being presented as the inferior, ‘parasitical’, ‘bastard’ brother of the original text.²⁰ According to comparative critics, ‘each subsequent adaptation is understood to hold a direct relationship with the culturally established original; this is why each adaptation appears to sustain the original, and to develop and improve it’.²¹ Yet simply reproducing the original text on screen is not a recipe for a critically acclaimed adaptation; as Alain Resnais famously put it, ‘simply adapting a novel without changing it … is like reheating a meal’.²² Recent scholarship has slowly moved towards considering more constructively the changes to which adaptations subject the original texts. For instance, scholars have compared screen adaptations to ‘mutations’ that help the source novel to survive in the face of socio-political changes. Robert Stam, a proponent of such an approach, suggests that adaptations ‘adapt to changing environments and changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos, and aesthetic norms’.²³ Even more importantly, as Cardwell notes, theorists from the mid-1990s onwards have made noteworthy attempts ‘to release adaptation from its enclosure within literary discourse’.²⁴ These theorists, many of whom are proponents of the pluralist approach, have thus tried to explore the ‘socio-historical, institutional and intertextual contexts’ that leave their mark on the screen adaptations.²⁵ Apart from emphasizing the importance of looking at context as a factor that influences adaptations, Cardwell promotes a departure from the traditional model, which consistently compares each adaptation with the original source text, suggesting instead that ‘a later adaptation may draw upon any earlier adaptations, as well as upon the primary text’.²⁶ Yet, whilst