Lesbian trajectories in Sylvia Molloy's 'En breve cárcel'

M. Stephenson

Sylvia Molloy's novel, En breve cárcel (1981), stands as one of Spanish America's most prominent explorations of lesbian sexuality published to date. The novel is not the story of the narrator's "outing" even though the title might create such an expectation in the reader who first peruses the work. There is no "inner" lesbian psyche that "comes out" to the public and, notably, the word "lesbian" never appears in the novel. Instead, Molloy's narrative continually destabilizes the notion of a fixed or essential identity through the strategical use of imitation or repetition and fragmentation or decomposition. This destabilizing process has an important bearing on the textual construction of the coming-to-being of lesbian subjectivity because it continually disputes its ontological status. The novel suggests that identity is not to be found in the recovery of or even the positing of a whole, unified self. Rather, identity is articulated in the provisional act or practice of fragmentation.