“Environmental Crisis and the Male Culture in Marie Arana’s Cellophane”
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
Marie Arana, the Peruvian American author, takes on the exploitation of our natural resources, focusing specifically the Peruvian Amazon jungle, in novel Cellophane (2007). The novel brings to life the great perils entailed in enterprises of human audacity and desire to control and tame nature and other men. It is a cautionary tale of the limits of human desire and promotes for finding equilibrium with our natural environment. It also suggests the superiority of nature in spite of human’s ruthless ability to destroy and kill.
Set in the first half of the 20th century, Cellophane presents the juxtaposition of the romantic imagination in a politically volatile Latin America still emerging from its colonial past to establish as a modern continent—both economically and politically. The protagonist, Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua’s fascination for Gustavo Eiffel’s Iron House relocated to Iquitos, in the Amazon forest—one of the many monuments to modernity—is his driving force to achieve something similar. It is not just the romantic scientist that is attracted to the vast possibilities that the Amazon has to offer, but capitalist businessmen from Latin America, and beyond, and power hungry leaders of the country all realize its potential, leading to a race for complete control.
Cellophane reiterates the Latin American political rhetoric of Civilización y Barbarie, (Civilization and Barbarism), first theorized by the 19th century Argentine intellectual and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in his Facundo (1845); yet present and central to the understanding of all theories of power domination. This paper explores the institutions of male culture of colonization and romanticism—in the European and Latin American sense— through a post-colonial feminist perspective, as represented in Marie Arana’s Cellophane, to show its role in the understanding of the global environmental crisis, a central theme of Arana’s narrative.
