IMAGING THE FILIPINO WOMAN. Theme: Love and the Erotic

Romantic Love is, of course, an important theme in the fiction by Filipino women. The erotic element, though generally downplayed, is there too. We see it even in the pre-war fiction, for instance in the stories of Estrella Alfon and Loreto Paras Sulit.

In the post war fiction, eroticism is continued to be expressed with great subtlety:

The Virgin (ca 1950's) by Kerima Polotan
and The Coral by Edith Tiempo

more explicit in the stories of Gilda Cordero Fernado (A Cake Left Out in the Rain)

and Tita Lacambra Ayala ( The Bird)

What the youngest women writers are doing with the themes is interesting:

Ma. Romina Gonzales in Welostit, Joy Dayrit in Mist and Lakambini Sitoy in Weight.

Eroticism is an aesthetic focused on sexual desires especially on the anticipation of sexual activity, state of arousal and an attempt through whatever means of representation to incite those feelings.

The erotic strain is a powerful one in the poetry in English by Filipino women from 1935 to the 90's: Tita Lacambra Ayala, Ophelia Dimalanta, Marjorie Evasco, Merlie Alunan, Kerima Polotan, Gilda Cordero Fernando, Estrella Alfon, Joy Dayrit, Ma. Romina Gonzalez, Lakambini Sitoy.

We have discussed the following stories:

Servant Girl (1930's), The Virgin (1952), Mist (1997) and Welostit (1997)

In Sythesis: What these stories have in common is that first of all, their tales are very much of the city. Their protagonists are independent creatures, very rarely depicted as part of a family--they live alone, work for a living, do not belong to anyone, least of all to the men they are in love with (or not in love with). Clearly, the female protagonists of the last four stories we've discusses fly in the teeth of any attempt to fit them into traditional female roles. Indeed, they don't even seem to be aware of these roles.