Much of the postcolonial narratives and resistance literature are rich illustrations of victims’ anguish against discrimination under the colonial rule. Reality and liveliness are therefore regarded as the trademarks of postcolonial discourses. The sole aim of the postcolonial writers across continents and languages is to draw the attention of the readers to the after effects of colonization and the psychological trauma that followed. The literary contributions of postcolonial writers such as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, J.M Coetzee, Wole Soyinka etc are a testimony to it. Dorfman too follows the same tradition of these postcolonial writers and has successfully crafted the horrors of tyranny in his works ranging from How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971) to Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (2011).
Death and the Maiden chronicles the sudden disappearance and reappearance of democracy in Chile. Many a number of discourses accounting the political, economical and cultural transition of Chile from a personal dictatorship to a semi-fledged democracy have already been part of postcolonial fiction. The political repression under Augusto Pinochet Ugarte through fact and fantasy are clearly visible in Chilean postcolonial fiction such as Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Jose Donoso’s Curfew and Pamela Constable’s A Nation of Two Enemies. None of them throws light on the post-totalitarian emotional agony of people of Chile. At the same time, they don’t fall short of readers expectations of the depiction of political and spiritual decay of the nation during the regime. However, the authors intentionally or unintentionally omit mentioning post-totalitarian crisis in their writings.
On the contrary, Dorfman focuses on the psychological instability of a former torture victim under the dictatorship: Paulina Salas. He sketches every minute detail of her characteristics and turns her out to be a perfect replica of a woman going through mental outbreak in the beginning of the play. Dorfman carefully pins down the cause for Paulina’s anguish and through her characterization accuses the government in power for not executing law and order in the nation. He hints at Abraham Lincoln’s very definition of democracy made during Gettysburg Address: “Democracy is a government of the people, for the people and by the people” (Osborne 98) in the course of the play and leaves it out to the readers to decide if true democracy had been put across in Chile. The other characters in the play such as Gerardo Escobar and Roberto represent the propagators of misgovernance as well. The government only want the ideologies of it to be imposed on the citizens through coercion and other repressive measures. It is as Louis Althusser puts in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”: “The Repressive State Apparatus secures by repressions (from the most brutal physical force, via mere administrative commands and interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for the actions of the Ideological State Apparatus” (89).
The biographical details of Ariel Dorfman points out that he had been overthrown by General Augusto Pincheto from holding his position as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende. He was then forced to go exile but the memories of the assassination of President Salvador and the torture of emigration haunted him. Death and the Maiden can therefore be looked as a critique of paranoid dictatorship under which no citizens seemed to be happy and peaceful.
The play revolves around the question of phenomenology of citizens living in a Representative Democratic Republic: a nation neither democratic nor republic in nature. A government calling itself a Representative Democratic Republic can henceforth be a dictatorship to a certain extent. The only difference between a dictatorial government and a democratic republic is that the dictator openly admits his dictatorship in the former type of government while such claims are not evident in the latter. A few of such dictators till date are Fidel Castro of Cuba, Adolf Hitler of Germany, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and Augusto Pinochet of Chile. They are all very much akin to the depiction of Big Brother as seen in George Orwell’s political satire 1984. Jeffrey Puryear in Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973-1988 observes on Latin America’s most repressive military dictatorships: “Since taking power in a bloody 1973 coup, Pinochet had established a powerful military regime that radically transformed Chile’s social and economic conditions. Pinochet had controlled with an artful combination of guile and repression” (124).
Death and the Maiden does not directly illustrate the absolute rule of Pinochet but the hidden agenda behind the earlier military rule and the impact of it among citizens in later decades are neatly put in.
Although a Representative Democratic Republic propagates the representation of people in the democracy of the nation, the dictatorship brings down the actual participation of citizens. The military rule is allegedly accountable for the human rights violation such as illegal detention, massive killings, sexual abuse, forced exile and even psychological repression. The crime committed by Paulina or the criminal background if at all she has is hinted nowhere in the play. It is therefore evident that Paulina was put into prison unlawfully and not for any fault of hers. Like Paulina there would have been lakhs of people who must have gone through clandestine centres and illegal detention. Cuatro Alamos, Londres No.38, Villa Grimadi were some of the detention and torture centres established by the dictatorship in Chile. Ariel Dorfman does not give a clue of any of these torture sites in Death and the Maiden but the amount of persecution and pain a detainee went through is portrayed through the characterization of Paulina:
GERARDO: They—tortured you. Now you say it.
PAULINA: They tortured me. And what else? What else did they do to me, Gerardo?
(Gerardo goes to her, takes her in his arms)
GERARDO: They raped you.
PAULINA: How many times?
GERARDO: More than once (25).
The conversation between Paulina and Gerardo very well points out the horrific acts of sexual abuse against the victims.
Although women were the primary targets of such gruesome maltreatment; historical records states that men were also not spared by the militants. Peter Kornbluh in The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability comments on the routine sadism seen in detention camps:
“Rape was also a recurring form of abuse. DINA officers subjected female prisoners to grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and, as tactfully described in the Commission Report, “unnatural acts involving dogs” (171).
In short, there was no limit for torture execution facilities and strategies in Chile.
Augusto Pinochet thus successfully instilled a sense of fear in the Chilean population before assuming power and to keep it going he resorted to the aforementioned unlawful demeaning acts. Nobody showed the courage to either question him or challenge his self proposed rules. The similar fear for Pinochet’s rule took its shape into a ‘fear for unknown’ post dictatorship.
Paulina in Death and the Maiden carries deep within a relatively higher fear for an unknown subject. She does not act out accordingly in both favourable and unfavourable circumstances. Also it is difficult to make out if she is certainly emotionally instable or not. Paulina makes it to a point to have her hands on her gun in order to ensure self protection even when there is nothing to panic about: “She hurriedly stands up, goes to the other room, looks out the window. The car brakes, its motor still running, the lights blasting her. She goes to the sideboard, takes out a gun (2). Such insensible acts of her demonstrate the insanity of an individual. However the valid cause for her fear for trivial issues is reasonably understood only in the course of the play. At the same time, Paulina herself denies the fact that she had not been affected by the imprisonment and sexual abuse that followed: “I was wild and fearless, willing to do anything. I can’t believe that I didn’t have an ounce of fear in my whole body at that time” (21). This clearly indicates her resoluteness to stand against the military coup no matter whatever the consequences would be.
Paulina further remarks the sudden shift that welcomed her once the custodians let her go home: “I went to Gerardo’s house, I knocked on the door, over and over, just like you did last night, and when Gerardo finally answered, he looked agitated, his hair was dishevelled” (21). Having found that her husband sought pleasure in another woman during the time of her imprisonment totally shattered her. Readers can therefore arrive at a conclusion that it would be Gerardo’s betrayal towards Paulina that led to her ill health and not the atrocities of the army force as such. Also there are other instances bringing out Paulina and Gerardo’s incompatibility:
GERARDO: Paulina, you are going to listen to me,
PAULINA: Of course I’m going to listen to you. Haven’t I always listened to you?
GERARDO: I want you to sit down and I want you to really listen to me. (Paulina sits
down.) You know that I have spent a good part of my life defending the lay. If there was one thing that revolted me in the past regime..... (21).
Gerardo’s inclination towards power and his passion for a top position in Chilean government are clearly stated here. For him the dignity and honour of his wife do not matter at all. He would not have been a part of the New Commission if he respects his wife to the core. To have a safer job for Gerardo and to let him climb the career ladder, Paulina even goes to the extent of not disclosing Gerardo’s name to the then militants:
“If I had mentioned Gerardo, he wouldn’t have been named to any Investigating Commission, but would have been one of the names that some other lawyer was investigating. And I would be in front of the Commission to tell them how I met Gerardo—in fact I met him just after the military coup, helping people seek asylum in embassies—saving lives with Gerardo, smuggling people out of the country so they wouldn’t be killed” (21).
It is therefore clear that Gerardo had once stood for rehabilitation of citizens during the dictatorship in secret. But the spirit of the cause did not last long in Gerardo as it got rooted in Paulina.
Also Gerardo’s ideologies are very much different from that of Paulina’s. Paulina prefers all the perpetrators to be brought under the law and justice be delivered to the victims. On the other hand, Gerardo irrespective of his profession as a lawyer wants to provide justice only to those who were murdered by the militants.
PAULINA: This Commission you’re named to. Doesn’t it only investigate the cases that
ended in death?
GERARDO: It’s appointed to investigate human rights violations that ended in death or
the presumption of death, yes.
PAULINA: Only the most serious cases?
GERARDO: The idea is that if we can throw light on the worst crimes, other abuses will
also come to light (7).
Gerardo himself openly admits that it is death of a person that decides the law and order in Chile. The survivor or victims of the violence are thus wiped out from the judiciary rubric. The failure of the government officials in power to pursue justice for the Chileans is brought to light with the structure of the New Commission. Paulina throughout the play shows her contempt towards the government’s failure to act out accordingly. She even suspects the motive behind the newly formed democratic republic for its inability to serve the citizens at any cost. All the legal procedures of “listening to the evidence, relatives and eyewitnesses and survivors” (7) are not carried out by the New Commission as execution of law and order is only meant to gain trust of all the citizens of a transitional democratic nation. Therefore newly represented officials do not even give a thought about the punishment to be given for the people responsible for bloodshed. It is Ruti G. Tetei puts in Transitional Justice, “The legitimation of regime violence goes beyond the purview of trial and trails of the political leadership were not done (26).
Dorfman makes the readers thus to ponder over the age old saying of ‘everyone is equal in the eyes of law’ and leaves it out to the reader for ruminating over the wide gulf between laws prescribed and justice delivered to the citizens.
The Chilean totalitarian government authorized certain government agencies such as National Intelligence Directorate and Joint Command to carry out repressive measures over the citizens of the State. Civilians like Paulina thus become prey of such state-sponsored terrorisms for no violation of law and order. Militants recruited physicians to check on the prisoner’s ability to bear the physical torture. They kept subjecting them to infliction based on the physician’s reports. Michael Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison observes torture as a “quantitative art of pain” and continues that “Torture correlates the type of corporal effect, the quality, intensity, duration of pain, with the gravity of the crime, the person of the criminal, the rank of his victims” (34).
Roberto was also employed in the military in order to provide medical attention to the detainees. He accepted the offer simply because of “humanitarian reasons” (41) but was then assigned “to determine if the prisoners could take that much torture, that much electric current” (41). Roberto further remarks that the amount of virtue in him deteriorated and such torture sessions “turned into an excitement” (41) in course of time. Later he openly confesses the crime of sexually assaulting Paulina and abandoning her. This in a way emphasizes the depravity of morality and civilization even among educated individuals in Chile. Every person falls into the trap of violence either directly or indirectly. The loss of individualism and self control are too evident in the characterization of Robert.
Paulina’s firm decision to enact vigilante justice may seem appropriate for some readers but some might find it quite absurd. Carrying out law and order for the brutalization she endured is only a retaliatory measure of Paulina. Her modus operandi of putting her hostage taker (Roberto) go through every brutalization she endured is appreciable in the eyes of ordinary citizens. While the judiciary system finds it difficult to encourage citizens taking up law and order in their hands. Paulina makes Roberto confess everything and such honest confession makes her feel satisfied as seen in the end of the play. Roberto pleading guilty for his crime and acknowledging that his admission of guilt “at the moment of the country reaching reconciliation and peace” (42) reveal his difficulty to hide anymore the violence he did.
All the three characters of Death and the Maiden are subjected to the dictatorship one way or the other. The binaries of oppressed/oppressor or victimized/victimizer are in a way analogous to the characterization of Paulina; and Roberto and Gerardo. Although they all stood against the violations of human rights under the dictatorship in Chile, Roberto and Gerardo surrendered themselves to the authoritarian regime half-way. This could be mainly because they did not suffer a personal loss directly like Paulina did. Hence Paulina’s understanding of justice differs from that of Roberto’s and Gerardo’s. For her personal justice is way higher than national peace since she is a victim herself. On the other hand, Roberto and Gerardo give prominence to national peace since they are victimizers. In a nutshell, Ariel Dorfman through Death and the Maiden asserts that transitional justice is paradoxical in nature and therefore its scope is limited.
Works Cited
1. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. USA: NYU Press, 2001. Print.
2. Dorfman, Ariel. "Death and the Maiden - Vanderbilt University." N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.
3. Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. US: Vintage Books, 1977. Print.
4. Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. US: New Press, 2011. Print.
5. Osborne, Roger. Of the People, By the People: A New History of Democracy. UK: Random House, 2011. Print.
6. Puryear, Jeffrey. Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973-1988. US: JHU Press, 1994. Print.
7. Teitel, Ruti G. Transitional Justice. UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
