What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers: Food, Weight, and Ea ...

(words and ideas), mix them well (organize the words and ideas), and cook them on the fire (using the “combustible of imagination”). Thus, not only does Ferré equate the value of cooking and writing, but she also suggests that women can successfully pursue both, a notion that, as we have seen, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Rosario Castellanos already had advanced. Furthermore, Ferré goes on to pay homage to the figure of Sor Juana. When she included “La cocina de la escritura” in the second edition of Sitio a Eros (Siege to Eros, 1986), she added as an epigraph the sorjuanine sentence “if Aristotle had ventured to cook, he would have written more,” reinforcing the nun’s view that cooking is a cognitive activity equally important to the activities of men.

Moreover, following Sor Juana’s example, Ferré incorporates anecdotes of her own life to support her views as to whether a feminine writing exists. She points out, “[d]espite my metamorphoses from homemaker to writer, I often confuse cooking with writing, and I discover a correspondence in both terms” (153).

She demonstrates through her own experiences that marriage limits women’s potential. During her own marriage, she adopted the traditional role of mother and wife in Puerto Rican society, which seems to have prevented her from developing her “own intellectual and spiritual space” (139). After her divorce, she was able to devote herself to her artistic vocation. Ferré wanted to learn “patiently [to] hold the frying pan to the fire, rather than aggressively brandish the pan across its flames” (140). From Virginia Woolf she learned to value an objective way of writing that was not “destructive” but “harmonious,” and from Simone de Beauvoir she learned the need to concentrate on the “exterior reality” (historical and social) instead of the “interior reality” (love and social condemnation) that traditionally had been favored by women authors. She then tries to apply the lessons of the feminist European models to the Hispanic context. Taking