Interpreting Photography
Imagery is a requirement to transform the moment captured visually on film into prose. This is especially true when that one single visual moment is also being endowed with larger metaphorical important. A photo of protagonist, Gabriela Mistral, and her schoolmates and teacher is given this treatment with effective results:
“The children stand outside in orderly rows behind the authoritative schoolteacher, who is not set up as a particularly maternal figure. Emelina does not stand with the schoolchildren; she does not touch, much less embrace, them or gaze at them lovingly. The schoolteacher cannot be interpreted as a loving, maternal figure; she stands for discipline, perhaps `tough love.’”
The Urge to Read
Mistral’s own writing is quoted to reveal the high regard she herself placed upon learning to read. Such a desire, however, was deemed unlikely for the bulk of the population. The imagery here is thus a demonstration of the urge toward literacy that is too often dampened by social construction:
“May the eyes dart to the printed page like a dog to his master; may the book, just like the human face, call us to the storefront and make us plant ourselves in front of it, in a true spell; may the act of reading become in us veritably an impetus of the flesh, may the noble book industry exist for us to the same extent to which we make a noble expenditure in it”
Femininity
The author is especially concerned with the image of Mistral as it relates to gender conventions and subversion. The coming juxtaposition is first set up with descriptive imagery situating the convention ideal of feminine beauty as seen on the pages of women’s magazines in Chile at the time:
“a July issue of Familia, probably published in 1913, features the classic fetishized image of the woman Feminine, but wearing with fashionable boyish dress signaling a tantalizing gender-crossing (and always holding or displaying a phallic symbol such as tiny binoculars pointed slightly upward or a long, erect feather in her hat), the woman here is not plenitude but a reassuring lack—the kind that confirms that the phallus is indeed in its proper place, in the spectator’s eye, and that women want it at all costs.”
Not Such Femininity
Photographic images the mature Mistral is then described with ideal in mind as a mean of comparison. The comparison is significant and necessary as imagery throughout has been used to reveal a concerned effort to diminish Mistral by attacking her femininity:
“Another head shot, taken in Mexico in 1922, portrays an unmistakably masculine, strikingly butch Mistral. She fills almost the entire frame of the picture. She is blindingly lit, looks away from the camera without the slightest trace of a smile, and appears stern and uninviting. The photo exhibits a harsh quality and the same obliteration of space.”
