The Filipino Identity: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach to Allegorical Characterization in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels Anonymous College

The mirror’s cracked world was safe no longer; was perilous with broken glass, teeming with ghosts; was now the world where Paco waited for the strange-hold and dear good Mary told lies and cautious Rita was dazzled by dragons and Tony hid in a monastery and fathers took drugs and mothers had lost their dictionaries and young woman had two navels…

One of the closing paragraphs of the first part of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels alluded to Alice and her looking glass: the image signaled the beginning of an excursion into redefining the stock characters’ conceptual worlds – a coming demarcation of their identities and what they had come to consider the norm, and who else proved to have “broken the glass”, to have triggered such an event, but Connie Escobar? As recounted by Paco Teixeira, it was his interludes with the mother-daughter twosome, Conchita de Vidal and Connie Escobar, that prompted a certain restlessness within him, and in extent, to the community he came home to in Hong Kong. An investigation into the character of Connie Escobar may shed light onto her role as catalyst – what power does she hold that she had the capacity to inundate a group of virtual strangers? Where does this power come from, and...