Rosaura A Las Diez

While most scholarship and criticism published about Rosaura a las diez has been in Spanish, two key articles are available to English-speaking readers. The first, “Camilo’s Closet: Sexual Camouflage in Denevi’s Rosaura a las diez” by Herbert J. Brant (Hispanic Issues, Vol. 13, 1996), has been highly influential in contemporary interpretations of Camilo and his relationship to gender and sexuality. The second, “Making sense of others: The use of biographical statements in Rosaura a las diez” by Teófilo Espada-Brignoni (Advances in Language and Literary Studies Vol. 9, 2018), recenters the text’s philosophical roots in order to understand its formulation of individual experience. Both articles can provide readers with insights into the book that may not be obvious upon first reading.

In “Camilo’s Closet,” Brant argues that Camilo, the novel’s central figure, is a closeted gay man. He arrives at this claim by noting the frequent passages that call into question Camilo’s gender and sexuality, such as Mrs. Milagros’s first impression of him. She notices that Camilo “take[s] on the ridiculous appearance of a man wearing high heels, as they day dukes and marquises used to do in olden times, when, with all those bows and wigs and silk stockings, they all looked like women” (8). In addition, Brant notes Camilo’s discomfort around women throughout the text, which he argues goes beyond simple awkwardness and ventures into the realm of repulsion. He clarifies that the label given to Camilo by Mrs. Milagros and her daughters, “bachelor uncle,” is commonly understood as a euphemism for a man who “does not appear to conform to society’s heterosexist standard” (Brant, 7). All of these observations, among others, lead Brant to understand Camilo’s construction of Rosa as an elaborate, exaggerated, performance of heterosexuality for the residents of La Madrileña, staged to hide Camilo’s sexuality. As such, Rosa functions as a sort of “closet” for Camilo. This underlying dynamic, he argues, is the more fundamental mystery that lies beneath the more obvious mystery of Rosa’s identity. “In short,” he writes, “the enigma of Rosaura a las diez really revolves around how Camilo carefully builds a closet and the disastrous consequences that result from such a construction” (Brant 4).

In “Making sense of others,” Espada-Brignoni interprets Rosaura “not only as a work of fiction but also as a socio-psychological thesis of how individuals make sense of their world through the discourses available to them in a particular society and the groups they belong to” (Espada-Brignoni, 110). Analyzing the specific cultural references made by each character, he argues that their perceptions of others are highly influenced by the cultural circles in which they perceive themselves as belonging:

In Rosaura a las Diez, both low and highbrow culture provide discursive resources to understand the lives of others and imagine their pasts. The entire novel blurs the lines between low and highbrow by referencing multiple sources from Argentina and Europe, and imagines narrators on a continuum. Milagros is closer to popular culture, David constructs himself as more sophisticated, and Camilo might be somewhere in the middle (Espada-Brignoni, 113).

This analysis is highly reliant on the novel’s cultural context. Espada-Brignoni is positioned to tease out these nuances, paying attention to how the works of influential philosophers like Freud and Foucault were being incorporated into Argentinian popular culture at the time of Rosaura’s publication. In his estimation, the novel functions as a microcosm of all the various cultural influences that might inform one’s sense of self (including unexpected fields like psychology and medicine). In this way, Espada-Brignoni’s interpretation of Rosaura is based more firmly within the novel’s cultural epoch, whereas Brent seeks to describe dynamics in the book using a modern vocabulary of gender and sexuality. Both modes of analysis allow for insight and raise questions about how readers should understand the book’s purpose.