Innocent Eréndira and the Function of Magic-Realism

This essay was written in the winter of my sophomore year at the University of Denver for an introductory course to English, taught by Dr. Kristy Ulibarri. As part of my writing minor capstone, I revised this essay to match a more casual critical review genre. Eréndira is my favorite short story and has stayed burned into my mind since I first read it, so the opportunity to revisit it has been exciting. This essay uses Eréndira to define magic-realism as a genre and emphasize how its purpose is distinct from any other genre, defeating the misconception that magic-realism is merely "Latin American fantasy."

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Download the original essay as a PDF:

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Magic realism is a sadly misunderstood genre.

With the release of the film Encanto came more attention toward Latin American stories as a whole. With this attention came a focus on Latin American stories that utilize the magical. A post came across my timeline that claimed that if audiences liked Encanto, they would love Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s works, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. It was a misguided post, assuming that the fairy-tale like kid friendly drama of Encanto was akin to the darkly twisted world of magic realism, emphasis on the realism. They are both beautiful stories that serve very different purposes.

It was the first time I’ve seen magic realism and Eréndira spoken about in a space where I was not actively seeking it out—and even then, discussion around the story is sadly bare. It is my favorite short story, one of the most artfully crafted dream-like atmospheres I’ve ever seen constructed in fiction. Reading it feels like waking up after a bout of sleep paralysis. Most importantly, it is not a story for the faint of heart. The uniquely Latin-American construction of magic realism must be thoroughly analyzed and appreciated as it stands on its own. What better story can be used for this deconstruction but Eréndira?

The magical qualities in The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother (and yes, the story lives up to its long name,) contribute to a story that is a political tale of intergenerational trauma. The story begins when Eréndira, so exhausted with the constant list of chores her grandmother gives to her, begins to work in her sleep. She sweeps, cooks dinner, tends to her grandmother’s exotic and rare pets, cleans her eccentric furniture, sets and winds clocks, and more. She is so fatigued that she falls asleep one night without putting out the candle sitting by her bed. It burns the house down. In response, her grandmother forces her into sex work to repay the countless riches Eréndira has accidentally destroyed—which her grandmother calculates would take nearly nine years, should Eréndira work all day, every day. They set up a tent in the middle of a desert, which quickly becomes a tourist spot for soldiers who want to be serviced by poor Eréndira.

She eventually meets a young man named Ulisses, who sneaks into her tent after her grandmother tells all of the soldiers waiting in line for Eréndira to leave for the day. Eréndira falls in love with him, and he ends up murdering her grandmother at the end of the story. After Ulises kills Eréndira’s grandmother, she runs away without him and never looks back.

Though it is not a fairy tale, it functions as a modern fable, grounded in reality in its commentary on sexual exploitation and pedophilia and whimsical in the way that characters readily accept situations that teeter just between hyperbole and fantasy. By creating elements that barely go beyond hyperbole, the reader is left to connect which parts of the story are relatable to our own reality. Eréndira floats in the air like a feather; Eréndira is a child forced into sex work. Which is more hyperbolic? These situations exist alongside one another to force us to recognize the possibility of unimaginable darkness.

The genre’s role in the story is to create something similar to a fairy tale that both contrasts and emphasizes the horrors of rape and child prostitution—especially at the hands of one’s own family member. In an interview, Márquez claimed that Eréndira was based on a real-life experience he had. When he was sixteen, he witnessed an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute, accompanied by who he assumed to be a female relative. Eréndira’s childish youth is highlighted in a magical world that is otherwise cruel to her, forcing us to face the reality of the story and of our own world. Child prostitution is a horrific notion that feels unreal, but unlike every other unbelievable element casually presented to the reader, it is one of the only aspects of the story that isn’t so absurd it fully steps outside of the bounds of what is believable.

Márquez’s personal experience with sex workers, of which many were friends to him, is further shown and emphasized when the story switches to the first person, making the narrator into a character within the story. He seems to use this opportunity to inject his personal feelings into the story. Usually, this kind of self-insertion is jarring in fiction, but Márquez’s artful construction of the story allows it to be pulled off delicately and beautifully.

Written in 1973 by a Colombian author, Eréndira’s perversion of the family dynamic is especially biting. Colombia has always held a family-centric culture, especially during Eréndira’s time (and as can be seen in the familial values replicated, not entirely subverted, in the film Encanto.) With this context provided, we can assume that the content of the story would be far more disturbing and groundbreaking to a Colombian living in 1973 than to someone from a less family-oriented/collectivist culture living in the modern era. The irony of a cold-hearted grandmother, typically synonymous with the archetype of the wise family matriarch, exploiting her own granddaughter is especially upsetting. Eréndira manipulating her lover into murdering her grandmother only to run off without him at the end of the story also directly subverts these values. Eréndira chose to go alone with no family and no male partner—and more importantly, her partner evidently needed her far more than she needed him.

We see innocent Eréndira become jaded at the end. Knowing her grandmother’s past, which is similar to her granddaughter’s, the reader is left to wonder if Eréndira ran away only to become just as heartless as her grandmother. Ulises, despite his illusion of power and protection over Eréndira as her male savior, is entirely dependent on Eréndira. Much like her grandmother took advantage of her, she took advantage of Ulises—the story even directly states at the end that Ulises called for her “with painful shouts that were no longer those of a lover but of a son.” This is a direct callback to the family relations that Eréndira perverts. When she chooses to run off entirely on her own, her air of passiveness is thoroughly eradicated, but what the loss of this passiveness means for her future is entirely open for interpretation.

Much in the story is left up to the reader’s interpretation, making for a highly reflective piece. Eréndira is no longer the perfect victim by the end of the story—do we still love her? Sympathize with her? Do we believe her grandmother’s prophetic prediction that she will become a wealthy woman with her own home in an “important city”, perhaps even becoming as greedy and heartless as her grandmother, or is it a narcissistic projection? After all, the only time Eréndira is at peace in the story is when she is temporarily rescued by nuns who have her work in a mission, the epitome of symbolic purity. Is Eréndira doomed by the cycle of abuse, or is the murder of her grandmother followed by her escape proof that she has broken it?

The story relies heavily on the reader’s sense of morality. What shall we make of it, and what does that say about us?