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The novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and of Her Heartless Grandmother (1972) was written by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez; the film Erendira (1983) was scripted by Garcia Marquez and directed by Ruy Guerra. In the Erendira texts, readers and viewers are presented with a situation in which a fourteen-year-old girl is forced to prostitute herself to pay back a debt to her "heartless" grandmother due to an accident. Both the novella and film could be read as an allegory of Colombia's political situation beginning with the "violencia" of the 1940s through today. Then, as today, revolutionaries fought the civil authority for a better distribution of goods, autonomy, and land. More broadly, the texts could be seen as a battle for power between governmental forces and the people in all of Latin America-Erendira representing the people, and the grandmother (and the men who use Erendira) the different governments. Critics such as Beesley, Portocarrero, and Jaeck rely on the symbolic element the two main female characters portray: mainly the power structures between Latin America vs. Spain or Latin American governments vs. the people. As Diane E. Marling points out, many early critics of the novella concentrate on the "magical, fairy-tale elements" of the written text (175).1 Much of the criticism on Erendira was written in the eighties after the published text and film production, although an earlier film script was apparently written years before the novella in the mid-1960s (Mills and Gronlund 117).
Except for Moyland C. Mills and Enrique Gronlund's essay, which focuses on the magic realism both texts include, critics make few comparisons between the film and novella. I believe that Garcia Marquez is being satirical in the two texts in his representation of power and in showing how the body can serve as a means to achieve everyone's desires, goals, and ultimately for Erendira, her freedom. I also read the two texts as demonstrating how the female body-used as object-becomes the powerful subject of Erendira's freedom. In the Erendira texts, we see how Erendira subjects her body to those vying for power over her: her grandmother and the men who seek her for sexual pleasure. Erendira's physical submission due to tradition and patriarchy renders her body as object.