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Summary Death and the maiden by Ariel Dorfman study notes
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Brief Biography of Ariel DorfmanAriel Dorfman is the son of Fanny Dorfman and Adolf Dorfman, an
Argentine professor of economics. The family moved from Argentina
to the U.S. before then settling in Chile when Dorfman was around the
age of twelve. Dorfman completed his schooling at the University of
Santiago. In the early 1970s, Dorfman worked as a cultural adviser to
Salvador Allende, Chile’s first socialist president. His 1971 book-length
essay on American imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck, became a
bestseller throughout Latin America and, eventually, the world. In 1973
Dorfman was forced to leave Chile for the U.S. when a military coup led
by General Pinochet overthrew Allende’s government. The new dictator
banned How to Read Donald Duck and ordered any copies of it
burned. Dorfman continued to write while living in the U.S. and became
a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University
in 1985. His best-known work, Death and the Maiden, was completed in
1990 and deals with Chile’s pained transition from dictatorship to
democracy. More recently, Dorfman and his family have divided their
time between Chile and the U.S., a way of living which serves as the
,subject for the 1998 memoir, Heading North, Looking South: A Bilingual
Journey. Much of Dorfman’s work concerns issues of human rights,
tyranny, and power.
Memory, Trauma, and the Senses
Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is a harrowing play that centers
on Paulina, a woman attempting to come to terms with having been
abducted, tortured, and raped under her country’s previous dictatorial
regime. Having suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of her
abductors, Paulina is forced to confront her trauma when her husband,
Gerardo, is visited by Roberto, a man whose voice and habitual
phrases seem to match those of the doctor who blindfolded and
repeatedly raped her. Dorfman’s play argues that memory, trauma,
and the senses are inextricably linked. The play specifically shows the
difficulties of coming to terms with trauma when its sensory impact is
permanently etched into victims’ memories, readily reappearing when
those same senses later receive similar stimuli; for instance, the sound
of Schubert, which her rapist played during her torture, continues to
make Paulina physically ill.
When confronted by stimuli that reminds her of her torture, Paulina
shows a distress which, though she tries to hold it back under a
projection of calm, is never far from the surface. Importantly, the
emphasis on the senses also makes the experience more visceral for
the audience, bringing them painfully closer to Paulina’s trauma. When
Roberto comes to Gerardo and Paulina’s house, on the pretext of
wishing to congratulate Gerardo on his new governmental position,
Paulina, hidden from view, recognizes the sound of Roberto’s voice.
She quickly becomes extremely agitated, tying Roberto up at gunpoint
in order to put him “on trial” as the doctor who systematically abused
her. Later in the play she tells Gerardo that she is sure Roberto is her
torturer because she also remembers the specific smell of his skin. This
detail foregrounds the violent intimacy—the violation of her
senses—that Paulina’s rape represents to her.
, The audience comes to learn that Paulina was blindfolded when she
was tortured. While this was obviously intended to make her less likely
to be able to identify her attacker, it also heightened her other senses,
which explains her intense reaction to Roberto’s voice. After tying
Roberto up, Paulina puts on Schubert’s quartet “Death and the
Maiden.” This, she explains, is what the doctor would play when raping
her and, as she finds the cassette tape in Roberto’s car, contributes to
her certainty that he is the same doctor. It was once one of her favorite
pieces of music but has since come to make her feel “extremely ill”
whenever she hears it. The psychological link between the music and
her torture has understandably ruined Paulina’s enjoyment of
Schubert, showing the integrated relationship between the senses,
memory, and trauma.
Playing the quartet back to Roberto while she has him tied up and
fearing for his life is an attempt by Paulina to reclaim Schubert for
herself, targeted at that particular aspect of her trauma. Later Paulina
takes this thought further, saying that she might kill Roberto “so I can
listen to my Schubert without thinking that you’ll also be listening to it,
soiling my day and my Schubert and my country and my husband.”
Dorfman, then, shows that extreme sensory experience constitutes a
kind of memory in which traumatic events are stored.
Different strategies for dealing with trauma are presented throughout
the play, but none of them seem to match the visceral horror of
Paulina’s experience of rape and torture. Dorfman therefore argues
that nothing can ever truly erase this kind of experience or, indeed,
bring about a truly satisfying justice—the memory and trauma will
always be there.
Paulina, sensing in Roberto’s chance arrival at her house an
opportunity to bring some kind of closure to her trauma, is unsure how
best to go about it. She changes her mind throughout the play. At one
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