The identity problem of the protagonists of Vuelo del cisne, by Rosario Ferré.

Abstract

The life of legendary ballerina, Anna Pavlova, is fictionalized in Vuelo del cisne written by Rosario Ferré. The novel is majorly depicts the year of 1917 when the U.S. citizenship was granted to Puerto Rican people. This change of the national identity is observed by the ballet company from Russia, where the Revolution broke out in the same year. By setting the narrator as foreign to the Puerto Rico, the novel reveals the identity crisis of both Puerto Rico and the Russian ballet company. This article aims to observe and analyze how the love of two main characters is represented. The two protagonists, Niura Póliakoff and Diamantino Márquez, are dedicated to art and idealism; Madame is devoted to saving souls through art and Diamantino is struggling to realize the Independence of Puerto Rican nation from U.S. regime. The love story recalls the Latinamerican nationalist discourse, which is one of the persistent tendencies from the nineteenth century, according to Doris Sommer. However, the main stance of the novel is the criticism towards the nationalism. We will see how the couple is rendered in order to represent the conventions of Latinamerican nationalist discourse and, at the same time, how the couple is criticized by the narrator, who is also a character inside the novel, who observes the contradictions of the main characters.