Memory, Desire and Sexual Identity in El unicornio, by Manuel Mujica Lainez

Abstract

The chapter shows how the retelling of the medieval French story of the fairy Melusine allowed Mujica Lainez to engage with and express homosexual desire in an epoch of social repression and homophobia. Melusine, a fairy-human hybrid living under an interdiction to never disclose her true identity, is examined in light of Mujica Lainez´s closeted homosexuality and his known autobiographical tendencies. In the retelling of Melusine´s loneliness, the immortal fairy falls in love with a man while re-embodied as a man herself, allowing Mujica Lainez to express same-sex desire. Melusine´s fear of being discovered and her loneliness due to these imposed interdictions likewise manifest Mujica Lainez´s dejection over the emotionally taxing and long-lived prohibitions on homosexual love established by the norms of society. In our field´s ongoing search for nonreactionary utilizations of "the medieval", and in contrast to better known nationalist and identitarian uses, this Argentinian engagement provides a necessary example of a more progressive use of the Middle Ages as a time-space from which to sympathetically critique social repression.