The Hungry Woman

Chac-Mool is unique among the main cast of characters in The Hungry Woman. He is a boy raised by women in a community built by women. Despite the tragic nature of their exile, Medea and Luna have built a home for their small family in Phoenix. The city may be destroyed and the revolution betrayed, but they have the chance to create a more empathetic, egalitarian, and tolerant society in opposition to everything that has come before. Chac-Mool is raised in their environment. While most of the female characters grew up before the uprising and before the founding of the new nations, Chac-Mool remembers none of this. His unique upbringing, as a boy raised in a matriarchal society, is juxtaposed against the lives of people like Luna, Medea, and Mama Sal, who were women raised in a patriarchal society. In this sense, Chac-Mool represents a break from the past. For all the talk about building a new world or planting old crops, Chac-Mool is the only embodiment of a brave new world that is not governed by the past. He is the prototype for a new, egalitarian future.

Chac-Mool is the first to be raised in such a society, but he cannot escape the trauma of the past. Medea knows all too well the destructive effects of misogyny and patriarchal power structures. She has been hurt, traumatized, and abused by such structures in the past, and she struggles to navigate these lingering pains. Medea argues with Luna, for example, more because of her past pain than their present. The violence of the past reverberates through this new society, affecting even the seemingly utopian visions for a new world found in places like Aztlán. Chac-Mool does not receive the benefits of this utopian vision because he must navigate his mother’s trauma. At the same time, he feels an inexorable pull toward his father that he cannot quite explain. He does not believe that his mother and Luna have the knowledge to teach him about “manhood”; Medea considers Jasón’s version of manhood to be little more than a “weakness.” As such, Chac-Mool feels like a key part of his identity is missing. He feels a pull toward a man he does not like due to a need to understand something about his masculine identity. Medea has long feared this; she knows all too well how Jasón and other men corrupt others. As they corrupted their post-revolutionary society, she does not want them to corrupt her son as well. As a result, Chac-Mool gets caught in a power struggle between parents. This power struggle is not just motivated by individual betrayal and mistrust but by a broader ideological vision of the world. Chac-Mool is caught in the battle between patriarchy and matriarchy, between the traumatized and the traumatizer, without any credible means of resolving this conflict.

The result is that Chac-Mool is turned into a tragic figure. His mother refuses to see him as anything other than a child, even as he explains to her his desire to understand himself as a man. He rejects his father, but still seems drawn to him. Chac-Mool’s father named him Adolfo, for example, but he rejects this “Nazi name.” He has no interest in conforming to the identity that his father wishes to impose upon him, yet he cannot deny that his need to understand himself is not satisfied by the matriarchal community, just as his mother’s need to understand herself was not satisfied in a patriarchal society. His mother kills him to stop him from becoming everything she has struggled to escape.

Jasón plays the role of antagonist in The Hungry Woman. He represents the darker side of the world portrayed in the play, but there are suggestions that he was not always the villain. Jasón is one of the central figures of the post-revolutionary society that has been constructed along ethnic and cultural lines. In her memories, Medea can concede that Jasón was an impressive figure and was integral in creating her idea of what a brighter future might be. As he gains power, however, Jasón’s moral failings become more starkly pronounced. Every element of his purportedly heroic past is undermined by Medea’s recollections. He may have impressed her with his ideals and status when he was a younger man, but she accuses him of assaulting her, stripping away any romance from their relationship and revealing the brutal misogyny beneath. This misogyny becomes an important element of how Jasón is defined in the play. He represents the betrayal of ideals in the post-revolutionary world, as the male leaders of utopian communities impose the same patriarchal structures that existed in the societies they fought to break away from. The idealism of that time gave way to prejudice, as queer people such as Medea, Luna, and Savannah were sent into exile. They had no place in the new society being created by men like Jasón. Rather than idealists, Jasón and his ilk proved themselves to be as patriarchal and brutal as the society they defined themselves against. The revolutionaries betrayed their own revolution.

In this way, Medea’s suspicions of Jasón are proved valid. As well as their brutal, violent past, Jasón has continued his persecution of Medea into the present. He sends her divorce papers which are filled with unacceptable terms, Medea says, and serve as a prelude to his admission that he is trying to lure her son away from her. Jasón does not attempt to hide his desire to take Chac-Mool from Medea. After taking her innocence and her optimism, he wants to take the one person she loves more than anyone else. Jasón has already betrayed so much, Medea reasons, that he possesses the capacity to destroy the one part of her life that remains pure and good. Jasón emerges as a corrosive force, someone willing to shatter Medea’s life to assert his property rights. He does not love Chac-Mool as Medea does; his apparent love of his son is as cynical and manipulative as his supposed idealism and affection. Jasón is the catalyst for the rage that threatens to burn down Medea’s life. In Jasón, she recognizes everything that has ever hurt her and will continue to hurt her.