SOURCE: Sommer, Doris. “Who Can Tell? Filling in Blanks for Villaverde.” American Literary History 6, no. 2 (summer 1994): 213-33.

In the following essay, Sommer examines Villaverde's narrative strategy whereby he deliberately limits readers' knowledge of the title character's racial background in Cecilia Valdés.

Very early in Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), the truth of the title character's racially obscure background becomes clear to the reader. Yet the narrator, for some reason, blocks and delays an explicit revelation. That reason is, in my reading, to dramatize a certain resistance or inability to assimilate the enlightening information that the novel's black informants can and do tell. Each time a pale protagonist turns a deaf ear to slaves' stories, the narrative suggests that not listening is an effort to keep the text of Cecilia's life conveniently blank, that is, white. The gesture is one of those defensive denials that end self-destructively. To...