SOURCE: "Aspects of the Triple Lunar Goddess in Fuentes' Short Fiction," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 1987, pp. 139-47.

In the following essay, Perez examines how Fuentes uses the ancient myth of the "White Goddess" or "Mother Goddess" in his short fiction.

Any reading but the most superficial will reveal the special, symbolic nature of female figures in Fuentes' works. Few of his women characters can be classed as mimetic portraits of individuals drawn from life, although there is usually a mixture of elements drawn from reality with ingredients of the mythic, magical or occult. The real tends to give way before the unreal at the story's end, which strikes a note of the mysterious or unexplained. Several critics have noted Fuentes' interest in the occult, and Gloria Durán [in The Archetypes of Carlos Fuentes, 1980] has studied his interest in witches, seeing them as a...