STILL HANDS: CELIA'S TRANSGRESSION IN CRISTINA GARCIA'S DREAMING IN CUBAN

This paper highlights the association between creativity and madness in Cuban American writer Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), focusing on the portrayal of the novel's matriarch Celia. Although Celia's artistry feeds into her categorization as mentally imbalanced, she turns to art to resist the labels of aberrance thrust her way. As the articulation of her defiance, art is what causes her to be labeled deviant. In this depiction, Garcia draws from dominant ideologies that frame creativity and madness together. However, she challenges such notions by questioning the grounds for Celia's institutionalization, underscoring how Celia's diagnosis as mentally ill is gendered, racialized, and ethnicized. Evoking the literary figure of the archetypal "madwoman,'' yet illustrating how this figure is marked by gender as well as race and ethnicity, Garcia claims a space within traditional literary analyses of madness that have tended to focus on gender at the expense of race and ethnicity.