ABSTRACT
In Montserrat Roig's story "Mar," only one woman drives over a cliff, a few days after the narrator turns down her invitation to run away with her. Mar's death is not a release into the splendor of the Grand Canyon; instead, a comatose Mar is isolated by the "prophylactic" glass of an intensive care unit, and her body is penetrated by tubes and by her ex-husband's possessive gaze. The narrator, Norma, attempts to write about their friendship. The lesbian love story, she tells, reiterates the gesture of disavowal as it shuttles back and forth in time. It also mirrors Roig's own struggle with the seductions of French feminism in the 1970s. "Mar" is a love story but it is also a hybrid text that combines fiction and feminist theory, as Christina Duplaa pointed out regarding Roig's essays and novels.
