The Disrupting Presence; She- Figure in Borges

The aim of Borges is to impart to his reader the sense of the mystery of the world, a sense of skeptical reverence, akin to Einstein?s "cosmic religious feelings". For this, as a man of letters, he may use any means at his disposal, including magic and mysticism, and including logic, valid or somewhat faulty. (Agassi, 1970)Borges?s world is indeed swarming with the paradoxical mixture of ordinarily simple and extremely violent. It is replete with scenes carved out of real life and put forward for simultaneous depiction of the mysteriously real. The reporters of tales in his stories are selected from among ordinary people like a friend, a neighbor or a passerby. However, within such seemingly natural, tough life of his characters, the feminine aspect of life is strongly attenuated and even erased. In other words, Borges?s masculine world has sterilized itself against female characters. Nonetheless, there occasionally arises the need for the presence of a woman in his stories. In such cases, female characters are shown as constantly being manipulated by male figures in order to provide temporary pleasure for men. This degrades them to a position of no more than an object and a part of the setting for the story. Nonetheless, in a few instances, Borges manages to create female characters that succeed in having an active role rather than that of a passive being in his violent masculine world. The present study aims to examine these characters that differ greatly depending on the way they influence patriarchal interactions- either directly or indirectly. Four female characters that appear in four short stories; El Muerto, La Intrusa, Juan Mura?a, and more importantly Emma Zunz, whose protagonist is a woman, are hence studied comparatively and through thorough examination of female role from a psychological point of view.