As one critic has written:.
Susana herself is portrayed as sensuality incarnate. From her first direct appearance in the novel, Rulfo emphasizes her carnality.Susana appears to be the only character to have achieved sexual fulfillment. (Burton, 229). Rulfo's exploration of female eroticism through the character of Susana San Juan deserves a sharper critical focus. How does he emphasize her sensuality? How is her sexual fulfillment portrayed in the text? How does her eroticism intersect with her madness?.
Literary criticism on Pedro Paramo (which is mostly in Spanish) has not taken up these questions when exploring the character of Susana San Juan. Burton's essay, for example, merely points at Susana's eroticism without considering its full range of meanings. In the scholarly volume Juan Rulfo: Toda la obra (Complete Works), one searches in vain through its selection of thirty critical essays for a sustained, thorough reading of Susana San Juan. Its forty-page bibliography of writings on Rulfo's work has no title that suggests that a focused study has ever been done for this character. By examining the different representations of Susana San Juan in this novel, I am attempting to redress the imbalance in the existing criticism.
Our first image of Susana San Juan is filtered through the adolescent Pedro Paramo's idealizing gaze: "Hundreds of meters above the clouds, far, far above everything, you are hiding Susana. Hiding in God's immensity, behind His Divine Providence where I cannot touch you or see you, and where my words cannot reach you" (13). The Susana San Juan of the youthful Pedro's imagination is untouchable and invisible, a spiritualized object of desire. And despite the thirty years that pass between his first loss of Susana San Juan and her return to Comala, years in which he becomes the brutal, land-usurping don Pedro, his vision of Susana remains otherworldly.
As a fetishized goddess, the Susana San Juan of Pedro Paramo's imagination exhibits the iconography traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary--which includes the Virgin's paradoxically chaste sensuality.
