Women’s fictional narratives, besides influencing the process of nation building, also
served to redefine the feminine gender and its incontrovertible contribution to the
processes involved in imagining their communities. Although the systematic oppression
suffered by women was effective, there were women writers who through negotiation
gained access to male-dominated circles and achieved recognition. These women had a
fundamental role in defying the stratification of gender in their society. They opposed
every limitation imposed upon their gender, particularly the construction of the maternal
role from a patriarchal perspective. In the works selected for this analysis, the authors
reject the institutionalization of motherhood using as a narrative device motherless
heroines who redefine femininity in their own terms and defy the patriarchal construct that confines motherhood to the seclusion of the home. Written in times of political
upheaval, these novels emphasize the importance of women’s participation in the public
sphere.
In this dissertation I analyze four novels situated in or written during authoritarian
regimes. The introduction provides the theoretical framework in which the definition of
gender is discussed as well as the process of nation building in Latin America. I also
include critical views on the topic of motherhood as women writers struggle with the
representation of the maternal role and its implications in the construction of gender. In
chapter one I discuss Argentinean writer Juana Manuela Gorriti’s La hija del
mashorquero (1865); the second chapter analyzes Brazilian novelist Julia Lópes de
Almeida’s A familia Medeiros (1892); chapter three is dedicated to the study of
Argentinean Elvira Orpheé’s Uno (1961); the fourth chapter analyzes Brazilian Lygia
Fagundes Telles’s As meninas (1973), so as to outline periods in which the patriarchal
discourse concerning the role of women in society revolved around the traditional
concepts of femininity and to reveal the insistence of women to obviate such concepts,
specifically in terms of nation building. Through the detailed textual analysis of these
novels, I aim to demonstrate the strategies used by these authors to openly defy the
constructions of femininity through their critique of the socio-political systems of their
times. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/7552 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Creators | Arce, Emilia Isabel |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | Spanish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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