Estrategias de la representacion de lo femenino en la novela chilena escrita por mujeres (1939-1963).

Abstract

The analysis of the different narrative strategies in the works of six Chilean women authors written between 1939 and 1963 was done through a narratological and feminist framework. The application of narratological concepts by Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes and Seymour Chatman was combined with Julia Kristeva's concept of oscillation between the symbolic and the semiotic. The work of Elaine Showalter and Susan Lanser also contributed to the design of the framework. The narrative voices studied show a sustained attempt to alter the sacralized models of the feminine as they have been determined by a tradition characterized by its androcentricity. The analysis of the ways in which the narrative voices relate with other levels of the texts shows an increasing awareness of the mechanisms of marginalization affecting the feminine. The analysis of the novel by Chela Reyes reveals a narrative strategy in which a feminine voice tells of its rejection of an oppressive reality. The story focuses on the dilemma of a woman who discovers restrictive social realities as she passes from childhood to womanhood. In the novels by Maria Flora Yanez, the narrative voices sustain a problematic and oscillating ideological distance towards the level of actions, and the level occupied by the implicit author. The study of the narrative strategies present in the works by Maria Carolina Geel shows a failed effort to transcend the concept of the feminine as mystery and Nature rooted in patriarchal hierarchies. Both of the novels by Marta Brunet, on the other hand, reveal the restrictions encountered by the acceptance of the established norms regarding the representation of the feminine, and the possibilities offered by its rejection. The novels written by Maria Elena Gertner and Mercedes Valdivieso include the presence of the female body and its sexuality, thus overcoming an implicit injunction followed by many women writers in the beginning half of the twentieth century in Latin America. The tensions and contradictions present in both of Gertner's texts are a result of the hierarchical structuring of its discourse. Valdivieso avoids this in her novel La brecha, a landmark of awareness communicated by its defiant narrative voice.