Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on September 10, 2008
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2008 44(4):445-459; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqn058
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: The Fantastic: An Enduring Literary Mode [View the issue table of contents]
Over Our Dead Bodies: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosario Ferré, and the Feminine Fantastic
18 rue de Neuchâtel
1201 Geneva
Switzerland
bts200{at}nyu.edu
 |
Abstract |
|---|
This article examines how the nineteenth-century Spanish author Emilia Pardo Bazán and the twentieth-century Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré employ the fantastic's "hesitation" between natural and supernatural events to encourage the reader to pause and reflect upon the objectification of females and the closing of narratives over their dead bodies. In the stories studied, Pardo Bazán's "El destripador de antaño" ("The Ripper of Yesteryear", 1900), and Ferré's "La muñeca menor" ("The Youngest Doll", 1976) and "La bella durmiente" ("Sleeping Beauty", 1976), the two authors employ a strikingly similar strategy to question men's figurations of the feminine: they take a prevalent literary image of women as inanimate beings (as a cadaver and as a doll, respectively) and complicate this image in such a way that they undermine the idea of passivity that informs the male writer's representation of females. In the process, they call into question both the masculine underpinnings of the aesthetics they engage (of naturalism and the fantastic) and the authority of various male figures (doctors, priests, fathers and husbands) who consider control over women's bodies their natural right.
Key Words: feminine fantastic, the • hesitation • naturalism • dolls • narrative closure • violence against women • Pardo Bazán, Emilia • "El destripador de antaño" • Ferré, Rosario • "La muñeca menor" • "La bella durmiente"