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Beyond the Private Sphere: Writing as Space of Self-Affirmation in Martin Gaite, Esquivel and Cisneros
Abstract
Feminist critics have devoted considerable attention to the role of literary space, analyzing the contexts in which women characters function, and how such spatial images reflect and impact women in the social realm. Calling attention to women's relative lack of mobility and secondary status in literary, cultural, political and economic power centers, they have noted that for women to gain access to spaces traditionally reserved for males, they first had to abandon the domestic sphere, home and kitchen, for the outside world. This work studies three contemporary novels by women: Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) (1989), by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel; The House on Mango Street (1984) by the North American Sandra Cisneros; and El cuarto de atras (The Back Room) (1978) by the Spaniard Carmen Martin Gaite. In these works the female protagonists inhabit radically different social, political and geographical areas, such as revolutionary Mexico in the 1910s, a Chicago barrio in the 1980s, and Spain during and after the Civil War (1936-1939). Within each of these works the act of writing helps the protagonist achieve a level of self-awareness and personal identity. Interior psychological and mental space is exteriorized as a literary text, not only because the women protagonists write their stories but also because the space of the written text becomes the site of women's definition and affirmation, a why to oppose the patriarchal structure each inhabits, transforming it into a public space where interior experiences are recorded. Literary space works as a bridge between the private world of the mind and the public world of the text. The women in these works confront the blank page as they face the outside world, seeking an original space which provides the opportunity to inscribe and communicate their inner world. The process of self-affirmation, however, is not completed with their access to the public, traditionally masculine world, but by means of a second movement of interior exploration. Both a physical and psychological dimension are involved in completing this second process in which the woman reclaims those spaces considered feminine but with a new attitude, the result of her process of introspection. In this search or impulse toward the outside world through literary production, the text itself becomes the space of self-affirmation which had been denied to women in the outside masculine world.
Subject Area
Modern literature|Romance literature|American literature|Latin American literature|Literature
Recommended Citation
Lago-Grana-Pearson, Josefa, "Beyond the Private Sphere: Writing as Space of Self-Affirmation in Martin Gaite, Esquivel and Cisneros" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9815896.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9815896