A dialogue with psychoanalytic theory in the prose of Cristina Peri Rossi

The aim of this dissertation is to examine Cristina Peri Rossi's dialogue with the psychoanalytic discourse endemic to patriarchal society which marginalizes women. Peri Rossi's prose, structured like unconscious productions which give free expression to desire and passion as emanating from the forbidden recesses of the psyche, powerfully reveals the message as a treatment for an "ill" society. The language in the three works studied facilitates and reveals the protagonists' interaction with the desired female object as a regression to a semiotic, pre-Oedipal state in a type of "return of the repressed" of consuming desire which has been written out of mainstream patriarchy and which serves to challenge its rational, symbolic order. It is from this vantage point that the author attempts to re-write the conclusions obtained through Lacanian and patriarchal discourse so that woman can emerge as a subject in her own right.; The three novels of this study; Solitario de amor, La ultima noche de Dostoievski and El amor es una droga dura, written over the course of a decade, share common elements and varying degrees of emphasis with the feminist critique of psychoanalytic theories marginalizing women. Jacques Lacan's theories, in which woman is invisible except for the cues she can provide to reinforce the male symbolic phallus, a constant intertextual presence, are challenged, just as those of Julia Kristeva are validated with, to a lesser extent, certain of the French feminists. All the works studied owe a significant debt to the feminist theorists who privilege the female body and who view the woman's body as the primal source and object of destabilizing desire.; Solitario de amor underlines Kristeva's theme that the woman's body is a source of all meaning, as a semiotic condition. La ultima noche de Dostoievski deals with the totalizing nature of desire as a destabilizing factor in Lacanian based power relationships while El amor es una droga dura challenges Lacan's theories which privilege incorporation of the female object through the gaze. A close reading reveals that, rather than novels of great love, these works show battles for power, identity and subjectivity.