Reading the feminine voice in Latin American women's fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela

This dissertation explores the evolution of Latin American women writers' participation in discourse from a comparative perspective within the frameworks of feminist criticism and of Bakhtin's dialogical approach to language. Defining voice as a trans-individual expression of the cultural, social, and political circumstances, this study interprets the feminine voice as the result of a dialogical interaction between the forces of patriarchy, the monological voice that has dominated literature, and the submerged and silenced voices of the Other---of women or the marginalized---of those previously excluded from the territory of discourse.;To survey the theoretical and the fictional aspects of the feminine voice in Latin America, Chapter One reviews the leading trends of the Latin American Feminist literary debate and Chapter Two is a comparative study tracing the evolution of the voice in language strategies in the prose of seven representative writers beginning with Teresa de la Parra in Venezuela in the 1920s and continuing through the 1990s with Maria Luisa Bombal and Mercedes Valdivieso in Chile, Marta Lynch in Argentina, Clarice Lispector in Brazil, and Rosario Castellanos and Angeles Mastretta in Mexico. The works analyzed are: Parra's Ifigenia, Bombal's La ultima niebla, Valdivieso's La brecha, Lynch's La senora Ordonez, Lispector's A Paixao segundo G. H., Castellanos's Baltin Canan and Oficio de Tinieblas, Mastretta's Mal de amores, Poniatowska's Hasta no verte Jesus mio and Tinisima, and Valenzuela's Cambio de armas. Chapters Three and Four each concentrates on an author considered to have made the most significant contribution in the process of writing by women in Latin America: Elena Poniatowska in Mexico and Luisa Valenzuela in Argentina. These two chapters propose a model of analysis based also in part on the theoretical writings and public pronouncements of these authors, and their fiction demonstrates how their writings reflect their ideology and social convictions. The fiction of Poniatowska is read as "the voice of the oppressed" and the inclusion of a plurality of 'social languages' in the text. The analysis of Valenzuela's Cambio de armas shows how her language results from the confrontation between the mechanisms of repressive power and the voice of the author as a liberating agent.;This study demonstrates that the feminine voice in Latin America is represented through a community of writers who have explored the multiple layers of feminine experiences and who have gradually developed a means of challenging patriarchy in their social surroundings of the home and later of the public space. It further shows that women's fiction has often been a space to inscribe unrecorded events from a social and political reality marked by fear and oppression.