The Shattered Mirror: Representations of Women in Mexican Literature

Popular images of women in Mexico--conveyed through literature and, more recently, film and television--were long restricted to either the stereotypically submissive wife and mother or the demonized fallen woman. But new representations of women and their roles in Mexican society have shattered the ideological mirrors that reflected these images. This book explores this major change in the literary representation of women in Mexico. María Elena de Valdés enters into a selective and hard-hitting examination of literary representation in its social context and a contestatory engagement of both the literary text and its place in the social reality of Mexico. Some of the topics she considers are Carlos Fuentes and the subversion of the social codes for women; the poetic ties between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Octavio Paz; questions of female identity in the writings of Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Josefina Hernández, María Luisa Puga, and Elena Poniatowska; the Chicana writing of Sandra Cisneros; and the postmodern celebration--without reprobation--of being a woman in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate.

Author: Maria Elena De Valdes, Maria Elena de Valdes, Mara Elena de Valds
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 01/01/1998
Pages: 294
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.79lbs
Size: 8.92h x 5.99w x 1.28d
ISBN: 9780292715905

About the Author
María Elena de Valdés is Administrative Director of the University of Toronto Literary History Project.