Prospero's Daughter
The Prose of Rosario Castellanos
A member of Mexico's privileged upper class, yet still subordinated because of her gender, Rosario Castellanos became one of Latin America's most influential feminist social critics. Joanna O'Connell here offers the first book-length study of all Castellanos' prose writings, focusing specifically on how Castellanos' experiences as a Mexican woman led her to an ethic of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of her home state of Chiapas.
O'Connell provides an original and detailed analysis of Castellanos' first venture into feminist cultural analysis in her essay Sobre cultura feminina (1950) and traces her moral and intellectual trajectory as feminist and social critic. An overview of Mexican indigenismo establishes the context for individual chapters on Castellanos' narratives of ethnic conflict (the novels Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas and the short stories of Ciudad Real). In further chapters O'Connell reads Los convidados de agosto,Album de familia, and Castellanos' four collections of essays as developments of her feminist social analysis.
The title of this superb book emphasizes the analogy between the role of Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest and that of Rosario Castellanos herself. As O'Connell explains in her gendered reading of the familiar Caliban trope, these women—privileged yet subordinated in their respective cultures—act as mediators between the colonising and indigenous peoples; both identify with, and speak on behalf of, the father and learn to read from his books, yet they also claim a women's voice and refuse to endorse social injustice.... The subtle and informed readings of such a wide range of prose works in relation to this paradigmatic trope make the book a pleasure to read.
O'Connell...carefully and cogently places Castellanos' interests in gender issues within the context of her concerns for indigenismo...so that the reader appreciates how Castellanos' considerations about women expand to implicate racism and exploitation in Mexico.
Joanna O’Connell is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated with Women’s Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Prospero’s Daughter
- 2. Castellanos as Resisting Reader: Sobre cultura femenina
- 3. Castellanos and Indigenismo in Mexico
- 4. Balún Canán as Palimpsest
- 5. Ciudad Real: The Pitfalls of Indigenista Consciousness
- 6. Versions of History in Oficio de tinieblas
- 7. “Buceando cada vez más hondo ...”: The Dangerous Memory of Women’s Lives
- 8. Public Writing, Public Reading: Rosario Castellanos as Essayist
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
