Carmen’s Final Problem: Contesting Crime Fiction and Gender Roles in Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra Señora de la Soledad

Abstract

Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra Senora de la Soledad/Our Lady of Solitude (1999) challenges the phallocentric output of Latin American neopolicial fiction by drawing a parallel between conforming to the conventions of the detective genre and to patriarchal gender roles. A famous female writer fakes her mysterious disappearance in order to stop writing the same detective tales and to escape her bourgeois, unfulfilling married life. Private investigator Rosa Alvallay ultimately decides not to unveil the writer’s fate in an act of female solidarity.