Introduction: Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women’s Literature

Abstract

A mysterious tree planted in the middle of the desert; the roaring fire in the nearby pajonal; the dense silence disrupted only by wild sounds of strange birds and animals; the unchanged appearance of the desert. Such are the powerful spatial images that populate the pages of La cautiva, the poem that Esteban Echeverria published in 1837. This foundational imaginary geography evokes a vivid landscape for the eyes of the reader, namely that of the desert as a barbaric space that the writer feels compelled and yet challenged to represent. Argentine literature sought, in the decades that followed, to rewrite this symbolic space as both a liter-ary and a political project. La cautiva not only sets in place an imaginary function for this landscape at the literary level, it also fundamentally asso-ciates it to gender and racial relationships of hegemony and domination; for instance, through the equation of the wild landscape to the indigenous populations described through a Dante-esque portrayal of el malon and its raiding tactics to sweep the precarious colonial settlements in the Pampas. The spatial iconography of the desert also addresses gender tensions through the introduction of the female captive, Maria, and her role in civilizing the barbaric space. At times, an almost supernatural character displaying an extreme endurance in dealing with the hardships posed by the desert, Maria also exhibits stereotypical feminine traits when she demonstrates an unusual capacity to feel and be passionate about her role as the savior of Brian from the dark forces of nature.