Marriage in the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos

Abstract

Prominent in Latin American letters and a leading voice in early Mexican feminism, Rosario Castellanos goes beyond the limits of conventional feminist questions to more universal problems that transcend gender and are concerned with society, language, and creativity. Critical inquiry into her work has concentrated primarily on her feminism and the image of woman, mostly in her novels and in the collection Album de familia. Quite a few of these studies point to the importance and centrality of the image of marriage in her work (Franco 31; Fiscal, La imagen 51; Fiscal, Identidad y lenguaje 27), without examining it from the point of view of linguistic and literary technique. Since we have only one significant study of her short stories,1 I propose to treat the topic of marriage in these narratives and in the process analyze the dialogic nature of these works. In my emphasis on this approach, I have greatly benefitted from M.M. Bakhtin's theories. The notions of the other, of dialogue, and of the fundamental nature of