Melodrama and the Monster by Your Side in Asunción Izquierdo Albiñana's Andréϊda: El tercer sexo

Abstract

Focusing on melodramatic elements and female relationships in Asunción Izquierdo Albiñana's 1938 novel, this study argues that the agonistic excesses in the work foster consideration of and encourage struggle over conceptions of gender roles, matrimony, and agency. The title protagonist, Andréϊda, challenges a strict binary gender division through her dramatically portrayed mechanistic self-construction and in the way questions of desire relate to the control of that construction. Further, through both a brief, trenchant epilogue and a complementary plot arc that involves sensationalist portrayals of heterosexual relationships, the novel disrupts the narrative framing of marriage and imagines a more egalitarian arrangement. Finally, the homosocial relations between the female characters themselves also contribute to a conception of agency that seeps beyond the heroic individual to proffer a more diffuse, modest, and quotidian activism to achieve change. Theoretical work by Peter Brooks, Jesús MartínBarbero, Laura Podalsky, and Sharon Marcus informs this analysis.