Public Space/Private Discourse

Abstract

The chapter argues that the notions of public and private, while mapped onto exterior and interior spaces respectively—the street and public institutions vs. the home—are uncontainable within supposedly set parameters. The permeability of the barriers between exterior and interior means that private and public become enmeshed as both positive and negative, sometimes simultaneously. Using Habermas’s concept of private and public spaces, the chapter analyzes the countryside, small villages, and cities represented in, respectively, María by Jorge Isaacs, Aves sin nido by Clorinda Matto de Turner, Martín Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana, and La mestiza by Eligio Ancona and discusses how these authors explore, test, and question the ways in which social norms are mapped onto physical and psychic spaces. As these representations enforce or subvert particular behavioral codes, they also draw attention to the constructed nature of the ways in which human beings possess and use the spaces around them. These novels perpetuate the separation of public and private spaces and the fixed gender roles assigned to each space to encourage the incipient bourgeoisie and its accompanying middle-class ideals. The insistent linkage of gender identity and space results in restrictions on women’s mobility, literal and metaphorical.