Self-Censorship or Irony? The Rhetoric of Silence in Rosalía de Castro’s “Las literatas”

Abstract

This article studies the textual strategies used by Rosalía de Castro in “Las literatas” to denounce the structural and epistemic violence suffered by women writers and to defend their right to participate in the public sphere through literary activity. The text appears in a peculiar context, a year after street demonstrations by seminarians prevented the publication of another article of hers in the same Almanaque para la Juventud Elegante. This article, addressing the general theme of the silencing imposed on women, exposes their reaction to any kind of pressure: to continue writing and publishing. The splitting of the narratorial voice to show an excinded, dialogic and even incoherent or contradictory authorial self continues a tradition initiated by Romantic women authors to generate fissures in a model of femininity disciplined within the limits of the space assigned to them.