Spanish–American Interiors: Spatial Metaphors, Gender and Modernity

Abstract

In this article I discuss how spatial metaphors signify modernity in terms if gender. I refer to two novels written by women in nineteenth-century Latin America: Pablo, ou la vie dans les pampas (paris, 1869) / Pablo o la vida en las pampas (Buenos Aires, 1870) by Argentine author Eduarda Mansilla (1838–1892), and Aves sin nido (1889) by Peruvian author Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852–1909). These novels explicitly engage with the dominant gender regime, contemporary political debate, and the legacy if colonial economies. By foregrounding the domestic interior they inscribe modernity as problematical on account of women's ambiguous status vis-à-vis the state.