Abstract

CHAVEZ DIAZ, Liliana. A traveling woman: Self-representation and female subjectivity in Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo. Lit. mex [online]. 2021, vol.32, n.2, pp.125-149.  Epub Jan 17, 2022. ISSN 2448-8216.  https://doi.org/10.19130/iifl.litmex.2021.32.2.29155.

This paper reflects on the relationship between the female traveling experience and the epistolary genre through a reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo as travel literature. The aim is to analyse the hybrid nature of the letter as a genre that allows the exploration of ideas and confessing or revealing affects during particular processes of constructing female subjectivities. Different than conventional travel chronicles, it is argued that the travel accounts transmitted through the female epistolary genre can throw light on physical and emotional displacement, but also on the intellectual and creative work of women in (self)censored or repressed environments. It is concluded that for Castellanos both traveling and writing are conscious acts of intellectual and gender freedom.

Keywords : Rosario Castellanos; women writing; travel literature; chronicles; epistolary literature; Mexican nonfictional literature.

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