La representation de las mujeres en la narrativa de la escritora Nicaraguense Rosario Aguilar
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Description
Rosario Aguilar (Nicaragua, 1938) is one of the most important Nicaraguan women writers. She is the author of seven short novels and a biography. Aguilar portrays the attitudes and ideological conceptions of women in Nicaraguan society in narratives through which it is possible to trace an evolution in the handling of her feminine characters, their roles and their relationship vis-a-vis men and social institutions. One of the main contributions of this dissertation is to study and analyze this development of women roles throughout her seven novels During the 1960's Aguilar was the first woman writer in Nicaragua to publish a short novel in which a woman is the subject and not the object of discourse. In her early novels she adheres to the literary conventions that represent women as inferior, weak, and subjugated. However, in her later novels, she offers models encouraging women to seek a social and political role in the construction of a new Nicaraguan society, and her protagonists gain effective mode of self-representation and self-determination Aguilar is the first woman writer in Central America to write a novel dealing with the theme of guerrilla warfare, a very dangerous topic during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. In this historic context women appear as a new type of literary figure who breaks the traditional role of a passive subjects, and emerge as assertive and independent figures taking their future in their own hands This dissertation has as its theoretical framework the feminist studies of Elaine Showalter, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, stressing their interest in the problem of gender, and profiting from the emphasis on the praxis of feminism and its relationship to literature. Another important source of theoretical foundations are the theories of intertextuality and narratology developed among others by Gerard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Linda Hutcheon This study contributes greatly to both the understanding of women's standing in Central America society, as well as, to the study of the narrative structure of Rosario Aguilar's works. Being the first and the foremost woman writer in Nicaragua, the study of her works can serve as a model for further scrutiny of Nicaraguan and Central American literature