La sombra de la madre: un mito materno en la novela de mujeres

Abstract

In this paper I attempt to explore the discursive construction of feminine subjectivity in literature and myth. The authority of myth, hardly questioned until fairly recent times, and the interpretive theories that reinforce the ideology from which it arises and which in turn it contributes to uphold, are particularly evident in the Oedipus myth. Through a brief review of the role played by the mother in fiction by female authors in the 18th an 19th centuries and a more detailed analysis of significant contemporary novels I try to explore women's absorption and internalization of a fixed gendered identity that has ascribed them for a long time to the realm of the private and the family, and has been the cause of no small anxiety and frustration. Being myth embedded in language, I try to show how any attempt to uncover and expose its meaning necessarily implies the exposure of the discursive practices that have largely signified and reinscribed those social gendered practices.