(The female body in front of the mirror: metaphors of self-representation in the work of ecuadorian writers in the first half of the 20th century)

Abstract

This article analyzes the self-representation of the female body in the works of Blanca Martínez Mera (En la paz del campo, 1940) and Laura Pérez (Sangre en las manos, 1959), two representative Ecuadorian authors of the first half of the 20th century. In both works, the metaphors about the female gazing at her own body through mirrors are used to transgress the gender order of the time. The objective of this work is to reconstruct the historical narrative based on the experience of women as active subjects in literature. To achieve this, a rereading of the two works is proposed from a historical and gender perspective within the framework of new historicisms and feminist literary criticism. In both cases, the creation of powerful metaphors around vanity, masturbation and abortion is recognized as symbols of a female experience that has been left out of the narrative -historical and literary- canon but can explain the construction of women as subjects facing the National State. Even though critics dismissed these works at the time or passed them by without much relevance, this new reading explains how the female body and its gaze generate tensions concerning the discourses of criticism, politics, and medicine that support the masculine hierarchy. In their works, the authors record and transgress such a hierarchy in the order of literary representation, placing the female gaze on her own body in disruptive contexts.