The representation of the woman in El Eterno Femenino of Rosario Castellanos. Analysis of characters and personal values.

• Main Authors: Song-yun Wei, 魏松韻
• Other Authors: Suh-ching Li
• Format: Others
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/97126198656111989713

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 西班牙語文學系研究所 === 98 === Rosario Castellanos is one of the most important writers of Mexican Literature of the last century. The most important topics of her writings are to emphasize the situation of the woman and the necessity to free herself from the traditionalistic customs. In her drama El eterno femenino, Castellnos criticizes the 20th century of Mexican society and at the same time, she tries to represents different types of how to be a woman, and also from the work summarizes the concerns that have shown in all the literary genre that she wrote such as poetry, prose, journalism and essay. The dramatic piece is a farce: Rosario Catellanos exaggerates the absurd situation to present the reality by the laugh and the irony. According to the author, “the script is about situations, not characters”, in another words, the most important thing is to criticize the situations by which women experience, those created by them, or those they go thru because it seems normal. In this thesis, we are going to review the three acts of this drama to understand the behavior and the values of each characters and what they symbolize. In the first act we will find that Lupita is experiencing something in the hair salon such as submission, self-denial and sacrifice, a reality that we find frequently in society. In the second act, the feminine characters who appear before Lupita are those women which history has recorded as playing minor roles, always seen from the men’s point of view. In the third act, Lupita tries to use wigs but she doesn’t like them: they are not the traditional custom to the Mexicans of that time; they prefer to live “trapped” in the comfort of family and social roles, those who do not allow an evolution. Nevertheless, the main character doesn’t learn from the experiences of others. Here the spectator/reader (but most of all the female spectator / reader) becomes aware. In El eterno femenino the author combines the reflection feminist theory, poetics, genre of the essay even psychological and relies on drama to get to people and make them think.