10 - “That Damned Mob of Scribbling Women”

Summary

In the prologue to Oasis de Arte, a travel chronicle by the Peruvian writer Zoila Aurora Caceres, Ruben Dario confesses having little fondness for women of letters. Dario's fixation on the general unattractiveness of the woman of letters reappears in a chronicle entitled 'Estas mujeres'. Dario's writings on female authorship reaffirm the doctrine of the spheres that female writers aimed to subvert through their intellectual activism. Although Latin American women writers of the nineteenth century wrote biographical profiles on colleagues of the other sex with the tacit goal of inserting themselves into the masculine networks that excluded them, the inverse was much less common. In Recuerdos de Espana, Ricardo Palma, a key figure of transatlantic culture, writes of the way in which the bonds of literary fraternity tighten when under threat of gendered diversification. Ricardo Palma's desire to neutralize an identity chaos in which men are feminized and women are masculinized reproduces Dario's distinction between domestic and abnormal female writers.