The archetypal wise woman in postcolonial works of magical realism of the Americas: An examination of Rudolfo Anaya's "Bless Me, Ultima", Toni ... Garcia Marquez's "Cien anos de soledad".

This dissertation examines U.S. and Latin American representations of the archetypal wise woman in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though diverse in representation, this archetype can be found in the fiction of Native American, African American and Mexican American authors, as well as that of Latin American authors. Through a careful examination of this archetype as she permeates the fiction of Bless Me, Ultima, Paradise, and Cien anos de soledad, this dissertation brings together different trends in literature in order to discover common aspects of the postcolonial cultural realities depicted in these fictions. In looking at the wise woman as she appears in each of these texts, this project reveals her as a product of the postcolonial New World and a character that highlights the multiplicity existent in inhabitants of the Americas through both their shared history and bordering encounters with varied racial and cultural influences. Additionally, this comparative look at this postcolonial phenomenon in these three texts reveals both parallels and differences in the resultant postcolonial attitudes towards hybridity and female empowerment in Mexican American, African American, and Latin American literatures. Finally the exploration of this archetype reveals the individual cultures' colonial processes and the ways in which they inform the wise woman's powers, as well the implications of the archetypal qualities as they transcend the boundaries of multiple postcolonial cultures.