Passionate Subjects/Split Subjects in Twentieth-Century Literature in Chile: Brunet, Bombal, and Eltit

This book analyzes how Marta Brunet, María Luisa Bombal, and Diamela Eltit develop a counter narrative to the Chilean literary canon. They revisit and defy female narratives within a liberal Catholic modernity by representing the flaws of a patriarchal ideology through sexual and legal contracts. In these aesthetic projects, gender is a form of marginalization embedded in an authoritarian-state morality and law regulated by marriage and the family. In this context, female aggression and unconventional sexuality become a double threat both to masculinity and to the process of modernization. These writers challenge a logocentric linguistic system through discursive strategies that organize a new narrative model, showing that motherhood and womanhood inevitably conflict in the public sphere and rights of citizenship.