The female as battleground: Carmen de Burgos's "Quiero vivir mi vida"

• Autores: Shirley Mangini González
• Localización: Foro hispánico: revista hispánica de Flandes y Holanda, ISSN 0925-8620, Nº. 31, 2008 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Visions and revisions. Women's narrative in twentieth-century Spain / Kathleen M. Glenn (ed. lit.), Kathleen McNerney (ed. lit.)), ISBN 978-90-420-2411-3, págs. 19-35
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In Carmen de Burgos's last novel, "Quiero vivir mi vida", the author appears to shape the book conforming to the ideas of endocrinologist and writer Gregorio Marañón on the subject of intersexuality. Yet Burgos's interpretation of the misogynistic Marañón is suspect. The protagonist, Isabel, is a young, married woman who resents her husband because she would prefer to have the freedom that men have. She becomes obsessed with her plight and her body becomes the battleground for her confused identity. When her illness, intersexuality, is diagnosed by a Marañónian-like doctor the catastrophes predicted are cloaked in the gloom and doom of a gothic novel. Isabel oscillates between promiscuity and religious fanaticism until she finally murders her husband in order to "steal his soul". By turning the beautiful Isabel into a monstrous criminal, rather than proving Marañon's theories on the dangers of intersexuality, Burgos turns patriarchal discourse on its head and reveals the misogynistic plot against women