Rosario Castellanos

E S S AY S : A C R I T I C A L A N D
IRONIC HOUSE OF MIRRORS
 Women
The Nineteenth-
and Woman and her
image
Century Mexican The Liberation of Love
Woman
feminism

Discrimination
and Herlinda Leaves
Discrimination in the
United States and in
Chiapas
injustice

Language as an instrument
Language of domination
Woman and her image

Binarism in culture that assigns

Masculinity
Consciousness
Willpower
Spirit

Femininity
imminent passivity
inertia
“Battle of the sexes”

Masculine victory requires the banishment of the feminine: the feminine is the absolute sacred or
the absolute profane.
“This ambivalence of male attitudes is merely superficial.”
Beauty/handicap
Feminine purity/ignorance
Idealization of motherhood/loss of self
The Nineteenth-Century Mexican Woman

A review of the chronicles of Fanny Calderón de la Barca focusing on how she view Mexican
women.
-Her judgement of the physical appearance of Mexican women and their customs.
-Where do we perceive Castellanos’s perspective regarding GCB’s text?
The Liberation of Love

• How does Castellanos present Mexican women vis-à-vis the Women’s Liberation movement?

• How does Castellanos present Ms. Kasagi idea of the way Japanese women should respond to
feminism?
 Herlinda Leaves

Discrimination in the United

States and in Chiapas

Discrimination Language as an instrument of

and Injustice domination
Herlinda Leaves

A look at her own role in exploitation, at being born to privilege in a culture that treats certain
people as objects. She confesses that, even as she vow not to take advantage of her privilege, she
did not know how to extricate herself from the world she was born into:
”Between a startled María and a defenseless Rosario there was no possible contact.”
“There I was off playing Quetzalcoatl, the great white civilizing fod, while right next to me
someone was walking around ignorant.”
Discrimination in the United States and in
Chiapas
• Were the politics of Vicente Pineda “–and the gentlemen of his class-” so different than the white
supremacy preached by the KKK?
Language as an instrument of domination

Linguistic correction, linguistic possession as a privilege used to oppress others.

“The usufructors of language perverted it over the course of three or four centuries; they sacked it. It
is not worth the trouble to appeal to the local court because the treasure, that treasure, is irrecoverable.
We have to create another language, we have to find another starting point, search for the pearl within
each shell, the pit beneath the peel, because the shell holds still another treasure, the peel another
substance.
Word is the incarnation of the truth, because language has meaning.” p. 252