¿Y qué cree que no puedo? : La obra teatral El eterno femenino de Rosario Castellanos desde una perspectiva feminista.

This essay’s main goal is to analyse Rosario Castellanos’s play El eterno femenino, published in 1975. Castellanos was an essayist, a poet, and novelist and played an important role for the feminist movement in Mexico during her time. In her work, she presents a stereotyped image of the Mexican woman and her history. Using humour and irony, she creates a satire which plays with the myth of the eternal feminine and ridicule gender stereotypes. This literary analysis is based on a feminist perspective. By examining the work through its social and political context and putting it in dialogue with the feminist literary theories, the primary aim is to receive a better understanding of the importance of the work. Having in mind the historical context of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Mexico and the modern feminist literary criticism which took off in the late 1960s, the investigation focuses on the relation between the play and the situation of the Mexican women and their position in society as well as the aspects of the understanding of gender historically. The results show us how the woman is presented, in the traditional roles of the Mexican society, as the virgin, the married woman, the mother and the housewife in a humoristic way. The connection between the work and the feminist wave in Mexico during the 1970s is seen through the protagonist Lupita who becomes aware of a historical and contemporary oppression. Castellanos creates a fictional universe where the woman can finally tell her own story. We discover the traditional role of women as well as their battle against it