El itinerario del monstruo: la mujer como sujeto periferico en el siglo xix

El itinerario del monstruo: La mujer como sujeto periférico en el siglo XIX (The Itinerary of the Monster: Women as Peripheral Subjects in the Nineteenth Century) is a dissertation that traces the images of monstrosity associated with the feminine through six authors from different geographical locations and historical and national contexts who wrote during the 19th century. From a feminist perspective, any woman who rejected the bourgeois norms that confined women to the domestic sphere was considered monstrous. Women were expected to conform to the image of the ¨angel of the house.¨ The rebellious female authors studied in this dissertations were doubly-marginalized – not only were they women, all were from peripheral regions of Spain. They challenged the project of building a unified nation-state on the Iberian Peninsula, instead privileging its plurinationality. The text begins chronologically with one of the first scientific monsters, Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein. Shelley’s novel initiates the feminization of monstrosity with images that inspire the most prominent women writers on the Iberian Peninsula. In the first chapter, Shelley´s monster will be analyzed together with Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda´s Sab, a mulatto slave who represents a point of departure in abolitionist literature. The themes in Sab connect the notions of race, gender, and class from the colonial perspective of mid-19th century Cuba. The analysis continues with a study of peripheral and marginal images of feminity associated with the monstrous in the works of Cecilia Böhl de Faber and Rosalía de Castro. Both authors wrote from a non-central locus, not only because of their condition as women, but also because of their belonging to the margins of Spanish hegemonic culture, as a foreigner in the case of Böhl de Faber, and as a representative of the Galician nation in Rosalía de Castro´s case. Finally, monstrosity is analyzed in two authors who represent a new wave of imagined- nation building while the colonial world is in crisis. Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Víctor Català highlight the tension between nation and state, and represent feminity, and feminine desire, as associated with monstrosity.Hispanic Studies, Department o