The untamed other: Beastly, mythical, and corporeal representations in Vaz Ferreira, Agustini, and Ibarbourou

This dissertation analyzes the representation of otherness through the literary lens of three turn-of-the century Uruguayan women poets: Maria Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, Delmira Agustini, and Juana de Ibarbourou. As writers and intellectuals during a time period wherein neither was fully embraced without difficulty or qualification, these women sought various ways to revamp the confines of the female subjectivity attributed to them by the patriarchal hegemony. Through the use of a multitude of disguises and performances that were both subversive and acquiescent to social mores during the Modernist movement and beyond, Vaz Ferreira, Agustini and Ibarbourou knowingly appropriated roles of both passivity and dissidence for their very literary survival. Following the theories of both Sylvia Molloy (Women's Writing in Latin America 1991) and Debra Castillo (Talking Back 1992), my study seeks to discover the means by which these women poets choose to subvert various components of the patriarchal system while at the same investigate what it is they do when they are not merely committing transgressive acts.;In challenging the Modernist movement that viewed women as intellectual fodder, these women authors and intellectuals re-authorize the modern era as well as confront the binary systems of male/female, animal/human, body/soul that had compartmentalized, subordinated, and eviscerated women's bodies and writing talents. Through various concepts of self-styling that incorporate their each author's unique brand of otherness, Vaz Ferreira, Agustini and Ibarbourou appropriate or utilize mythical, wild, or corporeal representations in order to write themselves into their work as well as to challenge what is implied in being human.;By aligning with the non-human or untamable other through their own animal bestiary, each poet breaks free of previously maintained ontological categories and creates an open space wherein innovative literary formation can occur (Brown "Becoming Animal" 2007). In doing so, Vaz Ferreira, Agustini and Ibarbourou question and reconfigure all that had heretofore subjugated women authors as well as separated humans from differing forms of otherness, thereby creating new structures of categorization and acceptance.