Daughters of Saint Teresa: Authority and rhetoric in the confessional narratives of three twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American women writers

For centuries in the Hispanic world, confessional writing stands out as one of few acceptable genres through which women were able to articulate their thoughts and lives. In the last three decades, scholarship about nuns' texts from early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America has illuminated the ways in which confessional writing allowed women to express the tensions and mediation surrounding their literary self-representation. In contrast, few scholars consider the influence of confessional discourse in twentieth-century women's narratives. In this dissertation, I link nuns' life writing with twentieth-century fictional autobiographies from Spain and Latin America in order to show that women continue to use confessional writing as a genre well-suited to explore the difficult relationship between gender and authorship. I begin by presenting an overview of scholarship about convent writing from early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America. Next I look at twentieth-century studies of confession and related genres, including autobiography and testimonio, in order to examine contemporary theories of self-representation. I conclude the first chapter by establishing four characteristics of women's confessional narratives from Spain and Latin America: the presence of a male confessor figure (to show mediation), the concept of transgression (sinful behavior), confessional dialogue and narrative strategies, and the role of absolution. In subsequent chapters I examine these aspects of confessional discourse in three texts from different countries: Carmen Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atras (Spain 1978), Helena Parente Cunha's A Mulher no Espelho (Brazil 1983), and Yanitzia Canetti's Al otro lado (Cuba/USA 1997). All three novels reflect the struggles women authors face when inscribing their lives within patriarchal social and literary norms. These texts highlight the interplay of power, language and gender as women assert their authorship and authority in writing. Although some feminist theory emphasizes a break from (patriarchal) literary conventions, confessional writing remains a powerful and potentially subversive literary genre that locates twentieth-century authors within a history of women's literature.