Ficciones femeninas inspiradas en el rosismo: El aporte de la escritora a la narrativa politica en la Argentina, 1846--1876 (Spanish text, Juana Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduarda Mansilla)

My dissertation studies the political writings by three prominent female authors of the Romantic period in Argentina: Juana Manso, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Eduarda Mansilla. These women were contemporaries of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the dictator who polarized post-Independence Argentina into two enemy camps, the unitarios and the federales, whose dispute shaped the consciousness of the nation for decades. My dissertation analyzes the reflections of the socio-political conflicts generated by the Rosas regime in two novels and seven short stories by these three authors. Each work is a story of loyalty and betrayal on two levels: the political and the erotic, as each is set during the years of the Rosas regime, and each is structured as a love story between people of either or both political affiliations. Heterosexual romance is the medium through which the politicization of everyday life in the Rosas era is explored by these authors. These works share three additional features: first, they are woman-centered; second, the protagonists take an active part in the plot, often substituting for politically incapacitated men; and lastly, the vast majority of these stories end tragically as the protagonist is driven to the brink of madness or actually goes mad. Thus, in these fictions by women, madness is the most common female response to women's difficulties to conform to societal expectations vis-à-vis the bourgeois ideal of submissive femininity. These difficulties were practically guaranteed given the socio-political climate of permanent civil war. Politics and love, the realms of the public and the private, overlap in these narrative fictions, and the narrative solution provided by madness redefines the perspective on the subject of the place of woman in society held by the (male) authors of the canonical literature of the period.