Gosser Esquilin, Mary Ann

In Latin America, wet nurses and nannies have played a relevant role in the transmission of legends, myths, medicinal knowledge, popular beliefs, and the religious practices of marginalized groups. This historical reality also ties them closely to the vitality of the marvelous real in Latin American culture and history as theorized by Alejo Carpentier. This dissertation focuses on examining the characters of wet nurses and nannies, especially in connection with the expression of the marvelous real in Latin American novels published in the second half of the twentieth century.
Employing primarily Alex Woloch’s theory of characterization, this dissertation explores the character space and position within the character system of la Vieja in El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier, Peta Ponce in El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970) by José Donoso, and Petra Avilés in La casa de la laguna (1996) by Rosario Ferré. They serve as marvelous agents introducing elements of the marvelous real in the narrative. These characters are at the center of an extensive network of cultural codes that signify different sources of the marvelous real in Latin American culture. The marvelous network they establish functions as a vindicating mechanism that leads to the penalization of the families that hire their services, who represent a decadent and oppressive social system, whereas the wet nurses or nannies embody the oppressed groups in society. This is a literary strategy to impart, at a symbolic level, the justice that traditionally has been denied, both textually and socially, to these women.

Within the Caribbean, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are unusual: they are French overseas departments and thus also European Union members. As such, they must assimilate to French national culture even though their heterogeneous populations, mainly descendants of exploited imported labour, have their own unique island identity. Their heavy economic dependence on France and the effects of modernization and globalization pose further identitarian challenges for them. Franco-Antillean literature clearly reflects this long-standing identity confusion. This thesis explores two very recent novels— Toxic Island by Guadeloupean Ernest Pépin and L’Empreinte à Crusoé by Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau— and their divergent stylistic treatments of individuation. Both are inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theories of Relation and Tout- Monde; both engage questions of language, orality, the island space, race, the subject of alterity and the role of the arts and artists in identity formation. Yet both are also marked by distinctly unique forms of ambivalence.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the ruthless Dominican Republic ruler
dominated his island’s politics for over thirty years. In his acclaimed 2000 novel, The
Feast of the Goat, Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa creates Urania Cabral, a
49-year-old émigrée who at 14 left her nation after becoming Trujillo’s sexual victim.
The novel, told from many perspectives, focuses on her return, the dictator’s last day, and
the story of the four conspirators waiting to ambush him the night of May 30th 1961.
My study analyzes the complex narrative structures of the novel as masterful
“rupturing” techniques. Through these the reader pieces together the broken body politic
of a traumatized nation as Urania reconstructs in painful detail how the impotent dictator
digitally rapes her to ensure her body bears the mark of his brutal anger and frustration.

Julio Cortazar's preoccupation with the musicality of language celebrates the paradox of its intent to construct and convey meaning and its inability to be equated with actual human experience. His works expand traditional boundaries associated with the narrative form by encompassing characteristics typical of various forms of communication other than literary, which he engages for the purpose of seeking authenticity in all and every aspect of human existence. Rayuela, like a jazz musician's improvisation, is Cortazar's testimony; although not explicitly autobiographical, its fluidity and lack of constructed pretension allow for a direct bridge of communication between author, narrative, and reader akin to the experience of jazz performance. Like a musical improvisation, Rayuela juxtaposes the serious elements of structure and logical sequencing with a playful, intuitive imagination that succeeds in catapulting the reader into new worlds which, like an individual improvised solo, is never repeated in exactly the same way.

The poema en prosa originates in the Romantic subversion of discursive boundaries, as a problematic genre that foregrounds its theoretical self-questioning. Through its confrontation of prose and poetry, and the paradoxical affirmation of a form that results from the dialogic struggle between them, the poema en prosa is able to create an alternative space for Spanish American writers conditioned by a colonial history of literary borrowings from other traditions. This counter-discursive entity attracted turn-of-the-century modernistas such as Julian del Casal and Ruben Dario, as did the prose experiments of Jose Marti Delineating an autochthonous discursive identity for Spanish America through Romantic ideology, Marti anticipates the renovating social and aesthetic ideals of the poema en prosa. His search for a paradoxically original Spanish American expression helps establish the theoretical parameters for later modernistas and postmodernistas, who resort to the poema en prosa as an ambiguous means of creative autonomy.

Through careful selection of historical events and linguistic transformations, Ana Lydia Vega, born in 1946, tries to capture the essence of a diverse array of Puerto Rican figures. She bases her fiction on historical facts, cultural aspects, and linguistic peculiarities. Her writing blends these three aspects; however, the use of the unique Puerto Rican verbal expression is the foremost tool of her conceptualization. Because of the attention to detail, her work has become focal in contemporary Puerto Rican studies. Her work is marked by the constant use of humor even though the daily lives of her characters are marked by the tragedy of Puerto Rican historical search for identity. This study examines four of her stories "Letra para salsa y tres soneos por encargo," "Puerto Rican Syndrome o cosas extranas veredes," "Sobre tumbas y heroes (folletin de caballeria boricua)" y "El regreso del heroe." Her transformation of history, with its political connotations, and of culture through the fine articulation of colloquial Puerto Rican Spanish constitute the focus of this study.

In The Sot-Weed Factor, set in the eighteenth century, John Barth describes the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame. Ebenezer, or Eben, and Henry, see the world and themselves through a diversity of texts, not just written ones. Ironically, Henry tries to dissuade Eben from relying on these texts. In El siglo de las luces, Alejo Carpentier depicts the development of the protagonists Esteban and Victor during the French Revolution in France and its repercussions in the Caribbean. Esteban realizes during and after the Revolution that it and himself are influenced by texts that cannot express reality or help establish identity and therefore, he abandons it. However, Victor continues to participate in it since his identity relies on its manifestations. Texts in these novels includes more than just written materials such as paintings that the characters and readers "read" or try to understand and/or "write," and even mark on their bodies.