Representaciones de la maternidad en Cuentos de Eva Luna de Isabel Allende: El caso de “Clarisa” y “Tosca”

Abstract

Motherhood is a central life experience to female identity and to the configuration of gender roles in any society. However, despite this centrality, the figure of motherhood in literature has not been studied until a few decades ago. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to this growing academic corpus, analyzing how the Chilean writer Isabel Allende represents motherhood in a small part of her work, specifically two stories: "Clarisa" and "Tosca". This work is an ethnoliterarian analysis in which, using Jungian theory, we identify underlying archetypes in the text with the aim of reconstructing motherhood discourses represented in the texts. In addition, I analyzed the attitudes of the narrator towards those discourses. Even though the protagonists of her stories subvert in a certain way the gender roles imposed on them, in general lines Isabel Allende reproduces Chilean dominant motherhood discourse. Furthermore, the Chilean author shows a very conservative attitude in this regard.