LA BRECHA EN PERSPECTIVA: TEXTOS, PRETEXTOS, CONTEXTOS

Regarding Mercedes Valdivieso’s La Brecha breakthrough (1961) as the first Latin American feminist novel is certainly a valid critique. But we know that the “questionable” first moment in a novel in which a divorce is filed and abortion, and the economic freedom of women through female labor are advocated, is sustained upon a complex weave of discourses that had already been articulated previously. More than discussing existing criticism, we are interested in reconstructing the genealogical weave that makes the reading of La brecha as a feminist novel possible, revisiting selected texts written during the first half of the twentieth century in Chile including Augusto D’Halmar’s Juana Lucero (1902), Delie Rouge’s Los fracasados (1922), and Brunet’s María Nadie (1957), among others, in addition to several contemporary texts to Valdivieso’s novel.