Reflections on Chilean feminism within Isabel Allende’s autofictional writing

Abstract

With regard to women’s literature produced in Latin America, academics such as Márcia Hoppe Navarro (1995) and Sara Beatriz Guardía (2013) emphasize Isabel Allende on being one of the first authoresses to be recognized, still in the 1980s –both in number of copies sold and in compliments from literary critics. As an essential element of her writing, Allende seeks to retell stories of women through fiction, locating them not only as characters, but also as narrators. Furthermore, Allende’s production consists of literary works narrated in the first person, in which there isuse of ficctional writing to analyze and opine on different topics, such as the societal conditions of women in Latin America. In this sense, the paper aims to comparatively analyze the books Mi país inventado(2013) and Mujeres del alma mía(2020), stemming from the concept of autofiction, created by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, and analyzed by Brazilian theorists Eurídice Figueiredo (2010) and Anna Faedrich (2014; 2016). The research sought to identify convergences and divergences within the (auto)fictional configuration of women in both narratives, besides taking into account the social shift that happened in Chile, in the post-dictatorial period, as of 1990, and after the feminist manifestations from 2018 and 2019. Therefore, the theoretical background was based on Verónica Feliu (2009); Valentina Saavedra and Javiera Toro (2018); Catherine Reyes-Housholder and Beatriz Roque (2019), who investigate the roles and conditions of Chilean women following the aforementioned periods, in addition to the influence of feminist movements in the country.