SOURCE: “Women's Language in Two Poems by Alfonsina Storni,” in Monographic Review, Vol. VI, 1990, pp. 232–44.

In the following essay, Titiev discusses two poems by Storni that explore feminist themes focused on the female body.

As Patricia Yaeger recently pointed out, the French feminist critics who call for a new woman's language make the mistake of “omitting the practices of real, historical women from their analysis of women's writing” and thereby “remain blind to what has actually happened in women's texts” (20). She undertakes a definition of “a countertradition within women's writing, a tradition that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a body of speech women have found exclusive and alienating” (2). In the Argentina of the 30's Alfonsina Storni (Switzerland 1892-Argentina 1938), a poet known for iconoclasm in both lifestyle and literary subject matter, was part of that countertradition. We will give particular attention here to two poems, both little known...