SOURCE: Davies, Catherine. “‘Venus impera’? Women and Power in Femeninas and Epitalamio.” In Ramón María del Valle-Inclán: Questions of Gender, edited by Carol Maier and Roberta L. Salper, pp. 129-53. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994.

In the following essay, Davies contends that Valle-Inclán's Femeninas and Epitalamio subvert the modernist aesthetic through their depiction of female sexuality.

This essay explores how Valle-Inclán's early narrative subverts the modernist aesthetic through its representation of female sexuality. In this context, Rubén Darío's Prosas profanas [Profane hymns] provides a useful contrast because, despite obvious thematic and stylistic resemblances between these early texts, the subversive strategy employed by Valle-Inclán's is quite distinct. Indeed, as we shall see, Epitalamio [Epithalamium] engages with Prosas profanas itself, undermining its claim to seriousness by means of a counterrepresentation of the female figure.

Valle-Inclán's first book (Femeninas [Feminine portraits...