SOURCE: Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia. “What Does Luciana Want? Reclaiming the Female Consciousness in Cortázar's ‘Cambio de Luces’.” Hispanic Review 65, no. 4 (autumn 1997): 415-30.

In the following essay, Schmidt-Cruz examines the treatment of sexual difference in “Cambio de luces.”

Any reference to the female characters in the short stories of Julio Cortázar is bound to set up a characteristic expectation in the mind of the reader. After all, what type of depiction of women can we expect from the writer who gained notoriety by coining the phrase “lector hembra” to denote a passive, non-critical reader? When we focus on the female characters in his best known stories, we might recall Rema in “Bestiario,” who is the victim of her brother's incestuous advances, or the character of Eva in “Instrucciones para John Howell,” who begs Rice to help her escape a husband bent on avenging her infidelity. In “La salud...