SOURCE: “‘The Shrouded Woman’: Marriage and Its Constraints in the Fiction of María Luisa Bombal,” in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. X, No. 20, Spring-Summer, 1982, pp. 21-30.

Below, Williams investigates the theme of confinement and its effects on the women protagonists of Bombal's La última niebla, La amortajada, and “El árbol.”

Over the past decade, most Americans have come to assume that achievement in the public domain is a variable pursuit for both men and women. At the same time that American women were affirming their right to be self-oriented and not merely other-oriented, as they have been for centuries, the Chilean novelist, María Luisa Bombal (1910-1980), was acknowledging that there was an archetypal woman, whose natural sphere of interest was the life of the emotions. As she stated in a recent interview:

I do not believe that the social rights now being granted to women officially...