SOURCE: “Rosario Castellanos: ‘Leccion De Cocina,’” in White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America, Tamesis Books Limited, 1993, pp. 45-53.

In the following essay, Hart explores what he considers the protagonist's ironic defiance of patriarchal law in “Lección de cocina.”

In her essay ‘Woman and Her Image’, Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974: Mexico) employs Simone de Beauvoir's study, Le Deuxième Sexe, to analyse the ways in which women have been mythified and therefore dis-abled (either through beauty or angelicness) concluding that ‘woman is stripped of her spontaneity of action, forbidden the initiative of decision, taught to obey the commandments of an ethic that is completely alien to her and has no more justification or basis than that of serving the interests, goals, and end of others’.¹ In her essay Castellanos lists the means by which women are incarcerated within the phallocentric code (her most...