SOURCE: Geldrich-Leffman, Hanna. “Woman's Emerging Voice: Rosario Castellanos.” In The Dialogue of Marriage in Contemporary German and Latin American Short Stories, pp. 7-19. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Geldrich-Leffman offers a feminist perspective on Castellanos's short fiction.

Prominent in Latin American letters and a leading voice in early Mexican feminism, Rosario Castellanos goes beyond the limits of conventional feminist questions to more universal problems that transcend gender and are concerned with society, language, and creativity. Critical inquiry into her work has concentrated primarily on her feminism and the image of woman, mostly in her novels and in the collection Album de familia (1971). Quite a few of these studies point to the importance and centrality of the image of marriage in her work (Franco 31; Fiscal, La imagen 51; Fiscal, “Identidad y lenguaje” 27), without examining it from the point of view of linguistic and literary technique.¹

Examining Castellanos's...