Let’s Talk About the Other Foundational Fiction. A postcolonial Feminist Reading of the Erotic Chaste Women in 19th-Century Catholic Literature

• In Event: Foundational Fictions. Twenty-Five Years Later

Abstract

Taking Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions. The National Romance of Latin America (1991), one of the most influential books in Literary Criticism that opened a seminal theorization about sexuality, sentiment and gender, this paper explores Mexican Catholic publications as another foundational fiction in the consolidation of nationhood. I argue that in order to understand Latin America’s coloniality, and specifically Mexico’s, critics have to go into a serious reassessment of works that were much closer to society in 19th-Century such as Catholic newspapers and texts that responded to romantic novels modeling ambiguous and complicated stereotypes. These publications present their own model of female sensuality within a discourse of chastity in a negotiated domesticity. The identity politics they create are built on a systematic critic and censorship of fictional novels, arguing that they corrupt women, take them apart from their “sacred” functions and encourage them to set apart from religion. The civilizing “code” Sommer talks about, within a “rhetoric of love, specifically of productive sexuality at home” (1991, 6), as well as the idea of a “domestic happiness” (1991, 7) guide my reading of short stories and essays in newspapers, and hagiographies published in novenas—prayer books—in the second part of the 19th-Century. The reemergence of a Catholic discourse in Mexico at the center of the liberal project, hearten this work to rethink that other hegemonic discourse that shaped female identity politics in another foundational discourse targeted to create a Catholic nation within the liberal one.

Author

• Adriana M Pacheco, Universidad de las Américas Puebla