'El paisaje deshecho’: Reconfiguring Gendered Landscapes in María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla

• In Event: Spatial Perspectives: Reconsidering the Role of Landscape in Latin American Literature

Abstract

This paper will interrogate the treatment of landscape and movement within María Luisa Bombal’s 1934 work La última niebla. The novel sees an unnamed female protagonist enact a number of specifically spatial tactics in order to counter the 'silencio aterrador' (Bombal: 1996, 59) that pervades her rural existence. In line with W. J. T. Mitchell’s proposition that landscape be conceived 'not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed' (2002: 1), this paper will attend to Bombal's landscapes as more than simply setting or backdrop, proposing them as key sites for the construction of gendered identity. Through the course of the paper, I will examine the protagonist’s interactions with three key locations within the novel (the forest, the pond, and the city) in light of Michel de Certeau’s notion of the ‘“enunciative” function’ of our movements through space (1998: 97-8). I argue that the protagonist’s enunciative incursions into the silent Chilean landscape overturn key gendered conceptions of both rural and urban spaces, constructing a stark portrait of female self-realisation within early twentieth-century Latin America.

Author

• Camilla Sutherland, University of Oxford