SOURCE: "Text and Countertext in Rosario Ferré's 'Sleeping Beauty*," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 207-18.

Below, Glenn offers an informative analysis of Ferré's short story "Sleeping Beauty," focusing in particular on the author's methods for conveying her message of social oppression and its consequences.

Rosario Ferré is one of a group of angry young Puerto Rican women authors who have seized the pen and wielded it effectively. Educated on the island and the mainland, Ferré is the daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico and by birth a member of the upper-class, conservative society she satirizes in her fiction. She has acknowledged that writing is for her a destructive as well as a constructive endeavor and that she is driven by a need for vengeance and a desire to give permanence to what hurts and to what attracts her ("Writer's Kitchen...