SOURCE: “Maria Luisa Bombal's Poetic Novels of Female Estrangement,” in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. XIV, No. 1, January, 1980, pp. 139-55.

In the essay below, Rodríguez-Peralta compares Bombal's two novellas, noting in particular their unique position in Hispanic literature.

Many women writers in Latin American literature have presented a feminine world overtly concerned with emotional responses which often carefully cover underlying repressive forces. In these works, man generates the impulses and reactions in the spatial corridors structured around him, whether or not his own space is focused at the center or at a distance. Baroque profusion enabled Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to conceal her total personality. But Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda in the nineteenth century was openly dependent upon passionate relationships, and the twentieth century poetesses Mistral, Agustini, Storni, and Ibarbourou, although completely different in their responses, react to personal factors invariably designated...