SOURCE: Gold, Janet. “The Feminine Bond: Victimization and Beyond in the Novels of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.” Letras Femeninas 15, no. 1-2 (1989): 83-90.

In the following essay, Gold asserts the importance of female relationships in Sab, Dos mujeres, and El Artista Barquero.

Chloe liked Olivia … perhaps for the first time in literature … All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women were represented as friends. … They are confidantes, of course now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men … And how small a part of a woman's life is that.

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Virginia Woolf pondered this literary phenomenon in 1928. Pondering Virginia Woolf's observations, and the recent work of Janice...