Alfonsina, Polixena and "the good women"

Abstract

The historical relay and literary production make spaces that produce narratives and discourses that favor cross-analysis and thereby expand consciences. Polixena y la cocinerita [Polixena andthe cook], by Alfonsina Storni, tragic farce in prose and verse in an act and epilogue, is a play that we can consider as a strategy ofrepresentation of the philosophical-literary and political-historicaland social paradigms, as long as they were prevalent with which this writer conjured her feminine problems of the early twentieth century in our country. Through the story of a young student who prepares an exam and who is enthused by the character of Polyxena emulates his final gesture choosing a dignified death rather than slavery. In this way, the fictionalized tension emerges from a verified reality: the counterpoint between “good woman” and those whowere not. This labeling imposed by the Argentine patriarchal society and that comes to us was established as a latent fear, that of the social and moral disqualification that would surround every woman who did not follow the prescriptions of the prevailing order. The terrors and fictional horrors reproduce, literary, a concretereality in which those are stabilized by having been naturalized. In this intersection that Storni made, we will analyze the scope of the terrors and horrors that as a society we have statued and to what extent as circular paradoxes it will be necessary to turn to literatureto detect them in our real lives.