La idealización femenina como estrategia de validación en Lucía Miranda de Eduarda Mansilla

Abstract

Eduarda Mansilla's historical novel Lucía Miranda (1860) was published in a moment when traditional conceptions of femininity were beginning to be challenged by discourses that advocated the possibility for women to educate themselves and engage in activities outside the domestic environment. In this complex context, women who aimed to develop a literary career had to carry out various strategies to earn legitimacy as authors and avoid contradicting the nineteenth-century female role model: the household caretaker. Acknowledging this, we intend to identify parallel procedures on a literary level that have sought to intellectually validate female characters without drastically interfering with the roles assigned to women.