Initiation, Fall and Redemption: the romantic evolution of female subject in Rosario Castellanos' poetry

Abstract

The exploration of inwardness of being has been one of the main concerns for romantic writers and their heirs, who, with such a goal, grab themselves from biblical myth to approach to the terra incognita of human spirituality and to represent its evolution in poetry. Rosario Castellanos, mexican writer of the mid-twentieth century, take up this intertextual appropriation model, and making use of narration of Adam and Eve’s Fall, presents the development of female self of his poems in three contiguous moments: the first one, the Initiation, in which the poetic voice experiences an analogic and primitive stage of fullness, sometimes tarnished by moments of individuation; the second one, the Fall, in which the former individuation is intensified up to convert itself in solipsistic and solitary self-awareness; and a third moment, the Redemption, where desire of fullness of Initiation and the solitary  autognosis of the Fall are melted in a state of lucid and ironic recognition of self.