La lectura incestuosa de "La vida es sueño"

It has been said so much about "Life is a Dream" that it seems not to be probable to say anything more, but on the other hand there is such a disagreement and plurality concerning the criticism that is related to the work that it looks like there is still so much left to say about it. Being the debate between these two views, our work tries to focus on the consequences that are derived from the analysis of a character who is never appeared on the stage and is barely named along the text. This character is not other but Clorilene. It has been only two times in which her name comes on the scene and that is the reason why the critics have considered appropriated to talk about two different characters. However, there have also been some people who support the idea about these two Clorilene could be the same character, that is the same person. All doubts are left out by contextualizing the subject and taking into account that if Clorilene who is Basiliós sister and the other Clorilene who is Basiliós wife are the same character, then we would be talking that such a coincidence could be incest. So Segismundo would be the son of such incest. On our opinion, there is no need to insist more on the legitimacy of the incestuous reading of "Life is a Dream", so the contributions we count on are enough to be sure about their validity. However, our work takes an enough span to account for the accumulated bibliography about the case, although it is not very numerous, it is useful. The aim of this thesis is not to question the existence of the incest. It would not be a novelty and as we have said before, the incest is there and it works. However, what is still left to do is an exercise of general interpretation about "Life is a Dream" and to analyze to what extend it could be relevant the reason for the incest or if it is not other thing that a word game that the author ventured without much pretension that the "onomastic incest" which Maurice Molho referred to...

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?