Conclusion: Literary History As Dialogue

This essay has sought to read a discontinuous series of texts, somewhat as if they were moments overheard in an ongoing dialogue among women and

men writers—Mármol and Gorriti in mid-nineteenth-century Argentina; in the 1920s and 1930s, de la Parra and Gallegos in Venezuela; Wiesse, García Calderón, López Albújar, and Portal in Peru; Chileans Mistral and Neruda in the 1930s and 1940s. A variety of instances have been taken up: the identity crisis of the Argentine Independence period; the reviewing of hacienda society from the perspective of modernization in Venezuela; the "nationalizing" of race problematics in Peru; the search for epic in Chile. All involve moments of crisis in nationhood and national self-understanding. The aim has been to observe the participation of women writers and intellectuals in these moments, placing them in dialogue with the dominant male voices of their contemporaries. All these writers and these instances have their own deep complexities, which discussion here has necessarily oversimplified. The goal in this essay has been less to elucidate the dialogue than simply to observe it, to establish that it existed.

Literary history can be told in many ways, of course, and to construct it as a dialogue across lines of gender and power is only one way. But it is a valid and important way: critical understanding, and literature itself, are impoverished and distorted when all is reduced to a monologue, or to a conversation exclusively among men. The principal strategy in this paper has been to read writings of the less powerful as contesting and reworking those of the more powerful. The challenge that remains is to achieve the reverse as well—that is, to understand the writings of the dominant as constituted by and in relation to the voices of subaltern groups that the dominant often like to think of as silent.