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Abstract

This dissertation analyses the depiction of bodies in Mexican magical realist fiction. It focuses on three primary texts, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989), Sofia Segovia’s The Murmur of Bees (2015) and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), exploring their use of othered bodies in female, disabled, and ghostly forms. This dissertation argues that the authors situate bodies as primary sites of ambiguity and uncertainty, often in in-between spaces that are disruptive of boundaries (reflecting the magical realist genre). This is reflective of the artwork of Frida Kahlo, and this frames my argument. I argue that the authors utilise such othered bodies as a way to reject the constraints associated with a narrow western and patriarchal discourse and enable a freedom of expression. I engage throughout with the foundational work of Wendy Faris to expand specifically on bodies, for the narratives which stem from them are those of power, assertion and defiance. I also engage closely with David Danow’s concept of the carnivalesque, noting that, despite the otherness associated with bodies in the texts, the overriding narrative is of a celebration of voice and expression. By analysing the corporeal within the texts, I assert the ways in which magical realism serves as a sphere through which the voices of the subjugated and marginalised characters are heard. Through the depiction of otherness, the authors untether the bodies from the narrative voices, creating a space that allows for a freedom of expression which is disconnected from limitations of the gendered, geographical and temporal bodily constraints. This renders the texts, in their essence, as profound celebrations of otherness and rejections of
silencing.

Course: English Literature - BA (Hons) - C0995

Date Deposited: 2024-01-22

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14301.html