Lamentación de Dido: Rosario Castellanos' quest for a feminine voice

Abstract

This study undertakes an analysis of Rosario Castellanos' 1953 feminist poem "Lamentación de Dido". It takes into account the influence of Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and Simone Well, the classical foreground of Virgil and Homer, and the relations of the poem to Luis de Gongora's cultismo. In "Lamentación", Castellanos attempts to create a public feminist discourse in a time and space where women were supposed to remain in the domestic-private sphere. An in-depth analysis of "Lamentación" shows that for Castellanos the issues of race and gender were tightly intertwined. For Castellanos, the creation of a discourse that could change the extreme discrimination suffered by women and the indigenous people of Mexico became a life-long quest.