Madwomen: between the archive, mourning and affections

Abstract

Gabriela Mistral, an iconic figure of Hispanic American literature for her vast production and for having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, was known for zealously guarding her private life. In 2011, Madwomen, a documentary directed by María Elena Wood, was released, presenting the story of the relationship between the author and her administrator, Doris Dana. The film makes a movement of displacement from the sphere of intimacy to the field of the visible and in this gesture, it poses the question of the ethical position of exhibition. Likewise, a second question is activated in the face of the task of preservation shown in the film. After Mistral's death in 1957, the literary rights were inherited by Doris Dana. With her death in 2006, Doris Atkinson, her niece, took charge of gathering all the pieces, that is, unpublished writings, works and letters, as well as personal objects, and transferred them to Chile a year later. Love, death and memory emerge as themes in a crossing of voices that come and go in time and thus constitute an archive of affections.