Eduarda Mansilla. Una mujer que contiene multitudes

Abstract

In this paper we will analyse the figure of Eduarda Mansilla in light of her self-figurations as author and mother. In this nineteenth-century author, the public and private dimensions do not seem to exclude each other but rather to complement each other, although sometimes, as we will try to show, the former is more important than the latter.

We also note that the ideal of specialised spheres (the domestic and the public) does not always occur in the expected way. In Mansilla, the boundary between the public and the private becomes labile and, in this instability of the spheres, tensions arise that do not always find a solution. The tense and the contradictory become evident and turn this woman of the Buenos Aires elite into a complex author who is difficult to classify.

The analysis of the intertwining of the public and the private will focus on the prologue to Cuentos (Mansilla, [1880] 2011), entitled ‘Una palabra al lector’, written by the author herself, and on some journalistic texts.