Más allá del naturalismo y las bellas enfermas: “El velo de la purísima” (s/f), de Adela Zamudio y “A caolha” (1903), de Júlia Lopes de Almeida y la representación de la enfermedad como metáfora crítica de la modernidad industrial en el entre siglos latinoamericano

This paper analyzes the representations of female disease and deformity in two works by Bolivian writer Adela Zamudio (1854-1928), and Brazilian writer Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934). The purpose is to delve into the different uses and resignifications of the pathological metaphor by female writers, in dialogue with modernist and decadent aesthetics, and naturalist ideology. Whereas texts framed within patriarchal modernist-decadent aesthetics and ideologies emphasized the representation of female disease as an aesthetic ideal; and whereas literary texts framed within naturalism portrayed sick female figures as culprits of social degeneration; Adela Zamudio and Júlia Lopes de Almeida depict different representations of sick women. In their works, pathological conditions and deformities are far from being deterministic features nor aesthetic ideals, but critical metaphors of an industrial modernity that condemns women to invisibility and marginality. By picturing disease as critical metaphor of industrial modernity, I read in these texts claims for women’s access to the means of production. Besides fostering more complex readings of disease in the period, I propose an intersectional reading of these works to analyze how they shed lights on the social and racial connotations that problematize hegemonic archetypes of the feminine (such as the bourgeois’ “angel of the house”) and, therefore, turn them into an exclusive privilege for women belonging to specific social classes and racial groups.