Madame Lynch (1957) y la emergencia de un nuevo régimen sentimental

This article focuses on the novel Madame Lynch, written by the Paraguayan feminist María Concepción Leyes de Chaves in 1957. During this year, the struggle for the female vote in Paraguay was at a decisive moment. In this context, the writer reconstructs and gives a new profile to Elisa Alicia Lynch, a woman whose morals had been publicly questioned because she had been the lover and mother of President Francisco Solano López’s children, even though she had previously married another man; because she influenced her husband’s political decisions and publicly expressed her opinion about the War of the Triple Alliance; and also because she denied the education that her family had given her from an early age.The first half of the article begins with an overview of the situation in Paraguay when the novel is published, it also talks about the women’s movement and its relationship with power; the role runs through various reconstructions of Madame Lynch that were made before and after she died; and ends with a presentation by María Concepción Leyes de Chaves as social subjectivity. The second half of the paper focuses on the analysis of the novel Madame Lynch based on the theory of affects. This approach will allow us to verify how, in the novel, the meanings and emotions that surrounded the character for decades are displaced and a debate on the identity of political women is also opened. Given the activism of the writer and the moment the nation was going through when the work at hand appears, it will be easy to see how María Concepción used her centrality and literature to turn the identities of political women into desirable elements for her present and, in this way, argue in favor of the participation of women in decision-making spaces.