Competing Feminisms in Leonor Espinoza de Menéndez's (1910?) Zarela (A Feminist Novel): Beyond Utopias, Conciliations, and Exceptionalities

Zarela (A Feminist Novel) presents the upheavals of a group of women that converge in the precariousness of their lives. This leads them to deploy not always successful strategies of self-preservation and survival. Even though the text establishes a dialogue with a realist aesthetics and ideology (a framework frequently disqualified due to the experimental tendencies fashionable in the literary field at the time), Zarela problematizes and rewrites realism by re-signifying it and imposing gender marks fundamental for, first, showcasing the critical circumstances of female subjects in the microcosm depicted in the novel; second, confronting the patriarchal literary and cultural tradition; and, third, proposing a subjugated feminist imaginary that vindicates individualist projects and affective counter-pedagogies based on rationality and anti-sentimentality for non-exceptional female subjects.