著者

洲崎 圭子

出版者

お茶の水女子大学英文学会

雑誌

Journal of the Ochanomizu University English Society

巻号頁・発行日

vol.5, pp.18-28, 2015-03

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Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos (1925-74) described spinster figures to question patriarchal values in many of her works written around the 1960s, when Mexican society, particularly in the countryside, still accepted and even promoted the idea that a decent woman should get married and produce children. Castellanos portrays Emelina, a thirty-five-year-old single woman, who lives in a small town in the countryside of Chiapas, in her short story The Guests of August (Los convidados de agosto) (1964). The society perceives Emelina as a useless woman because she is not married, and she is frustrated with the town's criticism of and opinions about her. But at an annual summer festival, she meets a stranger and reveals her desire to leave the small town with him. In this article I analyze how Castellanos' depiction of the protagonist's revelation of desire to meet a man and abandon the traditional rural town, in which they maintain a hierarchical power structure among the upper class, serves to severely condemn Mexican society, which devalues unmarried women who do not produce offspring.