Kim Beauchesne

The following thesis offers an interpretation of Noticias de Nutka, written by José Mariano Mociño, after he visited Nootka, on the Western coast of Vancouver Island. Mociño was a Mexican naturalist in the team of the Royal Scientific Expedition to New Spain organised in 1792 by the Spaniard crown to explore the territories beyond California, which were considered as part of its domains. The book, prepared in the next year (1793), is the most complete approach of its time to the area’s people and culture in Spanish literature and can be considered as part of the testimonial corpus of first European-Indigenous encounters on the Canadian Pacific coast, besides the most known texts by James Cook or George Vancouver.This study focuses on the representation of nature and natives of Nootka and analyses the apparent contradiction between the goals of the scientific mission and Mociño’s recommendation for the Europeans powers to prevent colonizing the Northwest coast. By discussing those elements, the thesis explores the relation between the discourses of natural history and Spanish imperialism at the end of the Eighteenth Century. The interpretative proposal developed by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation serves as the main theoretical framework for the analysis presented here, although I show how it needs to be modified when applied to Mociño’s context.In sum, the thesis reveals the “colonial ambiguity” that distinguishes Mociño’s positionalities in relation to his subject of study and Spanish imperial expansion, considering that feature as part of the construction of scientific discourse and Creole identity in New Spain.

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The Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) is well known for Balún Canán (1957) and other works of prose, poetry, or drama. However, in my thesis I aim to shed light on a genre that has been understudied by scholars and neglected by translators: her nonfiction. Of her nonfiction, I look specifically at her travel writing. Firstly, at the letters she addressed to Ricardo Guerra (1927-2007), compiled in Cartas a Ricardo (1994) [Letters to Ricardo]. And, lastly, at the articles she wrote as Mexican ambassador to Israel (1971-1974) which were originally published in Excélsior but, have since been anthologized and edited by Andrea Reyes in Mujer de palabras: artículos rescatados de Rosario Castellanos, volume III (2007). More specifically, Castellanos, after being awarded a scholarship by the Institute of Hispanic Culture (1950-1951), wrote letters from aboard the S.S. Argentina, and from the women’s residence in Madrid. I look at Castellanos and her companion, Dolores Castro (1923- 2022), as women traveling unaccompanied by men in Franco’s Spain. I also analyze Castellanos’s reaction to the Moorish, Jewish and Catholic cultures in Spain in relation to her own complex legacy as a member of the dominant land-owning class in Mexico. Some twenty-five years later in Castellanos’s letters which she wrote as a visiting professor in the U.S., (1966-1967), I focus on her identity as a cosmopolitan woman whose letters constitute a form of resistance to gender roles in Mexican society. I argue that she uses the epistolary genre to create her own self and that during her stay in the U.S., along with her son and her son’s nanny, Herlinda Bolaños, she reconfigures her own identity and, consequently, her identity from both inside and beyond the confines of the family. Castellanos’s letters, and to some extent her journalism, with the myriad details of daily life, function as a combination of travel diary, autobiographical memoir, and epistolary novel where she can create herself as a literary character. My objective is to avoid a strictly autobiographical reading of this work and so be able to place Castellanos’s travel writing firmly in contemporary literature.

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This thesis uses Lacan’s rhetorical understanding of human desire to investigate in greater depth the role of desire in Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández’s 1949 novella Las Hortensias. Chapter one looks at the dynamics of veiling and unveiling, of the female body, and of desire itself, which is both repressed into the subtext and expressed on the textual surface. Chapter two discusses the role of the sex doll—Las Hortensias’s privileged object of desire—in determining the identities of the characters who remain in its thrall. The next three chapters suggest that the story’s plot can be divided into two distinct phases: in the first, desire tends to follow a predominantly metaphoric logic, in which one love object is substituted for a number of others, while in the second it tends to follow a more metonymic logic, in which objects are displaced one after the other along a linear sequence. Desire in this first sense is the topic of chapters three and four, while desire in the second sense is the topic of chapter five. Chapter six looks at desire from a different angle: as an intersubjective, socially mediated phenomena, one which belies the notion that desire is an exclusively private, intimate affair. All chapters trace desire’s operations primarily in relation to the story’s protagonist, whose journey through the narrative is read as a kind of passage through Lacan’s three orders—from the symbolic dimension of desiring subjectivity, to imprisonment within an imaginary realm in which desire is derailed, and finally to a traumatic encounter with the real, with the unsymbolizable experience of psychosis. Chapter seven examines the forces behind desire’s derailment, while the thesis’s conclusion reaffirms its guiding idea: that Las Hortensias, by presenting desire’s promise of plenitude and presence as inextricably bound up with emptiness and absence, with philosophical issues of being and nonbeing, tells us something about its metaphysics, i.e. about the very nature of desire itself.

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