Incest and unhomeliness in "La jaula de la tía Enedina" by Adela Fernández and "Uno no sabe" by Mónica Lavín

Abstract

Adela Fernández and Mónica Lavín belong to a corpus of Latin American women writers who employ incest as a literary motif to examine social prohibitions and the corporeal, sexual, and affective disfiguration these generate. Their respective short stories, “La jaula de la tía Enedina” (1976) and “Uno no sabe” (2003), share diegetic and discursive elements that operate within an aesthetics of abjection and articulate incest between adult women and young men (aunt-nephew, mother-son) in its connection with unhomeliness. The present study contrasts the modes of representation of the endogamous taboo and analyzes the power relations between the characters in both stories, based in the theoretical propositions on the horror of incest by Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Adrienne Rich's feminist review of the subject, and in the interpretation of unhomeliness proposed by Homi K. Bhabha. The authors examined here resort to unhomeliness to portray the marginalization resulting from the transgression of patriarchal norms and gender roles, utilizing it as a catalyst for incestuous desire. Furthermore, they use euphemisms and unreliable narrators with the purpose of configuring an enunciative authority over female subjects.