Malinche and the feminine historical narrative in the 21st century

Abstract

The literature of feminine authorship lately registered experiences from female characters that circulate between private and public spheres with the aim of taking the mask off the woman’s subordination legitimated by the patriarchal ideology and by the canonic literature. In this setting, some writers have stood out in fiction for recovering historical figures that were forgotten or silenced throughout the time by an arbitrary values the male figure in disadvantage of the female figure. In this work, the outstanding is the character Malinche, an indian who took Hernan Cortez to Mexico Conquest and she became well known like the traitor of her people. The aim of this study is to present the reflections and the version of the past that Laura Esquivel offers in her Malinche novel (2006), entangling the historical and literary speech and making her play to provoke the dialogue with the History so that it is “lawbreaking”, for implies new versions on the established speech. The writer becomes, thus, an exponent of the written literature by women as own subjects of their discourse and that has as purpose to deconstruct the official historical speech on introducing a female character conscious of her acts and words.