Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Nov 2022)
Archive and work from a gender perspective: an itinerary from Ada Elflein
Abstract
Starting from a reflection on the operations of exclusion and curtailment towards early 20th Century female narrative by Ricardo Rojas in his Historia de la literatura argentina, this article analyzes women´s work –a central issue in feminist struggles of the time– in some unknown stories written by Ada Elflein (1880-1919). The literary corpus proposed here presents a series of female characters who work in three types of jobs: intra-family domestic work, low-skilled positions in the informal labor market and/or teaching positions. In all cases, the fiction narrates lives that are subjugated by some type of patriarchal violence: spouses, parents, employers, the State or civil society. Although the stories do not show open revolutions to these masters, they leave crushes to that apparently monolithic model of family, society, nation, model which would hatch in certain feminine narratives of the following decades. This rich literary heritage –the more than four hundred stories by Elflein recently rescued from the archives– is only a fraction of the Argentine female narrative of the period 1900-1919, largely unknown and still waiting to be discovered.
