Pasión que mata: Cárcel de mujeres de María Carolina Geel

Abstract

The novel Cárcel de mujeres (1956) (Women’s Prison) by the writer María Carolina Geel constitutes an anomaly within Chilean literature due to its thematic, the crime of passion, its hybrid genre and its visibilization of the lesbian subject. The narrative strategies of self representation shape the legitimation of a self who narrates a story of her imprisonment from the prision. The narration pacts with the state and the church in its moral stance by afirming the hegemonic social norm while paradoxically it interpellates those who break the law by telling the crime. Lesbianism as an option and sexual practice is represented in terms of a transgression that is doubly criminalized as the stories of the lesbian inmates reveal. Furthermore, female passion is linked to the crime of passion marking murder as the female crime that condenses symbolically all other themes and transgresions of the patriarchal law. However, the motifs of the crime that originate the novel, are never revealed and are obscured by the fate that transforms the narrator from victimizer to victim.