The ranges of violence in Rosa Montero’s La hija del caníbal

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyze Rosa Montero’s novel, published in 1997, a moment in which the “new Spanish historic novel” was in its initial steps. Our objective is to localize the ranges of violence in which the voice of the narrator and main character, Lucía, is inscribed, and the different ways in which the development of her discourse grows apart of the social, cultural and literary dominant forms, that are described in the novel as oppressive and restrictive. In the first part of the article, we analyze the utilization that La hija del cannibal does of the roman noir genre, a literary system that has been traditionally used by masculine voices. In the second part, we describe the representations of the relations between the public and private spheres, that are seen as social and cultural constructions that have historically worked in an oppressive way over the individuals. Finally, we mention different points of the argument in which the novel shows aspects of life that have been little represented by the literary discourse, aiming to prove that literature is also a space that has limited the possibilities of representing minority individuals and their stories.