Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera
Eleodora (1887) and Las consecuencias (1889) conform a singular example within Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera’s (1842- 1909) literary production, Though the usual critique tend to consider both as the same novel, because they share the same plot, there are manifold reasons to differentiate them, including their respective placements in different stages of the author’s production.The former stands closer to the romantic drama, whilst the latter shows the marked naturalistic influence of the author’s latest novels.Eleodora and Las consecuencias may be regarded as a rewriting process, thus revealing the strategies used for constructing the new aesthetics: title change, new ending, the complexities of supporting characters, the scientific terms, the descriptions, etc.At her release Eleodora benefitted from Ricardo Palma’s support: it is him who endorsed and published it in the Ateneo de Lima. Cabello had based the plot on his A Mother’s Love tradition, and had dedicated him the novel.Las consecuencias, much more voluminous, abandons this elite attitude as it appears serialized in several issues of La Nación and as a book, that same year, but is received with negative criticism, very similar to the reaction arisen by Blanca Sol.Two years span between these two novels of so diverse aesthetics, a fact that be interpreted as revealing the tension about what a woman should and should not write, the struggle between canon and transgression. By taking this stance Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera opted for the harsh path.This edition by Monica Cardenas has a special interest for the Latin American Feminist Literature critique. It allows reading under all the scientific criteria two novels by Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, unpublished since 1889. Peruvian Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera was an exceptional writer, whose fame equaled to Juana Manuela Gorriti’s and Emilia Pardo Bazan’s. Monica Cardenas has recovered Eleodora, the first versión of Las consecuencias, and shows how the aesthetics of sublime alternates with the grotesque, an inheritance from the romantic period. The Cabellos’ human types show the turn of the Century ideology. As the editor puts it: 'Mercedes Cabellos’ novels are a showcase of the traps surrounding the Lima society women of the nineteenth century [...] the novel shows a contradictory modernity'. Thanks to this research, with which Monica Cardenas completes her doctoral thesis in France, it becomes possible to make a genetic critique of the rewriting techniques and the narrative strategies used by Cabello de Carbonera in the passage from one novel to the other. Isabelle Tauzin-Castellanos.
