Mothers and Counter-Myths in the Poetry of Rosario Castellanos

Mothers as mythic figures who express themselves in the imaginative concreteness of passion and pain, familiar themes in Gabriela Mistral’s work, reappear in the poetry of Rosario Castellanos. The circular discourse undulating back and forth between pronouns ‘tú y yo’ or between the earthy mother and her desolate self does not stop with Mistral but continues as a perpetual dialogue among her female interpreters such as Castellanos. If we see Cecília Meireles refer to Mistral as an authority figure on the language of fragmentation and pain, we find in Rosario Castellanos a poet who answers Mistral — especially insisting on the female poet as an ‘anti-mother’ — with a chorus of violence and resentment. The Chilean poet surfaces as an echo in the harsh and abstract language of Castellanos’s poetry. Where Mistral finds her voice in the perpetual rolling back and forth in the tangled web of maternal language, Castellanos attempts to untangle the knots and confusion by crafting counter-perceptions of the ‘Madre-de-los-niños’. Castellanos does not allow Mistral to fully embody her motherhood. Instead, and with careful metaphorical language, she overwrites the iconic Mistral with an uncanny but harsher likeness.