Tres fantasmas, un espectro: la maternidad disidente en Ecos de Atenea Cruz

Abstract

The imaginary of motherhood is a discursive practice, and its transgression can occur in speech acts, elocution and enunciation. Atenea Cruz’ Ecos explores the social construct of maternity through of a game of voices configured into three characters. They resist to the ideal of the woman-mother, and their ambivalent experience derive from this resistance. The female characters do not have a gender consciousness derived from an identified ideological agenda. However, they embody the attributes of an unconsciously and unstable chosen motherhood, whose actions and words transgress social and cultural codes and values. Therefore, far from being represented as a mere denouncing discourse, the complex idea of being a non-conventional mother penetrates the characters’ subjectivities, whose existences are intertwined beyond their genetic heritage. The ways of representing a conflicted motherhood in the novel form a spectrum of dissident ideas ranged from the discursive denial of motherhood to filicide, leaving in the violent acts inside their stories a lasting mark in the family’s memory. These aspects will be fundamental in the constitution of the stories, their characters and its subjectivities represented in the novel.