Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Onetti, Juan Carlos - Mark Millington (essay date March 1987)

Mark Millington (essay date March 1987)

SOURCE: Millington, Mark. “No Woman's Land: The Representation of Women in Onetti.” Modern Language Notes 102, no. 2 (March 1987): 358-77.

[In the following essay, Millington examines the ways in which Onetti's female characters, although they are marginalized in his texts, serve to define and support male identity and experience.]

“… the difference of the woman is the visibility of the man …”

—Stephen Heath

In Onetti we read a narrative of male subjectivity. It is a narrative founded on male characters' heterogeneity, incompleteness and difficulties. In a crucial sense, women characters barely exist—their containment within the categories of a male discourse is what constitutes them as well as what denies them. They have no independence of the male problematic, so that even the privileged, marginal women are to be understood as marginal to the...

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