Feminism’s Unruly Temporalities: Démodé Aesthetics in Aurora Cáceres’s La Rosa Muerta (1914)

Abstract:In this essay, I suggest that Aurora Cáceres’s embrace of the démodé, both at the level of form—through an “out-of-fashion” naturalistic style—and as a thematic focus of La Rosa Muerta (1914), is a deliberate choice that determines the author’s radically modern feminism. I propose readings of different moments from the novella from the perspective of démodé as an aesthetic category that evinces a particular relationship to time and, as such, it encompasses all of its iterations—the out of fashion, the untimely, and the out of timeliness. These readings complicate not only the narratives of the straightforward modern developmental chronopolitics, which organizes the logic of most of the contemporary literary works of the time, but also will reveal how this novella contributes to a feminist theorizing of time. This approach both destabilizes our dominant and naturalized models of feminism’s timing and challenges the traditional generational logic that has guided its reading in Latin America. By bringing questions of temporality and a revision to the concept of women’s time to bear on the understanding of this novella, this essay aims at complicating the linear and generational thinking that has influenced the reading of feminism in this modernist text, and perhaps in the work of Latin American women writers in general.