| Chapter 1: | Intellectual Appetites |
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literary production. The other central preoccupation in her writings is the Mexican indigenous peoples. She believes that (like women) they constitute the other; that is, that they are positioned in a marginal space in relation to the center, which men in the male-driven Mexican society occupy.
“Lección de cocina,” one of the short stories in Álbum de familia (Family Album), eavesdrops on the interior monologue of an educated new bride who prepares a meal from a cookbook for her husband while she reflects on her marital life. Although throughout the tale the protagonist mocks the cookbook (a feminine genre traditionally considered peripheral by the masculinist cultural elite), by constructing her short story from the act of reading a cookbook, the author signals her opposition to masculinist hegemonic practices and validates a woman’s discourse constructed independently from the dominant model.
In addition to the interior monologue long associated with women’s writing,4 Castellanos uses many innovative strategies, among them, binary oppositions. Almost ten years would pass before feminist critics like Hélène Cixous would utilize the same strategy to highlight society’s disparate treatment of women.5
One notices the first binary opposition when the protagonist is observing her kitchen:
disinfectants, the rubber footsteps of the cleaners, the hidden presence of illness and death? (7)
Castellanos presents the kitchen as life-giving but also as a sepulcher; the kitchen’s excessive cleanliness with its scent of