Un bateau ivre propio:Pizarnik lectora de Simone de Beauvoir y Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The work of the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) has not been sufficiently connected with the feminist movement. However, she read the works written by Virginia Woolf and by Simone de Beauvoir, whom she met in the 1960s in Paris. Many of the questions that insistently appear in The second sex (1949) are also present in Pizarnik’s work, and specifically in her diaries, from the difficulties that a woman has to face to choose poetry over family, matrimonial and maternal commands, to less obvious issues such as child sexuality. Also, the text of A room of one’s own (Woolf, 2002 [1929]) is very influential for Pizarnik, both explicitly and implicitly, in the configuration of the “room of her own”: a space ambivalently valued, since it is a refuge and a prison at the same time, as it happens with the body and the poem in Pizarnik’s writings.