Inhabiting one’s own voice, reflecting on writing: self-figurations of the female poet in Ficciones para una autobiografía (2015) by Ángeles Mora

Abstract

From the 1980s to the present, many Spanish poets have set out to develop new figures for women who write by disarticulation of literary representations of the feminine, usually typecast as “angel of the home”, “muse”, “goddess”, “mother”, “wife”, “lover”. These provocative gestures about the lyrical tradition go through the work of Ángeles Mora, whose irreverence is made in half voice with delicacy and tenderness. In this article, we discuss three autobiographical poems —“Consonancias conmigo en asonante”, “Noche y día” and “Lugares de escritura”— published in her book Ficciones para una autobiografía (2015), where we observe a revision of female subjectivity that rejects patriarchal imaginary and dominant constructions with respect to the poet. Through a textual analysis, we look into various discursive strategies that highlight the artificiality of crystallized images about women in pursuit of build a new female subjectivity developed from within.