Before the apple: the concept of time in Voces de mujer of Lourdes Ortiz

Abstract

The collection of stories by Spanish contemporary writer Lourdes Ortiz, Voices of Women, first published in 1991 under the title The reasons of Circe and republished in 2007 (Iberoamericana–Vervuert), is dedicated to the great female characters of Greek mythology and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The author’s purpose is to revise and subvert the ancient stories from the original plot of the Odyssey and the Old Testament, as well as to strip the protagonists (Eve, Penelope, Circe, Salome and Bathsheba) of the stereotypical image that has been attributed to them in previous centuries. By means of carefully premeditated language full of lyricism, Lourdes Ortiz successfully potrays the psychology of her characters, using a short original plot, enriched and intensified with a series of beautiful and suggestive images, complex metaphors and carefully chosen verb tenses. This study aims to investigate the concept of time in the collection Voices of Women of Lourdes Ortiz, challenging the linearity of the narrative, the cyclical and parallel constructions, the distribution of tenses and time references, which were elaborated according to the main objective of the author: to unravel the complex ancestral figures and thus provide a humane vision of the great stories of our collective memory.