Between history and fiction

Evita, the story of a woman’s body

Abstract

The story of Eva Duarte de Perón (1919-1952) has inspired popular imagination round the world and has been the subject of numerous creations and recreations in literature, film and music; it has kindled love and provoked hate. On the occasion of the recent centenary of the birth of Eva Perón in 2019, we propose to study some stories written over the past sixty years on the subject of the body of Argentina’s most famous woman. Taking as the starting point Juan Carlos Onetti’s “Ella”, the first such story which was written in 1953 and published in 1994 and which narrates the death of Eva Perón and the decision to embalm her body, the article studies Rodolfo Walsh’s “Esa mujer” (1965) and Rodrigo Fresán’s “The Only Privileged One” (1991). Onetti’s story inaugurates a long literary tradition, which takes as its subject the mythification and immortalisation of the body of this Argentine female legend, and also anticipates a series of recurring motifs in the later treatments of the subject.