The Journey in Search of Female Identity in Historia de Java by Elisabeth Mulder and “Si esto es la vida, yo soy Caperucita Roja” by Luisa Valenzuela

Abstract

A journey responds to the human need to go out in search of a new experience that changes the perception of the world: it is an invitation to immerse oneself in interwoven paths that help to understand the past and transgress it. But nevertheless, in the canon of travel literature an unequal relationship has been consolidated in which the male hero (Ulysses) assumes the role of the traveling explorer, while the female heroine (Penelope) is confined to private space and condemned to wait. As a result, the journey that the heroine must undertake is a journey and path that originally belonged to a male world. The starting point of this work is the chronotope of the road (Bajtin 1989), together with the ideas of rebellion and curiosity as the backbone of the search for identity as a female subject on the heroine’s journey. Using Elisabeth Mulder’s Historia de Java (1935) and Luisa Valenzuela’s short story “Si esto es la vida, yo soy Caperucita Roja” (1993), the journey and path are analysed as a symbolic place of learning and finding female identity to re-appropriate a space that traditionally belonged to men. During their inner and outer journeys, the heroines of both stories set out to encounter and discover otherness and their emancipation. They explore the forest of life, with the final journey leading them to the self-discovery of a new female identity, decrypted from the precepts of patriarchy. To this end, we will draw on both the reflections of the authors themselves (Mulder 1979 and Valenzuela 2002) and the research of Bacucz (2015), Cassole (2013), Mañas Martínez (1988, 2006), Díaz (1996), Marković (2013), Martínez (2001), Medeiros- Lichem (2007), Muñoz (1996), Noguerol (2001), Prada (2018), Regazzoni (2012), Zapico (2015) and Zipes (2006).