Confronting Patriarchy

Confronting Patriarchy: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Prose of Cristina Peri Rossi examines three works of the contemporary Uruguayan author who lives in exile as she dialogues with the psychoanalytic discourse endemic to patriarchal society. Peri Rossi's prose, structured like unconscious productions that give free expression to desire and passion as emanating from the forbidden recesses of the psyche, powerfully reveals the message as a treatment for an "ill" society. The language in the three works studied facilitates and reveals the male protagonist's interaction with the desired female object as a regression to a semiotic, pre-oedipal state in a type of "return of the repressed" of consuming desire that has been written out of mainstream patriarchy and that serves to challenge its rational, symbolic order. It is from this vantage point that the author attempts to re-write the conclusions obtained through Lacanian and patriarchal discourse so that woman can emerge as a subject in her own right.