Variations on Feminine Portraits in Venezuelan Prose Fiction

Abstract

This paper analyses the pictorial and literary forms of the mysoginistic fin-de-siècle discourse and focuses on the circulation of some representations through different fields of turn-of-the-century art. It takes into consideration the historicity of such representations in order to propose what Eric Mechoulan calls an "a priori archeology" in the case of fin-de-siècle women’s portraits. Depicted, reproduced in pictorial and literary portraits, women are collected in galleries, following a museumification process, which turns them into aesthetic objects and dehumanized idols, stripped from their plurality, petrified in an absolute and unreal individuality. This article explores a portraits gallery taken from modernist Venezuelan fiction in one hand and in the other from turn-of-the-century art (Venezuelan and European).