No soy la que procuras'. Relectura de arquetipos en la poesía de María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira

the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, sprang the singular voice of Uruguayan poet María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (1875-1924). Nevertheless, it has been virtually overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to verify, through some poems of Vaz Ferreira, the asymmetry between genders considering the symbolic, the “idealized”, the so called “hierarchical dualism”. We will examine the difficulty that women had in establishing a non-hierarchical relational dialogue –affectionate and intellectual– with their male counterparts, especially at the beginning of the 20th century. The poetic ambition of this Uruguayan poet did not emerge in order to emphasize qualities associated with the “feminine virtues” (modesty, delicacy, purity), but to unravel the acute tension between her artistic identity and the social destiny imposed by tradition. Therefore, in her poetry, re-created female archetypes engage in a dialogue with conventional codes of masculinity.