Female Actants in the Work of Maria Elena Walsh

Abstract

Drawing on a discursive-grammatical approach, this paper analyzes the female characters in the stories “Historia de una Princesa, su papá y el Príncipe Kinoto Fukasuka” (1966) and “Papalina, la tortuga con verruga”, both included in Cuentopos de Gulubú (1966). These characters tend to introduce disruptions both within the literary canon of the marvelous genre and beyond it. In other words, this disruption can be understood not only in terms of the literary originality of María Elena Walsh’s work, but also as a way of questioning the establishment of stereotyped female roles in our society. To support this reading and interpretation of these tales, we conduct an analysis based on the construction of the female actants in the stories. While the concept of actants stems from the study of the structure of literary texts (Propp, 1985 [1928]; Greimas, 1971), where characters fulfill specific roles and support the functionality of the story as a whole (destinator, object, recipient, helper, etc.), in this investigation, we mainly refer to the concept of actants at the clause level. This means that in each clause the actants are defined or redefined as the narrative progresses. Throughout this progression, we observe a series of redefinitions ultimately oriented toward a single objective: challenging certain stereotypes, not only literary but also social.