Esther Tusquets' El mismo mar de todos los veranos and "Carta a la madre": The Healing Transformation of the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Petersen, Julie M.
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	The aim of this thesis is to explore how Esther Tusquets’ “Carta a la madre” can be viewed as an evolution of Elia’s emotional struggles in her search for forgiveness and closure with her mother in El mismo mar de todos los veranos, and explain why Tusquets would chose to reintroduce these characters (or slight variations of them) to readers close to twenty years later. There are differences that exist between the works and some characters are altered, but my analysis illustrates that “Carta a la madre” is not a continuation of Elia’s story, but rather an evolution of the mother daughter relationship that ultimately has the “narrative space” and the epistolary characteristics that allow for healing. By presenting readers with a variation of the story using another genre, Tusquets suggests that there can be closure and progress made when an external, dialogic action is taken. Closure and resolution with the mother was not possible in El mismo mar de todos los veranos. Once the narrative voice steps beyond the representative thought process to action (letter writing), there is a “space” for acceptance, forgiveness and healing. Here the act of writing is both metaphorical and “emblematic.” By comparing and contrasting the structure of the stream-of-conscious novel and epistolary short story in Chapter 2 we can assess the importance of the mode of narration or the means of communication and come to some agreement about the limitations and allowances that each genre provides. 2 Chapter 3 focuses on the similarities and differences of re-emerged archetypal characters that explore a possible resolution with similar voices but differing results. Analysis of the relationship between mother and daughter in the early work (El mismo mar de todos los veranos 1977) and later work (“Carta a la madre” 2006) is the focus of chapter 4. “Carta” provides evidence for the solutions we see in the evolution of the mother daughter relationship. We can begin to understand Tusquets’ rationale for her epistolary short story and analyze the requirements for conflict resolution in “Carta,” a resolution or experience that seemed impossible in Tusquets’ earlier work. The most important thread binding the two works is the mother-daughter relationship. This relationship is central to the plot of both works and is central to the emotional and psychological development of the narrative voice. However, in El mismo mar, the cycle of hate and disgust is never broken while in “Carta a la madre” the epistolary narrative leads to retrospective forgiveness and, therefore, resolution. What is most compelling about this study is that “Carta” may provide a new narrative model for coming to terms with the archetypal relationship between mother and daughter for contemporary Spanish women writers.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1251&context=etds
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article