The role of mirrors in Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘In Praise of the Stepmother’ and ‘The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15381/escrypensam.v22i46.24569Keywords:
pictures, notebooks, eroticism, mirror, duplication, stepmotherAbstract
Due to their bond and continuous reading, In Praise of the Stepmother (1988) and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997), as a whole, are considered in this paper “the Vargasllosian erotic work” or “the voyeur’s novel”. The narrator invites us to gaze at a scenery where the semi-incestuous story between Lucrecia and Alfonso takes place, and creates a classic and universal work of art with pictures, books, architecture, music, and, of course, the notebooks. On the basis of Foucault (1968), Deleuze (2005), and Lacan (1998), my hypothesis is that the role of the mirrors in “the voyeur’s novel” can be interpreted, in fact, as a voyeuristic tool, but also as the place where the being recognizes itself, and at the same time, it duplicates. Sooner or later, the characters of the great work look in the mirror, discover themselves, unfold, and become pictures.
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