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Abstract
In totalitarian regimes, the Other is marginalized, prosecuted, and often eliminated from the national spectrum. While Spain is just beginning to confront the violations of the post-Civil War era, the nations of the Latin American Southern Cone have continued to struggle with the trauma and memory related to the violence perpetrated by the dictatorship. Through a psychoanalytic reading based on Julia Kristeva's theories of the abject and Joseph Campbell's investigations of myth within the hero's journey, I show how the young female heroes of El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) and La rebelión de los conejos mágicos (The Rabbits' Rebellion) embark upon a journey of personal self-discovery and self-transcendence in the marginal space of the abject, and how, by doing so, they release the repressed stories of the victims of these dictatorships. Through their journeys in these fairy-tale settings emerges a transformation of consciousness that provides more comprehensive readings of history at the universal level.
Recommended Citation
Swier, Patricia L.. 2011. "New Age Fairy Tales: The Abject Female Hero in El laberinto del fauno and La rebelión de los conejos mágicos." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (Fall): 65-79. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol1/iss1/15
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