La ironía y la (re)producción en El eterno femenino de Rosario Castellanos

This article examines the use of irony in El eterno femenino as a means to contest the perpetuation of repressive and limiting social constructions. Castellanos' text presents the reader with a long series of vignettes that portray the impossibility of dialogue, and thus creation, between the sexes. It is precisely via the repetition of frustrated (and frustrating) encounters, however, that Castellanos attempts to combat the recurrence of the eternal feminine dilemma. Because the absence of equality among the textual interlocutors produces automatic and sterile utterances, Castellanos ends each act of her play with a direct appeal to the reader/spectator — the only person capable of altering the eternal reproduction of the feminine struggle.