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! c h a p t e r 1 alfonsina storni’s misfits A Critical Refashioning of Poetisa Aesthetics In May 1919, as her regular contribution to the Buenos Aires periodical La nota, Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) crafted the whimsical tale “Historia sintética de un traje tailleur” (The concise story of a tailored dress). In this brief memoir, the garment traces its metamorphosis from the sheep that provided its wool to the tailored suit of a bourgeois porteña to the mended attire of a widowed mother who rides the streetcar to work and, finally, to the refashioned dress of a lively young girl. Now outgrown and discarded in the trash, which also includes scraps of writing, the dress reflects on its embodied education through the lives of the women it has clothed (Nosotras, 44– 48). Storni wrote this piece when she was twenty-seven, the year she published her third poetry collection, Irremediablemente. Its story raises key issues that marked Storni’s lifelong inquiry into the gender inequities of Argentine modernity and the role of women as writers and intellectuals. Storni’s creative activity culminated with her innovative poetry in Ocre (1925), Mundo de siete pozos (1934), and Mascarilla y trébol (1938), as well as in the groundbreaking “pyrotechnic farces” Cimbelina en 1900 y pico and Polixena y la cocinerita (1931). While critics accurately situate her achievements in the experimentalism of this later writing, Storni pursued the questions invoked by the memoir of a tailored dress in the seven poetry collections, four plays, six children’s plays, and countless journalistic chronicles, short stories, and essays that constitute her work. Fashion, as summoned by the mercurial traje tailleur provided a central metaphor for her inquiry into the embodied constitution of the self in the world. In this tale, the shifting semiotics of the garment through the human actors it clothes for diverse social roles point to the cardinal position of performance in Storni’s artistic formation, initiation into public literary life, and mode of cognitive inquiry. The dress’s hand-me-down identity provides an apt metaphor for Storni’s poetic, journalistic, and dramatic investigation into the power of inherited cultural scripts in human interaction . At the same time, the garment’s reincarnations through the bodies alfonsina storni’s misfits !31 that wear it intimate the susceptibility of those librettos, even as they are repeated, to change. The concluding metonymy of the dress’s remains with scraps of writing typifies Storni’s frequent juxtaposition of fashion and books, two powerful transmitters and challengers of cultural norms, to speak about women’s conflictive relationship to intellectual life. It also connects this process of reenactment and change to Storni’s ongoing struggle, as Argentina’s most renowned poetisa of her time, to refashion this public role and its prescribed expressive modes for women, not only into a more comfortable fit but also into a full-blown critique of its own terms. Critics have argued that Storni’s abandonment of the clichéd love poetry of her youth for mature experimental writing signaled artistic liberation. But my focus here is her embrace of the poetisa identity as the available role for a woman seeking to write and her redirection of the knowledge thus gleaned into an analysis of the gender dynamics of Argentine intellectual life. Storni was of two minds about the poetisa role right from the start, and over time this ambivalence produced her unique conception of women intellectuals. On the surface the poetisa lyrical mode consolidated gender stereotypes of a confessional, self-abnegating femininity. But declaiming one’s work before an audience, with embellishments of gesture and tone, constituted a fundamental element of the poetisa role, and Storni repeatedly mined the critical and analytical power of this performative malleability. Fraught with contradictions, the high-profile position Storni secured in Buenos Aires cultural life, from her arrival in the city in 1911 until her untimely death in 1938, was unprecedented. While she gained popularity as a poetisa enacting the designated themes of love and loss, she was also the first modern Latin American poet to write widely read feminist poems, including the mordant “Hombre pequeñito” or the more reflective but still polemical “Tu me quieres blanca.” Storni became the first Argentine woman to participate as a writer, rather than as somebody’s significant other, in the lively literary gatherings of Buenos Aires. She was a popular lecturer and poetry declaimer for women’s groups...

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