Intertextual Sexual Politics: Illness and Desire in Enrique Gómez Carrillo's Del amor, del dolor y del vicio and Aurora Cáceres's La rosa muerta

This study explores the intertextuality between Aurora Cáceres's La rosa muerta (1914) and the novel Del amor, del dolor y del vicio (1898) by her ex-husband, Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Cáceres strategically mentions Gómez Carrillo's novel in La rosa muerta to invite a reading of her work in dialogue with his. Both narratives follow the sexual awakening of an independently wealthy young widow, but exhibit important differences. Gómez Carrillo's sexually transgressive character closely follows the aesthetic and discursive norms of fin de siècle literature that pathologized female desire. His fictional women are a literary and aesthetic experiment in female decadentism, one that he ultimately puts aside by marrying the characters by the end of the novel. Cáceres's narrative revises Gómez Carrillo's representations of female sexuality and modernista representations of women more broadly. I analyze Cáceres's writing of the female body, illness, and desire to demonstrate the ways in which Cáceres simultaneously critiques misogynistic discourses of the turn of the century and presents positive and realistic images of women's sexuality for future generations of women. La rosa muerta is a modernista novel that anticipates the emboldened attitude toward female eroticism and the provocative writing style of women writers of the avant-garde and the boom.