A Horrifying Encounter: Economies of Desire in Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo’s La muñeca and Rosario Ferré’s “La muñeca menor”

In this article, I show that Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo’s La Muñeca performs almost a perfect inversion of the predominant novelistic form in Puerto Rico of its time, which I define as the “víctima” novel. While most female characters’ downfalls are precipitated by their acting outside of sociosexual norms, the downfall of La Muñeca’s male victim, Julián is directly related to his acting within sociosexual norms. Parting from this point, I use Jacques Lacan’s and Luce Irigaray’s characterizations of desire to compare Sanjurjo’s novel to Rosario Ferré’s short story, “La muñeca menor” and to show the ways in which both texts act to condemn and subvert the phallocentric economies of desire in which their characters operate.