Modernismo and the Audacious Illness Narratives of Aurora Cáceres and María Luisa Garza

Mainstream Spanish American modernista imagery associated illness with the uniqueness and creativity of male writers, and with the languishing female body as aesthetic object. This essay discusses audacious illness narratives—Aurora Cáceres's 1914 novels La rosamuerta and Las perlas de Rosa and María Luisa Garza's La novia de Nervo (1922) and Tentáculos de fuego (1930)—that reinterpret the modernista image of the ailing female body. Cáceres and Garza reinterpret the modernistaaesthetic and early 20th-century social body metaphors through narratives that detail physical experiences of gendered ailments situated in social contexts of inequality. Although both writers invoke modernista motifs, illness in these texts stands as a personal and sociocultural crisis rather than serving purely aesthetic purposes.