From Perrault’s 'Riquet à la Houppe' to Buero Vallejo’s Casi un cuento de hadas: The evolution of a formidable female voice

Autor: Alison J. Ridley
Rok vydání: 2012
Předmět:
Zdroj: Neohelicon. 39:149-165
ISSN: 1588-2810
0324-4652
DOI: 10.1007/s11059-012-0133-1
Popis: This article discusses the female characters of Casi un cuento de hadas (Almost a Fairy Tale), a play written by twentieth-century Spanish dramatist Antonio Buero Vallejo. Based on Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale titled “Riquet a la Houppe” (“Ricky of the Tuft”), Buero’s play borrows from its literary forebear the latent voice of its female characters. The present study analyzes the role of women in the earlier work in order to demonstrate how their essence is resurrected and developed by Buero in Casi un cuento de hadas to represent a budding feminist voice. While neither Perrault nor Buero were ardent feminists, both imbue their female characters with a palpable strength that warrants attention. In Buero criticism, the women of Casi un cuento de hadas have largely been ignored and other female characters have been credited with being the prototypes for the strong women who appear later in Buero’s oeuvre. This article argues that the women of Casi un cuento de hadas are the true prototypes for Buero’s most formidable female characters; an intriguing assertion given that their voices originated in Perrault’s seventeenth-century text.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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