After reading Madwomen, it is clear that Gabriela Mistral was anything by ordinary, not only in Latin American literature, but in her life as well. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the various poems that make up Mistral’s Madwomen. It gave me a new insight into life as a woman at the time the book was written. A time when women were constrained into a carefully constructed definition of how a woman should act. Her collection of poems reflect experiences and emotions of women, most notably those that have been oppressed. 

The poems are absolutely beautifully written, as they are full of powerful emotion, exploring themes of love, motherhood, discrimination, that captivated me. It was interesting the way Mistral depicted women and our generic forms of emotion including anxiety, anger, love, and some of the feelings we fear to feel, yet all experience as a woman. Her book was revolutionary, as it challenged the notion of what it meant to be a woman, and the confined, contracted definitions we are told by society to fit into. 

As I was reading her poems I felt like I was there, like I was feeling the emotion myself, through the descriptive language and metaphors. For example, the text reads, “I have sat down in the middle of the Earth, my love, in the middle of my life, to open my veins and my chest, to peel my skin like a pomegranate, and to break the red mahogany of these bones that loved you (35).” This small paragraph of the poem is full of powerful emotion that makes me feel the pain of abandonment with her. Another quote that resonated with me was one of the first lines of the book that read, “I killed a woman in me: one I did not love.” 

Gabriela Mistral, being passionate about social justice, brought attention to the discrimination women felt at this time, as they were continuously portrayed as “mad,” and arguably, at times still are. It is often that women are seen as “crazy” and “unreasonable” for their feelings. Mistral touches on this sense of portrayed “craziness” within her poems, however I believe she framed it to be highlighting and celebrating the emotion within women, rather than portraying it as craziness. I believe this helped pave the way for future ideals surrounding women to be broken down and challenged, bringing a more positive mindset to women’s emotions.

My question for this week is: If the book wasn’t written in free-form poetry, do you think the main themes of the text would remain? If not, how would the portrayal of women differ if written in a novel template?