Creative Flights of Fancy and Imagination in Virginia Elena Ortea’s Risas y lágrimas (1901)

ABSTRACT:Dominican writer Virginia Elena Ortea (1866–1903) has been largely ignored in literary scholarship, and few critics include her in the dialogue surrounding Latin American modernismo. This literary movement was traditionally characterized as male-dominated, apolitical, and marked by preciosista imagery, but contemporary studies by critics such as Gwen Kirkpatrick and Cathy Jrade have debunked its monolithic nature, as it also germinated political and even feminist texts by some overlooked or marginalized writers. In her collection of short stories titled Risas y lágrimas (1901), Virginia Elena Ortea reshapes traditionally modernist preciosista imagery to respond to sexism within the early stages of modernismo and to dialogue with canonical authors such as Rubén Darío, Julián del Casal, and José Martí. In this article, I examine Ortea’s feminist adaptation of modernist tropes such as tropical flowers, winged creatures, and the femme fatale in the stories “En tu glorieta” and “Reverie.” Through the re-imagination and questioning of metaphorical meanings of such tropes, Ortea engages with women’s subjectivity, marginalization, and creativity, and asserts her place as a modernist woman writer.