The Feminine Archetypes in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia: Modalities and Functions

Abstract

This paper examines the female archetypes that in Lágrimas en la lluvia, a novel published by Rosa Montero in 2011, are drawn from both canonical literature and Western pop culture —from the femme fatale to the domestic angel, passing through Lara Croft or the prototypical chicklit protagonist— to adapt them to the molds of dystopian science fiction. After showing to what extent the construction of the protagonist of the story, Bruna Husky -in which most of these archetypes converge- is based on a certain generic syncretism (in the double sense, sexual and architextual), we will analyse the formal (narrative and hypertextual) and thematic (through topoï and stereotyping phenomena) devices for the construction of female archetypes that are organised around two functions traditionally associated with the representation of women in the Western imaginary: that of the active sensual subject and that of the passive object, focused from the sphere of the intimate, linked in turn to the concept of care. From there we will show how the articulation of these figures with a fairly traditional science-fiction encyclopaedia (populated by cyborgs, artificial planets, plasma weapons and aliens), as well as the hybridism between detective novel, romance novel and bildungsroman, participate in the paratopia (in Maingueneau's terms) of Bruna's character, while enabling an ambivalent poetics of stereotyping that appeals to the reader's expectations in a playful reading pact.