High tide of desire in Salvador Reyes’s narrative

Abstract

This article proposes the study of the growth and expansion of female desire in Salvador Reyes’s narrative of Valparaíso: El café del puerto (1926), Piel nocturna (1936), Mónica Sanders (1951), and Valparaíso, puerto de nostalgia (1955). The transformation of female characters in these texts has been studied. We propose that these character change from objects of desire to desiring subjects, which clearly opposes the androcentric perspective of Chile in the first part of the 20th century. Likewise, the study analyzes a triad of lesbian scenes in Piel nocturna, which have not been studied in previous literaryresearch. These scenes anticipate the development of certain lesbian components in Chilean literature.