The representation of the feminine and the sinister

Jade Castellanos Rosales read Inés Arredondo early on and was captivated both by the perfection of the prose and by the unexpected revelation in the plot, which disrupts the meaning anticipated by a simple reading. This writing about motherhood, madness and death in a triad of stories about the feminine and the sinister is the literary research that Jade -- narrator, poet, chronicler of women herself -- presented to the Postgraduate Course in Contemporary Mexican Literature at the UAM in Mexico City. As a reading guide, it will serve to approach the apparently innocent but extremely disturbing writing of Arredondo, one of five or six women writers of the "Generation of the Mid-Century". The theoretical framework of this hermeneutic exercise includes psychoanalytical, feminist and anti-establishment concepts, among others. It uncovers "the disturbing strangeness" in the apparent everyday life of Arredondo's female characters. Here, the twists and turns are not phantasmagorical, but unexpected revelations of the plot, ranging from Freud's Unheimlich to Franca Basaglia's concept of woman as body-for-others.