Prosopography and Etopeia in Rosa Montero’s Character Bruna Husky

Abstract

This article endeavors to study the literary image of Bruna Husky, the fictional character in Rosa Montero’s novels, according to the theory of the artistic image developed by Georges Didi-Huberman. This critic explores the artistic image as a symptom, that is, as a conflict among latent contradictory impulses, located not only in the author’s unconscious, but in society as a whole. As a character, Bruna husky shows a conflict between prosopography (visual image, physical description) and etopeia, (a character’s values and actions). While Bruna Husky’s prosopography shows us a masculinized woman, her etopeia reveals a woman who is still subservient to her male partner through the romantic mystique of ideal love. In this way, Bruna Husky represents an interesting but failed attempt to find a literary image of an independent woman in our time.