Dramatic Monologue and Intertextuality: Claribel Alegría and Ovid

Abstract

For the West, the model of Ovid’s Heroides has offered ways to comprehend its female subjects’ passion and alienation when it deals with the spitefulness and the frustration provoked by their male lovers’ abandonment or lack of romantic correspondence. In Ovid’s “fictitious” letters, the historical and mythological characters speak and confess. That model will prove to be the seed for the dramatic monologue in which the poet’s voice is objectified by being projected onto a character other than the author, thanks to poetic expression. This technique serves to camouflage the author behind a poetic mask. In this essay, three instances of dramatic monologue from the poetry of Salvadoran-Nicaraguan writer, Claribel Alegría, are studied. On the one hand, the interpretation reveals the presence of three masks in each dramatic monologue, Ariadna and Medea, and on the other, the intertextual relationship of those monologues with the Heroides of Ovid.