Erzsébet Báthory en la Obra de Alejandra Pizarnik

Erszebet Bathory is the main character of Alejandra Pizarnik's last book La Condesa Sangrienta published in 1971. This essay traces the significance of the Countess in the work of Pizarnik, and also how the book may be evaluated as the first consistent probing in Latin-American literature of the themes of cruelty and eroticism within a purely feminine context. Pizarnik takes Countess Bathory and her legendary crimes and transforms her into a mythical creature of obsessive passions who can only be appeased through the murder of young peasant girls. Pizarnik turns Bathory into a counterpart of such famous literary characters as Gilles de Rais, Blue Beard, and the Marquis de Sade. The text also indicates Pizarnik's affiliation with ' la littérature maudite/and with poets like Daumal, Gombrowicz, Baudelaire Artaud, and Sade. Each chapter opens with an epigraph taken from one of these writers, and each chapter consists of the minute description of a specific torture. The most significant value of the text and its validity in Latin-American literature is its perverse and subtle use of cruelty and its vision of death in its relation to liberty. Pizarnik describes here, for the first time, a feminine archetype of cruelty: in this century there is no other example of such refinement in torture and such detached pleasure in observing the many agonies of death. It is a text which explores the possibilities of evil-" total liberty in human beings is horrible"--as Pizarnik discovers-and her readers later on-with still another revelation to her soul.