Toward New Models of Femininity in the Works of Virginia Elena Ortea

In the nineteenth century, literature written by women in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic saw an important rise due to the development of women’s education and the circulation of Krausist ideas, Positivism, and Normalismo among criollo intellectuals in both countries. The two countries became spaces where women had the possibility to publish their works. However, Virginia Elena Ortea (1866–1903), who spent her life between the two, produced a body of work which is scarcely acknowledged. The present study aims to shed light on this Dominican fin-de-siècle writer and to analyze the female characters in three works she produced in different genres in order to highlight the various ways she contests the limited options and fixed gender roles in the society of her time.