Batallar en los bordes. Heroínas de guerra en cuentos de Ada Elflein

Abstract

During fourteen years (from April 1905 until November 1918), the German-Argentine writer Ada María Elflein (1880-1919) published a weekly text in La Prensa´s Sunday feuilleton: a short-story, a historical note, a travel account. Her work is comprised of five hundred short pieces and, despite having received wide circulation at the time, today it is only partially accessible. Although some of her stories, and especially her travel narratives, have received considerable critical attention, nearly eighty percent of her work remains inaccessible to the public. This article analyzes a series of stories –selected among the more than four hundred that have never been republished and that we have recently rescued from the archives– where female characters are presented as participants of both the battles of Independence and the fights between unitarios and federales in today’s Argentina. In addition to revealing a literary corpus almost unknown (its neglection, undoubtedly, responds to gender issues), this article reviews some of the roles that, according to these fictions, women played in 19th century wars, proposes a place for this series within Elflein´s work and offers a possible typology for the study of this series of feisty women at war.