Between Literature and Photography: The Myth of Medusa in Rosario Castellanos's Album de Familia (the Female Condition and the Mirror Problem)

In the present article, we propose that Rosario Castellanos uses the Myth of Medusa to visibilize the way in which women writers in Mexican culture has been "fixed" -the same way a photograph is fixed- as some monstrous stereotype; at the same time, this Myth is used to construct an allegory of reflexive figures where women can be otherwise inscribed. "Album de familia" (1971) may be read in the story, a story intermedial that, like photographs, presents female characters looking for another way of being and self-representing, thus confronting stereotypes and male discourses, as well as a set of binary oppositions of Western culture that limits and restrains them to a sole way of being and expressing themselves