Manuela Sáenz: entre el género y la ficcionalización de la historia
Manuela Saenz Aizpuru (1797-1856), known as “The Liberator of the Liberator” and the mistress of Simon Bolivar, is one of the most important and controversial women of the period of Spanish American Independence. Recently, Saenz is on the select list of heroes of this period. However, male contemporaries depicted her as a masculine and immoral woman. Between 1860 and 1940, she was practically erased from official history and literature, due to minimal attention from historians and moralistic positions of society, particularly in her native land, Ecuador. In the middle of the twentieth century, she becomes the subject of writers and biographers who were gradually changing from this ‘negative’ image to a new representation in response to the lack of recognition as a transgressor of women’s spaces (domestic, military, public, and political). This thesis examines Saenz’s representation in a biography and two historical novels of the second half of the twentieth century, and proposes that through re-signification and fictionalization of history it is possible to represent a new figure of Saenz, which corresponds to a type of woman that is closer to the present times in Latin America and, at the same time, becomes a powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political icon.