‘Cuerpo de mujer’: Neruda's Sex Education

Abstract

This article aims to reconsider the alleged sexism of Pablo Neruda's early poetry, and in particular Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) from an historical perspective. The first part deals with Neruda's involvement with the anarchist journal Claridad, the radically libertarian ethos of which extended to both the issue of women's rights in contemporary Chilean society and the question of the sexual repression of women. The second section examines what critics have deemed to be one of the crudest examples of machismo in Neruda's early works (the opening stanza of the first of the Veinte poemas) in the light of a whole series of similar metaphors found in many of the political articles that appeared in Claridad between 1920–1924.

This article aims to reconsider the alleged sexism of Pablo Neruda's early poetry, and in particular Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) from an historical perspective. The first part deals with Neruda's involvement with the anarchist journal Claridad, the radically libertarian ethos of which extended to both the issue of women's rights in contemporary Chilean society and the question of the sexual repression of women. The second section examines what critics have deemed to be one of the crudest examples of machismo in Neruda's early works (the opening stanza of the first of the Veinte poemas) in the light of a whole series of similar metaphors found in many of the political articles that appeared in Claridad between 1920–1924.

El presente artículo replantea desde un punto de vista histórico el sexismo atribuido a los primeros poemas de Pablo Neruda, y más concretamente a los Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924). La primera parte explora la aportación de Neruda a la revista anarquista Claridad, cuyo programa radicalmente libertario englobaba tanto el tema de la represión sexual de la mujer como la cuestión de los derechos femeninos en la sociedad chilena contemporánea. La segunda parte investiga lo que la crítica ha considerado como uno de los ejemplos de machismo más toscos de las primeras obras de Neruda (la estrofa de apertura del primero de los Veinte poemas) a la luz de una serie de descripciones de temática similar que aparecen en una gran cantidad de artículos políticos publicados en la revista Claridad entre los años 1920–1924.