Amparo davila or the horror of being a woman

Abstract

The short story «The Houseguest» by Amparo Davila surprises with its frankly ominous atmosphere. The horror in the story emerges from the representation of a woman tormented by a strange creature. This work analyzes how-through several textual strategies, such as limited focalization and information dosing, among others-the narrative voice manages to build an ambiguity around the story, enabling the fantastic effect that Flora Botton Burla defines as essential to the genre. In addition, the work proposes a complementary interpretation of the story based on the function of the impossible in the ideological context. Focusing on the essay «The Seven Veils Of Fantasy » by Slavoj Zizek, the presence of the houseguest will be interpreted as a phantasmatic projection created by the narrator herself in order to avoid the horror of her daily life.