House of Beauty: childhood as a key to analysis

Abstract

Childhood has been a leitmotif in literature. Through the childhood perspective, literary works provide us mirrors in which we confront the mystery of existence; the reflections challenge us to face the possibility of remaking our lives, of reweaving what in the past was painful or was produced as potentiality. The article examines the different approaches to childhood in the novel House of Beauty by Melba Escobar de Nogales. First, we find the return to childhood as an explanation of the adult character. A second approach traces the appearance of children in the present tense of the main plot and the matrices of meaning that sustain it. A third approach glimpses the reference to childhood as a way of naming otherness. A fourth allusion raises a parallel between the condition of childhood, being a woman and its implications in sexuality.