“What ghost would it be?” Spiritist elements in Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia

Abstract

This article identifies the spiritualist elements that are present in the novel Ifigenia (1924), written by Teresa de la Parra, both at the lexical level of the work and at the argument-narrative level. To this end, definitions of Spiritism are reviewed, on the one hand, from the Spiritist perspective and, on the other, from non-Spiritist perspectives. Biographical documents of Teresa de la Parra are also incorporated (letters from the author and testimonies from her close friend Lydia Cabrera) in which she refers to her adhesion to spiritism, which explains why her literary work contains that doctrine, to the point of constructing its protagonist as a medium of the “involuntary speaker” type (according to spiritist concepts) and of giving an outcome to the novel with an action that corresponds to the materialization of a “mocking spirit”.