Nature, Gender, Race, and (D)Evolution: Belli's El infinito en la palma de la mano, Quiroga's 'El salvaje,' and Darwin's The Descent of Man.

There are unstudied similarities between Horacio Quiroga's titular short story, "El salvaje," from El salvaje (1920), and Gioconda Belli's novel, El infinito en la palma de la mano (2008). Quiroga and Belli allude to and challenge some of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871, 1882). Thus, this article compares and contrasts Quiroga's text with Belli's by exploring evolution and its retrogression or devolution in both works. It also probes how Darwin's ideas impacted the dichotomy of civilization vs. barbarism, especially in Argentina and Sarmiento. I will reconsider this binary by applying the concept of "biotrope" to Quiroga's work: Marran coined the term to analyze Asian literature and culture; Saramago applies it to Latin American writers other than Quiroga. Exemplified by Sarmiento's Facundo: civilización y barbarie (1845), said opposing notions are implied by the title of "El salvaje." However, Quiroga favors what Sarmiento and their contemporaries would have disdained as 'barbaric' by preferring nature to 'civilization' and by inverting the dichotomous trope in "El salvaje." In addition, "Nature, Gender, Race, and (D)Evolution" examines the way in which Belli's perspective of women and nature is mostly ecofeminist in El infinito , despite her imaginative reinterpretation of the Biblical Genesis and of the apocryphal Forgotten Books of Eden , edited by Platt, among other religious sources that she employs. In contrast, Quiroga's approach is patriarchal with respect to women and, ironically, is ambivalent towards nature in "El salvaje." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]