Castas o marchitas. "El amor del colibrí y "La flor muerta" de Manuel Ocaranza

Abstract

Angélica Velázquez rebuilds in this article the vision of the “faded woman”, character who dominated in the sphere of the Mexican Romanticism during the last years of the 19th- century. She has based her search on the reading of two paintings by Manuel Ocaranza and explains what she calls the pervert fascination, meaning the feeling that lead the faded woman to construct the idea of the masculine imaginary. The article then, analyzes the roll of the woman in a period that transformed the values of the colonial society into the values of the Liberal Republic. She bases on different sources such as iconography analysis, literary documents to support the artistic demonstrations, and documents that are contemporary to the epoch she studies. The author explains the process by which the painting and the novel adopted the genre style, the one that portrays the prevailing customs.