The emergence of divas in the Latin American cultural field: artistic representations in the modernist literary chronicle

Abstract

The chronicles that Rubén Darío and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera publish in the Chilean and Mexican presses —respectively— , consolidate, at the end of the 19th century, the diva as a literary topic. These productions give shape to an imaginary that celebrates beauty, harmony and exclusivity. For this reason, this imaginary rebels against the bourgeois conception of art and the life that governs Latin American societies at the end of the cen- tury. In this article, we will study the above-mentioned modernist authors’ representations of Sarah Bernhardt and Adelina Patti in order to analyze the emergence of a diva–like temperament, that is, a narrative where the hegemony of the star ends up overriding the work interpreted itself. We will contrast this corpus with Paul Groussac’s theater critique about Sarah Bernhardt, which focuses on the actress and her acting skills.