Memories of a country mouse: Elizabeth Bishop's short stories

• Autores: Ernesto Suárez Toste
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 931-940
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Prose, while not properly a short-story cycle, is given enviable internal coherence by the autobiographical character of most pieces. Divided rather arbitrarily between ‘Memory: People and Places’ and ‘Stories’ —as though the reader would appreciate such distinction between “Primer Class” and “Memories of Uncle Neddy”— these pieces stand in their apparent simplicity as another enigma for readers and scholars. Bishop’s criteria for inclusion in either group are far from clear. Whereas “The Sea and Its Shore” or “In Prison” are clearly fables of introspection displaying Bishop’s highly idiosyncratic fantasy —and hence appropriately grouped under ‘Stories’— there is a clear autobiographical connection between some ‘memories’ (notably “Primer Class” and “The Country Mouse”) and other ‘stories’ such as “In the Village” or “Gwendolyn”. In this paper I explore some characteristics shared by the pieces in each group, and propose reasons for Bishop’s grouping them in such a personal manner.