Desmitificación y reencanto femeninos de lo rural en De bestias y aves, de Pilar Adón, Las herederas, de Aixa de la Cruz, y Habitada, de Cristina Sánchez-Andrade

Abstract

Abstract

This article aims to examine the characteristics of the female gaze on the rural world through the analysis of three novels about rural life: Pilar Adón’s De bestias y aves (2022), Aixa de la Cruz’s Las herederas (2022) and Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s Habitada (2025). After observing the mechanisms that contribute to demystifying the rural space as an idyllic setting, the analysis will address the integration of the unusual as a way to render visible the role of women and thus build new literary genealogies. By intertwining the rural, the feminine, and the magical, it is suggested that the emergence of the unusual in the narrative of rurality is likely to generate an idealising effect that needs to be challenged. In these texts, the countryside is a space dominated by an often threatening nature, inhabited by spirits, beasts, birds of prey and toxic plants. This form of “magical ruralism” questions the association between women and rural nature and, at the same time, opens up the possibility of new collective dynamics building a pluralistic view that gives visibility to women within rural communities. By exploring the current narrative potential of mythical representations, these novels combine content and form in order to offer new aesthetic perspectives to contemporary Spanish rural narrative, drawing on the poetics of apnoea or of hallucination.