Ladies of Providence: The Absence of Motherhood and Motherland in Irene Vilar's <i>The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets</i>

Abstract

In this article, I offer an analysis of Puerto Rican author Irene Vilar‘s The Ladies‘ Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets, not merely as a non-fictional account of a single family‘s tragedy but as a metaphor for an entire island‘s struggle with the violent and traumatic effects of colonization and modernization. I aim to show how Vilar‘s memoir forms part of a larger body of work done by intellectuals on the problems of collective memory in Puerto Rico, particularly as these questions relate to women‘s experience during the years following Operation Bootstrap.