The book analyzes how Marta Brunet, Maria Luisa Bombal and Diamela Eltit develop a counter narrative to the Chilean literary canon. They revisit and defy female narratives within a liberal Catholic modernity by representing the flaws of a patriarchal ideology through sexual and legal contracts. In these aesthetic projects gender is a form of marginalization embedded in an authoritarian state morality and law regulated by marriage and the family. In this context, female aggression and unconventional sexuality become a double threat both to masculinity and to the process of modernization. These writers challenge a logocentric linguistic system through discursive strategies that organize a new narrative model, showing that motherhood and womanhood inevitably conflict in the public sphere and rights of citizenship. Bernardita Llanos M. is Professor of Spanish and Women's Studies at Denison University.