Literary recreation of a rite of passage

Abstract

According to Victor Turnes, rituals are the means through which societies adapt themselves to internal or external, personal or collective changes, and whose complexity depends on the stratification of the society in which it takes place. The case we propose is Rito de iniciación by Rosario Castellanos, a posthumous novel that deals with the changes of Cecilia, a nineteen-year-old woman recently arrived in the country's capital to start a university career. Arnold van Gennep uses the term “rite of passage” to mark and establish transitions in different states, whose process consists of three phases: separation, liminal and aggregation. These three moments are represented in the novel of Castellanos, since the character develops changes that contrast the Cecilia of the beginning with the one of the end.