The Deceptive Defense of a Woman Scorned: The Unreliable Narrator and Her Reworking of the Truth in Marina Mayoral’s Casi Perfecto
Document Type
Article
Journal Title
Hispanic Studies Review
Publication Date
10-29-2025
Abstract
Marina Mayoral’s female protagonist and first-person narrator in her epistolary noir novel, Casi perfecto (2007), is a writer by trade whose representation of reality and herself are, at times, contradictory and hence disorienting for even the most discerning of readers. In response to the accusation of her youngest son that she plotted the perfect murder of his father (her ex-husband), modeling it after the fictional homicide of one of her male protagonists, Ana—Mayoral’s narrator—drafts a letter in which she unfalteringly maintains her innocence while unrepentantly rationalizing her questionable behavior and decisions through the years. As she composes her defense, Ana engages in a dual exercise of rhetoric and autobiographical self-fashioning with the aim of convincing both her implicit and explicit reader of her coherence and authenticity and, thus, exonerating herself in the process. Nevertheless, Ana undermines the original purpose of her epistle by either neglecting or brazenly refusing to conceal her character flaws, self-contradictions, and actions, not to mention her anger and frustration in response to her son’s accusations, as well as the deliberately ambiguous nature of her text and motivations. As her unintended—or perhaps intended—audience, we therefore come to question both who she claims to be and the very reliability and purpose of her account. In this essay, I depart from Roberta Johnson’s belief that Mayoral’s narrator-protagonist is indeed a reliable one, by identifying her many inconsistencies, her use of irony, and, as she herself discloses, her possible motivations for wanting her ex-husband dead. With the help of Dorrit Cohn’s seminal studies on discordant narration and narrative consciousness in self-narrated monologues, I explore the paradoxical manner in which Ana fashions herself as a way to simultaneously control the narrative and persuade her reader into accepting her version of the truth, while I also maintain that the narrator’s defense doubles as a feminist apology, or self-justification, for her actions and premeditated crime.
Publisher Statement
Hispanic Studies Review is an international refereed journal published twice a year by the Department of Hispanic Studies at the College of Charleston. The journal welcomes submissions on cultural studies, applied and theoretical linguistics, and the literatures of the Spanish-speaking worlds and their contact zones. Hispanic Studies Review particularly invites scholarship with approaches that are interdisciplinary and/or engage innovative dialogues.
Recommended Citation
Delgado-Poust, Antonia. “The Deceptive Defense of a Woman Scorned: The Unreliable Narrator and Her Reworking of the Truth in Marina Mayoral’s Casi Perfecto.” Hispanic Studies Review, vol. 9, no. 2, Oct. 2025.
Comments
This article is freely available online.