Philippine E-Journals

Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s The Last Full Moon and the Problematique of Female Self-Representation

Beatriz Pilar Lim

Discipline: Humanities, Philippine Literature

 

Abstract:

This study explores Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s memoir, The Last Full Moon, and how she creates, through her empowering language, representations of her multiple selves in the context of “others” who have played integral roles in her life. Furthermore, this study also aims to unearth the silenced aspects of the writer’s life imposed by patriarchal society. To do these tasks, this study utilizes “autobiographics,” a theory on female self-representation pioneered by Leigh Gilmore, which focuses on uncovering the contradictions, interruptions, resistance, and eruptions in the texts as strategies of self-representation. Cordero-Fernando constructs many different selves, and her self-construct as a writer is her narrator, the self that sees through (and sometimes goes beyond) the social impositions of patriarchy and the boundaries set for women by Philippine culture.