Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, best known as Quintrala, is a historical figure of the Chilean Colonial period. Within Chilean culture, she became a myth that developed into a literary character variously portraited as a witch, a murderer, and a parricide. To this day, these remain the portraits that have been reproduced in the literary narrative about the character.

In this work I will analyse the symbolic structures of the witch and the femme fatale, which are essential and reiterative in the construction of the narrative discourse about this literary character. For this purpose, I have chosen the figurative structuralism that views a literary text as a sermo mythicus, that is to say, as a myth in which symbolic structures are a part of the mythical discourse advocated by this theory; this kind of discourse is likewise a fundamental and inherent component of the myth of Quintrala that has not been studied as such.

This work aims to examine these symbolic structures embedded in the myth of La Quintrala by analysing and comparing Gustavo Frías’ latest novels, Tres nombres para Catalina: Catrala (2001) and Tres nombres para Catalina: la doña de Campofrío (2003), the work of Magdalena Petit, La Quintrala (2009), that of Mercedes Valdivieso, Maldita yo entre las mujeres (1991), as well as the historical essay Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna ([1877] 1944) in order to establish the existence through time of a rewriting and a transfiguration of the symbolic structures in these literary works.

The purpose of this comparative study is to analyse La Quintrala’s myth as a symbolic discourse, thereby filling a gap in the previous studies about La Quintrala.

The theoretical and methodological framework of this analysis consists of a hermeneutical approach based on the method of figurative structuralism: mythocriticism. This is a dual classification method of symbols: Diurnal and Nocturnal Orders that expose the symbolic structures formed by symbols and archetypes found in mythemes in a compilation of corpora. The first one is Gustavo Frías’ novels Tres Nombres para Catalina: Catrala (2008) and Tres nombres para Catalina: la doña de Campofrío (2008); the second is a historic essay (hypotext), Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala (1944), and four novels: Magdalena Petit’s (2009) La Quintrala, Mercedes Valdivieso’s (1991) Maldita yo entre las Mujeres, Virginia Vidal’s (2002) Oro, veneno y puñal, and Gustavo Frías’ El Inquisidor (2008).

Mythocriticism is employed in the analysis to show what the mythical structure of the hero’s journey (Separation, Initiation, Return) reveal. Such journey is combined structurally with the Mother archetype (White, Red and Black Goddess), the intrinsic archetype of La Quintrala’s myth. The heroic structure unveils its own mythemes, La Quintrala’s and the first corpus’s mytheme through the diachronic and synchronic flow of the hero’s journey. This method permits to identify and compare the progression of the symbolic structures.

The analysis demonstrates a transformation of the symbolic structures between both corpora. This survey reveals that Vicuña Mackenna and Petit, and partially Vidal and El Inquisidor, exhibit an inclination to the diurnal symbols that strengthen, through a heterodiegetic narrator, the representations of the witch-femme fatale, counteractive attributes of the Red and Black Goddesses in the myth. Valdivieso, on the other hand, shows a propensity to the nocturnal symbols of inversion and intimacy that emphasize the Red Goddess’ features, though the novel also exposes La Quintrala as a witch-femme fatale. This exposure occurs through the use of both an autodiegetic narrator –La Quintrala– and a heterodiegetic one –the hypotext embodied in the popular voice– that appear to contrast each other. Finally, in Tres Nombres para Catalina, La Quintrala as the autodiegetic narrator dominates the whole story. She personifies the Great Goddess archetype who bestows her new positive attributes during the adventure. This novel assumes primordially the nocturnal symbolism incarnated by both the mystical and the synthetical structures and relegates the diurnal discourse of the hypotext to a secondary position in the narrative. Nonetheless, Tres Nombres para Catalina’s narrative still relies on the hypotext to reproduce and reconstruct all the mythemes in the myth of La Quintrala.

Conclusively, the results of this analysis indicate that the identification of all the mythemes supports the hypothesis of a transformation in the symbolic structures which characterize La Quintrala in both corpora. This reveals the embodiment of Tres Nombres para Catalina’s own mytheme, consisting of a vindication and a recognition to her indigenous heritage, and the acceptance of her mestizaje. As a consequence, Tres nombres para Catalina, in comparison to the second corpus, diverges and expands the symbolic structures, but still shows a continuity of the myth.