A heart that beats on the outside: Passionate images in Frida Kahlo's letters

Abstract

Between the years of 1930s and 1940, Mexico witnessed the emergence, from the Mexican revolution’s ashes, a singular figure. Frida Khalo is described, even today, by the social imaginary - in her paintings and photographs - as an epoch-making woman who became s symbol of struggle, and that remains nowadays. Several social images were created based on the Mexican painter, outlined in the dialogic game between her work and her interlocutors. Taking these assertions as references, this article aims to analyze a letter written by Frida for one of her loved/lover interlocutors - one of the men with whom she got affectively involved during distinct periods of her life -, and to map the ethé built by her in statements in which she verbally “paints” an image of herself that reveals itself through the lexical choices elected for talking about love, betrayal, friendship, pain, and being in the world. We have refined an aesthetic and ideological image of Frida Khalo that is covered by distinct passion and by diverse dialogic degrees. In order to do so, our analysis is based on M. Bakhtin’s the theoretical assumptions on the image construction itself, and Maingueneau on discursive ethos