Scopophilic Glances and Young Girls in Leopoldo Lugones’s Modernist Poetry

Abstract

Through a close reading of a selection of his poems, this article explores how the Argentine modernist poet, Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938), is portrayed as a peeping Tom or voyeur of young girls. We base the study particularly on the article, “Leopoldo Lugones. La Luna Doncella en su poesia erotica” (1981), by Juan José Hernández, who concludes that the repeated glances and suggestive commentaries about young girls are actually the poet’s repressed fear of mature women. From Freud, we conclude that such repression produces an instinctive impulse such as scopophilia to control the fear, reject it totally, or keep it out
of his conscience.