Más que naturalismo: melodrama, exceso y abandono en "La gallina degollada" de Horacio Quiroga.

This work proposes another reading of the story La gallina degollada by Horacio Quiroga, through which we can establish the limits of naturalism in the tale. We start with a traditional reading to notice the introduction of elements related to abandonment, melodrama, and excess. In this way, the monotonous note brought to the tale by naturalism is not enough to justify the dimension of what is told; it is not enough just to think in the objective of all naturalist fiction: to demonstrate the workings of social pathologies. The tale updates the horror grasped from Edgar A. Poe and Guy de Maupassant (taken to the extreme). It makes it more real and, in collating it with the pages of crimes and rarities of the press of the time, infanticide -which can also be read as a form of abandonmentarticulates with a rhetorical intuition: the melodrama and sensationalism typical to many of the works of fiction of this writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]