Both Ocampo and Pizarnik create a space for themselves within the framework of childhood. Both have been mythologized, Ocampo because of her popularity yet obscurity, Pizarnik because of the poète maudit aura around her. My aim has been to draw together these mythologized figures of Argentine literature and examine in detail one aspect of the myth which surrounds them, that is, the fascination with childhood. Ocampo fits quirkily into the highly intellectual society of which she was part, returning frequently to children or childlike characters and making their world her world; she scrutinizes the workings of nostalgia, demythifying childhood innocence, and proposes a flexible attitude to the perceived boundaries between childhood and adulthood. For Ocampo, focusing on the negative as well as the positive aspects of childhood has the concomitant effect of turning the spotlight on those things which we would rather ignore about adulthood, such as hypocrisy; Mónica Zapata asserts that ‘la lectura de los cuentos de Silvina Ocampo […] nos perturba […] al sugerirnos lo que preferiríamos seguramente no ver en nosotros mismos’ (‘Entre niños y adultos’, p. 358). Pizarnik largely absents herself from the radical student and feminist movements of her contemporaries, and instead turns inward, making her poetic persona's locus the memory of childhood, plumbing the depths of her inner feelings of loss and nostalgia for this childhood, associating it with orphanhood and a precocious fascination for death. Although Ocampo's childhood world is generally more grounded than that of Pizarnik, especially when comparing narrative with poetry, it reflects the pecularities of her childhood upbringing in the absence of school (with the obvious exception of the Canto escolar) and the idealization of poverty.

My focus in looking at childhood in these two writers has been largely on close reading of this theme and perspective in their texts and personae, but it is also interesting to consider for a moment broader applications of the concept of childhood in Argentina. At the time when Silvina Ocampo started writing, and her elder sister Victoria was establishing Sur, a certain European tendency to adopt a superior, parent–child position with regard to the Americas was not uncommon.