Women’s Modernism in Peripheral Catholic Europe: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld and Concha Méndez Ciara Catherine McGrath A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Anthony L. Geist Gordana Crnkovic Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Comparative Literature ©Copyright 2013 Ciara Catherine McGrath University of Washington Abstract Women’s Modernism in Peripheral Catholic Europe: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld and Concha Méndez Ciara C McGrath Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Brian Reed English Department Hindered by both the gendering of modernism and entrenched patriarchal Catholic notions of gender, the Irish poet Blanaid Salkeld and the Spanish poet Concha Méndez have been respectively erased from their national canon or only partially accepted. Over twenty years later, Bonnie Kime Scott’s seminal work, Gender of Modernism, arguing to reread women poets under a broader definition of modernism is still relevant to the recovery of women’s modernism in Ireland and Spain. Additionally, because of the period in which these two poets wrote (from the mid 1920s to the end of the 1930s), their modernism is of special interest because it involves a feminist critique of state, institution and Catholic patriarchal hierarchy. Their feminist projects (intended or not) are politicized in significant and unexpected ways, and take on a strong political and aesthetic sense of urgency as their respective governments’ contestation of modernity had direct impacts on women’s basic freedoms and liberties. What we find in the recovery of both Irish and Spanish women’s modernism is that it is not simply about trying to find narrative or political alternatives to their male counterparts, or even just about revising the marriage plot. The work of these poets confronts issues between female autonomy and agency and the conservative desire to forcefully shape the constructs of nation, state and family. Our literary histories are limited by national and stylistic boundaries, and these can blind us to other important things. For both Salkeld and Méndez, their independent vocation and position as poets, giving voice to a marginal female experience, create unease in the literary world and complicate their full integration in to the national canon. Also, there are fundamental questions of institutional powers of authority shared between Ireland and Spain that reveal a comparable social situation for both women. These include the rise of right-wing conservativism, based on fascist principles, the politicization of gender, and the inextricable ties between the Catholic Church and the government, all of which help shape similar experiences and reactions in their poetry and allow for new modernist readings beyond stylistic and national limitations. DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my loving family and many friends. Particularly to my late mother Shirley who always believed in my ability to finish and regretfully missed it by one day, and to my father who has supported me every step of the way. I must also thank my dear friends who have been my family away from home, Suzanne Goodman, Kristin Ramsdale, Meg McFarland, Paloma Borreguero and Gus Perez, who never gave up believing I could finish this, and who have spent countless hours over these years helping me overcome my doubts, cheering me on and being my number one supporters. You never tired of me and you never left my side. Thank you. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of those people and institutions who helped make this dissertation possible. First, I would like to thank my advisor and chair, Dr. Brian Reed for all of his encouragement, guidance, patience, and time. His unwavering support and enthusiasm in my work and his dedication to helping me achieve my goals had the most impact in my ability to finish this on time. Not to mention his commitment to reading everything over and over again to ensure that what I submitted was ready to be presented. Thank you so much. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Anthony Geist, who helped provide me access to the National Library of Spain and to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, which helped kickstart my third and fourth chapters after a period of stagnancy, and who with unwavering humor continued to encourage me to just sit down and write, and Dr. Gordana Crnkovic for sticking with me despite the many years of downtime and absences. I would also like to thank the National Library of Ireland, National Archives of Ireland and the Trinity College, Dublin Library for the incredible access to all of their manusicripts and the kind support of all of their staff. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Early Feminist Politics in the Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld 14 Chapter Two: Blanaid Salkeld’s Feminist Modernism in the 1930s 57 Chapter Three: Freedom and Modernity in Concha Méndez’s Early Poetry 111 Chapter Four: Fending Off Silence: Concha Méndez in the 1930s 169 Conclusion 229 Works Cited 234 Women’s Modernism in Peripheral Catholic Europe: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld and Concha Méndez Introduction In 1990 Bonnie Kime Scott’s Gender of Modernism was a groundbreaking anthology that inaugurated the study of British and American women’s modernism. This landmark intervention into modernist studies showed what is now well known, women’s modernism does not necessarily mean the same thing as it does for men’s modernism, and what constitutes formal or thematic innovation in writing can be very different for women. The significant impact of this study in the subsequent decades is seen in the increased scholarship in different female and feminist writers from British and American traditions, though Scott notes that the “scholars have been investigating the marginalized archive of women writers” “[s]ince the early 1970s” (2). It is, however, a very different picture once you turn your attention to the peripheral Catholic countries of Ireland and Spain. The speed of even the basic recovery or reassessment efforts of female modernist poets has been shockingly slow. This issue became glaringly obvious during my research for my MA essay on Mary O’Malley, a contemporary Irish poet where I first encountered the deep-rooted issues of canon erasure faced by women poets. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was published in 1991 in Ireland. In three volumes, in over 4,000 pages, only five women writers’ names appear in the “Contemporary Writing Section” between 1900 and 1988, this includes writers writing in English or Irish (Ní Dhomhnaill 1291). The local and international reaction to the continued neglect of women from the national canon in modern day Ireland was one of outrage. This led to the commissioning of initially just one volume dedicated to women, but by 2002, two volumes documenting Irish women’s history and culture were published. In its introduction, one of the editors points to 1 something that underlines an important difference between the recovery of Irish women’s writing (and Spanish too, for that matter) and that of their American and British counterparts: “In the 1970s and 1980s… the project of defending and redefining Ireland did not accommodate the reevaluation and recovery of women’s words and history” (Bourke, IV xxxiv). Instead, both Ireland and Spain were looking to shed their anti-modern and anti-progress reputations, and grant women some of the basic freedoms and liberties denied them over the last forty or so years. Despite the Field Day fiasco, by the end of the 1990s there was a general consensus that women’s poetry “was experiencing a renaissance” “in the publishing houses and the bookstores” (Moloney 4). Yet in a collection of essays published in 2003 (a year after the women’s Field Day volumes) about Irish women writers and poets, Caitriona Moloney observes that this “renaissance” did not translate or was not reflected “in academia, literary criticism, and journalism, [where] women writers still [were] not get[ting] anthologized, critiqued, or reviewed with the same attention as men” (Moloney 4). The exception belongs to four contemporary women poets whose names appear over and over again in anthologies, articles and reviews, these are: Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. I had not considered the MA essay on O’Malley a recovery project, but it became clear that little to no attention was given to poets outside of the four named, and once theirs was mentioned in an anthology, review, etc… it appeared not much more needed to be said about Irish women’s writing. More recently, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry was published in 2010, and the blurb on the Harvard University Press website states, “never before has there been a single- volume anthology of modern Irish poetry so significant and groundbreaking…. Collected here is a comprehensive representation of Irish poetic achievement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” Only nine women are represented out of over fifty, and there are no women named 2 prior to Boland, McGuckian, Ní Dhomhnaill or Ní Chuilleanáin. This “comprehensive representation” furthers the misguided belief that no woman of significant import wrote poetry before the 1960s. The other five names suggest an attempt to reflect the “renaissance” of contemporary women poets. The absence of any female modernist poet demonstrates the importance of this recovery effort for Irish studies. There is no identical example like the Field Day controversy in Spain. However, contemporary Spanish women poets are experiencing the same anthology issues as their Irish counterparts. Echoing Caitriona Moloney’s complaint over the disconnect between the “renaissance” of women writers publishing and their appearance in anthologies, María Rosal states in her introduction to her 2006 anthology Con voz propia: Estudio y antología comentada de la poesía escrita por mujeres, 1970-2005: “Boom de la poesía escrita por mujeres.”..