FROM HUNGERS TO APPETITES: WOMEN WRITERS AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Julie Mann Lind May 2013 ©2013JulieMannLind FROM HUNGERS TO APPETITES: WOMEN WRITERS AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Julie Mann Lind Cornell University 2013 My dissertation reveals a feminist discourse in texts written by Spanish women who use hunger and appetite as literary tropes after the post Civil War Hunger Years. I argue that the symbolic employment of hunger and appetite allows women writers to find feminism within traditional feminine identities. Drawing attention to the food women cook for others, particularly in their role as mothers, these authors ask us to question the hungers of women themselves. Once they identify various feminine hungers, they begin to explore the emergence of appetite. The emergence of appetite from a condition of hunger is where, I argue, a feminist impulse is manifest. I frame my study in the symbolic connotations of hunger and appetite in the writing of two Spanish women grouped with the Generation of ’27, Rosa Chacel and María Zambrano. In Chacel’s diaries and Zambrano’s philosophical essays, they reveal the tensions that form as women struggle to give their bodies the artistic and intellectual nourishment that they need in the first decades of the Franco regime. They also show that when a woman engages with appetite, a natural desire to explore the world or, as Chacel says, to say “yes” to everything, she is more connected to herself, to art, to knowledge and to others. In the third chapter, I turn to texts of Generation of ’50 novelist, Mercedes Salisachs, who explores the hungers repressed in women who grow up during the Franco Regime and live into the Spanish Transition to Democracy. I finish my study with contemporary novelist, Adelaida García Morales, who points to the emergence of appetite from within a chronically repressed feminine hunger as key to re- establishing the health of both the individual and of the community after the Regime. By revealing the feminist function of hungers and appetites in literature from the 1940s to the 1980s, my dissertation challenges the notion that Spain is a nation that lacks a strong feminist presence during the Franco regime. I highlight that Spanish feminism re-appropriates the female body as a site where an active exploration of life emerges from within lack itself. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Julie Mann Lind is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her specialization is 20th century Spanish peninsular literature with a focus on women writers. In 2005 she completed a Master’s of Arts in Hispanic literatures at New York University’s graduate program in Madrid. In 2004 she received a Bachelor’s of Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. iii This study is dedicated to Joshua Lind and the late Susan and Constance Piccirillo. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the enduring academic support of my co-chairs, Debra Castillo and Patty Keller. Their constant feedback, encouragement and patience have been crucial to the completion of this project. I am also grateful to my third committee member, Gerard Aching, for coming on board late in the project and for being a continual source of support during the year preceding my defense. This project is also indebted to academic conversations I had with and feedback I received from Walter Cohen of Cornell and José María García Rodríguez of Duke University, Anjouli Janzon and Isabel Pereira of NYU, and Elizabeth Scarlett of SUNY Buffalo. In addition to the academic support I have received, this project would not have come to fruition without Carolyn Hodges, Randy Patterson and Susan Wiser. They have been the most patient members of my non-academic committee. Thanks to their help, everything has been possible. Thanks and love will never be enough to speak to the immeasurable support and cheerleading my family and friends have provided. My family – Ava DeLuca, Brian DeLuca, Jack DeLuca, Nicole DeLuca, Donn Lind, Laurie Lind, Seth Lind, Helen Mann, Joelle Mann, Judy Mann, Matt Mann, Mike Mann, the late Constance Piccirillo, Frank Piccirillo and Gabrielle Steinhardt – are my rock. I would like to particularly acknowledge my grandmother, Constance, who passed away the week of my defense. My friends – Alex Derrico, Emily Eaton, and Rose Casey – are always there. My cats – Flannery, Cyrus and Luis – are the best company for which a student and writer could ask. Finally, my husband, Joshua Lind, has been an endless source of ideas, feedback, Bundy Road walks, bear hugs and dreams. He has fueled my inspiration and my love. This work is for Joshua, my late grandmother, Constance, and my late aunt, Susan Piccirillo, the women with the strongest appetites I know, especially when facing the end. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical sketch: iii Dedication: iv Acknowledgements: v Introduction: From Hungers to Appetites: Women Writers after the Spanish Civil War 1-19 Chapter 1: Hungry Daughters and their Mothers: Rosa Chacel 20-66 Chapter 2: Disembodied: María Zambrano Writes Philosophy 67-105 Chapter 3: Chronic Hungers: Mercedes Salisachs 106-147 Chapter 4: The Emergence of Appetite: Adelaida García Morales 148-180 Conclusion: 181-182 Bibliography: 183-193 vi Introduction: From Hungers to Appetites: Spanish Women Writers after the Civil War While the Nationalist victory of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War brought drastic political, economic and social changes to Spain, one aspect of daily life remained a constant: the physical experience of hunger. Rather than resolve the insidious food shortage with which Spaniards lived during the war, the first years of the Franco regime brought the transformation of that shortage into a full-blown famine. The lack of food became so severe that the early 1940s would later be referred to as “Los años de hambre,” or “The Hunger Years,” in Spain. Although the hunger of “The Hunger Years” refers to the physiological sensation that occurs when the body lacks food, Spanish women writers have adopted the image to communicate the many emotional, psychological and social lacks from which women suffered during the Franco regime, which lasted from 1939 through 1975. In my dissertation, I argue that the metaphoric function of hunger in their writing characterizes a period in Spanish literature that can be referred to as the literary “Hunger Years,” which span decades longer than the famine. This literary phenomenon can be traced from the postwar novels and philosophical pieces of Generation of ’27 artists Rosa Chacel and María Zambrano to the middlebrow novels of Generation of ’50’s Mercedes Salisachs and the popular novels of the contemporary Adelaida García Morales. By employing hunger, the body’s means of communicating its need for nourishment, as a literary trope, these writers point out that women of the Franco regime are hungry not only for food, but also to meet their basic emotional, intellectual and social needs. Because the literary function of hunger facilitates a confusion of the boundaries between mind and body, which correspond with the binary categories masculine and feminine, the metaphor has a poignant, subtle feminist function during 1 the Regime. In my dissertation, I define hunger as a language that connects the state of the feminine body to the states of the feminine mind and spirit. Throughout my study, it becomes clear that Chacel, Zambrano, Salisachs and García Morales reveal various stages of physical, emotional and intellectual feminine hunger. The initial stage, which we see first in Chacel’s adolescent character, Leticia Valle, is the immediate physical sensation that communicates a lack of vital nourishment. This is the type of hunger that one feels when one wakes up in the morning, senses the physical need to eat breakfast, and responds to that need by going to the kitchen and preparing a meal. Although Leticia continually responds to her gnawing hunger by eating, however, she remains hungry because she has not correctly interpreted her needs, which are not for food but for intellectual stimulation and maternal care. Once she begins to respond to her intellectual and emotional needs through the education and care she receives from Doña Luisa, she is no longer hungry. Although Leticia is able to nourish her hungers before they become chronic, as she writes she discovers that her teacher, Doña Luisa, lacks the drive to obtain vital nourishment. Because her hunger has persisted for so long, it has entered a second stage, which I refer to as chronic hunger. Chronic hunger is more evasive than the primary hunger Leticia experiences. It produces a numbing of the body that impedes one from responding to physical, emotional and intellectual lacks. As one becomes numb to the sensation of primary hunger, one begins to express an apathetic attitude towards life itself. The apathy of chronic hunger functions to maintain hunger by decreasing the drive that facilitates the nourishment of vital needs. Leticia begins to recognize the formation of that apathy in herself in the beginning of the novel, before she meets Doña Luisa. She then identifies it in Doña Luisa as a symptom of chronic 2 hunger the first day they meet. The active drive that Doña Luisa lacks because her hungers have become chronic is what I refer to as appetite. While hunger is the communication of a vital need, appetite is the specific impetus that leads one to obtain not only that which one needs, but also that which one desires. Because appetite brings us from the realm of need to the realm of desire, it has a more active, impulsive nature than hunger.