Women's Writing in Twentieth-Century

Mirrors and Echoes: Women’s Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Richard Herr Published in association with University of California Press Description: Throughout Spain's tumultuous twentieth century, women writers produced a dazzling variety of novels, popular theater, and poetry. Their work both reflected and helped to transform women’s gender, family, and public roles, carving out new space in the literary canon. This multilingual collection of essays by both scholars and creative artists explores the diversity of Spanish women's writing, both celebrated and forgotten. Editors: Emilie L. Bergmann is professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Herr is professor of history, emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. Review: “With contributions by well-known and respected critics, writing of a very high caliber, and essays that explore hitherto uncharted territory, Mirrors and Echoes is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Spanish women's writing.” —Lou Charnon-Deutsch, author of Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women Mirrors and Echoes Mirrors and Echoes Women’s Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Richard Herr Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press Berkeley los Angeles London The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the UC system. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and open- access digital editions, represent the best traditions of regional studies, reconfigured through fresh global, transnational, and thematic perspectives. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mirrors and echoes : women’s writing in twentieth-century Spain / edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Richard Herr. p. cm.—(Global, area, and international archive) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn: 978-0-520-25267-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Spanish literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Spanish literature—20th century—History and criticism. I. Bergmann, Emilie L., 1949– II. Herr, Richard. pq6055.M57 2007 860.9'92870904—dc22 2007007187 Manufactured in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Spain 1 Emilie L. Bergmann Part I. Mirrors and Spaces of Narration: Women Writers on Their Work 1. Mujer del espejo 17 Soledad Puértolas 2. Cómo escribí Un millón de luces 22 Clara Sánchez Part II. Performing Modernity: Gender and the Body between the Wars 3. Women Writing on Physical Culture in Pre–Civil War Catalonia 29 P. Louise Johnson 4. Out of the Glass Niche and into the Swimming Pool: The Transformation of the Sirena Figure in the Poetry of Concha Méndez 46 Nicole Altamirano vi / Contents Part III. Cultural Archives of Popular Fiction, Theater, and Film 5. Romancing the Early Franco Regime: The novelas románticas of Concha Linares-Becerra and Luisa-María Linares 63 Jo Labanyi 6. Desde la pared de vidrio hasta la otra orilla: El exilio de María Martínez Sierra 79 Alda Blanco Part IV. Family, Gender, and Nation 7. Reproducción, familia y futuro: Cuatro denuncias en clave femenina 95 Geraldine Cleary Nichols 8. Mothers and Daughters in Transition and Beyond 108 Emilie L. Bergmann Part V. Writing and Historical Memory in the Transición 9. Las narradoras y su inserción en la sociedad literaria de la transición política española (1975–1982) 121 Pilar Nieva de la Paz 10. La batalla de la educación: Historical Memory in Josefina Aldecoa’s Trilogy 136 Sara Brenneis Part VI. Echoes and Silences 11. El país del alma en las geografías literarias de Nuria Amat 151 Marta E. Altisent 12. The Discourse of Silence in Alcanfor and “Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora” 164 Kathleen M. Glenn Contributors 173 Acknowledgments The essays in this volume began as papers for a conference organized by the Spanish Studies Program of the Institute for European Studies, University of California, Berkeley. The editors thank the following funding organizations: at UC Berkeley, the Spanish Studies Program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Dean of Arts and Humanities, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports and United States Universities; the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C.; and Camilo Barcia García- Villamil, Consul-General of Spain in San Francisco. We also thank Julia Farmer for valuable assistance in preparing the manuscript, and Nathan MacBrien for his sound judgment and editorial expertise. vii Introduction Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Spain Emilie L. Bergmann The fiction, poetry, and theater discussed in this volume bear witness to the continuities, ruptures, and paradoxes that characterize Spanish women’s writing throughout the twentieth century. This writing emerged amid dra- matic political and cultural change, from the monarchy and dictatorship of the century’s first decades, to the brief period of moderate socialist govern- ments under the Second Republic in the 1930s, the fall of the Republic in 1939, the nearly forty years of dictatorship ending with the death of Franco in 1975, and the transición to democratic government and regional auto- nomies beginning with the new constitution and elections in 1978. These essays offer surprising perspectives on topics familiar to Hispanists working on gender and women’s writing: woman, family, and nationalisms; women on the cultural and linguistic margins, and women at the center as educa- tors; reclaiming the body and the erotic from masculinist cultural inscrip- tions; revisionist mythmaking and historiography; and women’s roles in, and responses to, Spain’s crisis of modernity. They shed new light on such recognized writers as Carmen Martín Gaite, Soledad Puértolas, and Carme Riera, but they also focus on writers whose work has been overlooked or misrepresented in scholarly discussions. In order to understand the popular appeal of such writers, it is necessary to address changes in writers’ and readers’ views of female subjectivity during a period of political and social developments that affected women’s everyday lives and their access to publication. The book’s title, Mirrors and Echoes, figures women’s writing as a reflection of bodies and voices always present in Spanish culture but not always perceived or heard. Such metaphors are always imperfect, of course, and there is a way in which the figures of mirror image and voice invert the 1 2/Bergmann relationships between Spanish women writers and the foremothers they are so reluctant to acknowledge (López-Cabrales, 49–50).1 Topics mentioned only obliquely earlier in the century—female sexual desire, economic exploitation, rape, abortion, and prostitution—have, since the late 1970s, become central to women’s writing. In this sense, instead of the blurring or attenuation one might associate with reflection and repetition, the greater freedom in the decades since the end of the dictatorship has magnified and intensified the presence of female subjectivity in Spanish literature. It is common to identify twentieth-century male writers in terms of their “generations,” but women writers have been left out of chronological views and critical discussion by Spanish scholars and critics, creating the erro- neous impression that women have been literary outsiders throughout the century. The problem of integrating women’s writing into literary history has changed very little since Elizabeth Ordóñez pointed out in 1991 that the inclusion of women writers within a movement or generation often seems arbitrary and interchangeable, making their cultural participation appear “curiously unmanageable” (15). Janet Pérez and Catherine Davies present women writers in terms of political periods, although Pérez’s overview includes chapters that focus on women writers of the generations of 1898 and 1927. Emphasis on the interrelationship between major political changes and shifts in the status of women has given the critical study of Spanish women’s writing, like approaches to writing by their male counter- parts, a strong historiographical component. As a result of the imbalance between literary-historical views of writing by men and women, however, the terms “twentieth-century” and “contemporary” do not always correspond to the period 1901–2000 when they refer to women’s writing. “Twentieth-century” and “contemporary” Spanish women’s writing can begin in 1944 (Hart; Brown; Nichols 1992; Schumm) or even 1969 (López-Cabrales). Several studies of “contemporary” women’s

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