Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 33 Issue 2 Identities on the Verge of a Nervous Article 9 Breakdown: The Case of Spain 6-1-2009 A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmic Make-over of the Nation Andrés Zamora Vanderbilt University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Zamora, Andrés (2009) "A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmic Make-over of the Nation," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 33: Iss. 2, Article 9. https://doi.org/10.4148/ 2334-4415.1706 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmic Make-over of the Nation Abstract The maternal figure as an explicit or oblique image of the Spanish nation has undergone a good share of indignities throughout the modern cultural history of the country, from the nineteenth-century Mater Dolorosa to the stepmother of those forced into exile after the civil war, from the terrible matriarchs of Benito Peréz Galdós, Federico Garcia Lorca and Camilo José Cela to the patriarchal mothers of Spanish oppositional cinema in the final phase of the dictatorship and first years of the democratic transition.