Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
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WRITING IN FRANCO’S SPAIN: CENSORSHIP, GENDER AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE POSTWAR NOVEL BY JULIA VAN LUIJK A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2014 Abstract Following the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), General Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime ruled Spain in a dictatorship that lasted almost forty years. In order to preserve the dominance of the regime and its ideology in Spain, all cultural activity was strictly censored, with censorship being particularly severe in the immediate postwar years. The regime’s censorship board, often with the involvement of Catholic clergy, had to approve all types of public communication, from poetry to television, before it could be published or broadcast. The censor was to ensure that the material in question was not critical of the regime or its ideology and that it did not challenge Catholic morals and traditional Spanish family values. Despite the regime’s efforts, however, writers who wished to convey their opposition to the dictatorship turned to a realist, objective narrative style that would allow them to denounce Francoist society without causing concern for the censors. In this thesis, I examine five Spanish postwar novels, published between 1945 and 1961, that provide a critique of Francoism and its associated values: Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945), Luis Romero’s La noria (1952), Ignacio Aldecoa’s El fulgor y la sangre (1954), Juan García Hortelano’s Nuevas amistades (1959) and Dolores Medio’s Diario de una maestra (1961). This particular combination of novels has been selected in order to examine social and political criticism in the postwar novel from a wider perspective than that which is traditionally assigned to the Spanish novela social. In each case study, I identify which aspects of the Franco regime and postwar society the author sought to denounce and discuss how the author manages to convey these critical views despite the constraints of censorship. Themes include the misery and hunger that plagued Spain in the 1940s, the harsh repression suffered by the losers of the war, class and wealth inequality, the subversion of the regime’s ‘official’ historiography and the adoption of the Catholic Church’s ultra-conservative moral values. There is a particular focus on the critique of social themes that most affected women, such as the strict moral code assigned to women by the regime and the i double moral standards with regard to issues such as premarital sex, prostitution and abortion; these themes are prominent in all of the selected novels, regardless of the gender of the author. In the first chapter, I outline the historical background that led to the Civil War and the establishment of the dictatorship and describe the literary context of the early Franco era. The following five chapters consist of my case studies which are examined in chronological order: each novel is examined separately in the context of social and political history, although I will draw parallels where suitable. The analyses are framed by theories of political and social commitment in literature; I draw also on gender and memory studies, and critics who discuss the relationship between literature and censorship. I have consulted the official censor’s report for each novel and discuss how each novel was received and altered, if at all, by the censor, as well as speculating as to how each author may have tailored his or her work in order to avoid such censorial intervention. ii Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank my primary supervisor, Sarah Leggott, for her expertise, patience, invaluable feedback on drafts and support, not only in her guidance of my thesis, but also in her encouragement to present and publish my work. I would especially like to thank her for bearing with me during the last six months as first I, and then she, moved from Wellington to the other side of the world and for always having confidence in me, even when I doubted myself. I would also like to thank Ross Woods, my second supervisor, for his friendly moral support over the last three years and for his valuable input over the last months of putting this thesis together. I am a grateful recipient of a Victoria University PhD Scholarship which has enabled me to work full-time on this thesis. I would like to thank the other staff and postgraduate students in the School of Languages for their company and support, particularly my former office-mates Sally-Ann, Anne and Andrea—I have really missed our camaraderie and conversations over the last six months, it’s been difficult finishing this project alone at home in London without colleagues to share the ups and downs. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my friends and family for their support during the writing of my thesis: my parents, for teaching me to work hard but not to take myself too seriously, and for their support, even though I know my dad would have liked me to choose a more ‘practical’ career-path; my sisters, one of whom is writing her own doctorate; my friends, in London, New Zealand and elsewhere; and to Alex, for his love and encouragement, for reading my drafts, for surviving the somewhat chaotic move to London this year together, it’s been a busy year—here’s to 2014! iii iv Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One Franco’s Spain: History, Gender and Postwar Literature 11 Chapter Two Sociopolitical Commentary in a Postwar Classic: Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945) 47 Chapter Three Postwar Barcelona as Collective Protagonist in Luis Romero’s La noria (1952) 81 Chapter Four The Women of the Guardia Civil: Memory in Ignacio Aldecoa’s El fulgor y la sangre (1954) 109 Chapter Five Francoist Spain’s Alta Burguesía: Wealth and Gender in Juan García Hortelano’s Nuevas amistades (1959) 147 Chapter Six “Escaping” the Censor: The Second Republic, the Civil War and Francoism in Dolores Medio’s Diario de una maestra (1961) 179 Conclusion 219 Bibliography 229 v vi Introduction After almost three years of intense violence which had killed approximately 500,000 people and displaced thousands more, the Spanish Civil War ended in April 1939.1 Officially, the conflict was over, but the painful aftermath of the war would affect Spain and its people for decades to come as General Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime ruled Spain until 1975. The regime’s need to cement its position in the early postwar years resulted in violent reprisals against those who had supported the Republic or other leftist groups during the war. In the longer term, the regime ensured its continued power and the dominance of its ideology in Spain by eliminating the possibility of political opposition and by strictly censoring all cultural activity. The official censorship board, with the involvement of Catholic clergy, had to approve all forms of public communication, from poetry to television, before it could be published or broadcast. The censor was to ensure that the material in question was not critical of the regime or its ideology and that it did not challenge Catholic morals and traditional Spanish family values. In terms of literature, the early postwar years were, therefore, very much dominated by works, usually of scarce literary value, that exalted the recent Nationalist victory and propagated Francoist values. Despite the regime’s efforts, however, from the mid-1940s, a small number of writers began to use the novel as an instrument of protest and resistance, conveying their opposition to Francoism by turning to a realist narrative style which allowed them to describe the difficulties of life under Franco and the conservatism of postwar society, aspects that could not be reported on in the strictly controlled media. The key aspect of their work, however, was that they related their vision of postwar Spain in an objective, impartial narrative style, withholding any explicit commentary and thus avoided censorial intervention. In this thesis, I analyse five such novels, 1 Estimates of the number killed during the war range from 250,000 (Payne, The Franco Regime 220) to one million, as suggested in the title of José María Gironella’s Un millón de muertos. 1 published between 1945 and 1961, which provide a critique of Francoism and its associated values; these works are: Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945), Luis Romero’s La noria (1952), Ignacio Aldecoa’s El fulgor y la sangre (1954), Juan García Hortelano’s Nuevas amistades (1959) and Dolores Medio’s Diario de una maestra (1961). The critical literature of this period is most commonly associated with the movement known as the novela social; however, as will become apparent, the definition of what constitutes a socially- or politically-committed novel used in this thesis is broader, in terms of chronology, literary style, and the types of themes addressed, than that which is usually applied to the genre known as the novela social.2 With the possible exception of the postwar novels that are now considered Spanish classics and are taught in most Spanish high schools, such as Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte and Laforet’s Nada, the literature of the postwar period has been somewhat neglected by scholars in recent years. Following the transition to democracy in Spain, literature written under Franco’s rule lost favour amongst the reading public and also as an academic subject of study. This applied not only to the literature that was considered pro-Franco, but also to the critical social realist novel which became unfashionable from the 1960s as the economic and political circumstances in Spain slowly improved, censorship restrictions began to open up, and the Latin American novel became dominant in the Spanish literary market.