Changing Political Representations Of
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DOMESTIC TYRANTS: CHANGING POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH NOVEL by JULIA CORINE BARNES (Under the direction of Stacey Dolgin Casado) ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the origins and continued presence of the literary figure of the tyrannical mother in the works of five contemporary Spanish novelists. With the advent of Enlightenment contract theory, and the exclusion of women from the public sphere, misogynistic representations of mother-figures acquire a political connotation. The tyrannical mother figure is used by progressive writers to represent their conservative political enemies, because coding these conservative ideologies as feminine casts into doubt their legitimacy. Even in the works of women novelists, the tyrannical mother figure continues to have influence as a political tool. This dissertation analyzes novels of Ana María Matute, Ana María Moix, Almudena Grandes, Josefina Aldecoa and Lucía Etxebarria in order to show the continued use of the figure and how more recent novelists have attempted to contest the stereotype. INDEX WORDS: Motherhood, Feminism, Spain, Novel, Tyranny, Dictatorship, Ana María Matute, Ana María Moix, Almudena Grandes, Josefina Aldecoa, Lucía Etxebarria DOMESTIC TYRANTS: CHANGING POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH NOVEL by JULIA CORINE BARNES B.A., Davidson College, 1995 M.A.R., Yale University, 1997 M.A., University of North Carolina, 1999 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Julia Corine Barnes All Rights Reserved DOMESTIC TYRANTS: CHANGING POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH NOVEL by JULIA CORINE BARNES Major Professor: Stacey Dolgin Casado Committee: Lesley Feracho Dana Bultman Elizabeth Wright Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2010 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 2 REJECTING THE MOTHER: TYRANNICAL MOTHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS IN PRIMERA MEMORIA (1959) AND LA TRAMPA (1969) BY ANA MARÍA MATUTE AND JULIA (1969) BY ANA MARÍA MOIX..........39 3 RECUPERATING THE MOTHER: THE RECOVERY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY IN MALENA ES UN NOMBRE DE TANGO (1994) AND EL CORAZÓN HELADO (2007) BY ALMUDENA GRANDES.......................................................74 4 REINVENTING THE TYRANNICAL MOTHER: NEW REPRESENTATIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN NOVELS BY JOSEFINA ALDECOA AND LUCÍA ETXEBARRIA.........................................................................................................109 5 CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................143 6 REFERENCES .........................................................................................................147 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When Federico García Lorca finished La casa de Bernarda Alba in June of 1936—one month before the Nationalist uprising that would lead to the Spanish Civil War and 36-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco—he created a quintessential character in Spanish letters. Bernarda Alba, with her phallic cane, intransigent attitude and domineering rule of her household, has become the measuring stick against which all other representations of authoritative women characters are compared. Conversely, Bernarda’s youngest daughter, Adela, represents sexual, personal and political freedom in her rebellion against an autocratic mother. Critics often see in the work two parallel interpretations: one, a critique of women’s sexual repression in García Lorca’s native Andalucía (Burton 260; Busette 179). The other— bolstered by the play’s serendipitous concurrence with the Nationalist coup and García Lorca’s assassination by Nationalist troops—casts the play as political allegory (Galerstein 187-89). In this light the battle between Bernarda and Adela serves as a prelude to the battle between Nationalist and Republican Spains that takes place from 1936-1939. Miguel Martínez, for example, argues that “el tema central no es [. .] La Casa del título, sino la gran Casona Nacional, España” (59). Bernarda represents the ruling oligarchy, while the other characters represent “el pueblo español, en lucha perpetual contra la tiranía” (61). One might think that a discussion about the portrayals of contemporary Spanish women writers should hardly be introduced via a pre-war male playwright; yet a quick examination shows Bernarda Alba to be an obvious touchstone. The authoritarian mother and grandmother 2 figures in Primera memoria (1959) and La trampa (1960) by Ana María Matute, and Julia (1969) by Ana María Moix, have begged comparisons to García Lorca’s ubiquitous character. Catherine Davies says of Matute’s doña Práxedes, for example, that like Bernarda Alba, she is a patriarch “more ruthless than a man” (189). Linda Gould Levine likewise compares Julia’s controlling and overly-devout grandmother to García Lorca’s archetype (307). Like García Lorca’s play, these novels also offer metaphorical political readings pitting their young female protagonists—representations of progressive, or at least non-conformist, ideologies—against older mother figures who represent conservative ideologies and the Francoist regime in particular. This analysis argues not that Moix and Matute’s characters derive from García Lorca’s, but rather that all three works participate in a long-lived literary phenomenon. This dissertation explores the representation of this literary phenomenon—the tyrannical mother stock character—in the works of five contemporary Spanish women novelists. They are: Matute and Moix’s previously-mentioned novels, Almudena Grandes’s Malena es un nombre de tango (1994) and El corazón helado (2007), Josefina Aldecoa’s Civil War trilogy Historia de una maestra (1990), Mujeres de negro (1994) and La fuerza del destino (1997), and finally, Lucía Etxebarria’s Un milagro en equilibrio (2004).1 Each of these works recognizes the prominence of the tyrannical mother. Moix and Matute’s novels, for example, use this character to the exclusion of other representations of mothers. Even as Grandes attempts to question and transform images of Spanish motherhood, she continues to use the tyrannical mother in her political critique of Francoism and conservative politics. Finally, Aldecoa and Etxebarria replace the tyrannical mother with more nuanced understandings of motherhood and politics. These works also examine the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. Primera memoria and Julia examine the conflict metaphorically, using the Bildungsroman genre to show the war and 3 the regime’s impact on young women protagonists and on society. Others, like Aldecoa’s trilogy and Grandes’s El corazón helado, tackle the war issue literally, by using memory to reexamine the conflict. Malena es un nombre de tango and Un milagro en equilibrio focus primarily on women’s subjectivity in the 1990s and 2000s, yet dedicate significant sections to the Civil War and dictatorship. Tellingly, the novels all acknowledge a particular concept of Spanish history, identity and politics called the “two Spains,” which I will define momentarily. This dissertation argues that the theme of the Civil War and Francoism, combined with the mental construction of the “two Spains” connect directly to these and previous authors’ use of the tyrannical mother figure. This tyrannical mother figure has many personae: the oppressive mother, the castrating mother, the omnipotent mother, the phallic mother, and the devouring mother. Like Bernarda Alba, she exercises near-total control over her children and often serves as an obstacle in the protagonists’ search for autonomy and liberty. Her presence is so prevalent in twentieth-century novels that Katharine Rogers writes: “While previous generations focused on the whore, twentieth century misogynists focus on the devouring mother” (264). Rogers locates the prominence of this mother in Freudian theories that portray mothers as the antithesis of civil society (235-37). This present study intends to add a political nuance to current understandings of this oppressive mother figure. Accordingly, it refers to the character described above as the “tyrannical mother” in order to call to mind the political implications of the word “tyrant” as one who illegitimately usurps political power.2 This nuance does not detract from much criticism that focuses on this character from a more psychoanalytical perspective; it argues in addition for the importance of ideology and politics in her creation and repeated use. Psychoanalytical understandings of oppressive mothers and political representations of the tyrannical mother are 4 both related discourses of modernity, and both discourses serve to exclude women from politics. Particularly in Spain, the appearance and repeated use of the tyrannical mother character appears in politically progressive texts that adhere to the “two Spains” concept of Spanish history and politics. The “two Spains” concept of identity is “el mito qua relato metahistórico” that “ha recorrido, en diversas figuraciones y semánticas los últimos siglos, de la Ilustración al franquismo” (Arnscheidt and Tous 13). As the name suggests, its posits a bipartite division between an old Spain, parallel to the Old Regime of the Enlightenment, which allies political absolutism,