“Feminine” Bestsellers: Gender and the Question of Modernity in the Spanish Short Novel (1907-1936) Thomas Antorino Charlottesville, VA M.A. Spanish, University of Virginia, 2016 B.A. Spanish, Loyola University Maryland, 2014 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese University of Virginia May, 2020 Acknowledgements The completion of this project would not have possible without the help of many individuals. First, I am grateful most of all to Andrew A. Anderson, who advised the project, for his invaluable suggestions and guidance throughout this long process. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, María Inés Lagos, E. Michael Gerli, and Susan Fraiman, whose edits, comments, suggestions will ensure the future success of this project. The compilation and cataloging of my primary sources has been a long and arduous process. It could not have been possible without the help, expertise, and dedication of Miguel Valladares-Llata, Librarian for Romance Languages at the University of Virginia, who spent months with me—sometimes hours at a time—combing through online databases in search of these materials. I would also like to express my gratitude to the various organizations and departments who have helped fund my research. In particular, the University of Virginia’s Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant for Doctoral Students, UVA’s department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese’s Charles Gordon Reid Summer Fellowship, and the ALDEEU’s Student Travel Grant all ensured a long and successful research stay in Spain during the summer of 2019. Finally, I never would have made it this far without the emotional support of my friends and family, especially my parents. I love you all. I dedicate this project to the two most important women in my life: my mother and, of course, Bekah, who has been by my side since the beginning. 3 Introduction On the night of May 6, 1910, in Valladolid, a group of three-hundred (or five-hundred depending on the source) indignant students rallied outside the editorial office of El Norte de Castilla protesting the publication of an article by Ángela Barco the previous day. They then directed themselves to her residence, where, according to a report in El Lábaro, “los escolares promovieron un tremendo escándalo que motivó la intervención del Gobernador.” Local authorities had to be called in to dissolve the protest, and Barco was subsequently dismissed from her residence. The article that sparked such outrage, “El hijo,” criticized the hypocrisy of a middle class that favored a son’s education (and the prestige that accompanied it) over the family’s economic well-being. Barco says, ¡Las tristezas, las amarguras por las cuales es necesario pasar para ver al hijo hecho hombre, con su título redentor bajo el brazo!… ¿Que se come poco? No importa, con tal que el niño no carezca de nutritivo principio. ¡Tiene que estudiar! […] Y así, viene a ser la única preocupación, el eje de la miserable familia, que se cree casi aristocrática porque tiene un hijo estudiando. (380-381; emphasis in the original)1 Moreover, by condemning this practice Barco delivered a second blow to the middle class because she did so in specifically gendered terms, attacking the underlying sexism of a culture in which success is measured according to the son’s prestige. She asks, “Y mientras tanto, ¿se fija alguien en esas dos o tres figuritas anémicas, de lindos rostros, que abren pasmadas sus grandes 1 References to “El hijo” come from the original publication in España Futura, no. 7, 1909, pp. 380-383. 4 ojazos de desheredadas, como no comprendiendo que de ellas no se ocupe nadie, dejándolas en el olvido, para soñar, no que son reinas, pero sí princesitas encantadas” (381). Thus, Barco considers the daughters to be the true victims of this system because they are neglected and left to become “ese tipo de mujer anodino e insustancial, incapaz de ser otra cosa que la eterna esclava” (382-383). Therefore, in criticizing the hypocrisy of middle-class practices, Barco was also providing an implicit, but radical, condemnation of conventional, middle-class gender discourse, attacking the commonplace bourgeois stereotype of the self-sacrificing and obedient wife and daughter whose role in society is defined relationally (to men) rather than individually. More radically, by suggesting that social and familial pressures force girls into this role, Barco was defying entrenched nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gender theories that viewed woman’s subservience as an inherent and irreducible consequence of her biology. At about the same time—April 8, 1910—Barco published the short novel Fémina in El Cuento Semanal to critical acclaim.2 As I show in more detail in Chapter One, it dramatizes the negative effects that the middle-class discourse of domesticity has on the female protagonist, Gabriela. In short, she is forced to become the “tipo de mujer anodino” described in “El hijo” not as an extension of her biology but by societal pressures beyond her control. The text, moreover, frames this issue within the larger context of Spain’s modernization, thus inviting readers to consider the relationship between a non-essentialist notion of femininity and an emergent 2 El Cronista published the following review of the novel: “Publica esta popular revista [El Cuento Semanal] un delicadísimo boceto de novela titulado Fémina, original de Ángela Barco, notable escritora castellana. Fue éste uno de los cuentos recomendados en el concurso que organizó El Cuento Semanal y del que fueron jurados Pío Baroja, Valle-Inclán y Felipe Trigo. De los que merecieron esta honra, Fémina es, sin disputa, uno de los mejores. La novedad del asunto y la exquisita sensibilidad con que está desarrollada su interesantísima trama, son las notas que sobresalen en este cuento, que ha de ser, ciertamente, acogido por el público con general aplauso.” 5 Spanish modernity. If, in Spain, the nineteenth century was a period “when the boundaries of gender were shifting and redefining themselves” (Charnon-Deutsch and Labanyi 2), Barco’s Fémina reveals an inherent relationship between this constant redefinition of gender categories and modernity more broadly. This study explores the ways in which women writers of early twentieth-century Spain explored the complex relationship between gender and modernity. In addition, it explores the ways in which women writers engaged with this question in the popular novela corta, a new and lucrative medium in which both established and novice writers could publish. A few scholars have raised the question of the “best” genre through which we can perceive collective anxieties surrounding gender in the nineteenth century. Jo Labanyi has argued that the realist novel is the genre best suited for this task because of its capacity to “invent stories, tailoring them to highlight specific concerns” (Gender and Modernization 5) and its importance in the formation of a national literary canon. David Gies, in response to Labanyi, has argued that “it is in the theatre where we can most accurately and powerfully detect the subtle changes taking place in the period’s gender culture” (“Genderama” 109). Without arguing for the invalidity of either of these positions, I am proposing that the novela corta, because of its inherent relationship to modernity and the modernization of literary production—as a genre that signaled “the transformation of literature into a battlefield of social reform … A whole literature developed on the basis of changing sexual mores” (Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, “Literary Collections” 40)—is a unique and useful medium through which we can track anxieties in early twentieth-century Spain. Moreover, given the popularity of the genre, particularly among women writers— personally, I have cataloged over three hundred female-authored novellas, a small yet noteworthy percentage of the thousands of novellas published between 1907 and 1936— they 6 offer scholars fruitful opportunities to explore the ways in which these writers engaged with the most pressing political, social, and cultural questions concerning woman’s place in an increasingly modernized Spain. I argue that many of the concerns about constantly-shifting notions of gender in turn-of-the-century Spain were inherently linked more broadly with anxieties surrounding modernity’s perceived destabilizing effects on traditional conceptions of essential gender differences. Between 1907 and 1936, thousands of short novels were published in the dozens of revistas literarias available. Among the most popular of the time, in Madrid, were El Cuento Semanal (1907-1912), Los Contemporáneos (1909-1926), El Libro Popular (1912-1914), La Novela Corta (1916-1925), La Novela Semanal (1921-1925), La Novela de Hoy (1922-1932), and La Novela Mundial (1926-1928), not to mention dozens of others, each, as the dates above indicate, lasting for different amounts of time.3 Although some collections were more specialized and were dedicated to a specific genre, such as erotic literature4 or theatrical works,5 the most popular ones appealed to a broader range of literary tastes and sensibilities. In Barcelona, the two most notable and popular collections were La Novela Ideal (1925-1938) and La Novela Libre (1933-1937), both publications of the anarchist magazine La Revista Blanca (1923-1936). 3 These particular collections have also been the most studied by literary scholars of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. See Mainer, Granjel, Sainz de Robles, Fernández Gutiérrez, Mogin-Martin, García Martínez, and Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa and Santamaría. In addition, Alberto Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa’s Bibliografía e historia de las colecciones literarias en España (1907-1957) is the most comprehensive catalog of literary collections of the first half of the twentieth century in Spain. 4 Collections of erotic content include La Novela Sugestiva, La Novela Pasional, La Novela Picante, all of which appeared in the latter part of the 1920s.