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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE IN THE SHORT STORY CORPUS OF ANA MARÍA MATUTE 1953 - 1962 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By JANET M. LIVESEY Norman, Oklahoma 2013 TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE IN THE SHORT STORY CORPUS OF ANA MARÍA MATUTE 1953-1962 A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND LINGUISTICS BY ______________________________ Dr. Bruce Boggs, Chair __________________________ Dr. Nancy LaGreca ______________________________ Dr. A. Robert Lauer __________________________ Dr. Ryan Long _______________________________ Dr. Robert Con Davis-Undiano © Copyright by JANET M. LIVESEY 2013 All Rights Reserved. This Doctoral Dissertation is dedicated to my parents Frank and Mary Livesey who always encouraged me to strive for more and reach higher. They would have been so proud. Thanks also go out to the rest of my lovely, supportive family in England. I also dedicate this achievement to my daughter, Chandra who, with her family, is my reason for being. Thank you all. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge the faculty in the Spanish & Latin American Section of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, for your encouragement, and for motivating me throughout my graduate program of study. I particularly wish to acknowledge, and thank my Committee Chair Dr. Bruce Boggs who patiently and graciously read, and re-read the different versions of this project. I know it was tough. I truly appreciate your willingness to sign-on, stay- on, and survive the ride. I also thank my Committee Members: Dr. Nancy LaGreca, Dr. A. Robert Lauer, Dr. Ryan Long, and Dr. Robert Con Davis-Undiano for their generosity in taking the time to read this project and offer astute suggestions to improve it. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page Signature Page Copyright Dedicatory Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Abstract vii Introduction Trauma and Resistance in the Short Story Corpus 1 of Ana María Matute Ausejo: 1953 – 1962 The Social, Economic, and Political Context 7 Internal Colonization 17 Trauma Theory 35 Chapter II Power and Resistance in El tiempo (1957) 43 La pequeña vida (1953), «El tiempo» (1957) 49 «La frontera del pan» 61 «Sombras» 71 «La ronda» 78 «Fausto» 87 «El amigo» 97 Chapter III Alterity and Libro de juegos para los niños de los 110 Otros (1961) v Libro de juegos para los niños de los Otros 117 Chapter IV A la mitad del camino (1961) and El arrepentido 163 y otros cuentos (1961) Feminist Theory and its Impact on Matute’s Short Story 165 Corpus: 1953 to 1962 «Las mujeres» 177 «El hermoso amanecer» 183 «El maestro» 188 «El barro» 196 Chapter V Resolution to Trauma and Resistance in the Short 203 Stories of Ana María Matute: «El saltamontes verde» (1960), and «Carnavalito» (1962) «El saltamontes verde» 204 «Carnavalito» 212 Conclusion 222 Consulted Works 226 Appendix I: Photographs: El libro de juegos para los niños de 237 Los otros (1961) Addendum: Matute’s Corpus 257 vi ABSTRACT From 1953 to 1962 Ana María Matute Ausejo (b. 1926) published ten short story collections of and two additioinal stories. The project focuses on three central tenets: first, the physical and psychological trauma created in the wake of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and General Francisco Franco’s treatment of Spain as an internal colony; second, the plight of the socio-political sphere of Spanish life during the decades after the Civil War, particularly as it relates to the Republican vencidos, women and children; and third, resistance to power, to repression, to patriarchy, and to alterity in Matute’s short story corpus. Due to the political climate in mid-twentieth century Spain, Matute could only couch her dissention to the Régime in a subversive manner by disguising her critiques covertly within short stories of ambiguous narrative content. Had she been more overt in her criticism she would have risked censorship, punishment, and possible imprisonment. Conceiving post-War Spain as an internally colonized country has been explored before, but not through a reading of Matute’s short stories. Analyzing this selection of short stories in this light offers the reader a new perspective on Matute studies because this corpus exposes a critique of the social, emotional, and physical traumas that existed in Spain in the mid-twentieth century. By evidencing her covert resistance to the Régime which caused the various traumas we visit a facet of Matute studies that has been relatively unexplored until this point. vii Chapter I Trauma and Resistance in the Short Story Corpus of Ana María Matute Ausejo: 1953 – 1962 “Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition.” . Jean Paul Sartre Introduction This study looks at thirteen narratives from six separate collections of short stories that Ana María Matute wrote between 1953 and 1962. Matute uses language and evocative imagery to voice her resistance to the repression of post-War Spain. She does this by focusing on the trials and tribulations of the so-called lesser beings, the “sub-humans” mentioned in Sartre’s citation above, who, for the purposes of this project refer to the Republican Others, and the double Others who are women and children. Sartre’s words also serve to illustrate the notion of Spain as an internally colonized space. From a humanistic perspective Colonialism deprives the colonized of their basic human rights of freedom and self determination even as its violent imposition of social and economic modes alienates the individual from the rest of society. Through the selected narratives, I examine how the restrictions that post- 1 War patriarchal society imposed on women and children caused them to suffer a marginalized, traumatic existence. The narratives represent a form of situational evidence of a series of oppressed Others, victims and survivors of the Franco Régime. I argue that the Republican survivors of the Spanish Civil War – los vencidos – suffered physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma due to the marginalization, and victimization inflicted upon them during the post-War years, and I posit Matute’s short story corpus during the 1953-1962 period as a discourse of resistance. María Carmen Riddel in her article “Ana María Matute,” (1993), states that the greater part of Matute’s corpus “reflect[s] alienation and loneliness, and manifests her opposition to social injustice.” (309) Ana María Matute has been a writer of interest to Hispanic scholars for more than six decades. Matute’s novels and short stories have been the subject of only two book-length studies that are now dated: Margaret Jones (The Literary World of Ana María Matute, 1970) and Janet Pérez (Ana María Matute, 1971). More recently, Matute’s work has figured in dissertations by Guadalupe Maria Cabedo (“La madre ausente en la novela femenina de la posguerra española,” 2004), Anita Lee Coffey (“Six Archetypes in Selected Novels of Ana María Matute,” 2002), Ling Wu (“Aspectos de la ‘novela’ de la posguerra española 1950-1960: Miguel Delibes, Carmen Laforet, Ana Maria Matute y Elena Quiroga,” 1998), and Donna Janine McGiboney (“Language, Sexuality, and Subjectivity in Selected Works by Ana María Matute, Carmen Laforet and Mercé Rodoreda,” 1994). These dissertations deal with Matute’s novels as do the majority of the articles written about Matute’s 2 work which have appeared on a regular basis since the 1940s when Matute first emerged on the literary scene. Articles on Matute’s work continue to appear, some as recently as 2008: Scott MacDonald Frame (“Through the Eyes of a Child: Representations of Violence and Conflict in the Juvenilia of Ana María Matute”), María Sergia Steen (“Función visual del objeto en cuentos de Ana María Matute,” 2007), Marie-Linda Ortega (“Inscripciones de las ‘dos Españas’ en Primera memoria de Ana María Matute: La unidad de nunca jamás,” 2007), Guadalupe M. Cabedo (“La madre ausente: inconformismo social en algunas novelas de la posguerra civil escritas por tres autoras españolas: Carmen Laforet, Carmen Martín Gaite y Ana María Matute,” 2005) and Réka Vastaq (“El espacio en los cuentos de Ana María Matute,” 2003). These studies focus on the novels and certain elements in a number of short stories. They do not, however, shed much light upon the short stories written by Matute between 1953 and 1962, which is the decade under consideration in this project. Scott MacDonald Frame, in his 2008 study of Matute’s juvenile writing, points to the fact that until a few years ago critics dismissed an author’s early writings as being amateurish or the experimental work of a nascent talent. He points out, however, that recently critics have begun to re-evaluate adult writers’ juvenilia in the light of its being “an alternative to, rather than a preparation for, the adult work,” (Frame, 219; McMaster 2001, 287). Frame’s article “Through the Eyes of a Child: Representations of Violence and Conflict in the Juvenilia of Ana María Matute” (2008) examines Matute’s earliest writings, especially La Revista de Shybil, 3 which although enlightening is not relevant to this project as it deals with Matute’s writing before 1953, when she was a child. María Sergia Steen, in “Función visual del objeto en cuentos de Ana María Matute” (2007), examines the purpose of certain objects in the lives of the characters in a number of short stories from Los niños tontos (1956), Historias de la Artámila (1961), and El tiempo (1957). Referring to «La frontera del pan» (El tiempo, 1957), one short story that is analyzed in this project, she isolates two objects, the pan and the figura del ángel, as the two preeminent metaphors in the story: the pan represents the reality of life, and the basic necessities necessary to survive; and the finger of the ángelito, pointing to the infinity of the sky, represents the passage of time, the infinite symbol of stagnant situations in the lives of those characters who are unable to move forward.