Representations of Women in Postwar Spain
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Representations of Women in Postwar Spain: Gender and Performance in Recent Novels and Films Rachel Elaine Finney Hopewell, VA Bachelor of Arts, University of Tennessee at Martin, 1996 Master of Arts, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, 1999 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese University of Virginia December 2017 ii © Copyright by Rachel Elaine Finney 2017 iii ABSTRACT This study explores how women’s lives in postwar Spain are represented in recent (largely from the 21st century, with a few notable exceptions) novels and films. With almost all of the featured narratives here centering on women’s lives in the decades immediately following the Spanish civil war (mostly the 1940s, during the time of the most oppressive reprisals), special attention is given to Francoist social policies as they related specifically to women. By viewing gender as both a social construct as well as a performance, the reader will note how more recent fictional versions of Spanish women’s postwar experiences manage to create an opportunity for contestation, for agency, for pushing back against the social norms that strove to restrict women in their tightly scripted gendered roles in Franco’s New Spain. The introductory chapter opens with a rehearsal of the highlights of key issues in Spanish women’s lives in the years preceding the war, during the Second Republic, and then during the war itself. The lives of both Nationalist and Republican key players such as Dolores Ibárruri (la Pasionaria), Pilar Primo de Rivera, Victoria Kent, and Mercedes Sanz Bachiller are briefly highlighted. Also mentioned are key women’s organizations of the war and postwar era: the Sección Femenina, the AMA, and the Mujeres Libres, among others. All this historical review is helpful in the development of more firm footing in the discussion of Spanish women’s postwar lives in general and in the more specific delineation of what would come to be known as the ideal Spanish woman. The first chapter builds on the foundation laid in the introduction by exploring further the concept of true, Catholic womanhood (as articulated by Aurora Morcillo and others). Starting with Lacan and his “mirror stage,” this chapter seeks to reveal how societies, in general, encode iv gender norms, and how gender was socially determined in Franco’s Spain, more specifically. I employ Martín Gaite’s concepts of “una mujer muy mujer” and “espejos negativos” to point out the way recent Spanish novels and films use female protagonists to either exemplify an ideologically oppressed gendered performance, or manage to evade such a requisite, scripted performance and instead engage in a resistant gendered manifestation of their own creation. Some of the novels and films I look at here are Caso’s novel Un largo silencio (2000), Grandes’s novel Inés y la alegría (2010), Carlos Iglesias’s film Ispansi (2011), and José Luis Cuerda’s film Los girasoles ciegos (2008). In the second chapter, I look at several recent films and novels featuring stories of women’s lives in Franco’s prisons of the 1940s. Using such theorists as Judith Butler and Foucault, I examine how Franco’s gendered body politic came to be inscribed on the text of the imprisoned female body. Butler’s work on gender performativity is crucial as I explore how these novels and films feature imprisoned female protagonists who engage in distinctly gendered performances that they then subvert and use to create a kind of contestatory discourse in response to the restrictive, oppressive gender norms into which Francoist policy sought to inscribe them. The fictional narratives examined here include Cañil’s novel Si a los tres años no he vuelto (2011), Chacón’s novel La voz dormida (2002) and film version (2011), and Ferrero’s novel Las trece rosas (2003) and film version (2007). Chapter three moves forward chronologically somewhat, past the early years of the most severe reprisals and into the height of the resistance movement engaged in by the maquis and their enlaces. Novels such as Almudena Grandes’s Inés y la alegría (2010), and films such as Silencio roto (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (2006), unlike earlier narratives, now feature women as co-protagonists with the men they strove to aid or protect. In this chapter, I employ the v concepts of dispossession, spectrality, and foreignness (as articulated by Butler and Kristeva) to highlight the way the women in these stories are no longer simply wives, sisters, mothers, or lovers--they are now equal to men in the measure of agency they wield as active participants in the resistance movement. At the same time, the women exist alongside the maquis within a dispossessed state of precarity, forever branded foreign elements in Franco’s Spain. In this dispossessed, precarious state, the women constantly engage in a gendered performance necessary for survival while at the same time participating in what Butler calls “situated acts of resistance.” Finally, in chapter four, I turn to a discussion of gender, identity, and postmemory in this chapter’s focus on mothers, daughters, and the motherless. Many of the works examined here (such as Prado’s novel Mala gente que camina [2006] and Riera’s novel La mitad del alma [2006]) have the modern world as their setting, yet their protagonists and narrators reach back to the immediate postwar era in their exploration of the gendered performance a Spanish woman either chose to engage in, or was necessarily compelled to engage in, in order to survive in Franco’s Spain. Francoist propaganda consistently promoted the nineteenth century ideology of domesticity, whereby a woman’s life was limited to that of home and family in the state’s project of reconstructing the country after the damage inflicted by the decadence of the Second Republic’s sick body politic. Underlying all the novels and films mentioned here is the issue of the “brand” of femininity a mother attempted to pass on to her daughter. Will the daughters accept or reject the maternal inheritance of the performative quality of a gendered identity? Films such as El laberinto del fauno (2006), Carol’s Journey (2003), and even such classics as El espíritu de la colmena (1973), increasingly show a tendency for young daughters to reject the mother’s performance in their attempts to forge their own gender identity. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... vii Introduction: Women and the Spanish Civil War: Before, During, and After ...........................................1 Chapter One: Mirror, mirror on the wall: Framing the Gendered Subject in Postwar Spain .................... 44 Chapter Two: Women in Postwar Prisons: the Body as Text ................................................................ 90 Chapter Three: Mujeres y maquis: Precarity, Spectrality, and… Agency .............................................. 132 Chapter Four: Mothers, daughters, and the motherless: the legacy of war ........................................ 175 Epilogue ......................................................................................................................................... 224 PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 228 SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 229 vii Acknowledgements God has blessed me with so many who have helped me complete this dissertation. I am thankful to my advisor at UVA, Professor Andrew Anderson, whose gentle reminders to not give up were just as important as all the copy editing he did at every step of the way. I am grateful to have been his student and to have been inspired by his class to pursue this research topic. I thank Professor Jennifer Wicke for her suggestions on how to approach chapter three. I thank my UVA study buddies for their friendship and support--Davina, Morgan, Adriana, Tim, and Kátia. I also thank my many friends and colleagues (past and present) at Richard Bland College in Petersburg, Virginia who have been so supportive. Thanks to Dan, Michelle, Linda, Pat C., Pat H., Amy, Christine, Alexandra, Tim, Esther, Mary P., and others who gave me pep talks, shared meals, shouldered extra shares of committee work, and subbed classes for me. Thanks to Christyl who made me lunches every Tuesday and Thursday for two entire academic years during a particularly difficult stretch. Thanks to LeAnn, who as interim Dean of Faculty, helped make my workload lighter at a key juncture. Thanks to Dr. Vern Lindquist, who first encouraged me to pursue doctoral work every year on my FDR. Thanks to Kevin R. who mowed my yard (for free) for the last two years of the completion of this project. I extend special thanks to my Ladies’ Bible class friends at the Cawson St. Church of Christ in Hopewell, VA (especially Jessica, Hope, Lisa, and Glenda); to my AR support team (Wein, Tara, and Becky), and to my “Guatemala Girls” (especially Vicky, Julie, Kelly, and Janet). I lovingly dedicate this work to my family: Ma, Pa, Derek, and Shanon; to the memory of my late Granny, whose love of books and education I carry with me always; and to my beloved Pedro, who carried me every step of the way. Without your love and support, I would never have made