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Girl, Interrupted and Continued Rethinking the Influence of Elena Fortún’S Celia

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Girl, Interrupted and Continued Rethinking the Influence of Elena Fortún’S Celia Girl, Interrupted and Continued Rethinking the Influence of Elena Fortún’s Celia Ana Puchau de Lecea a ABSTRACT In this article I consider the characterization of Celia, the protagonist in Elena Fortún’s “Celia and Her World” series (1929–1952), and the role of Fortún as a forerunner of women writers in the 1950s. I explore the ways in which Fortún presented herself as a female author offering alternative models of femininity to her readers through the character Celia and the social context of the series. In addition, I examine Fortún’s shifting representation of Celia as a subversive char- acter, and Fortún’s ideological influence on female writers who used similar literary strategies. Using the point of view of the girl in her texts as an insurgent protag- onist to reflect different sociohistorical moments in Spain suggests a continuity in Spanish narrative instead of an abrupt change after the Civil War. KEYWORDS censorship, children’s literature, modern woman, non-conformism, rebel, submis- sion, twentieth-century Spanish literature, weird girls b In late 1920s Spain, Elena Fortún (pseudonym of Encarnación Aragoneses, 1886–1952) introduced the character of Celia Gálvez de Montalbán, a seven-year-old girl from a middle-class family in Madrid. She presented Celia as a girl who encouraged children to wonder why grown-ups have to be right even in the most illogical of circumstances. The construction of Celia’s childhood innocence allowed Fortún to promote non-conformist messages directed at all members of society, starting with little girls and then their mothers. Although Celia’s world reflects a hierarchy in which adults dominate children, she finds a way to ask her readers to consider the fairness of given situations. In doing so, Fortún encourages girls to be critical of their own world during the Second Republic (1931–1939), a period of social progress that preceded the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Although progressive elements were silenced under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) in the decades to follow, Fortún continued adding titles to the series from her exile in Argentina. Her young readers could Girlhood Studies 10, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 137-151 © Berghahn Books doi: 10.3167/ghs.2017.100311 ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online) a ANA PUCHAU DE LECEA continue appreciating Celia’s ability to disclose how things are not always the way adults say they are, even during a period of suppressed freedom. During the 1940s and 1950s, while the final stories in the series, Celia insti- tutriz (Celia governess) (1944) and Celia se casa (Celia gets married) (1950), were being published some of her early readers began their own careers as writers. Nada (Nothing) (1944), by 23-year-old Carmen Laforet, initiated a boom of autobiographical novels written by women that featured adoles- cents. These bildungsroman show the characteristic stifling context of post- war Spain, represented through an unstable family atmosphere. These young characters, as reflected in the works of Carmen Laforet (1921–2004), were modelled on Celia and written in emulation of Fortún’s literary style. Appre- ciating her influence on different occasions, writer and critic Carmen Martín Gaite pointed out that “a rigorous study of the work of Elena Fortún, which all writers of the fifties enjoyed in childhood, will explain what the principles of ‘social realism’ of the mid-century novel were” (1993: 37).1 I consider Fortún as a harbinger of girls’ power in the 1920s and seek to discuss how she, as a literary figure, served as a precursor to authors of the 1950s in Spain. In the first section I consider the creation and impact of Celia as an alternative character in children’s literature in the context of the role of women and girls in society in the 1920s. The second section turns to the reaction of Franco’s censorship corps to these books and their under- lying ideology and considers the reception among members of the next gen- eration of writers and the impact of these books on them. Through different examples, I demonstrate that Celia was not always the rebellious girl depicted in the first volumes, and I show how she transitioned into a misfit or what would later be called La chica rara (the weird girl) in an essay thus named by Martín Gaite in 1987. (I will return to this presently.) Since the 1920s, Fortún’s stories have continued to be republished, and Celia’s adventures have been enjoyed by generations of girls. After a hiatus in the publication of the series during the Francoist censorship period, the discovery of the unpublished manuscript of Celia en la revolución (Celia in the revolution) (1943) at the end of the 1980s by researcher Marisol Dorao spurred interest in not only Celia but also in Fortún, and the writer’s works were published again. In 1992, film director José Luis Borau produced a tel- evision adaptation of the first volumes of “Celia and Her World,” with Martín Gaite collaborating on the screenplay. The recent re-editing of some of Fortún’s books and the publication of what is now thought of as her secret novel, Oculto sendero (Hidden path) (2016)2 have brought Fortún back to the forefront of the Spanish literary scene. 138 RETHINKING THE INFLUENCE OF ELENA FORTÚN'S CELIA b The Problem of the Modern Woman Fortún’s biography (Dorao 2001) illustrates the many lives lived by the author of “Celia and Her World,”her constant pursuit of peace, happiness, and iden- tity, and her personal struggle to remain true to her feminist values without neglecting her writing career while trying to be a virtuous mother and wife. Fortún’s role as a mother and wife was troubled given the death of her youngest child, Manuel (Bolín), at the age of ten. Furthermore, this was not the only unexpected death in the family. Her husband Eusebio Gorbea, strug- gling with depression, committed suicide in 1948 in Argentina, where they had lived in exile for almost ten years because of his allegiance to and service with the Republican faction during the war. In 1951, months before her death, she wrote to her friends Inés Field and Mercedes Hernández regretting the “nonsense” (Dorao 2001: 73) of getting married and, later, not getting divorced, and explaining that she had never enjoyed motherhood. It was Hernández’s children, her daughter Florinda especially, who inspired Celia’s adventures. However, as Martín Gaite has pointed out, it is unlikely that Fortún would have written these stories if she had not met other intellectuals at the Feminine Lyceum Club in Madrid, a socially pro- gressive, cultural institution where women could organize and collaborate on intellectual events (1993).3 At different points throughout “Celia and Her World,”Fortún’s biogra- phical details are recognizable through the words of her protagonist. In this way, Fortún explores the creative subjectivity of women and the problematic role of motherhood in a society that is beginning to discuss the emancipation of women and the importance of education as a means to regenerate the nation and the individual (Capdevila-Argüelles 2009). As an example of the faithful portrayal of the society of the time depicted in the stories about Celia, Fortún introduces Celia’s mother as a member of the Lyceum. In a scene from Celia, lo que dice (What Celia says) (1929), Celia’s mother cannot stay and play with her daughter because she has many things to do: “Paying the cook, writing two or three letters and going out at six to have tea with my friends from the Lyceum” (64). If the girl reader was not familiar with such a modern institution as the Lyceum, she would learn about it from Celia. In this subtle way, Fortún spread the idea of a progressive society. One of the most interesting relationships in the books is that between Celia and her mother. Pilar de Montalbán is educated and spends a lot of time away from home and from her daughter. This relationship illustrates the role of women in the Spain of the 1920s and the uncertain role that 139 a ANA PUCHAU DE LECEA motherhood had in the life of the new modern woman. Celia’s mother rep- resents a desire to be active outside of the home, to have a life separate from her family duties, and independent of her husband; she shares these desires with Fortún. As a consequence, Celia is left with Miss Nelly, her English nanny, who embodies traditional education. She is used by Fortún as a way of criticizing and exploring different forms of pedagogy. Aligned with the philosophy of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (The Free Educational Institution) (1876–1936), a significant educational project based on the ideas of Krausism, Fortún followed its guidelines and collabo- rated with their mission in different ways.4 At an institutional conference Fortún read about the importance of telling stories to children and worried about how little time mothers were spending at home and their lack of con- tribution to their children’s education. She wrote, “It would be desirable for it to be the mother who told the first stories because the faculty of attention is acquired in the first years of life … but in modern times the mother is too busy … or infinitely unoccupied, and either way she does not have time to tell stories to her children” ([1946] 2008: 19). Fortún knew about the importance of nurturing and the benefits that children receive from having a close relationship with their mother; she herself was dealing with a prob- lematic relationship with motherhood. She presents Pilar de Montalbán as a modern woman combining motherhood with the development of her social and independent self.
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