Copyright by Inmaculada Concepción Cívico Lyons 2006
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Copyright by Inmaculada Concepción Cívico Lyons 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Inmaculada Concepción Cívico Lyons Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Construction of Male Subjectivity by Four Contemporary Spanish Women Writers Committee: Virginia Higginbotham, Supervisor Charles Ramirez-Berg Leopoldo Bernucci Denise DuPont Enrique Fierro Vance Holloway The Construction of Male Subjectivity by Four Contemporary Spanish Women Writers by Inmaculada Concepción Cívico Lyons, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2006 Dedication To my husband Philip, and my daughters Anna, and Vanessa, for their understanding and support. In loving memory of my mother, Isabel. Acknowledgements I am grateful to all the people whose support I have received throughout the years. I am especially thankful to Virginia Higginbotham, my constant source of support, guidance and encouragement. I thank the members of my committee, Vance Holloway, Enrique Fierro, Charles Ramirez-Berg, Leopoldo Bernucci, and Denise DuPont for their ongoing assistance and direction as well as their individual contributions. Thank you all for your careful reading and advice. I must also give thanks to my friends and colleagues for lending me a friendly ear when I felt overwhelmed. v The Construction of Male Subjectivity by Four Contemporary Spanish Women Writers Publication No._____________ Inmaculada Concepción Cívico Lyons, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisor: Virginia Higginbotham This dissertation examines four contemporary Spanish women writers’ insight into the formation and development of male subjectivity in the context of socio-political and artistic status of women in democratic Spain. In this study I analyze the following novels: La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón, Azul (1994) by Rosa Regás, La señora Berg (1999) by Soledad Puértolas, and Fiebre para siempre (1994) by Irene Gracia. The narrative representation of men as a central theme by women can be considered a revolutionary event as women foreground themselves as subjects of a discourse, overthrowing the traditional dichotomy woman/object. By questioning men’s social and cultural positions, women writers adopt a new identity: that of the female observer writing male behavior. This younger generation of Spanish women writers questions the traditional definitions of gender roles and views masculinity as a set of impositions on male and female subjects. Gender tensions are represented in the novels as their male and female vi protagonists attempt to survive a world in crisis by either submitting to or resisting the impositions of power through external forces such as institutionalized religion, political mandates, and socially prescribed behavior. Each author focuses on different aspects of the strategic impositions of power. In these novels, accounts are given of why characters react to external forces in particular ways, and of the consequences of their behavior. Gender relation subtleties are defined as determined by cultural, social and psychological motivations. In order to illuminate the fictional construction of masculinity and gender relations in contemporary women’s narrative, I make use of the following theories: a) Michel Foucault’s explanations of power, knowledge, and discourse; b) Paul Smith’s understanding of the subject as a place of contradiction in which cultural practices are made concrete; c) Julia Kristeva’s linguistic and psychological theories in relation to the “subject-in-process”; and d) current sociological and anthropological notions of masculinity and gender relations. Contrary to the possibility of drawing a composite male character from these novels, we are faced with a sincere, not stereotyped account of males as fragmented beings in conflict with themselves and with the forces that shape their identities. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION................................................................................................... 1 The construction of male subjectivity by four contemporary Spanish women writers ........................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1 22 La voz dormida : Writing gender in revolutionary times....................................... 22 Male Identity in La voz dormida.................................................................. 25 Male Bonding............................................................................................... 35 Ideological impositions ................................................................................ 41 Female identity in La voz dormida .............................................................. 46 Gender Conflict............................................................................................ 55 CHAPTER 2 79 The Mythical Representation of Masculinity and Gender Relations in Azul ....... 79 Intertextuality ............................................................................................... 84 The Mythical Representation of Masculinity............................................... 96 Power and Gender Relations...................................................................... 115 CHAPTER 3 129 Masculinity at a crossroads in La señora Berg (1999) by Soledad Puértolas ..... 129 Perspectives in the construction of the ideal woman ................................. 134 The narrative representation of women’s reality in Democratic Spain...... 142 New patterns of masculinity and gender relations ..................................... 151 CHAPTER 4 183 Language and the Deconstruction of Masculinity in Irene Gracia’s Fiebre para siempre ....................................................................................................... 183 Discourses that break identity: Poetry, Maternity and Psychoanalysis in the representation of masculinity ............................................................ 189 The absent father ........................................................................................ 198 Thanatos and Eros in the development of masculinity .............................. 202 viii Boxing as the metaphorical representation of masculinity ........................ 213 CONCLUSION 230 Representations of Masculinities ........................................................................ 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 Vita .................................................................................................................... 252 ix INTRODUCTION The construction of male subjectivity by four contemporary Spanish women writers In the last few years there has been a proliferation of literary critical studies with a commonly defined aim: the analysis of female discourse in contemporary Spanish women’s narrative. The increase of such studies is parallel to the number of women novelists in Spain today, and signals literary critics’ preoccupation and fascination with the phenomenon of women’s ability to produce literary works of art. Current research examining women’s narrative in Spain extends over a variety of topics creating a vast interdisciplinary web: from socio-political, to psychological and linguistic concerns, among others, are being examined in relation to contemporary women’s narrative. However, little attention has been given to women’s conceptions about fiction, particularly to women writers’ insight into the formation and development of male subjectivity. My study contributes to the understanding of the representation of male subjectivities in relation to the socio-political and artistic status of women in democratic Spain. Such examination will shed light into the mechanisms by which male subjectivities and gender relations are represented in four examples by contemporary women’s fiction. After the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, a new era of democracy began for Spanish society. Literary critics report on the explosion of women 1 writers which coincided with the abolition of the remnants of the dictatorship in 1978. Already in 1988, Janet Perez in her study of contemporary Spanish women writers hoped that the best would be yet to come due to “women’s writers new numbers, new visibility, and new freedoms, their heightened level of consciousness, education, and self-awareness, improved channels of communication, and increased contacts with one another” (11). The impact women’s narrative may have on the panorama of contemporary Spanish literature continues to be measured by literary critics. The landscape of contemporary Spanish literature is also enriched by the contributions of women novelists who write in languages other than Spanish, such as Catalan, Galician, and Basque, and by the variety of ideological tendencies, narrative styles, and themes they bring to the novel. With thematic variations, novelists of the immediate post-Franco period (1975-1985) emphasize the search for their identity as women and as writers, as is the case with Carmen Martín Gaite. Other writers, such as Esther Tusquets, investigate questions of women’s sexuality as conflicting with patterns of prevailing notions of femininity. Carme Riera exposes the ironical relation between men and women. Younger writers, such as Almudena Grandes, discover in her narrative the unrestricted sexual possibilities open to females at the same time