IN HER PLACE: GEOGRAPHIES OF URBAN FEMALE LABOR IN SPANISH CULTURE (1880-1931) BY MARIA DEL MAR SORIA LOPEZ DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Luisa-Elena Delgado, Chair Professor John C. Wilcox Associate Professor Robert Rushing Assistant Professor Javier Irigoyen García ABSTRACT My dissertation demonstrates how three aesthetic and ideological movements— such as costumbrismo, realism, and avant-garde—construct characterizations of urban female workers in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature and culture as symbols of middle-class anxieties and desires as a reaction to experienced social and political instability in turn-of-the-century Spain. Costumbrismo, realism, and avant-garde highlight as the main social category from which writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, María Martínez Sierra, or Ramón Gómez de la Serna fashioned fictional urban working women’s gender and work identities and their trajectories in various narratives. In particular, I claim that in these texts, the working woman’s class conflicts with gender in the process of narrative signification, producing a multiplicity of contradictory meanings that expose turn-of-the-century bourgeois anxieties about women’s emancipation and working-class unrest. My analysis of urban female working characters reveals that middle-class representations of working women result from a dominant conceptualization of class and gendered spaces in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain. For that reason, my thesis draws a geography of urban female labor through the analysis of the symbolic condensation of class, gender, and space in the cultural representations of urban working women. By doing so, I shed light on the ambivalent cultural location that working women have occupied in cultural representations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Even though the construction and development of modern Spain could not have taken place without the participation working women’s labor, this segment of the population has been “out-of-place” for too long in literary and cultural criticism. It is my hope that ii this dissertation will reposition these marginalized characters to their legitimate place in critical discourse. iii Para José Diego y María Mercedes iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My dissertation would not have been possible without the support of different people and institutions. Special thanks to my advisor and mentor, L. Elena Delgado who has been my intellectual and professional guide and model during the last four years of graduate school. Without her intelligent and challenging questions and suggestions, I would have never learned to look at texts from a different analytical perspective: a perspective that has irremediably permeated the way I look at life now. I thank her for her support, receptiveness, and patience. I would also like to thank Prof. John C. Wilcox, whose encouragement, friendliness, and hard work as my professor and committee member have tremendously helped me to write this dissertation. My other two committee members, Prof. Robert Rushing and Prof. Javier Irigoyen García, have also been essential in the final result of my work. I am very grateful to both for being such insightful readers and approachable scholars. I am also greatly indebted to Prof. María Llanos Díaz Pérez for welcoming and granting me access to the library of the Real Conservatorio de Música y Danza in Albacete, Spain. Institutional support has been equally crucial in the development and completion of my dissertation. Both the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities have provided me with grants to conduct archival research in Spain. In addition, the School of Languages, Cultures and Literatures at the University of Illinois generously funded one summer fellowship and one dissertation completion fellowship which allowed me to finish my dissertation in a timely manner. v No me cabe la menor duda que sin el cariño y apoyo de María Mercedes López Sánchez y José Diego Soria Sevilla, mis padres, jamás hubiera escrito esta tesis, ni mi aventura en las Américas hubiera sido posible. Gracias también por haberme transmitido el amor a la naturaleza, la cual, aunque invisible en la narrativa de este proyecto, me ha permitido afrontar la soledad y el estrés de las horas de trabajo en frente de un ordenador. Y gracias a Francisco José Soria López, mi hermano/el nene, porque sé que siempre estará ahí con su humor y afecto y porque hace que mis viajes a España siempre merezcan la pena. Mis tías Paqui y Pachi, junto con mi madre y mi abuela Maria Rosa, han sido las musas de este trabajo. Su fuerza, su valor, sus frustraciones, sus éxitos y derrotas y su lucha constante por encontrar un lugar en un mundo que las ha marginado me han inspirado a escribir esta tesis y a saber cuál es mi sitio. En especial, gracias a mi madre: no hay nada más maravilloso que saber dónde está la felicidad y a ella le debo el valorar y el disfrutar las cosas más pequeñas de la vida. El cariño y amistad de amigos como Marlene y Bruce Mather, Claudia Holguin, Marcos Campillo, Irune del Río, Mari Carmen Rubio, Ana Belén López, Kristina Medina (y su garaje), Jessica Jakubanis, Sebastián Burset, Sonia Aroca, Ana Vivancos, Paz Gutiérrez, Katia Curbelo, Yolanda Aroca, Llanos Martínez y otros muchos a lo largo de estos años de doctorado han sido fundamentales. Gracias a ellos, no he perdido de vista lo que es ser un ser sociable con capacidad para la diversión y el compañerismo. Finally, I am immensely grateful to Navadeep Khanal. He is one of the happiest, most loving, and generous people I have ever met. Had it not been for his positive attitude, understanding, and contribution to housework, I would not have been able to vi complete my thesis without trouble. With him by my side, life has become a smooth and beautiful journey. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION:..............................................................................................................1 i. The Myth of El ángel del hogar in Turn-of-the-Century Spain.......................1 ii. Dismantling the Myth of Female Domesticity: Working Women as Producers and Consumers................................................................................3 iii. Working Women Under Scrutiny: Labor Conditions and Social Prejudices.......................................................................................................10 iv. Articulating Middle-Class Anxieties and Desires: Working Women’s Representation in Context..............................................................................15 CHAPTER 1. DEFINING THE AUTOCHTHONOUS IN GÉNERO CHICO: THE CASTIZA WORKING WOMAN.......................................................................................30 1.1. A Sexual Landmark: The Urban Maid in “La Gran Vía” (1886) by Felipe Pérez González...............................................................................................39 1.2. Cigars, Machines, and the Patriotic Female Worker: (Re)Imagining the Nation in Ángel Munilla and Luis Ferreiros’ “Las Cigarreras” (1898).......53 1.3. Fantasy Worlds and Chameleonic Identities: The Modern Working-Class Cinderella in Martínez Sierra’s “La suerte de Isabelita” (1911)....................66 1.4. Female Worker’s Public Counterspaces in Carlos Arniches’ “Los Pasionales” (1915).................................................................................75 CHAPTER 2. RECONFIGURING THE HOME: WOMEN’S LABOR IN REALISM AND NATURALISM........................................................................................................99 2.1. “Home, Sweet Home”?: Domestic Workers in Pérez Galdós’ Tormento (1884)...........................................................................................................105 2.2. Reconfiguring the Domestic Space: The Self-Made Women in Pardo Bazán’s “Casi artista” and “El mundo” (1908)..................................118 CHAPTER 3. DANGEROUS SPACES OF WORK IN THE CITY: THE STORE AND THE SHOPGIRL IN AVANT-GARDE LITERATURE.......................................152 3.1. Mapping the Working Female Body in the City: Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa (1917)...........................................................................................160 3.2. A Castiza Commodity: The Salesgirl in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s La Nardo (1930)................................................................................................202 3.3. Figure 1.........................................................................................................238 CONCLUSION: ..............................................................................................................239 WORKS CITED: ............................................................................................................245 viii INTRODUCTION We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology. Edward Soja No Language is innocent. Roland Barthes i. The Myth of El ángel del hogar in