Copyright by Debra Joanne Ochoa 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Debra Joanne Ochoa Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation La chica rara: Witness to Transgression in the Fiction of Spanish Women Writers 1958-2003 Committee: Virginia Higginbotham, Supervisor Enrique Fierro Vance Holloway Naomi Lindstrom Alexandra Wettlaufer La chica rara: Witness to Transgression in the Fiction of Spanish Women Writers 1958-2003 by Debra Joanne Ochoa 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 In loving memory of my mother Joann Ochoa “y la felicidad que me invadía en el sueño no radicaba sólo en poderle contar cosas de Nueva York a mi madre y en tener la certeza de que ella, aun después de muerta, me oía” ---De su ventana a la mía, Carmen Martín Gaite Acknowledgements Thank you to the members of my dissertation committee, Virginia Higginbotham,Vance Holloway, Naomi Lindstrom, Alexandra Wettlaufer, and Enrique Fierro. A special thanks to my advisor Virginia Higginbotham for all her support and encouragement. Thank you to the many friends I have made during my years at the University of Texas at Austin. My deep appreciation goes to my father Richard Ochoa for his unconditional love. Thank you to my family especially Micio and Chiara. v La chica rara: Witness to Transgression in the Fiction of Spanish Women Writers 1958-2003 Publication No._____________ Debra Joanne Ochoa, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisor: Virginia Higginbotham The last twenty years marks a considerable increase in the scholarship of the fiction of Spanish women writers. After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish women gained increasing freedom to write of their experiences of life under a dictatorship. In this study, I examine how Carmen Martín Gaite, Concha Alós, Carme Riera, Adelaida García Morales, and Luisa Castro treat the topics of family, space, and writing. The novels and short stories of these women writers span the last half of the twentieth century and trace female subjectivity and Spanish women’s unique perspectives on feminism. In Chapter One, I show how the selected authors re-write the traditional images of the family to displace masculine authority. The family is the building block of patriarchal society and Spanish women writers reconstruct the family to dismantle Francoist ideology. The relationships between mothers and daughters, in Concha Alós’s vi Los cien pájaros (1962) and Luisa Castro’s Viajes con mi padre (2003), is a source of empowerment for the young female characters who look to their mothers as models of independence. Incest, in Alós’s Argeo ha muerto, supongo (1985) and García Morales’s El Sur (1985) and La tía Águeda (1995), is an example of familial dysfunction that Spanish women writers expose. Finally Riera, Martín Gaite and Castro celebrate their regional culture to challenge Francoist attempt to erase Catalan and Galician identities. Chapter Two discusses the authors’ examination of space and the techniques women use to appropriate space for themselves within the home and in public. Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978) is one of the most outstanding explorations of space in twentieth-century Spanish literature. In Martín Gaite’s Entre visillos (1958) and Alós’s Los cien pájaros (1963) the reader sees how young female protagonists enter prohibited parts of the home, such as the father’s library, or neighborhoods to test the limits of family and societal behavior codes. In Chapter Three I explore the transgressive function of women’s writing of and during the Franco dictatorship. I use the term anti-novela rosa to refer to the prose of Spanish women writers that do not offer neat solutions to the reader. Unlike the novela rosa that assures its reading audience of a ‘final feliz’ the work of Carmen Martín Gaite, Luisa Castro, and Carme Riera purposely omit conclusions that define the characters’ futures. These conclusions function to counter-narrate Francoist strictures of female comportment. Spanish women writers have successfully challenged patriarchal society to voice their experiences and perspectives. Their fiction addresses the undercurrent of the Franco era to reveal ‘unspoken’ topics including incest, violence, and drug use. In the late vii twentieth century and early twenty-first century, Spanish women writers articulate women’s issues with courageous honesty. They have gained strong literary voices in the fiction of Spain. viii Table of Contents Introduction: La chica rara......................................................................................1 Review of Critical Studies on Spanish Women Writers...............................15 Theoretical Approach to Female Subjectivity ..............................................22 Female Subjectivity in Spain ........................................................................34 La chica rara at the End of the Century .......................................................42 Chapter 1 Women’s Views of Family Dynamics ..................................................45 Defining Spanish Womanhood in the Franco Era ........................................51 Alternative Mother-Daughter Relationships................................................60 Exposure of Dysfunction ..............................................................................68 Recuperation of Regional Voices .................................................................74 Chapter 2 Beyond the Backroom...........................................................................84 The Gender of Space.....................................................................................86 Ángel del hogar No Longer ..........................................................................90 Entry into the City.......................................................................................102 Chapter 3 The anti-novela rosa as Subversion....................................................124 Mujeres noveleras.......................................................................................127 Novela rosa as Francoist propaganda .........................................................130 The anti-novela rosa....................................................................................135 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................164 Bibliography ........................................................................................................172 Vita…...................................................................................................................185 ix Introduction: La chica rara It is necessary to destroy and rebuild the entire false picture of the world. M.M. Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination Cuando una mujer escribe se convierte en una Judith armada de pluma y la pluma puede ser una arma tan peligrosa como una espada. Aurora López and María Ángeles Pastor Crítica y ficción literaria: mujeres españolas contemporáneas With the hindsight that scholars have of the twentieth century, this project examines how Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000), Concha Alós (1928-), Carme Riera (1948-), Adelaida García Morales (1945-), and Luisa Castro (1966-) inscribe women as subjects in narrative from 1958-2003. Each writer utilizes the chica rara to critique and evaluate Spain through the female protagonist’s observations and experiences. The works of these women writers span forty-five years and mark the advances and setbacks of women’s liberation in Spain. This study contributes to the growing interest in heterogeneity in Spain; therefore specific attention is paid to regional identities, particularly Catalan and Galician culture, and the particularities of Spanish feminism. Rather than following a traditional chronological literary analysis of each novel, the present study divides chapters according to three topics: women’s view of family dynamics, female appropriation of space, and the subversive function of women’s narrative. Such an approach invites a larger readership in fields outside of literature and contributes to other disciplines including history and women’s studies. 1 The eponymous term chica rara was coined by Carmen Martín Gaite in an essay “La chica rara” from the collection Desde la ventana (1987), “De ahora en adelante, las nuevas protagonistas de la novela femenina, capitaneadas por el ejemplo de Andrea, se atreverán a desafinar, a instalarse en la marginación y a pensar desde ella; van a ser conscientes de su excepcionalidad, viviéndola con una mezcla de impotencia y orgullo” (100). Martín Gaite locates Andrea of Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1945) as an example of a ‘strange girl’ that defines herself through nonconformity to what society determines acceptable behavior and appropriate interests for young women. The chica rara shows no interest in courtship and prefers solitude over socialization. She is the polar opposite of the chica casadera in the same way that the post-War novel written by women is a counter-argument to the novela rosa (López 23).1 The destiny of the chica casadera was to fall in love and marry, the most appropriate future for women considered, “el puntal y el espejo de futuras familias” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos 27). The main difference between the chica casadera and the chica rara is that the latter does not find