Fictions of surrender: Romance and exemplarity in post -war Spanish women's narratives

Abstract

Notorious for its supposed lack of literary merit, Spanish post-war novelistic production remains largely unexplored. The burgeoning of cultural and interdisciplinary studies has prompted scholars to question the criteria for evaluating individual works as well as the principles used for assessing and delimiting one's field of inquiry. The present study views selected Spanish women-authored texts from the early 1940s as cultural artifacts to be considered in their historical and socio-political context. Specifically, it explores the relationship between the post-war reactionary values and conventions of representing women, the constraints implicit in the state monopolization of signifying practices and the built-in indeterminacy of literary discourse.

Parting from the premise that literature in the early years of Franco's rule participated in the diffusion of hegemonic gender roles and models of conduct, I study selected women-authored texts as narratives of female exemplarity. Underlying this notion of exemplarity is a belief in the power of fictional works to influence the conduct of their readers. A comprehensive study of the Catholic, bourgeois, and Falangist feminine ideals in the first part of this dissertation serves to elucidate the nonnative and normalizing tenets of womanhood, shared by the novelists and their contemporary female audiences.

The second part of this dissertation focuses on three novels by the best-selling authors of novelas rosa—Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, and Carmen de Icaza. Reading post-war romance fictions in terms of exemplarity allows us to consider the ways in which given texts simultaneously "reinforce" and "deviate" from the dominant cultural norms, instead of limiting our interpretation to either one or the other category. While legitimate accounts of romance, as a rule, lead to the production of an ideal type (models to be emulated), the very transformation that the heroine undergoes on the way to matrimony presupposes a departure from the norm—a disruption, error, defiance—that must be eliminated, corrected or redeemed as a precondition for the narrative's happy end.

Finally, it is my hope that this dissertation helps to assuage the lack of readership and scholarly attention to Francoist cultural production in general, and to post-war women's narratives in particular.

Keywords. 20^th-Century Spain, Women Authors, Social Conditions, Romance, Novela rosa