FRANCOIST POLITICS OF FEMALE IDENTITY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LIDA VERONA

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities for allowing me to consult the censors’ files held at the Archivo General de la Administración, Spain. Notes 1. The present study echoes Mary Nash's Nash , Mary . “Un/Contested Identities: Motherhood, Sex Reform and the Modernization of Gender Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain.” Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain . Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff . 1998 New York : SUNY P . 25 49 . [Google Scholar] contention that while “[g]ender discourse does not necessarily reflect reality [in] fact, its normative framework may blur contestation or dissonance in the historical experience of women or obscure their renegotiation of gender contracts and relationships […]”, it “can give us a clue to the system of ideas against which women had to measure their behavior and to the meanings of their challenges or compliance”. See “Un/Contested Identities” (26–7). 2. The works I am referring to are: Asilo de huérfanas (1942), La casa de los Guzmanes (1941), Ella es así (1946), En pos de la ilusión (1940), and Jugando a millonaria (1950). The selection reflects these texts’ relative accessibility as well as the focus of my then ongoing project, chronologically oriented towards the earlier years of Franco's rule. In the process of revising this paper, I have read Ella no era Elisa (1958) and, looking back, would posit that Ortoll's preoccupation with female identity and male–female power relations is, at the very least, recurrent. In nearly all of her novels, the heroine's identity or perception of herself is presented as an obstacle to her “happiness”, which is to say marriage. And if “happiness” can only be achieved “by undergoing a complex process of self-subversion, during which [the heroine] sacrifices her aggressive instincts, her ‘pride’ and—nearly—her life”, does this mean that the readers are encouraged to “participate in and actively desire feminine self-betrayal” (Modleski Modleski , Tania . Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women . London : Methuen , 1984 . [Google Scholar] 37) or could it be a pattern that belies the conscious or unconscious pressures experienced by women in their efforts to mold to the reigning expectations of themselves? The problem lies in believing that such a molding must “naturally” take place, rather than seeing the need to mold as itself repressive; the texts seem open to interpretation. 3. These four authors—Carmen de Icaza, Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, and María Mercedes Ortoll—are commonly cited together, along with Rafael Pérez y Pérez (the only male practitioner of the genre to have elicited some scholarly attention) on the basis of their shared popularity among readers and prestige within the industry. Their novels were regarded as stylistically more sophisticated and better crafted than those of other novela rosa writers. See Azorín Fernández, María Dolores, La obra novelística de Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Charlo, Ramón, “La novela sentimental” in La novela popular en España, Vol. 2, Vázquez de Parga, Salvador, Héroes y enamoradas: La novela popular española, and Núñez Núñez Puente , Sonia . Reescribir la femineidad: La mujer y el discurso cultural en la España contemporánea . Madrid : Pliegos , 2008 . [Google Scholar] Puente, Sonia, Reescribir la Femineidad: La mujer y el discurso cultural en la España contemporánea. 4. The question that comes to mind here is how the genre, understood as “a social [sic] contract between writers and readers” (Radford 8) regulates the narrative, its structure and possible meaning(s). 5. Kebadze Romance and Exemplarity. 6. I find Stevi Jackson's discussion of romantic love in terms of discourse and her claim that popular romance novels’ “success depends precisely on being one of the most compelling discourses by which any one of us is inscribed” most convincing. See “Women and Heterosexual Love: Complicity, Resistance and Change” in Romance Revisited (12). 7. Didier Coste's observations on the inner workings of the “happy romance” offer some interesting parallels to this reading. According to Coste, whose article examines Rafael Pérez y Pérez's work, “the enigma, or the hermeneutic code, to use Barthes's terminology, is only a matter of how obstacles are (a) created for the lovers, (b) identified by them, and (c) overcome by them, with or without human help. This does not mean that the narrative entertains no pretense of uncertainty about its outcome, but the function of the pretense is precisely to boost the reader's confidence: the reader knows better, he or she will not be taken in so easily; the reader's confidence has its source in the knowledge of formulaic rules manifested at collection scale, and each individual instance of narrative can play with it without destroying it”. See “Installments of the Heart: Text Delimitation in Periodical Narrative and its Consequences” (61–2). 8. Constructing Spanish Womanhood, a collection of essays edited by Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, Aurora G. Morcillo's True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Francoist Spain, Inbal Ofer's Señoritas in Blue: The Making of a Female Political Elite in Franco's Spain, and Cathleen Richmond's Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women's Section of the Falange 1934-1959 are all excellent and up-to-date studies on the production, propagation, and negotiation of normative models of womanhood in Franco's Spain. 9. On internal contradictions within the national-Catholic model of womanhood see Señoritas in Blue, especially chapter 2. The image of an ideal woman that emerges through a wide range of prescriptive texts, including the political speeches of the head of the Sección Femenina, Pilar Primo de Rivera, and in the novels of one of Sección Femenina's elite members, Carmen de Icaza, is “a baffling mixture of seemingly irreconcilable images and responsibilities. She was committed to caring for others (children, male companions and husbands, aging parents, younger colleagues), but at the same time was called upon to invest time and energy in improving herself physically and intellectually. She was evaluated according to her homemaking skills, but also according to her ambitions to influence society at large. She was called upon to set an example in the workplace, the school and the street. She was expected to be a proud Spaniard and a devout Catholic while not always abiding by the dictates of National Catholicism” (Ofer 55–6). The heroines of novelas rosa exhibit similar inconsistencies in being at once “subservient, yet enterprising; youthful, yet grave; meek, yet dignified; modest, yet accomplished; longsuffering, yet cheerful; staid, yet dynamic; simple, yet refined; austere, yet elegant, binding the ascetic with the aesthetic sensibility” (Kebadze 68). 10. See Kebadze. 11. In El pecado, as in a number of other works, genre conventions that impose limitations on the level of signification have the effect of opening the text to hitherto unsuspected narrative and, by the same token, interpretative possibilities. In a political climate which induced both men and women to “incluir fragmentos y frases de forma intencional para que se cebasen en ellas los censores dejando intacto el texto fundamental” (Conde Peñalosa 288), it may not be too far-fetched to hypothesize that adhesion to certain (gendered) genre conventions may have had the intended or unintended effect of circumventing censorship. As critics and writers have attested time and again, self-censorship worked both on conscious and unconscious levels and the readers, well aware of the writers’ limited expressive freedoms, knew to read between the lines. “Toda la literatura de los años cuarenta y sesenta”, contends Conde Peñalosa, “es un juego dialéctico entre planos literarios explícitos y planos implícitos, entre la denuncia solapada y la literatura permitida” (289). Similarly, in studying the self-representations of the female elite in charge of the women's branch of the Spanish Phalanx, Sección Femenina, Inbal Ofer points to the perceived need on the part of women to guard their language for “publicly breaking Francoist gender codes, [they] would have disqualified [themselves] from other political and cultural affiliations” (47); a strategy which in turn requires of historians like Ofer and anyone interested in understanding the linguistic stakes in uneven power relations to think in terms of these discourses’ “‘textual architecture’—the art of scrutinizing an author's use of language in order to read between the lines” (47). Furthermore, the “importance of dissimulation as a strategy for survival” and “a postmodern notion of identity—particularly gender identity—as performance”, noted by Labanyi in her discussion of the best-selling novels of Concha Linares-Becerra and Luisa-María Linares (15), signal a homologous coping strategy arising from the perceived pressure to conform to a model and subsequent adherence to that model. 12. Another way of gauging the possible bearing that Ortoll's launching of her literary career during the Republican years may have had on her work would be through the category of “historical generation” defined as “[a]n age group, whose members share common historical experiences, which influence the way they perceived the world around them … Members of the same generation might hold opposite political positions, but under these apparent disagreements they share a basic agreement concerning the important issues, questions, and facts of life” (qtd. in Ofer, 22). 13. I am honoring her request to remain anonymous. 14. These memories form part of an e-mail correspondence established in efforts to gather, information about the life of an author who has been read assiduously over half a century without eliciting a single entry in any readily available bio-bibliographical sources, not even those devoted to women writers, (including Carolyn Galerstein's otherwise apposite and helpful annotated bio-bibliographical guide, Women Writers of Spain). A web page, Amigas de la Biblioteca de Mujeres, operating under the auspices of the Instituto de la Mujer (http://www.mujerpalabra.net/bibliotecademujeres), offers a substantial list of Ortoll's works, including dates and, in some cases, numbers corresponding to their edition in Juventud's collection of La Novela Rosa. 15. However, the quest does not end here, and I remain hopeful that with further inquiries more can be ascertained. 16. Although there were other publishing houses that like Juventud launched their own collections of romantic novels, hoping, no doubt, to replicate La Novela Rosa's success, the latter had a loyal following from before the war and managed to sustain its reputation as a pioneer in the field. 17. The patterns which Jo Labanyi identifies in the works of Luisa-María Linares and Concha Linares-Becerra are both relevant and applicable in the context of Ortoll's work. “The heroines who get their man are always independent women: a large number are orphans who have made their way in the world through their own efforts, comprising unusual female examples of the autonomous self-made individual. They routinely claim not to be interested in men—putting career or pride first, for not all the heroines are sympathetic—and end up falling in love despite themselves [sic]. The repetition of this formula deserves some thought for these novels are not simply advocating domesticity” and, as another critic has observed, “frequently feature a taming-of-the-shrew format” (7). 18. See Modleski. 19. Thus, from the outset, Lida, with her age, economic position, and marital status, represents a minority, if not an anomaly. She is no spinster mourning or awaiting an absent betrothed, or a dutiful, embittered aunt rigorously looking after her sibling's orphaned and always misbehaving children, she is no widow, and is too old to be a “chica rara”. The only other viable cultural models that come to mind are those of lay members of a Catholic organization (i.e. Acción Católica), known for practicing so-called social motherhood, or the leaders of the Sección Femenina in charge of indoctrinating female constituents. 20. Given how little we known about Ortoll, it is difficult to make any conjectures about the possible autobiographical references, but her first-hand knowledge of army officers’ life experiences—she was married to a General—and her vocation—writing—shared by the heroine, bear pointing out. 21. The choice of names with Slavic connotations—first for a dog, and later for a man she is to marry, Coronel Máxim (my emphasis) de Soto—seems at the very least peculiar at the time when Spain was accepting US aid in a common alliance against the Soviet Union. Could this be a veiled allusion? If Máxim is meant to suggest something as agreeable and unlikely even for censors to quibble with as “greatest”, then what of Vanoski? And besides, it would hardly have been difficult to come up with an edifying Spanish name, one that would be free of such ambiguous connotations. 22. Notably, all the male characters in the novel are tied to a form of institutional authority: the Church (Father Juan), the Military (the brothers Emilio and Lorenzo), and the Sciences (doctor/psychiatrist Máxim de Soto, who also happens to be a coronel). 23. I am merely using the term to invoke a discernible pattern, and not to cancel out the need for nuanced reading(s) or reinforce ready-made interpretations. 24. The emphases in the two subsequent passages are mine. 25. Lida is composing a practical guidebook for women in the vein of conduct manuals described above. While many were authored by clergymen, and many others spread the teachings of the Sección Femenina, there was also a steadily growing demand for less edifying works on beauty, fashion, and etiquette in general. 26. Here again, it is clear that for Lida feelings are not only malleable, but subject to discipline—as such, their rejection or withholding (as seen in the previous passages) constitutes a form of resistance. 27. Thus, Jackson's proposition “to develop analysis of love as a culturally constructed emotion and to explore its linkages to specific social orderings of intimate relationships” proves particularly fruitful in the context of novela rosa (51). 28. The completion of the book-project prior to marriage may belie an anxiety that such activity will be at the very least difficult, if not impossible, to maintain as a rehabilitated wife of a coronel; an anxiety which did not preclude Ortoll herself from having a sterling career. Even if only on the level of speculation, I would contend that this achievement, for such it is given the political and cultural climate in which she wrote, would not have blinded her, or should not blind us, to the fact that her own condition, like that of Señoritas in Blue, was rather an exception than a rule.