Gender and the Question of Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: De-Essentializing Femininity in Ángela Barco's Fémina (1910)

Abstract

Modernity, by definition, implies a break with the traditional order. In Spain, anxieties surrounding women's social roles in a constantly changing society became more acute as the country's modernization process problematized conventional, bourgeois conceptions of supposedly natural gender differences. This study explores the ways in which Ángela Barco, a writer who despite some notoriety during her life is practically unknown today, represents the relationship between gender and modernity in her short novel Fémina. I analyze the ways in which the notion of an essential and immutable feminine nature is problematized in the novel as well as the ways in which the novel positions this question within the larger context of Spain's modernization. Furthermore, I argue that the novel, by revealing that gender differences are socially constructed rather than natural, exposes that the very notion of the "Natural," on which the subordination of women to male authority was legitimated, is itself socially determined. In doing so, the novel raises questions not only about a woman's role in modern Spanish society but also about a woman writer's role in the modernization of Spanish literature.