Hijos de la decadencia: transgressive representations of gender in the works of Emilia Pardo Baz�n

IntroductionTraditionally, the femme fatale has been closely associated with a series of noir films (such as Double Indemnity [1944], The Maltese Falcon [1941], and The Big Heat [1953]) in the 1940s and 50s that necessarily betray male anxieties about independent women in the years during and following World War II. However, the anxieties and historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In this context, to re-imagine is to imagine or conceive of something in a new way. It involves taking a concept or an idea and re-imagining it into something simultaneously similar and new. This article will argue, first, that the noir femme fatale’s emergence coincided with a period of history characterised by suspicion, intolerance and perceived vulnerability and that a similar set of historical factors—namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws—precipitated the emergence a femme fatale type figure in the Renaissance period. Second, noir films typically contain a series of narrative tropes that can be similarly identified in a selection of Renaissance plays, which enables the production of a new, re-imagined reading of these plays as tragedies of the feminine desire for autonomy. The femme fatale, according to Rebecca Stott, is not unique to the twentieth century. The femme fatale label can be applied retrospectively to seductive, if noticeably evil women, whose seduction and destruction of men render them amenable to our twenty-first century understanding of the femme fatale (Allen). Mario Praz similarly contends that the femme fatale has always existed; she simply becomes more prolific in times of social and cultural upheaval. The definition of the femme fatale, however, has only recently been added to the dictionary and the burden of all definitions is the same: the femme fatale is a woman who lures men into danger, destruction and even death by means of her overpowering seductive charms. There is a woman on the Renaissance stage who combines adultery, murder, and insubordination and this figure embodies the same characteristics as the twentieth-century femme fatale because she is similarly drawn from an archetypal pattern of male anxieties regarding sexually appetitive/desirous women. The fear that this selection of women elicit arises invariably from their initial defiance of their fathers and/or brothers in marrying without their consent and/or the possibility that these women may marry or seek a union with a man out of sexual lust.The femme fatale of 1940s and 50s noir films is embodied by such women as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Maltese Falcon), Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity), and Ann Grayle (Murder, My Sweet), while the figure of the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592), and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619). Like the noir femme fatale, there is a female protagonist in each of these plays who uses both cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her desired independence. By focusing on one noir film and one Renaissance play, this article will explore both the historical factors that precipitate the emergence of these fatal women and the structural tropes that are common to both Double Indemnity and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. The obvious parallels between the two figures at the centre of these narratives—Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna respectively—namely an aversion to the institution of marriage and the instigation of murder to attain one’s desires, enable a re-imagined reading of Beatrice-Joanna as a femme fatale. Socio-Cultural AnxietiesThe femme fatale is a component of changing consciousness: she is one of the recurring motifs of the film noir genre and takes her place amongst degeneration anxieties, anxieties about sexuality and race and concerns about cultural virility and fitness (Stott). According to Sylvia Harvey, the emergence of the femme fatale parallels social changes taking place in the 1940s, particularly the increasing entry of women into the labour market. She also notes the apparent frustration of the institution of the family in this era and the boredom and stifling entrapment of marriage and how the femme fatale threatens to destroy traditional family structures. Jans Wager likewise notes that the femme fatale emerged as an expression of the New Woman, whose presence in the public sphere was in opposition to her adherence to traditional societal values, while Virginia Allen argues that the femme fatale came to maturity in the years marked by the first birth control campaigns and female emancipation movement. The Renaissance femme fatale similarly emerged in the wake of historical trigger factors occurring at the time, namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws. In 1558, Queen Elizabeth I assumed the throne, which had a profound impact upon relations of gender in English Renaissance society. She occupied a privileged position of power in a society that believed women should have none by virtue of their inferior sex (Montrose). This was compounded by her decision to remain unmarried, which ensured the consolidation of her power that she would have otherwise forfeited to her husband. The presence of a female ruler destabilised established notions of women as passive objects of desire and, as I argue here, contributed to representations of powerful women in Renaissance drama. Men created femme fatales in their work as an expression of what they saw in women who were beginning to declare their sexual and political freedom. In addition, changing conceptions of marriage from arranged practices (unions for social and economic reasons) to romantic idealism (marriage for companionship and affective ties) saw the legitimation of desire outside the holy sacrament. Plays depicting femme fatales, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592) and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) to name a few, appear to have fed off the anxieties that resulted from the shift from arranged marriages to individual choice of a spouse. Similarly, in the noir period, “restrictions on women’s rights ensured that married women had comparatively fewer rights than single women, who could at least lay claim to their own property and wages” (Braun 53). As such, the femme fatale represented an alternative to domesticity, one in which a woman could retain her dignity without a man.Re-imagining the Femme Fatale James Damico proposes a model of film noir’s plot structure and character type. The male protagonist is hired for a job associated with a non-innocent woman to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted to. Through his attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is a natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to or actually murder a second man to whom a woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally her husband or lover). This act invariably leads to the woman’s betrayal of the protagonist and either metaphorically or literally results in the destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and the protagonist himself. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson lures her hapless lover, Walter Neff, into committing murder on her behalf. He puts up minimal resistance to Phyllis’s plan to insure her husband without his knowledge so that he can be killed and she can reap the benefits of the policy. Walter says, “I fought it [the idea of murder], only I guess I didn’t fight it hard enough.” Similarly, in The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna’s father, Vermandero, arranges her marriage to Alonzo de Piracquo; however, she is in love with Alsemero, who would also be a suitable match if Alonzo were out of the way. She thus employs the use of her servant DeFlores to kill her intended. He does as instructed and brings back her dead fiancée’s finger as proof of the deed, expecting for his services a sexual reward, rather than the gold Beatrice-Joanna offered him: “Never was man / Dearlier rewarded” (2.2.138-140). Renaissance fears regarding women’s desirous subjectivity are justified in this scene, which represent Beatrice-Joanna as willingly succumbing to DeFlore’s advances: she came to “love anon” what she had previously “fear’st and faint’st to venture on” (3.4.171-172). She experienced a “giddy turning in [her]” (1.1.159), which compelled her to seduce DeFlores on the eve of her wedding to Alsemero. Both Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna localise contemporary fears and fantasies about women, sexuality and marriage (Haber) and, despite the existing literature surrounding the noir femme fatale, a re-imagining of this figure on the Renaissance stage is unique. Furthermore, and in addition to similarities in plot structure, noir films are typically characterised by three narrative tropes (masquerade, the polarisation of the femme fatale with the femme attrappe and the demise of the femme fatale) that are likewise present in The Changeling. 1. Masquerade: Her Sexual Past Is the Central Mystery of the Narrative The femme fatale appropriates the signifiers of femininity (modesty, obedience, silence) that bewitch men and fool them into believing that she embodies everything he desires. According to Luce Irigaray, the femme fatale assumes an unnatural, flaunted facade and, in so doing, she conceals her own subjectivity and disrupts notions of what she is really like. Her sexual past is often the central mystery and so she figuratively embodies the hidden secrets of feminine sexuality while the males battle for control over this knowledge (Lee-Hedgecock). John Caleb-Hopkins characterises Phyllis as a faux housewife because of her rejection of the domestic, her utilisation of the role to further her agency, and her method of deception via gender perfor

SCHOLARS have explored many aspects of Pardo Bazan's writings that examine the plight of women in nineteenth-century Spain, in particular the ways that her fictional works employ unique narrative designs and contestatory strategies to subtly question the hegemony of patriarchal culture. In this study I will focus on a curious pair of stories from Pardo Bazan's corpus of short stories that seems to do just this but in an unusual way, by engaging with the paradigmatic figure of the femme fatale. Pardo Bazan repeatedly employs innovative representations of the femme fatale in her later novels, tellingly the titles of her last three published novels are: La quimera (1905), La sirena negra (1908) and Dulce dueno (1911). In an important study of a femme fatale figure from this last novel Dulce dueno Susan Kirkpatrick asserts: Women who adopted the contestatory stance of feminism were obliged to contend with the active and generally negative reinscription of feminine difference in to intervene in the cultural conversation about the significance of gender (Gender 119). This dynamic seems especially relevant in the stories that I analyze in this study, since the femme fatale is normally interpreted as a misogynistic archetype, although, as I will show, Pardo Bazan's representations of these female characters highlight their inherent power and require that the reader actively interpret their roles in the stories. While I do not believe that the female characters in these stories are archetypal femme fatales, I do believe that they engage with this literary model, and therefore a closer analysis of how these characters are shaped can elucidate our understanding of the tales. In Erika Bornay's study las hijas de Ulith, in which she analyzes the representations of the femme fatale in Western European literature and art, the key characteristics of this paradigm are highlighted: una belleza turbia, contaminada, perversa. Incuestionablemente, su cabellera es larga y abundante y, en muchas ocasiones, rojiza. Su color de piel pone acento en la blancura, y no es nada infrecuente que sus ojos sean descritos como de color verde. (...) En lo que concierne sus mas significativos rasgos psicologicos, destacara por su capacidad de dominio, de incitacion al mal, y su frialdad, que no le impedira, sin embargo, poseer una fuerte sexualidad, en muchas ocasiones lujuriosa y felina, es decir, animal. (114-15) As I will show in the following pages, the representations of women in the short stories analyzed here consistently reference certain aspects of the paradigmatic femme fatale, especially their assertive stares and their long flowing locks, which underscore their search for subjectivity and physical allure. On the other hand, other typical traits, specifically the femme fatales' animalistic sexuality and their controlling nature, are not present in Pardo Bazan's characterizations. Much has been said regarding the femme fatale's presence as a representation of male anxiety about women's changing roles in society in the fin de siglo. As Jess Sully notes: The exotic, sexually promiscuous 'otherness' of the femme fatale threatens to destabilize the established cultural order (47). Likewise, Virginia Allen asserts that the femme fatale's rejection of motherhood is one of her most threatening qualities since by denying his immortality and his posterity it leads to the ultimate destruction of the male (193). Indeed the femme fatale figures studied here align with this aspect of the model--they have no children and do not have carnal contact with their partners, thus eliminating the possibility of producing offspring. Along these same lines, Teresa Gomez Trueba shows how hegemonic cultural phenomena of the period were tied into artists' concerns regarding the many changes that were taking place in society during the turn of the century: Al tiempo que se echa mano de la ciencia para demostrar de manera infalible la inferioridad intelectual de la mujer, el artista decadente del fin de siglo representa su angustia y su temor ante la amenaza de los nuevos tiempos que se avecinan a traves de la imagen de una poderosa, perversa y devoradora mujer fatal, presente en infinidad de manifestaciones del arte finisecular (2). …

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

In her incisive and well-researched introduction Nuria Godón clearly lays out the thesis of her monograph: to show how Ana's masochism in La Regenta operates as a defense mechanism and a means of escaping her restricted existence. Godón explains the theoretical development of the concept of masochism, starting with the foundational texts of the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (who coined the term masochism based on Sacher-Masoch's name), Max Nordau, and Sigmund Freud, up through the work of more contemporary critics such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gilles Deleuze. She proceeds with a discussion of the ways in which sadomasochistic paradigms are found in other Spanish discourses of the time, such as medical discourses on hysteria, religious discourses on mysticism, cultural discourses on the ángel del hogar and the femme fatale, political discourses on French hegemony in Spain, and literary discourses in works such as Armando Palacio Valdés's Marta y María (1883), Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Sonata de otoño (1902), and Pardo Bazán's Dulce Dueño (1911).In Chapter 1, Godón further develops her theoretical frame. Differentiating her approach to masochism from turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific approaches that viewed masochism as pathological, Godón seeks to highlight the ways in which masochism is subversive. Emphasizing the importance of the contract in the sadomasochistic relationship, she reveals that it is the masochist who stipulates the behavior of the sadist. Put otherwise, the person who plays the passive role creates the rules and is free to leave the relationship if the dominant participant does not play out the role as dictated. Thus, the masochist shares authority with the sadist. Godón also explores the religious roots and the performative nature of masochism, along with the role of voyeurism and fetishism in sadomasochistic enactments.Chapter 2 explores the ways in which the sadomasochistic relationship between Ana and Fermín transforms throughout the course of the novel. Godón underscores that initially Ana not only seeks to recreate her own subjectivity, but to reconfigure the subjectivity of Don Fermín as well; they are twin souls and superior individuals above the laws of society. However, Fermín's betrayal of the masochistic contract, which stipulates the terms of Ana's voluntary submission, is betrayed in the same way as the bourgeois matrimonial ideal of companionship was often betrayed by an abusive husband. Moreover, just as society was unwilling to allow for the dissolution of the marriage contract in the case of abuse, Fermín refuses to respect Ana's decision to abandon him. The degeneration of Ana and Fermín's relationship also parodies Rousseau's social contract since Fermín prioritizes his interests as master over those of his slave, Ana, in the same way that politicians prioritized their interests over those who had elected them as their representatives.The details of the betrayal of the masochistic contract between penitent and confessor is the subject of Chapter 3. Godón argues that Fermín usurps Ana's fantasy by turning the Holy Week procession into a fetishistic performance that serves his own ends. Examples of similar fetishistic displays are seen earlier in the novel when Fermín is sexually aroused by both the letter in which Ana promises him her complete submission and by the rosebud that he aggressively picks and devours. Similarly, Ana discovers fetishistic pleasures in her bearskin rug, the whips she uses to flagellate herself (which are actually Petra's dusting cloths), and the hairshirt. Finally, in the Holy Week procession, Ana's bare feet are put on display for the sexual delectation of all of Vetusta. Ana's desire to use the event to publicly exhibit her superior capacity for true suffering is undermined by the presence of the hated schoolmaster Vinagre, the collective sexual focus on her feet, and Fermín's celebration, above all else, of his own virility. The manner in which Fermín co-opts her fantasy for his own benefit obliquely critiques the way the Kraussist idea of marriage as equal partnership often deteriorated into a relationship that only served the desires of the husband.The relationship between Doña Paula and the men in her life takes center stage in Chapter 4. Godón defines Paula as an imperatrix rather than a dominatrix because Fermín's mother wants nothing less than absolute dominance and has no interest in taking into consideration her subordinates’ desires, regardless of whether it is the priest from Matalerejo, her son, or the bishop. Godón argues that Paula, in her role as imperatrix, serves as an allegorical representation of a corrupt Catholic Church. Paula successfully expels the dominant patriarchal figure from her empire (Fermín's father is absent from the nuclear family, and God, the father, is absent from the Church). The de-eroticized, all-powerful, sadistic mother inverts the ideal of the self-abnegating maternal figure and serves as a pointed anticlerical critique of the Church's deviation from its purported role as spiritual savior. The Church is reduced to a corrupted institution of power led by a domineering and avaricious woman.Nuria Godón offers up a truly novel reading of Leopoldo Alas's masterpiece by studying an integral, yet overlooked, dynamic in the novel. She engages thoroughly with relevant scholarship, contextualizes the work within its socio-historical context, employs complex psychological theory in an accessible manner, and offers an incisive and creative analysis of the use of masochism as a feminist strategy to defy restrictive gender roles and to critique the weakness of marital and political ideals of the day. Godón's acknowledgement, however, that any agency Ana obtained in her masochistic relationship is crushed by the novel's end, does leave open the oft-disputed question regarding sadomasochisim: is it possible to protect against abuse when one willingly submits to another? Even when the masochist stipulates the terms of the relationship and activities beforehand, what prevents the sadist from disregarding these rules once s/he has all the power? The evolution of events in the novel, at least, suggests that there are no such safeguards to the masochist's desires. Still, Godón achieves her objective of demonstrating the subversive aims and potential of Ana's masochistic contract, regardless of its ultimate success. An enlightening and engaging book, Godón's La pasión esclava is an essential read for all Clarín scholars.

This research is intended to describe the relationship between love, death, and women, which is displayed in four short stories in a collection of “Falling in Love is the Best Way to Suicide” by Bernard Batubara. Data collected by a literature study and analyzed using descriptive analysis method. The study was conducted with the approach of literary psychology and feminist literary criticism. The theoretical basis for death and suicide used in this study comes from Durkheim, Freud, and Camus. The results of this study indicate that love is the cause or motive for suicide (physical or mental) committed by the protagonists. Suicides committed by the protagonists are categorized as egoistic and fatalistic suicides. The figure of the women in the shorts stories are imaged as a loyal woman and has a negative character (femme fatale).Women are shown to have power in love relations. Overall, the love that Bernard Batubara displays in these short stories is dark, unpleasant, and even deadly.

“Adriana” is one of the most famous characters of Mexican literature. She first appears in José Vasconcelos’s Ulises criollo and later in La tormenta (volumes 1 and 2 of his four-part biography). A stunning woman, intelligent and sensual, a modern compañera for Mexico’s premier revolutionary intellectual, Adriana is almost the “perfect” lover — that is, until she leaves him. Then, this “glorious Eve” is transformed into a devourer of men, the femme fatale of Mexican literature. Now, thanks to the exhaustive historical research, deft analysis, and fluid prose of Gabriela Cano, we have a biography of the real Adriana with excellent photographs. As the title establishes, her name was Elena Arizmendi, and she was a woman to be reckoned with.Arizmendi was born in 1884 into a comfortable family, granddaughter of Liberal general Ignacio Mejía. She spent her early years at her grandfather’s Ayotla sugar mill in Oaxaca and was later sent to Mexico City for a suitable education. She went on to study nursing in San Antonio, Texas, where she was befriended by Francisco and Sara Madero. Arizmendi founded the Cruz Blanca Mexicana Neutral (Mexican White Cross, equivalent of the Red Cross) while Madero was president. When problems arose in that organization, the Maderos sent her to get legal advice from the young Maderista lawyer, José Vasconcelos; thus began one of the most famous love affairs in Mexican history.A passion for literature and music along with an intense erotic relationship united this modern couple. Snubbed and slighted by the gente decente for carrying on an illicit love affair with a married man, Elena confidently defied her middle-class upbringing. She traveled with Vasconcelos to the United States when he was forced into exile during the revolution. As she developed intellectually, she tired of being la otra and broke off the relationship in 1916. Infuriated, Vasconcelos published a short story in 1920, “The Torment,” in which he proclaimed: “The serpent that has been coiled around my heart for some years, finally, has slithered off, leaving me only venom” (endnote, p. 209). Dominican writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña later observed: “Vasconcelos pursues her with horrendous threats and accusations to people from whom she is seeking employment. He seems to have lost his mind, crazed by her flight [ . . . ] Poor woman!”(p. 121).But Elena Arizmendi was anything but a poor woman or a femme fatale; she was a resourceful and independent woman who was determined to chart her own course. She married and separated from an American businessman, Robert Duersch, and moved to New York City in the 1920s to be on her own. She made a living by teaching music and writing articles for newspapers and journals. She focused her major energies on promoting the Liga de Mujeres Ibéricas e Hispanoamericanas, also known as the Liga de Mujeres de la Raza, and edited Feminismo Internacional, the first international journal dedicated to Hispanic feminism.As Cano underlines, “within modernist conventions, woman is only a theme and receptacle of masculine desire” (p. 23); for Vasconcelos, Adriana was the “best booty of the Revolution.” Facing these stereotypes, Arizmendi struggled to represent her own life and opinions on women’s capacities. She published a short biographical novel in New York City in 1927, Vida incompleta: Ligeros apuntes sobre mujeres en la vida real, in order to explain her vision of male-female relationships and feminism. It is unclear if this work was responding directly to Vasconcelos’s 1920 short story or to gossip, since Ulises criollo was not published until 1935 (by 1938 it had gone into 22 printings). Nevertheless, it was Elena Arizmendi Mejía’s attempt to set the record straight and to gain recognition as a mujer moderna. Given its limited diffusion, this novel failed to challenge the powerful literary figure of the femme fatale. Ironically, her later years paralleled those of Vasconcelos: although a pioneer of Hispanic feminism, Arizmendi, too, became Conservative, anti-Semitic, and a Falangista fellow traveler.Previously, Gabriela Cano’s skill in unraveling contradictory representations of female revolutionaries (who unfortunately leave no personal papers to make the historian’s task less arduous) provided readers with her provocative study of Amelio Robles, the transgendered Zapatista colonel (in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano, Duke University Press, 2006). Now, Arizmendi’s biography, accessible to academic as well as popular readers of Spanish, facilitates not only a better comprehension of changing gender norms and the limitations of middle-class feminism in revolutionary Mexico but also the ongoing struggle of women to represent their own lives.

The femme fatale, stemming from a French term meaning “fatal woman,” is one of the most common female archetypes in popular culture. First emerging in classic film noir stories, the femme fatale is most well-remembered for her proclivity to manipulate and seduce the male lead. However, in classic noir tales, she frequently meets an unhappy end in her narrative—either imprisoned or dead by the end of the story. By comparing the femme fatales of both the film and short story versions of Gun Crazy, the film Too Late for Tears, and the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, this research seeks to understand the ways in which the femme fatale gains and loses power over the course of her narrative. To address the reasons behind this loss of power, I contextualize the narratives of film noir within the cultural expectations of the time period—in particular, the expectations of the Hayes Production Code. I also address the sensational advertising that explains why we still think of the femme fatale as a powerful woman who gets what she wants rather than as a victim of the patriarchy in her own way. This media’s portrayal of the femme fatale reflects women’s treatment in the post-war era, reinforcing the patriarchy and possibly even leading to the delay of the second wave of feminism.

Durante el reinado de Felipe III la sociedad española vivió unos intensos procesos de elitización y marginalización procedentes en su mayoría de una particular recepción y asimilación del modelo antropológico y cultural presentado por Castiglione –lo que ha pasado a definirse con el nombre de cortegiana filosofia– que, en último término,se sirvieron del antiguo ideal de la teoría neoplatónica del amor para presentar un nuevoparadigma común de virtud y honestidad públicas destinado a preservar y sustentar instituciones sociorreligiosas como el matrimonio. La novela cortesana, haciéndose eco de todo ello a través de la tradición de las novelle italianas, se sirvió del universo picaresco para servir de canal moralizante de esta ejemplaridad amorosa. Esto se traducirá en la defensa de la máxima de que el bien vivir es un sinónimo del bien amar. El presente artículo tiene porobjeto el análisis de todo lo antedicho a partir de una pieza concreta del género cortesano: La hija de Celestina, o la ingeniosa Elena (1612) de Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo.

This article examines the significance of ‘la cuestión femenina’ in La España Moderna (1889–1914). This prestigious cultural review, directed by José Lázaro Galdiano, sought to educate its readers about women, encouraging them to reflect upon their current situation and future role in Spanish society. The variety of articles published was impressively diverse, ranging from pieces on legal concerns, female criminals, scientific theories on women's inferiority and their situation in countries like Turkey and Japan. In publishing controversial articles by important feminists, including Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concepción Arenal and Adolfo Posada, the review proved to be fearless and advanced. However, Lázaro did not attempt to impose a single line of thought upon his readers and, to counterbalance such forward-looking views, the review also published articles by those who believed that feminismo was responsible for ‘la decadencia del hogar’. ‘La cuestión femenina’ was also presented in different genres, such as short stories and dictionaries, thereby making it more ‘digestible’ for those hostile to the topic. The role of the publication, thus, was to educate readers during the fin de siglo about all aspects of ‘la cuestión femenina’ in order to enable them to decide for themselves where their sympathies lay.

The article is an examination of critical reception of the figure of the female monster as it emerged from the horror film during World War II, and it seeks to analyse discourses through which this figure was understood during the period of their initial release. In the process, the article demonstrates that the figure currently referred to as the femme fatale was not understood as a coherent or unified phenomenon in the period, and that it did not develop as part of a reaction against the working women of wartime. On the contrary, the essay demonstrates the ways in which the female monster developed around the start of the war and the way in which she was both identified with the figure of slacker and often overtly opposed to the figure of the independent woman of wartime.

Reviewed by: Growing up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain by Olga Bezhanova Sandra Watts Bezhanova, Olga. Growing up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain. Tempe: Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica, 2014. Pp. 228. ISBN 978-0-97944-803-4. Olga Bezhanova’s Growing up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain serves as a necessary addition to the limited body of research on the genre. This thorough study makes significant contributions to a broader range of scholarly topics including genre theory, the impact of social and political contexts on canonization, the relationship between the subject and history, narrative theory, and gender and sexuality in modern Spain. Originating in Germany and focusing on a male protagonist’s coming of age in modernizing society, the genre of the Bildungsroman is inextricably linked to notions and experiences of gender and modernity, as well as to specific national literatures. As Bezhanova notes, the female novel of formation has been subject to a double erasure due to both the marginalization of Spain within Europe and to the marginalization of women in Spanish society. She succinctly outlines the history and historicization of the Bildungsroman and argues for a broadening of the genre beyond conventional national, historical, and gender boundaries. Bezhanova’s study begins with a reevaluation of nineteenth century novels by Fernán Caballero, Pilar Sinués de Marco, and Concha Espina, traditionally viewed as antifeminist. Her analysis demonstrates that “far from being propaganda pieces aimed at keeping women in subjection, these novels discuss the obstacles that society places on the way to female development and offer ways of overcoming these obstacles” (54). By beginning with the text itself and moving outward towards the author and society, she is able to examine fruitfully a range of possible relationships among sociohistorical context, character building, narrative technique, genre, and gender. [End Page 173] Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of a key moment in Spanish literature characterized by the female Bildungsroman during the backlash of female oppression orchestrated by Franco’s regime. Bezhanova argues that the repressive environment brought issues of female development to the fore, and that the Bildungsroman provided a safe generic space for exploring them. This chapter analyzes one of this movement’s seminal works, Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle, in conjunction with less familiar novels such as Teresa Barbero’s El ultimo verano en el espejo, and traces relationships among these texts and Ana María Moix’s Julia and finally Esther Tusquet’s El mismo mar de todos los veranos, published in the changing times of 1978. These works demonstrate progression by emphasizing the role of sexuality in female development, yet follow a pattern of circularity rather than Bildungsroman’s traditional linear development towards maturity. As Bezhanova notes, this pattern reflects the impression that women do not yet feel fully empowered to pursue their own growth and remain thwarted by the obstacles society places in their paths. The narrative style of the texts is characterized by omissions, repetitions and flashbacks, thus mirroring the characters’ inability to take control of their own narratives both literally and metaphorically. This pattern characterizes the female Bildungsroman through the end of the twentieth century, as seen in Almudena Grandes’s Las edades de Lulú and Espido Freire’s Irlanda. In chapter 3, Bezhanova reads the circular structure of these novels as reflecting the protagonists’ resistance to growth, which is in turn a reaction to the rapidly changing role of women in Spanish society. Bezhanova reads the themes of sexuality and violence that characterize these novels as strategies the protagonists employ to stave off their own development. In highlighting this refusal to grow up and take on what may seem to be a threatening freedom precisely when society is beginning to allow women to do so, Bezhanova makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the genre, its nuanced relationship to its historical context, and the range of individual responses to social conditions. The 1990s see the emergence of what Bezhanova terms the “Reminiscent Bildungsroman,” explored in the fourth chapter of her book. Josefina Aldecoa’s Mujeres de negro and Marina Mayoral’s Recóndita armon...

The maternal figure embodies one of the most recurrent metaphors in Spanish cinema of late-Francoism and transi-tion, a metaphor that has been read as a device of social criticism towards the dictatorship. Largely due to the sym-bolic connotations that the Franco regime had projected on motherhood, it has been connected with the dictatorial past, functioning on the screen as a monstrous and uncanny personification of the Francoist repressive apparatus. Thus the maternal has become a privileged space for the deployment of film narratives that explore how power rela-tions within the family can be portrayed as a symbol of the relationship between the subject and the State. This arti-cle deals with the representation of the maternal figure in Furtivos (Jose Luis Borau, 1975), understood as a cultural symptom of the process to-ward the democratic transition in which Spanish society was immersed.

ABSTRACTTaking into account the works of Linda Hutcheon, Sergio Wolf and Eliseo Verón on adaptation, this article explores the connections that the children’s animation film Metegol (directed by Juan José Campanella and co-scripted with Eduardo Sacheri, 2013) establishes with “Memorias de un wing derecho” (Memories of a right wing footballer) by Roberto Fontanarrosa. Particular attention is paid to the film’s production context and its consumption in a period marked by a pervasive binary vision of Argentine society (Fernández de Kirchner’s administration). It also analyzes the relations of textual fidelity/infidelity with Fontanarrosa’s story, and its process of mutation, (re)interpreting and (re)creation to describe the new social environment of Argentina in which Metegol was produced. It concludes that the relationship with the short story is presented as a meditation on the effects of enunciation in a cultural, social and political context characterized by an ideology of confrontation. It also brings into discussion the discursive construction of otherness.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the presence of the Philippines in Spanish political discourses and media gradually intensified. This was caused by an increase in migration to the archipelago and by the importance that the colonies acquired in the imperialist discourse, which combined constructions of nation, race, and gender. The Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan paid attention to these Pacific islands in several of her stories and articles about the colonial conflict. The perception of the Philippines as an exotic alterity allowed the author to configure the archipelago as a narrative space that subverted the hegemonic discourse where masculinity and nation merged. According to this idea, the loss of the Philippines was associated in her fiction with the absence of women as an active subject in colonial management. In this article, I focus on how Pardo Bazan portrayed the islands in her short stories and novels such as Memorias de un solteron (1896) and La sirena negra (1908). In these works, the Philippines is depicted as a masculine and pathological space, where men embody racial degeneration and are, indirectly, responsible for the loss of the colonies.

Cinema and television series have been functioning as a sort of mirror of almost all societies since their first invention on the ground that they cover various topics concerning human beings. Cinematic thoughts, experiences, and digital and visual images in Television series accompany nearly all transformations which have taken place in any community. However, some issues such as gender roles or stereotypes related to women have not changed positively even though mass media and digital tools in media have been altering considerably and radically. In the digital media era, it is still crystal clear that women have been portrayed as inferior compared to man depiction. In this context, the main aim of this study is to accentuate this issue and emphasize the gender gap and changeless woman roles in changing the digital media age. In line with this purpose, the well-known Netflix series Lucifer has been studied in terms of the notorious character femme fatale with the help of descriptive analysis and it has been seen that woman figures have been depicted as derogatory and diabolic in Lucifer. Thence, it is possible to allege that shifting digital movie and broadcasting trends do not have a noteworthy effect on the representation of women in the cinematic universe.