Louis Bromfield’s The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg and The Rains Came in Francoist Spain

Abstract

Louis Bromfield’s The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg and The Rains Came in Francoist Spain Cristina Zimbroianu American writer Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his novel Early Autumn. Born in Mansfield, Ohio, a land that was a rich agricultural community a hundred years before his birth, Bromfield inherited his father’s love of farming. Unfortunately, around 1890, Mansfield developed into an industrial and commercial centre, and agriculture and farming became less important. His father Charles, a Democratic politician, was committed to opposing the city’s activities and maintained close relations with the remaining farmers in the hope that he would one day return to farming (Anderson 15). Charles instilled in his son a distrust of industry and a society that “deprived men of their manhood and made them bankers, bookkeepers and factory hands” (Anderson 15). Industrialization made some people rich and others poor: in the Flats below Mansfield, slums increased significantly, and farmers could barely survive (Anderson 15). In this context, Bromfield enrolled at Cornell to study agriculture after graduating from high school in 1914. However, he dropped out a year later to help when, for financial reasons, the Bromfield family was forced to sell their house in town and move to a farm. His mother, Annette Bromfield, convinced him that life on the farm would lead him “to hard work and oblivion,” so in 1916 he enrolled at Columbia University to study journalism (Anderson 24). Before the end of his studies, however, the United States was at war, and Louis Bromfield decided to enlist in the Army Ambulance Service, organized with the French Army, and travelled to France (Anderson 24). In the First World War, Bromfield served as a driver and interpreter with the French army, and he returned to New York to initiate his literary career in 1924 when he published his first novel, The Green Bay Tree. His early novels (1924–1930) treat the themes of industrialization and transformation from agriculture to industry. As a defender of the Jeffersonian tradition, Bromfield portrays the consequences of industrialism [End Page 455] and materialism on the human being both in his native land and abroad (Anderson). In The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928), Bromfield abandons his early themes, settings, contexts, and characters by introducing a mixture of sensuousness and mysticism that provide intentionally designed intensity and ambiguity (Anderson 56–61). Annie’s death, after having been considered a saint because she was marked by stigmata, and her apparently miraculous life give mysticism to the novel. The Rains Came (1937) is set in Ranchipur, India, and explores humanity’s potential to fight against miseries, poverty, religious prejudices, superstitions, diseases, and natural calamities. This is the first of Bromfield’s novels to introduce a large array of characters from both the West and the East who “battle on the sides of both light and darkness” (Anderson 100). However, the role of the church in The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg and the events of Annie’s life and death may not have been well received by readers in Franco’s Spain, nor would elements of Western modernity such as certain love stories and attitudes about religion have been accepted by Franco’s censors. Thus, the methodology employed for the study of the reception of these two novels in Franco’s Spain is based on context-activated theories, as Janet Staiger presents in her extensive analysis of reception studies, Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. The context is provided by the political and cultural environment of Francoist Spain, and the censorship apparatus that decided which books could reach readers. Therefore, the aim of this article is to examine the reception of Bromfield’s The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg and The Rains Came in Francoist Spain, focusing primarily on the response of the censors, whose evaluations were crucial in determining whether or not these two novels would be successful in Spain. This discussion involves an examination of the censorship archives located at the Administration General Archives (Archivo General de la Administración) in Alcalá de Henares, particularly the files that reveal whether or not The Strange Case of Miss...