Myth-Busters: Women Writers and the Myths of Modern Male Individualism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

Abstract

Men and women experienced, and therefore wrote about, modernity in ways shaped by history, culture, class and gender. This study examines how Blanca de los Ríos (1859–1956) and Margarita Nelken (1894–1968) reinterpreted the figures of Don Quixote, Don Juan and others as emblematic of specifically male understandings of what it means to be modern. Their texts reveal that contemporary mythic stories about modern individualism rely on prescribed gender-specific roles and therefore exclude woman as agents in a modern society largely constructed by and for man. This study explores how their texts decentre the male narrator as ‘author’ of modernity.