New Art, New Woman: Old Constructs: Gomez de la Serna, Pedro Salinas, and Vanguard Fiction

Abstract

As a manifestation of the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century a subcategory known as vanguard or avant-garde literature emerged in the Hispanic world and most of western Europe. 1 Often referred to as the "new art" when it began to assert itself in Spain and Latin America in the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, it also boasted of representing a "new woman," a claim that I propose to examine here. When some critics of the time (male of course) objected that the anti-conventional mode of this arte joven and its attempt to change the historical representation of women were expressions of deficient virility, of effeminacy (see for example Pérez Firmat 37), they drew attention to a gender issue central to vanguard art. These same detractors at times went so far as to charge that the new mode was guilty of emasculating the male image. 2 Yet today many would answer the charge of masculine emasculation by counter-charging that the [End Page 205] vanguardists in fact were guilty of perpetuating feminine violations. By examining some representative examples from El novelista of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and from Víspera del gozo of Pedro Salinas, 3 I propose to demonstrate how these male-authored vanguard texts project female representations that can be considered both seditiously threatening and stereotypically comforting to a virile discursive tradition.