Passion and Participation: Motherhood and Exile in the Works of María Teresa León

Abstract

This essay2 uses the literary works and life of Maria Teresa Leon to analyze the relationships among social and political realities, motherhood, and exile, and how they are reproduced in literature. Maria Teresa Leon was a young woman at a time in Spain when society valued women as mothers more than intellectuals. Leon, however, was an intellectual and a mother. Society compelled her to choose between her children and her professional goals and political beliefs, and ultimately forced her into exile. Her decision to accept exile from her children and later her country created life-long feelings of guilt and pains of abandonment. Leon spent most of her life away from her children and homeland, trying to fill spaces created by the absence of her family. In both her writing and life, she is drawn to children and women who are suffering the same familial separation and abandonment she experienced. She and her characters encounter new “families” and countless “children,” but Leon is always left unsatisfied, knowing that those whom she found can never replace the sons she left behind in Spain.