Teaching Narratives of Women’s Inner Exile in Spain and Chile

Abstract

By examining how contemporary Spanish and Chilean women writers represent dictatorial pasts and the experience of inner exile, this essay sheds light on the link between political and gendered violence underpinning the Franco dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975) and Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989). Without collapsing difference, we address political systems and artistic movements within a wider cultural, political and historical framework. Through a close reading of El lector de Julio Verne by Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes and Óxido de Carmen by Chilean author Ana María del Río, we gain a platform to ask questions that move beyond a monocultural or national standpoint and to explore how authors have responded to similar struggles. A transatlantic comparative study of these texts not only helps us to understand how the regimes’ violence was shaped by related ideologies, but also how literature might intervene, expose and subvert such violence through the reconstruction of silenced memories of resistance.