Explore the vast range of titles available.

The effects of General Francisco Franco's authoritarian rule (1939-1975) on the production and reception of cultural texts can be gauged by the silence that now surrounds them. This is especially true of works which enjoyed considerable popularity when first published. Most of the novels in question belong to the sentimental genre known as novela rosa, whose authors-mostly women-and heroines Academe has consistently treated as literary pariahs. This volume represents the first serious effort to question the categories used to assess the value and meaning of texts previously presumed to be devoid of both. It does so by bringing to the fore the operative premise of Francoist cultural politics, wherein fictional works have the power to mould individual character and conduct. Narratives by Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, Carmen de Icaza and María Mercedes Ortoll are thus examined in terms of the effects that they were expected to have on their readers, and the constraints that such expectations placed on the works' production and reception. The result is a paradox: while the study of women's bestselling novels is by definition a study of the constraints that shape them, careful reading reveals the limitations of those selfsame constraints. NINO KEBADZE is an Assistant Professor in the Hispanic Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston.

A reading of women's post-war literary representations in terms of exemplarity.The effects of General Francisco Franco's authoritarian rule (1939-1975) on the production and reception of cultural texts can be gauged by the silence that now surrounds them. This is especially true of works which enjoyed considerable popularity when first published. Most of the novels in question belong to the sentimental genre known as novela rosa, whose authors-mostly women-and heroines Academe has consistently treated as literary pariahs. This volume represents the first serious effort to question the categories used to assess the value and meaning of texts previously presumed to be devoid of both. It does so by bringing to the fore the operative premise of Francoist cultural politics, wherein fictional works have the power to mould individual character and conduct. Narratives by Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, Carmen de Icaza and María Mercedes Ortoll are thus examined in terms of the effects that they were expected to have on their readers, and the constraints that such expectations placed on the works' production and reception. The result is a paradox: while the study of women's bestselling novels is by definition a study of the constraints that shape them, careful reading reveals the limitations of those selfsame constraints. NINO KEBADZE is an Assistant Professor in the Hispanic Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This article examines the contradictions underlying the Falangist feminine ideal as it oscillated between demure/traditional and enterprising/modern in the rhetoric of the Sección Femenina. As the author demonstrates, the peculiarity of the Sección Femenina-which acted as the dominant cultural filter for women's familial, social, and political obligations at the time-stems from its leaders' at once-dominated (vis-à-vis the state) and dominant (vis-à-vis the female constituents) position in the cultural, social, national, and political landscape of post-civil war Spain. Although the retrograde ways of the Sección Femenina, whose statutes and rhetoric drew on the nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse of different and complementary gender relations, have elicited numerous studies, this article examines the use of this familiar and unthreatening (to the regime) model of female formation as the legitimating basis of its unconventional praxis.

The title of Carmen de Icaza's 1941 novel, Soñar la vida, evokes one of the persistent charges leveled at novelas rosa: that of escapism. According to Icaza's contemporary, writer and critic Eugenia Serrano, the authors of novelas rosa were ersatz apothecaries dealing in bogus dreams to lighten the yoke of quotidian grievances. That is, the reading of novelas rosa, as Serrano's disingenuous “Elogio a la novela rosa” (“Praise of the novela rosa”) suggests, had the insalubrious effect, not unlike sedatives, of drawing young women, especially the women of the lower middle classes, into a counterfeit world of happy endings, far from their crude reality. What follows is an excerpt from the aforementioned article which helps to elucidate the nature of the controversy over the social value and impact that novelas rosa purportedly bore on their female audiences:Un tranvia de los que hacen el trayecto Progreso–Cuatro Caminos. En un rincon, acurrucada, una mujercita. Tal vez, en su juventud mas temprana, haya sido hermosa; tal vez aun sea joven. Pero cuando la vida es dura, la comida poca y las preocupaciones muchas, no hay juventud posible, ni cutis terso, ni cuerpo esponjado, ni ojos y cabello brillantes… . Pero suben los ultimos viajeros de este principio o final de trayecto, el conductor arranca, y la mujercita saca de su derrengado bolsillo negro un libro encuadernado en rustica. Comienza a leer avidamente, con un apetito casi fisico. A los tres minutos de la lectura es otra …En el hogar estrecho, mal ventilado, insuficiente a la familia numerosa, todos se quejaran del calor; la mujercita no lo sentira. Ella esta en Saint-Moritz …, esquiando sobre la nieve eternamente pura. La comida resulto escasa y desabrida para todos; ella no lo sabe. Esta bebiendo champan y picoteando vacilante entre una cena fria y un te completo, deliciosos, con pasteleria digna de las hadas, servido en uno de esos saloncitos lujosos y confidenciales que ella conoce muy bien … por las novelas… . Maravilloso mundo sin miseria, sin malos olores, sin facturas por pagar, sin mas enfermedades que el leve accidente de automovil. Bienaventurado mundo, donde los ricos son generosos y los pobres resignados.

The Nationalist victory in the Civil War (1936–39) inaugurated a new order founded on the union of authoritarian politics and reactionary Catholic values. The years preceding the war were marked by significant political and socio-economic changes for Spain, which at the turn of the century was still undergoing the parallel processes of industrialization and urbanization. The rise of anarchist, socialist, and communist currents made evident the increasing fissures in the existing order, laying bare the insufficiencies surrounding the growing sectors of wage laborers and the landless population. The Church's failure to take an active initiative in response to these demands, advocating piety and conformity instead of reforming policies, betrayed its own interests in the swelling class conflict. However, the sources of local tensions were not confined to the national borders, as the effects of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the rising Fascist regimes reverberated throughout Europe. Spain's response to the mounting pressures from within and without were two brief and ideologically disparate tenures, represented by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and a liberal rule of the Second Republic.After the two-party Restoration system had been replaced by a series of coalition governments, the nation received its first “iron surgeon” as a result of the military coup staged by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The ensuing dictatorship (1923–30) was an authoritarian response to the preceding period of political instability and the increasing fear of those whose stakes lay in the preservation of the existing order. While intent on protecting the conservative status quo, the regime sought credibility in the Regenerationist discourse of middle-class liberal intellectuals who, in the aftermath of the Disaster of 1898, attempted national revival through a series of modernizing agrarian and educational reforms. One of the most prominent figures of the group, Joaquín Costa, disillusioned by the movement's failure to implement the desired changes, had claimed the need for an “iron surgeon” who could single-handedly change the course of the nation through a revolution from above.

Vying for their audiences’ attention, women's conduct manuals, especially those authored by clergymen, were quick to denounce the pitfalls to which novela rosa exposed its readers. Not only did marriage mean sacrifice and renunciation—not perpetual bliss, as these novels would have them believe—but the irresistible good looks and fortune of the male protagonists were likely to foster unrealistic expectations and an unseemly view of marriage as a consequence of “un flechazo” (love at first sight) or, still worse, of convenience. Nevertheless, it was agreed that the most effective way to steer women toward their officially sanctioned end with their virtue intact was through idealism and ignorance. For this reason, the Francoist ideologues considered la novela rosa “un mal menor” (“a lesser evil”), if not an expedient means of distraction and indoctrination. Commenting on the relationship between women's prescriptive guides to socialization and popular romance novels, Martín Gaite remarks: era una retórica opuesta a la del sacrificio y el mérito, pero tan alevosa como ella. Y entre las dos contribuían a acentuar el desconocimiento de las cosas tal como eran. La primera por la vía de la ilusión y del refugio en los sueños; la segunda por el abandono de aquellos sueños en el nombre del acatamiento a unas normas que tampoco se adaptaban de un modo flexible a la realidad.(It was a rhetoric opposite to that of sacrifice and merit, but just as treacherous. And between the two, they contributed to increasing the ignorance of things as they were. The first by way of illusion and of taking refuge in dreams; the second through abandoning those dreams in the name of compliance to rules that likewise failed to adapt themselves in a flexible way to reality.) (Usos amorosos 159)The road to marriage was thus paved with innocent dreams and limited knowledge, which the reading of novelas rosa, far from challenging, was meant to buttress.The extent to which representations of marriageable women, suffused by romantic fantasies and bourgeois sensibilities, upheld the status quo may also be glimpsed through the pages of contemporaneous women's magazines.

Although post-war Spain produced an abundance of ecclesiastical writings, especially on the properties of the ideal woman and her societal role, Fray Luis de León's sixteenth-century moral treatise La perfecta casada (1583) was fundamental in legitimating the official Francoist model of womanhood, and enjoyed wide circulation as a staple wedding gift. An epistolary dedicated to María Varela Osorio (kin of Fray Luis), La perfecta casada presents a tropological exegesis of Proverbs 31: 10–31. Each of the work's twenty chapters opens with, and offers a gloss of, a particular verse (save chapter 8, which introduces verses 17–19). As such, the most obvious source for Fray Luis’ model of a perfect wife is the Bible. In that sense, Fray Luis undoubtedly saw his work, La perfecta casada, as presenting a timeless model, and its persistence throughout centuries would seem to support this. In spite of this consideration, and notwithstanding the fact that Fray Luis considered his depiction of an ideal wife divinely inspired—if for no other reason than to stave off the criticism of those who claimed his knowledge of feminine mores all too accurate for a man of the cloth—most studies point out the work's historicity, situating Fray Luis’ rendition of Scripture within its relevant religious, cultural, and socio-economic contexts (or, perhaps, laying bare the historicity of religious thought as it is enmeshed in specific cultural, economic, political, and social contexts).The assertion that “Fray Luis de León se inspiró en la Escritura para escribir La perfecta casada. Pero le pesó también ser hijo de su tiempo” (“Scripture was the inspiration for Fray Luis de León to write La perfecta casada. But he was also a child of his time”) may, at first glance, seem too obvious to warrant repetition on its own merit (Castilla y Cortázar 193). It does, however, rather succinctly point us to two approaches discernible in the genealogy of Fray Luis’ representation of women. While the Scriptural influence on his work is indisputable, the critics’ sources of choice, when it comes to analyzing his model of perfection, range from St Paul to Erasmus.

According to post-war novelist and playwright Julia Maura, one of the shortcomings of the novela rosa's rendering of feminine experience is that it ends where “real” life for a woman begins: in marriage. What the arbiters of feminine mores, authors of novelas rosa, and novelists like Maura agree on is that female representation is inconceivable without reference to men. Most prescriptive texts divide women's life experience into three phases: el noviazgo (courtship or engagement), el matrimonio (marriage), and la maternidad (motherhood). In keeping with Maura's assertion, the popular romance novels see the first phase as their legitimate domain and, in contrast to narratives like Maura's own Ventolera (1943)—which situate the male–female dynamic within matrimonial bonds—use the allure of love to disguise the complex, hierarchical nature of gender relations. Luisa-María Linares’ 1941 romance novel, Un marido a precio fijo, manages to inhabit two of the aforementioned domains through the taming-of-the-shrew masterplot that characterizes many of her novels (Galerstein 178). While the “taming” in Linares’ novels iterates and reinforces patriarchal authority, the very nature of the confrontation that underlies these narratives (the necessary disruption of the traditional order) lends itself to multiple readings, and substantiates the earlier hypothesis that any reading of dissent in the selected texts is grounded in their conformity (epitomized by the novels’ conventional prefiguring of marriage and motherhood). If “the internal composition of a given text is nothing more or less than the history of its struggle with contrary forms of representation for the authority to control semiosis” (Armstrong 23), then even those narratives, which seem to be interested in promoting a single point of view, are neither univocal nor impervious to internal contestations.Ingeniously conceived as a charade of marriage, Un marido a precio fijo is a story of apprenticeship. Estrella Vilar, the adoptive daughter and heiress of tycoon Nicolás Mendoza, is prey to her own self-centeredness and frivolity. Her flawed character, we are told, is a consequence of her upbringing and the reason she is unfit to assume the role of domestic angel.

As we have seen, the new state warranted new subjects. Implicit in the struggle for power was “the struggle to impose certain meanings at the expense of others” (Graham and Labanyi 6). Fittingly, Sebastian Balfour stresses the significance of “value-systems” as “a battleground for the regime” (“The Desarrollo” 283), and Mary Nash locates the ideological underpinnings of post-war cultural and gender policies in the regime's national-Catholic orientation, “defined as a Spanish essentialism based on Catholicity” (“Moral Order” 289). Unity, sought on national and individual levels (as a milestone of the new state), presupposed exclusion, conformity, and ideological homogeneity. In spite of Franco's reputation as a monolith, the regime's makeup was heterogeneous, owing to the concomitant presence of contesting and often conflicting ideologies. The advocated models of womanhood were not uniform, either. Instead, the normative and therefore normalizing representations varied according to their loci of enunciation and according to the self-legitimating objectives of given discourses (as we shall see from the example of Sección Femenina). By and large, for a model to qualify as “official” it either had to stem from an authoritative source (such as the state or the Church) or bear the Church's seal of approval through the presence of a vast paratextual material (dedications, prefaces, introductions, etc.).The ensuing attempts to at once fix and institutionalize Francoist definitions of national and gender identities produced a large body of prescriptive texts. While their study further invalidates the argument for the existence of a coherent and monolithic model of Francoist womanhood, it is nonetheless both feasible and useful to trace the premises about the role and alleged nature of the Spanish woman that they share, albeit in varying degrees. In the following pages, I shall briefly outline the constituent elements of a model that, without being attributed to a single discursive practice, was common to all of them.The new state called its subjects, both male and female, to order (through observance of authorized practices), discipline (through compliance with instituted hierarchies), and service (through surrender of individual will for the benefit of the state).

Parting from the premise that “the construction of women in terms of recognizable roles, images, models, and labels occurs in discourse in response to specific social imperatives,” we must begin our analysis of the nineteenth-century model of domesticity by surveying the circumstances that propitiated its production and circulation (Sunder Rajan 129). The debate on the character and ideal of women in the second half of the nineteenth century must be considered in light of the country's changing political and socio-economic landscape, which was responsible for reconfiguring traditional gender roles. Although the effects of industrialization in Spain in the mid-nineteenth century were too insignificant to occasion women's active involvement in the state's productive sector or to give rise to an organized feminist movement, as was the case in England, the force of such change was palpable enough to warrant acknowledgments in countless manuals on female formation: [L]os autores de los manuales se daban cuenta de que las mujeres y jóvenes españolas, influidas en parte por el desarrollo en otros países, comenzaban a estar descontentas con su papel tradicional. Se alude frecuentemente a los nuevos conceptos de igualdad y emancipación así como a las consecuencias de adherirse a ellos, describiéndolas en términos apocalípticos: desorden, deuda, vicio, destrucción de la familia y—lo peor de todo—ostracismo social. J. Manjarrés advierte que el sentido común y la moral condenarán a aquellas jóvenes que se toman la libertad de quejarse de la condición de su sexo y que, de esta forma, ‘no harán más que dar una prueba de su indiscreción y de su poco talento, no harán más que dar a conocer la crasa ignorancia en que se hallan sumidas acerca de sus obligaciones como mujeres.’([T]he authors of the manuals realized that Spanish women and girls, influenced in part by development in other countries, began to be discontented with their traditional role. The new concepts of equality and emancipation are frequently alluded to, as are the consequences of following them. The latter are described in apocalyptic terms: disorder, debt, vice, destruction of the family and—worst of all—social ostracism.