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Interpreting ‘Surrender’ in Concha Linares-Becerra’s Como los hombres nos quieren
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Interpreting ‘Surrender’ in Concha Linares-Becerra’s Como los hombres nos quieren
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Book Chapter
Interpreting ‘Surrender’ in Concha Linares-Becerra’s Como los hombres nos quieren
2009
Overview
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.
