Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (review)

260 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel Vanderbilt University Press, 2003 By Roberta Johnson Take equal parts of two tasty ingredients (gender and nation). Make sure they are fresh (modern). Mix well, dollop by dollop, being careful not to let them curdle. Add spices to taste. Bake slowly into a solid mass. Allow time to settle. Remove from disk and label for storage and consumption. The result is sure to please distinguished wholesalers (Vanderbilt University Press), taste testers (reviewers), and consumers (readers). Roberta Johnson's new study is a major undertaking based on a mature scholar's decades -long investment in the thought and cultural flow of the days of the vanguard. An enterprise significant for irs topic and impressive for its execution, it boasts expansive research, thorough hisrorical grounding, and detailed textual analyses. Her design is to redress the omission of women from considerations of early rwentieth-century Spanish fiction, and the constant interplay of male and female voices is its most original feature and perhaps its prime accomplishmenr . The choice of "modernist," rather than "modern," for the tide requires the reader's full collaboration with Johnson's sleight of hand in delineating a fissure between what she dubs, with seeming paradox, the "social modernism" of the women writers as contrasted to the men's formal experimentation that falls under the more familiar rubric of "modernism." She returns insistently to this distinction throughout her book. Examining how men and women interrelate within the social structures of the time, she finds in both sexes' writings common concerns with gender and wirh the definition of Spain as a nation but widely divergent perceptions of diese issues. The women, not unexpectedly, stood much less in awe of hallowed traditions and suffered no delusions of Spain's grandeur. Simplistically restated, the men's literary modernism commanded a new art; the women's social modernism foresaw a new woman. A factual introduction provides a capsule summary of Spain's nascent feminist movement and makes a case for the post-Isabeline discourse on women and the rise of nationalism as interlocking bur clashing phenomena. Johnson chronicles how male writers veer back to history while the women focus on the present's break with tradition, espousing liberating views of domesticity, unveiling private spaces, and broaching the social, ethical issues that the men, in their repining, evade. That explains why the women tend to toe the realist narrative line while the men seek to shatter it. Each of the six chapters that follow is a variation on this theme. Their blueprint is to range synthetically over a number of texts by various authors and then to settle on two or three for close, illusrrative scrutiny. The major players are Unamuno, AzorÃ-n, Miró, Maeztu, Valle-Inclán, Baroja, and Pérez de Ayala among the men; the ample gallery of women includes Maria Martinez Sierra, Chacel, Espina, Blanca de los RÃ-os, Casanova, Burgos, Nelken, Montseny , and Zambrano. Chapter 1 on "Women and the Soul of Spain" shows writers seeking out in varied fashion Spain's essential nature, with the women more concrete than their male counterparts as rhey vindicate their rights and their sense of self. The nexr chapters turn ro Don Quijote as a nationalist icon and to the figure of a domesticated, superannuated Don Juan. Male remyrhification and female démythification stand in contrast here: Don Quijote as the men's hero and as the women's fool; Don Juan as a symbol of national virility versus Don Juan as reflector of a nation in decay. The particularly rich fifth chapter treats the scientific approaches to gender that took root in the 1920s and the men's alarm in the face of women's "invasion" of the public sphere. The final chapter rightly declares that with the Republic an entirely new day dawned for women in Spain and shows how the women of the preceding decades had forecast that new sexual, intellectual, legal, and political order. The flip side to the book's virtues is relatively minor. Reflecting a general tendency to overdocumentation, the copious body of notes Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 261 at...