Women Novelists in Spain and Spanish America by Lucia Fox-Lockert (review)

BOOK REVIEWS69 broken by a dry rosebud drapes the chest, and cloisonné birds hide from the caramel-colored sky and seem to peck and coo at the hairline — as do the poems themselves. The Introduction deals with belief in the unconscious and experiments with language. The section on "The Surrealist Tradition" stresses nineteenth-century England's preoccupation with "the psychopathology of the artist's mind" (p. 25). "Surealism in America" points up the predilection of Breton and his disciples for the destructively creative antics of Keaton, Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers and for silent films, which resemble "conscious dream" (p. 42); moreover, in America is "the need to connect daily life with deep mythic roots" (p. 43). Finally, "Surrealism as International Modernism" is "strategy of the mind" to attack conventional systems , integrate irrational desire, and invent "a veritable science of morality" (p. 45). The texture of the first group of poems is richly variegated, the pace of the second rather fast. Highlights include the marvelous chain poems; Gascoyne's translations of Arp, Breton, DaIi, Peret, Picasso, and Unik (no Apollinaire, though); and Bly's of Neruda, Vallejo, and Tranströmer. The poets are all indexed, their dates given (except Kuroda's, p. 185; possibly a printing error). Several poems fail to sustain the momentum of, say, Loving , Roditi, Scarfe, Barker, Penrose, Patchen, Del Renzio, O'Hara, Hays, Hitchcock, Hall, Perreault, Tate, and Merwin, but the volume certainly provides an abundance of poems from which to choose. NANCY WATANAHE, University of Oklahoma Lucia Fox-Lockert. Women Novelists in Spain and Spanish America. Metuchen , N.J. Scarecrow Press, 1979. 347 p. Until this decade, literary critics have neglected women's literature including the works of Spanish and Latin American women writers, important both from the standpoint of their literary-artistic merit as well as their social-cultural importance. Now critical consideration of women writers is booming in the United States, France, and England with the application of various critical models such as feminist, structuralist, Marxist , linguistic, phenomenological, semiological, etc. In this volume, Fox has chosen to explore the novelistic works of twenty-two outstanding but not widely acclaimed critically women novelists who are vanguardistic in terms of their feminine views. This critical study is a hallmark work in the field of Hispanic criticism in that it constitutes the first in-depth examination of Hispanic feminine fiction within a historical perspective of threehundred years and within a framework of dominant feminine sociological preoccupations of Hispanic women. The format of the study is as follows: An introductory essay gives a profile of each writer and her work, followed by a main corpus of critical essays about each writer. Part I deals with Spanish novelists María de 70ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Zayas, Fernán Caballero, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Carmen Laforet, Elena Quiroga, Elena Soriano, Delores Medio, and Concha Alós. Part II continues with studies on Latin America authors Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello Carbonera, Teresa de la Parra, María Luisa Bombai, Silvina Bullrich, Clara Silva, Marta Brunet, Rosario Castellanos, Beatriz Guido, Elena Garro, Luisa Josefina Hernández, and Elena Poniatowska. Each study provides up-todate literary and biographical information on the writer and her works, while the critical focus pursues the same pattern of studying four basic themes: family, social class, sexuality, the message of the work. A brief conclusive essay summarizes the salient aspects of the Hispanic sociocultural experience in life and literature. Professor Fox concludes: Obviously, in the very process of writing novels the authors have shown their awareness of the feminine cause. Their crusade extends to all women who have felt the injustices of the double standard. This system creates the major difficulties between the sexes. What is worse, hypocrisy makes open communication impossible. The men continue to support their masculine superiority, while the women are obliged to dig deep into the souls to find the necessary power to make an honest and valiant testimony of their personal crisis. These authors have placed great emphasis on novelistic honesty because they know that some male readers might realize that they are victims of the system. According to these novelists, sooner or later...