Of Gender and Genre: Building Woman with the Bildungsroman

Well-deserving of the AILCFH Victoria Urbano prize for the year’s best feminine/feminist monograph, Bezhanova’s Growing Up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain answers the question “Is there a female Bildungsroman genre in Spain?” with a resounding, well-researched and well-documented “yes.” Most of the prominent Spanish women writers of the twentieth century wrote narratives that illustrate a female protagonist’s development and personal growth. By analyzing the obstacles to advancement, both the writer and the reader ponder what it is to grow up female. Sometimes the conditions are nurturing and propitious for a quick and healthy ascent. More frequently, and often because of the harsh realities of life in Spain, especially in the mid-twentieth century, a woman’s coming-of-age is fraught with suffering and setbacks. Not only do these trials make them stronger, they also provide intriguing, stranger-than-fiction plots.

Yet, critical studies often limit the genre because of its obvious German Romantic roots in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, further stereotyping it as a young man’s genre. Bezhanova’s study breaks such restrictive nationalistic and paternalistic molds and demonstrates that feminine novels of maturation in Spain not only exist, but flourish, just as Spanish women do when their stories are voiced.

Chronologically ordered, with a clearly written introductory overview and a purposeful conclusion, the study identifies Fernán Caballero’s Clemencia (1852) and Las dos Gracias (1867) and Pilar Sinués de Marcos’s La vida íntima (1876) as the earliest examples the Spanish female Bildungsromane. Describing the constrictive society of the time, Bezhanova finds that the women characters of these incipient novels of formation, surprisingly, project an attitude of “Willful self-making” and self-advancement. Contrast this with examples of pre-Civil war female Bildungsroman, including Ernestina de Champourcin’s (1936) innocent, somewhat naïvely psychoanalytical La casa de enfrente, with its love-obsessed and self-destructive protagonist, and Concha Espina’s La rosa de los vientos (1925).

If there is a boom in Bildungsromane, it is in the post-Civil War Franco-dictatorship years with Carmen Laforet’s Nada (1944), Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (1945), Dolores Medio’s Nosotros, los Rivero (1950), Carmen Martín Gaité’s Entre visillos (1957), Ana María Matute’s Primera memoria (1959), and Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del Diamant (1962). Following their lead, other Bildungsroman continue to engage in inter-generational dialog with their foremothers. As these well-known examples show, the novel of female maturation has reappeared consistently throughout the twentieth century. It is not particularly earthshattering news that there is a female Bildungsroman genre in Spain, but codifying it in this volume undoubtedly helps us to recognize the unifying theme and approach, as well as many contemporary writers’ debt to these early masters of this gender genre. Post-Franco writers, notably Esther Tusquets in El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978), clearly follow in the path drawn by these earlier generations as they acknowledge the importance that maturation novels have had in their own formation. Using a rather permissive definition, Bezhanova categorizes Tusquets’s novel about a fifty-year-old woman as an “unlikely Bildungsroman”—but nonetheless an example of the genre, since it is “fixed upon the anxieties of growth and aging” (92). With such a wide array of both canonical and loosely interpreted examples, it is hardly necessary to ask if there is a female Bildungsroman. In view of these powerhouse examples, the answer is patently obvious.

Using the explanatory technique of deep reading, Olga Bezhanova evaluates theme and character traits found in novels of formation spanning more than a century of identifiable examples of the genre. Her text-specific detailed examples demonstrate how characters are drawn, developed and fragmented. There are examples of circular paths that lead them back to an infantilized beginning, and of high-energy trajectories that solidify...