Mujer, historia y sociedad: La dramaturgia española contemporánea de autoría femenina (review)

Grappling with some thirty-six works by seventeen different women, this comprehensive study of plays by Spanish women since just before the death of Franco and through 1990s has two purposes. First, it shows how women writers of this period have participated in a "revisionismo crítico" [critical revisionism] that rearticulates a Spanish historiography outside of dominant ideologies. Secondly, it highlights the ways that the theater of Spanish women has participated in the construction of a new autonomous political identity. In both cases, the experience of women living under a patriarchal system becomes an allegory for the Spanish republic's confrontation with a paternalistic and oppressive dictatorship. Despite beginning her chronological study with María Zambrano's 1967 play La tumba de Antígona and ending with Miauless by Itziar Pascual [1999], Zaza contextualizes all of the works she studies by connecting the changes identity experienced by the female characters in these texts with the profound changes occurring just prior to, during, and after the Transition.

Zaza organize the chapters of the book thematically. In Chapter One, Zaza looks to the treatment of Antígona and Eva by Zambrano and Carmen Conde respectively, to demonstrate how these writers have appropriated classical texts to refute "el concepto de la 'mujer pecadora' " [the concept of the sinful woman](35). According to Zaza, it is through this mujer pecadora that these texts construct an allegorical " 'antes,' dentro un sistema 'natural' matrilineal" [a before aligned with a system of matriarchy] and " 'después,' tras la instauración de la ley patriarcal" [after, following the installation of the patriarchal law] (35). Importantly though, by demonstrating the erroneous nature of the foundational myth of the mujer pecadora these texts undermine the legitimacy of the patriarchy which follows. Zaza takes this allegorical significance to its logical conclusion when she links these myths to the "before" and "after" of the Spanish Civil War. For it is within this "after" that the patriarachal myths of the Falange are employed as the historical basis for Spanish history.

This reappropriation of mythological characters is echoed in Chapter Two where treatments of Isabel la Católica, Juana la Loca and even Enrique IV by Concha Romero, Diosdado, and Resino demonstrate the pervasive power of this patriarchal after in which "pese a que la figura monárquica encarna el poder, el 'ser reina' no difiere sustancialmente del 'ser esposa': ambas condiciones requieren la sumisión femenina y una negación del 'ser mujer' " [despite the fact that the figure monarchical is the incarnate of power, the queen-being doesn't differ substantially from the wife-being: both conditions require feminine submission and a negation of the woman-being] (54). The representations of mythology and history are key tools for representing the historical circumstance of women throughout Spanish history.

The usefulness of these early chapters becomes apparent later in the book as Zaza demonstrates how the mujer pecadora [sinful woman] and the condition of ser mujer [woman-being] are challenged by the later trends in female drama production and result in the articulation of a strong female autonomous subject. Not coincidently this ability to project a dramatic representation of women as autonomous subject becomes possible when the political rights and influence of women enters into the after of the post-Franco years. Here Zaza looks to María Manuela Reina's La cinta dorada (1990) and Reflejos con cenizas (1992) to illustrate the ways that dramatic writing of Spanish women has helped to rearticulate the before and after of the Civil War as the transformation during the Transition from the umwelt of a patriarchal system of values to the expression of innewelt, the world of independent feminine desires. For Zaza, this movement towards a liberal autonomous subject represents not only the experience of women in Spain, but of Spain itself.

As a result, the last two chapters, "Teatro de la transición" and "Más allá de la modernidad," emphasize the correlation...