Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (review)

Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel is a worthy companion piece to the author's groundbreaking Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900-1934 (1993). In broad terms, Roberta Johnson sees the modernist novel as a rewriting of the literary and cultural past. At the same time, she notes that the current project gives her the opportunity to fill in an important lacuna, for here she concerns herself in great part with the often overlooked women writers of the modernist era. In a superb thirty-page introduction, Johnson presents an overview of modernism, generally associated with a male sensibility. The cosmopolitan and abstract bent of modernism eschewed what could be called the woman's domain of domesticity and its literary counterpart, realism. Gender distinctions are fundamental within this context, because the historical impulse, or obsession with the past, that distinguishes writing by men is often replaced, in works by women writers, with a strong interest in the present, in change, and in the search for new social configurations. If modernism seeks to intensify a sense of isolation and functions either ahistorically or through the evocation of earlier periods, women writers operate within the material world and with a concern for pressing issues such as education, career options, and social justice. The modernist novel of ideas, typically experimental and innovative in structure, stands in contrast to a type of social modernism in which radically new messages can blend with more traditional narrative structures. The domestic ideology of nineteenth-century Spanish fiction does not disappear, but rather is processed differently, even embedded subtly and subliminally, in modernist aesthetics, and it is, quite logically, gender-inflected. Domesticity becomes a common denominator, a marker of both similitude and difference, and a means of access to the feminine inscription in Spanish modernism.

Johnson links the pursuit of a national essence—Unamuno's intrahistoria or Azorín's el alma castellana, to cite two notable examples—to the influence of Krausism and its leading proponent in Spain, Francisco Giner de los Ríos. The flight from the present, an escape from political defeat and from modernizing tendencies, idealizes and mystifies tradition through a process of glorification based on highly selective memory, a type of nostalgic reinvention. The literary canon offers a template from which to examine national values. For Johnson, the classic texts "allowed male authors to shroud a domestic agenda within a nationalistic one" (21–22). Women authors likewise found inspiration in the classic texts, including Don Quijote and El burlador de Sevilla, but their objectives and the resulting fictions moved in diverse and frequently opposing directions. From an intertextual perspective, and recognizing the potential danger of over-generalization in a male versus female opposition, one could argue that men tended to revere or reconstruct the archetypes whereas women tended to problematize or deconstruct them. Johnson makes it clear, nonetheless, that it would be incorrect to contrast male conservatism with female liberalism. Feminism in Spain became politically polarized. The Catholic hierarchy fought for women's rights as fervently as secular feminists, despite approaching the matters under scrutiny from adversarial positions. If the independent Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas and its newspaper, Mundo Femenino, leaned a bit toward the right, the Lyceum Club, established to foster the intellectual advancement of women and with no affiliation to the Church, was accused (by conservatives and liberals) of forsaking traditional—that is, family—values. There was, in effect, little social legislation for women prior to the Second Republic (1931). One of Johnson's theses is that the works of women writers in the 1920s helped to advance the cause of women with respect to suffrage, divorce, labor regulations, and the right to hold public office. Literature thus reflects and has an impact on the course of history.

The first three chapters demonstrate the juncture, for better or worse, of myth and modernity. Chapter one, "Women and the Soul of...