Killing Carmens: Women's Crime Fiction from Spain (review)

Why must Carmen be killed? Readers of Shelley Godsland's new book must inevitably reflect on the question.

In Mérimée and then Bizet, the sensuous protagonist dazzles and deceives men, living outside Spanish law and 19th century mores. She is sexuality and revolution; give her liberty, or give her death!

That fearless woman who revels in sensuousness and disregards convention is a hero to some. They usually focus on Bizet, ignoring that in Mérimée, Carmen is bound by Gypsy law, which may by turns be extremely lax or absolutely brutal, but is always fatalistic. However, as musicologist Susan McClary points out, Carmen has most often been perceived as a threat. "She stands for everything that can potentially go wrong with women," says McClary ironically. "Just as we expect to see Dracula killed off at the end of a vampire movie, we expect to see this monstrous woman killed off " (206).¹

In a sparkling new study of women in Iberian crime fiction, Killing Carmens, Shelley Godsland alludes to the slippery correlation between female liberty embodied by nineteenth-century Carmen, and the myth of Andalusian female "Spanishness" as it was hyper-performed during and after the Francoist dictatorship. Within this clash of clichés, Godsland stakes out the first study of the Iberian roman noir written by and about women.

The book grows logically out of Godsland's work specializing in Iberian crime fiction, together with her significant body of research on gender issues in the Hispanic and Lusophone world. Formerly Director of the Crime Fictions Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, Godsland has refined a method of examining female-authored crime fiction through several different ideological feminist lenses. She demonstrates familiarity with the general work done by and about male-authored novela negra over the past 25 years. What José Colmeiro's 1994 landmark book La novela policíaca española was to the study of Spanish crime fiction in general, Godsland's book is to the study of crime fiction by and about women.

Godsland begins by demonstrating that although much critical attention has focused on the way that the post-dictatorship crime novel has been utilized in order to articulate Spanish political and social issues, almost no studies have centered on the feminocentric novela negra. In Chapter 1, "From Feminism to Post-Feminism," she lays out how she will navigate the primary conceptual differences between "equality feminists," who basically fight for women's equality, with "difference 'feminists' " (and the quotes around 'feminist' are Godsland's), who promote "an exclusively female genealogy, that focuses on the primacy of the female body, that exhorts women to refuse to participate in the wide political apparatus, and that promulgates such notions as the female return to the domestic space" (76). Maria Antònia Oliver's Lònia Guiu, for example, fits neatly within the first category, as she "investigates crimes that highlight the relentless multiplicity of aggressions to which women are subjected by men, and function as a sounding board for the author's commitment to second wave or equality feminism" (20). By contrast, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett's Inspector Petra Delicado is, in part, studied in conjunction with Spanish and international theories of difference "feminism." Godsland examines Delicado's ambiguity as "a woman who appears to enjoy social, sexual, financial, and some professional autonomy, but whose positioning within the police force and whose own perspective on many gender issues appear to render many of those autonomies of questionable authenticity" (40). Despite this, Godsland concludes that Petra's shifting stances are used by Giménez-Bartlett to work through "the prevailing and often contradictory gendered ideologies which her character must negotiate" (50). In some ways, Petra (like Lourdes Ortiz's Bárbara Arenas before her), is simply a "masculinized" female detective. Although both Petra and Lònia use strong language, Godsland points out that this is of limited liberating value...