Romance and Exemplarity in Post-War Spanish Women's Narratives (review)

In her first book-length work, Nino Kebadze offers a refreshing and insightful critical examination of narratives written by Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, Carmen de Icaza, and María Mercedes Ortoll, all female novelists of the tumultuous period following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Kebadze contextualizes her readings of these writers' works within the historical and ideological framework that informed the period, and she draws special attention to the way in which these writers carefully cultivated the novela rosa, a popular genre typically directed to certain facets of the Spanish female population. Kebadze not only foregrounds how the novela rosa of the post-war period seemed to triumphantly inculcate the values of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) as well as the tenets expounded by the women at the forefront of the Sección Femenina, but she also shows how Linares, Linares-Becerra, Icaza, and Ortoll each made use of the genre's limitations to successfully undermine notions of feminine "exemplarity" through their model protagonists. If the desired result of these novels was to encourage women's blind absorption into the Falange (Franco's Nationalist movement) while also inciting women to participate in that self-same movement through their participation in the Sección Femenina, Kebadze argues that another result was quite subversive. Specifically, these authors' models of feminine exemplarity often seemed to use the rhetoric of the Sección Femenina to inspire independent agency and feminine authority rather than blind submission and compliance with dictatorial codes of conduct.

Kebadze divides her book into two parts. In the first half, "Part I: Towards Female Exemplarity: Setting the Norm," she explores the signifying practices of the Nationalist regime by emphasizing the concept of exemplarity within Spanish culture. The author traces the genealogy of the ideal female archetype back to Fray Luis de León whose La perfecta casada (1583) served as an instructional manual aimed at shaping the behavior of bourgeois women. Using the biblical book of Proverbs as a basis for this vernacular writing, León commented on the role of a woman in her home, simultaneously emphasizing her subordinate role within the family. Fray Luis's "perfecta casada" not only allowed her spouse to govern her actions within matrimony, but she ultimately accepted his role as sovereign over any children and shared possessions. While this Renaissance model offers an excellent embodiment of feminine comportment, Kebadze equally acknowledges the importance of the 19th century's "ángel del hogar" and the 20th century's "nueva mujer de la Falange." The author suggests that, much like the "perfecta casada," the realm of the "ángel del hogar" was the domestic sphere, and as such, model Spanish women were not to transgress the boundaries of their homes. In going beyond these limits, a woman would not only bring dishonor to her family, but would incur public shame and spectacle since it would jeopardize the already well demarcated lines that divided the masculine domain—the world of labor, politics, and law—from the feminine, private sphere. In her investigation of the "nueva mujer de la Falange," Kebadze suggests some evolution of the model of feminine exemplarity since the ideal woman of this period still mainly inhabited the private sphere and, if at all possible, functioned as a maternal figure. Nonetheless, Kebadze notes a curious, paradoxical shift in the iconic domestic woman since the "nueva mujer" of the Sección Femenina stipulated that women not only accept the challenge of being wives and mothers, but also accept the challenge of nation-building ("hacer patria"), thus participating in the disciplined edification process of remaking a state which had been undone by the Civil War.

In the second half of her book, "Part II: Reading Romance: Questioning the Norm," Kebadze investigates different iterations of idealized...