Mother and Myth in Spanish Novels: Rewriting the Maternal Archetype by Sandra J. Schumm (review)

As a most interested reader of Sandra Schumm’s recent study Mother and Myth in Spanish Novels: Rewriting the Maternal Archetype, I entered the text within the theoretically afflicted context that Schumm undertakes to expand and remedy. In this context, readers of contemporary literature are ignorant of its links to ancient storytelling and mythology, specifically anything about Metis or her relationship to her daughter, Athena. Thus this audience does not understand the analogy of their ignorance to the societal oppression or denigration of women through the erasure of the mother nor how this erasure is reflected in contemporary prose. Schumm’s work helps us understand this gap in our knowledge. For us Hispanists, her study is extremely valuable in its focus upon female-authored novels of the early twenty-first century as a means of establishing a connection among these components

The myth of Metis and Athena begins with the attraction of Zeus to Metis, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, who was imbued with the highest wisdom. After becoming pregnant with Zeus’s child, Metis is tricked by the god into shrinking herself and being swallowed by him. Metis’s Athena is born fully grown from her father’s head with no knowledge or understanding of her mother’s existence. This impairment of the family story becomes more serious because the mother is forgotten to the ages and to those who recount it. Schumm demonstrates that, in this erasure, Metis not only becomes the forebear of forgotten mothers described in Spanish novels of the last several decades, but she likewise becomes the model for their resurrection through their daughters’ efforts to remember them.

In her argument about the social, political, and emotional dismissal of women in Francisco Franco’s post-civil-war Spain, Schumm explains:

In 1938, Franco intensified the anonymity of females in Spain even before the official end of the war when he enacted policies that limited women’s rights and made them dependent on their spouses by reestablishing the Civil Laws of 1889, which elevated the husband to “el representante de la mujer” (“the representative of the wife”). Although Spanish men did not claim pathogenesis, as Zeus did, they essentially “swallowed” the individuality of women.

(p. 8)

Thus a Zeus-like dictator reiterates the mythical deletion of the mother/wife, and Schumm then demonstrates in the rest of her text how “the novels in this study emphasize the lasting effect of Franco’s engulfment of females on women in Spain today” (p. 8). The novelists show how their female protagonists’ attention to and interrogation of their mothers’ identities have been obscured and also how each younger woman needs to account for the maternal in order to find her own identity. The mothers’ voices and legacies are rescued through their daughters’ efforts to comprehend what has been missing through the societal erasure of the maternal presence. Schumm examines how Spanish women writers rescue the maternal figure through the daughter’s process of gaining self-definition in Carme Riera’s La mitad del alma (2006), Lucia Etxevarria’s Un milaro en equilabrio (2004), Rosa Montero’s El corazón del tártaro (2001), Cristina Cerezales’s De oca a oca (2000), María de la Pau Janer’s Las mujeres que hay en mí (2002), and Soledad Puértolas’s Historia de un abrigo (2005).

In Riera’s novel the protagonist strives to find, and thus establish, a new image of her deceased mother’s legacy. Etxevarria’s work emphasizes the protagonist’s accomplishment of revaluing her mother while finding the worth of herself through her own motherhood. Montero’s text relays the story of a daughter who feels herself abandoned by her mother through the latter’s death, a transition that opens a life of sexual abuse, prostitution, drug addiction, and crime for the younger woman. In many of these texts, a resolution is...