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

This book is based substantially on the author’s doctoral thesis submitted in 2000 for the University of Auckland. Under an ambitious title, Wendy-Llyn Zaza’s purpose is to examine female identity through the double prism of history and 36 works by 17 different Spanish female dramatists born between 1904 and 1969. However, the author’s evident historical approach more than often absorbs the theatrical and gender components. In fact, in her chapter dedicated to the Spanish Civil War the author observes that her focus is on ‘obras dramáticas escogidas para entender la revisión histórica’ (59), the principle that articulates the entire book and determines its thematic structure. Because the same playwrights are dealt with in more than one chapter, and generational issues are largely left aside, the book is not able to establish a systematic and diachronic comparison. The author herself seems to be aware of the arbitrary nature of her selection of women playwrights some of whom, like Conde, Zambrano and O’Neill, were born at the very beginning of the twentieth century, and argues that her concept of ‘contemporary’ also includes the ‘memoria colectiva de los españoles supervivientes de los años treinta, la Guerra Civil y la posguerra’ (10). In the introduction there is a further structural decision, unconvincingly justified by appeals to Buero Vallejo (10) to deal solely with the text and not the performance of each play (despite the presence of various photographs of stage performances).

There are seven chapters. The first, which reviews the myths of Eve, Antigone and Penelope in plays by Carmen Conde (b. 1907), M^a Zambrano (b. 1904), Carlota O’Neill (b. 1905) and Carmen Resino (b. 1941), and the second – on plays by Resino, Concha Romero (b. 1948) and Ana Diosdado (b. 1938) inspired by historical figures such as Juana la Loca and Isabel Tudor – emphasize woman’s condition of inferiority in the private and the public sphere. Women like Isabel la Católica must adopt values that are perceived as more masculine and, according to Zaza, renounce their own female identity and sacrifice their true self. This one-sided concept of identity echoes Carolyn Heilbrun’s claim that successful women are ‘male-identified’ and that for a woman to enter the world of ‘masculine’ values signifies the failure of the autonomous subject (Reinventing Womanhood, 1979: 40; 46) and tends to undervalue the subversive nature of female identity in some of these plays.

The plays analysed in Chapter III deal with the events that led to the Spanish Civil War and the effects of the latter on female identity. Through the use of Marxist-feminist thought (though without explicit reference to the Ley de la Memoria Histórica), the author successfully contributes to the work of giving visibility to the historically marginalized production of the defeated, Republican, side. The works rescued from oblivion are Las republicanas (1984) and Casas Viejas (1992) by Teresa Gracia (b. 1932), Cómo fue España encadenada (1974), by Carlota O’Neill, and En igualdad de condiciones (1999, although Zaza wrongly assumes that it is still unpublished) by Pilar Pombo (b. 1953). Unusually, though, Zaza plays down the subversive potential of theatre in this context of reference, somewhat perversely directing the reader to Salaün’s defence of poetry as the more apt critical form for the times.

The focus of the next chapter is on Lidia Falcón (b. 1936), the founder of Spain’s Feminist Party, attorney, journalist, legal historian, playwright and novelist. There are useful insights into the power relations implicit in the characteristically feminist discourse of Las mujeres caminaron con el fuego del siglo (1994), where Falcón resorts to the principle of solidarity among women and a progressive female awareness. Chapter V concentrates on an increasing awareness of female identity from a psychoanalytical perspective in some plays by Reina...