Silence and Shadows: Religious Symbolism in Ana María Matute’s “La niña fea”

LOS niños tontos (1956), set in the universe of Artámila, can be read as a microcosm of Post-Civil War, Spanish rural society.¹ Surreptitiously Ana María Matute holds up a mirror so readers can see the bigotry and cruelty of Franco’s Spain played out in its most vulnerable citizens: its children. By using children as her main characters, and their imaginary qualities, the author strategically evaded regime censors. Many young writers of the mid 1950s considered Matute “su maestra en el antifranquismo y continuadora de Cela y Laforet en el arte de torear la censura” (Redondo Goicoechea 19). In several stories of her collection, including “La niña fea,” Matute presents a veiled depiction of anti-Christian sentiments that were part of a general atmosphere of intimidation and insensitivity.

The publication of Los niños tontos marked a unique literary achievement and remains one of Matute’s most important critical successes.² The brevity of her twenty-one stories, now categorized as micro-fiction, contributed considerably “a la configuración definitiva del género en el contexto español” (Hernández 297). These narratives vary in length from one paragraph to about six pages.³ Matute’s artistic choice of this brief genre permitted the minimization of contextual references (a reticency particularly advantageous in light of Francoist censorship).⁴ Some have conventional plots and others are just impressionistic sketches. In several stories, Matute also interweaves reality and fantasy. As Janet Díaz notes, the artistic use of fantasy has not been common in Spain (77). All of the stories in Los niños tontos have children as their main characters except for “La niña que no estaba en ninguna parte,” but even in this narrative, the memories and objects of childhood form the basis for the storyline. Matute is rare among Spanish authors for her focus on children and their point of view. María Paz Ortuño Ortín acknowledges that “la infancia como tema no es muy frecuente en la literatura española, al contrario que en otras literaturas como la inglesa” (23).

The word tonto in the title does not refer to the children’s intellectual capacity in a literal sense but rather to their inability (usually through no fault of their own) to conform to their circumstances and surroundings. Matute once affirmed that “son niños tontos entre comillas, porque precisamente no tienen nada de tontos. Como no se parecían a los otros, la gente decía ‘este es tonto.’ Pero no lo eran” (qtd. in Ortuño Ortín 23–24). These are marginalized children who are viewed as abnormal in some way and treated with indifference or worse. They often resort to dream worlds in an attempt to survive the harshness of their daily lives. Their deaths to escape their suffering constitute a pervading theme and is the source of Matute’s sharpest criticism. Often their premature passing is merely insinuated, a whisper on a breeze as in “La niña fea.” María Elena Soliño contends that the “greatness of Matute’s stories with child protagonists resides in her ability to express the deepest tragedies without sentimentality, a trope she may very well have learned from Andersen” (217).

Ana María Matute once said that if “algo ha influido realmente en mi infancia, fue precisamente aquel tomo de cuentos de Andersen, que hace tantos años trajeron los Reyes Magos a mi casa” (qtd. in Soliño 161). The future author read voraciously during her formative years. In addition to Hans Christian Andersen, other favorites included fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Pérez 190). In her acceptance speech “En el bosque” to the Real Academia Española, Matute passionately defended the premier place of fantasy and fairy tales in literature (Redondo Goicoechea 14). From an early age Matute also wrote to flee the horrors of the Civil War, even creating La revista de...