A Stranger in My Own Land: Sofia Casanova, a Spanish Writer in the European Fin de Siecle

Conclusion

169 Conclusion Sofía Casanova’s decision to return to the front line of the war in Poland in 1914 rather than remain in the relative safety of Spain was primarily a personal one, but its effect on her professional life and on the career she had worked so hard to resuscitate over the previous five years was transformative. On one hand, it opened the door to an exciting new career as Eastern European correspondent for the newspaper ABC, a post she accepted in 1915 and would hold for the next twenty years. This position, in turn, led to her work as a commentator on social, cultural, and political events both in Eastern Europe and at home in Spain. On the other hand, Casanova’s return to Poland brought to an abrupt end the critical, experimental, feminist trajectory that she had followed in the twenty years since El doctor Wolski. She would return to narrative after the war, with a series of novelas cortas (Triunfo de amor, Episodio de guerra, Princesa rusa, Valor y miedo, Kola el bandido, and El dolor de reinar) and (in 1930–1931) a pair of full-length novels (Como en la vida and Las catacumbas de Rusia roja), as well as several reeditions of Wolski and the revised (some might say neutered) versions of Lo eterno and El pecado. The tone and purpose of these novels and stories, however, is very different from those of the works examined in this study. The revisions to Lo eterno that we saw in Chapter 3 herein give a flavor of the “new” Casanova: Her wartime experiences, together with the changing social and political climate across Europe and especially in Spain, made her far less willing to raise her head above the parapet, even with the protection of generic convention and reader expectation. Moreover, she was now into her sixties, a grandmother who had lived through the Russian Revolution and seen the consequences of extreme radicalism at first hand. In this light, it is hardly surprising that her worldview should change so significantly. Although the works of the 1920s have little of the subtlety of Casanova’s prewar novels 170 A Stranger in My Own Land in terms of either content or style, they are not completely without interest. Novels such as El dolor de reinar and Princesa rusa develop Casanova’s longstanding interest in questions of government, power, and authority, whereas Kola el bandido, Valor y miedo, and Triunfo de amor introduce a strong current of cultural essentialism and even orientalism in their focus on Russia and the East. From an initial reading, it rather appears that by the 1920s narrative for Casanova had become little more than a cipher through which to flesh out the ideas she was expressing much more directly in her role as a journalist and commentator (although the financial incentives undoubtedly played a part as well). A detailed critical and contextual study of Casanova’s fictional and nonfictional works of the 1920s and 1930s would surely reveal much more, but that must remain a subject for another book. In the present study, my concerns have been twofold: (1) I resolved to redress the obscurity into which Casanova and her works have fallen and to reveal , through systematic readings and analyses of her texts on their own terms and in their own context, the evidence of her participation in the social, cultural , and political debates of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Spain. (2) Recognizing that context is all, I set out to demonstrate that existing narratives of fin de siglo Spain and fin de século Galicia are inadequate for an appreciation of the vibrant, challenging diversity of this crucial period in the development of modern Iberian identities. Now, by means of conclusion, I draw attention to the key implications of the critical and theoretical model proposed herein. It is especially important that these implications be considered in terms of the vast and all but forgotten body of work by Casanova’s sisters and foremothers that, in her Ateneo lecture, she so vividly likened to the utopian island of Atlantis, swallowed up by the sea (1910, La mujer española en el extranjero, 5). Casanova and her novels prove beyond doubt that although histories of Spanish and Galician literature, including many of those dedicated to Spanish women’s literature, present the years around the turn of the twentieth century as a “desert” for women writers, their absence from fin de século/siglo culture...