The Novels of Carmen Conde: Toward an Expression of Feminine Subjectivity by Lisa Nalbone (review)

Carmen Conde is known primarily as a poet and as the first woman elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. However, she also wrote novels, short stories, children’s literature, theater, and literary criticism. While her poetry has received critical attention, her novels have gone virtually unnoticed. Lisa Nalbone begins to correct this neglect with her comprehensive study of the eight novels Conde published between 1945 and 2002, but wrote earlier between the last years of the reign of Alfonso XIII and Spain’s transition to democracy. Looking at these novels from a feminist perspective, Nalbone examines how Conde portrays the female protagonists and their inner struggle for independence, inner peace, and self-realization. She stresses the extent to which these characters challenge existing patriarchal models of women’s roles and behavior, specifically as they relate to domesticity, motherhood, sexual desire, and existential autonomy. While noting the sociopolitical context in which the characters try to navigate the restrictions placed on them, Nalbone calls attention to shifts in the novelist’s viewpoint over the years. Although the book focuses on the characterization of the main character of each of Conde’s novels, in doing so, Nalbone also uncovers Conde’s treatment of a number of other themes, such as absence, interpersonal relations, coming of age, and death.

The Novels of Carmen Conde: Toward an Expression of Feminine Subjectivity is divided into three parts in which each novel is studied in chronological order. The first part, called “The Lyric Subject,” analyzes Vidas contra su espejo, En manos del silencio, and Las oscuras raíces, novels that revolve around inner turmoil, family conflicts, and violent deaths. The second part, called “The Subject Transformed,” studies Cobre with its gender shifting, La Rambla, a frame tale of four separate narrations, and Creció espesa la yerba a novel in which a middle-aged woman recovers her past through memory. The third part, “The Self-Manumitted Subject,” comprises studies of Soy la madre, a novel about the commitment to motherhood followed by the liberation from the image of the mother, and Virginia o la calle de los balcones, a work published posthumously that deals with a middle-aged woman’s doubts concerning her relationship with a much younger man.

The discussion of each novel begins with comments on the book’s composition and a succinct review of the critical responses to its published version. The bulk of each chapter is devoted to a description and explication of the protagonist’s development. In all the novels, Nalbone finds evidence of a wish on the part of the protagonist to break free of gender bias and normative conduct as well as varying reactions to the idea of the new, modern woman that emerged as Spain evolved from dictatorship to democracy. The book ends with an appendix of brief plot summaries of the eight novels, a list of works cited, and an index of proper names. It would have been helpful to readers to have had subjects incorporated into the index, given the variety of motifs as different as abortion and the gaze and images including the mirror and the tomb mentioned in connection with the feminist implications of the works. Minor errors and one glaring grammatical mistake (“His break with María allows both she [sic] and Laura…”) can be overlooked thanks to the book’s otherwise polished prose and, above all, to its scholarly underpinnings.

Lisa Nalbone has assimilated an impressive range of studies in feminism and of general literary criticism written by American, British, Spanish, and French scholars and theoreticians. She does not merely catalogue her readings in an introduction, nor does she quote from the works of others for the sake of erudite flourish, but rather, she integrates them seamlessly throughout her analyses whenever appropriate to lend credence to her arguments. These references give variety as well as depth to discussions that might otherwise seem repetitive. The book...