Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984 (review)

Christine Arkinstall has written a superb and fascinating study of women’s involvement in writing a liberal Spanish nation during the long century from 1877 to 1984. She centers Histories, Cultures, and National Identities on three unexpected authors, unexpected because they are less read and studied than some of their contemporaries: the playwright and essayist Rosario de Acuña, the poet Ángela Figuera, and the novelist and essayist Rosa Chacel. Each of these three liberal voices constructs modernity in opposition to the prevailing conservatism of her era. If this seems to be an easily ignored book because it argues from lesser-known figures, that perception is emphatically wrong. For one thing, we can understand better the uniqueness of, for example, Emilia Pardo Bazán if we know more about other extraordinary women like Acuña or Concepción Gimeno writing at the same time (almost to the year) and addressing some of the same issues. The same holds true for Figuera and Chacel, each of whom sheds light on the panorama of women’s writing in her own era; in the case of Chacel, that era includes the first three decades of the twentieth century, a period her fiction “remembers and reconstructs” (25), and post-Franco Spain. The three authors broaden our appreciation of how women imagined a liberal Spain in the context, respectively, of the First Republic, the Second Republic, and the early twentieth century. Arkinstall’s research and insights into Spain’s national identity across more than a century make this a must-read volume. As she contends, women writers contribute “different perspectives on accepted paradigms of Spain’s cultural and national identities” (28), a thesis she richly documents and theorizes. By carefully teasing out nuanced readings of specific works, she locates their ideas within competing historical, cultural, social, and gender discourses. Hybridity is one of the concepts that recurs throughout the book (much more frequently than the index indicates). She also highlights the attention to class and gender inequalities in the writings of all three women.

This three-part study first deconstructs Acuña’s simultaneous invocation and questioning of foundational myths of national identity. An upper-middle-class woman married into the aristocracy, Acuña adopted stances at once surprising and intriguing given her circumstances: a freemason, freethinker, anticlerical, defender of rights and education for women and the working class, and eventually an exile in Portugal (1911–1913), later amnestied. Part two explores Figuera’s constant revisiting of the Republic and Civil War in her poetry as she vindicates Republican ideals, constructing “history as fissure and trauma” expressed through the symbol of the wound and images of hybridity (24). The third part of the book examines sites of memory, employing Pierre Nora’s terminology, in Chacel’s Barrio de maravillas and Acrópolis. Like Acuña, Chacel identifies the key role of education and culture in the formation of a liberal Spain. In their fictional works, the three authors address the contradictions, incongruities, and ambiguities in liberal discourse, as well as the dichotomies of country versus city and public versus domestic space.

Acuña shared Giner de los Ríos’s ideas for reforming society and the nation, but she also recognized the paradox of the liberal intellectual who was “a freethinker in political and cultural circles, but a conservative Catholic within his own home” (75). Arkinstall elucidates how her neo-Romantic historical plays challenge core myths of Spain’s national identity: the Spanish War of Independence in Amor a la patria and the sixteenth-century uprising of the Valencian Germanía in Tribunales de venganza, perhaps, Arkinstall suggests, an allegory of the First Republic. Their view of patriarchal bourgeois liberalism reveals that “women’s inclusion in...