UC Irvine

In this dissertation I intend to explore three acts of resistance done by intellectual women against the Franco dictatorship that lasted from 1939 until 1975. At the same time, these acts of resistance are forms of subversion against the hegemonic patriarchal system that has always placed men in a superior position when compared to women. This has been true especially when it comes to literature and the public realm. The fact is that men have dominated the fields of intellectuality and have therefore controlled who belongs to the canon and who does not, placing women and their experiences in what the influential literary critic Gayatri Chackvorty Spivak calls the subaltern.

It is well known that after the Spanish Civil War, Spain endured one of its most repressive periods with Francisco Franco in power bringing back many laws that discriminated against minority, marginalized groups such as homosexuals, Jews, people from the Basque, Catalonia, and Galicia regions, and women, amongst others. Although, the totalitarian government tried to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, women writers did not stay silent and through their texts resisted the censorship that was imposed on them. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault would point out: "where there is power, there is resistance” and writing is one of the most effective forms of resistance. In this dissertation I intend to focus on three strategies women used to have their voices heard and resist: autobiography, the flâneuse, and sexuality.

In the first chapter, I start exploring how the contemporary intellectual was established with Zola and the Dreyfus affair, following with Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of the organic intellectual and hegemony. Zola and Gramsci were influential on how the rest of the intellectuals would describe their role in society in the twentieth century by siding with marginalized groups and speaking truth to power. In the second half of this chapter, I also explore Michel Foucault’s relationship between power and resistance and Spivak’s strategic essentialism and the subaltern. These are key concepts that helped shaped how women have been able to resist the hegemonic patriarchy they have lived under. In the rest of the dissertation I explore three specific acts of resistance: the autobiography, the flâneuse, and sexuality. I start the second chapter examining different configurations of autobiography and how this genre is used by women as resistance to patriarchy. I argue that when women make their personal lives public, they take control of their own narratives and they directly commit an act of subversion against hegemonic societal rules. In the third chapter, I study the domestic and public spheres well established in the nineteenth century and how the act of women entering the urban space is a sign of transgression which leads them to be judged by the community they live in. At the same time, I also argue for the existence of the flâneuse, whose experience in the city is not the same as the flâneur. In the final chapter I explore the traditional definitions of femininity and sexuality and how women, especially Malena, in Malena es un nombre de tango, play with these definitions. Almudena Grandes gives feminine traits to male characters and traditional masculine characteristics to the protagonist, exposing a more realistic women's experience.

To conclude, in my dissertation I argue that, although women have been largely portrayed in canonical texts and paintings in the domestic sphere, they still made their lives public by writing and have always walked in the urban space. As the same time, I propose that women, being unable to get out of what Julia Kristeva calls “the symbolic”, play with the definitions of femininity and sexuality in order to narrate a more realistic feminine experience and resist the idea of the “Angel of the House” established in the 19th century.