"Too disconnected/too bound up": the paradox of identity in Mercé Rodoreda's The time of the doves

Feminist theory has shown how women's lives are paradoxically both marginal to, yet affected by, hegemonic discourses of power. However, as long as women's experiences are viewed singularly along an axis of sexual difference, placing paradox as a trope for female identity risks reinscribing a closed system of oppression based only on male-female relations, thereby foreclosing possibilities for oppositional strategies organized around intersecting locations of resistance. Mercé Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves, originally published in Catalan as La Plaça del Diamant in 1962, portrays a working-class woman's life in Barcelona from the onset of the Second Republic to the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a period she calls "a piece of history." Natalia's presence as both "articulate" narrator and "inarticulate" character embodies her paradoxical position as both outside and inside discourses of gender, class, and national oppression. Attention to the specific cultural contexts within which women's lives are both externally constructed and internalized allows a recognition of Natalia's silence and inwardness oppositional strategies of survival rather than as qualities of limitation and alienation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor dc:publisher

Colorado State University. Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

1991

Authors dc:creator

• Short, Kayann, author
• Freeman, Marion, committee member
• Mitchell, Carol, committee member
• Boyer, Harriet, 1936-, committee member

• Spanish fiction -- Women authors
• Women in literature
• Identity (Psychology) in literature

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.

Language dc:language.iso

eng, English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.25675/3.024691

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mountainscholar.org:10217/82522