Ellas Se Fugan Del Museo: La Narrativa Femenina Frente a La Imagen De La Mujer en Publicaciones Ilustradas Espanolas Del Fin De Siglo
"This is a study of the contradictory relations in turn-of-the-century Spain between the visual images of women produced by men in illustrated periodicals and textual representations of them in feminine narratives. I examine three kinds of word and image interaction: First, their fusion in ""costumbrista"" sketches (Las mujeres espanolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por si mismas); second, their coexistence in popular collections of novellas (El Cuento Semanal, La Novela Corta), in particular those by authors such as Carmen de Burgos and Angela Barco; and third, the more indirect connection between the images in mass-produced magazines (Blanco y Negro) and the textual response to them found in novels by Emilia Pardo Bazan and Concha Espina. This interdisciplinary examination reveals that the visual ""eternal feminine"" reinforced women's paradoxical status as either eroticized objects of desire or asexual mothers and wives; but also that certain female writers managed to escape these universal categories, demanding hybrid positions between their role in the private sphere and their status in intellectual and social arenas. The de-classification of women achieved by female writers forces us to critically reconsider the accepted categorizations of these writers as conservative or frivolous, as well as the canonical hierarchy of the literary genres transformed by their collaboration. Ultimately, the texts I study not only destabilize our assumptions about so-called high and low culture in turn-of-the-century Spain, but also serve as striking reminders that, far from being true copies of a stable reality, representations of women always encode the point of view and the gender of the producer."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign