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Article Excerpt
In the mid-1970s Estrella del Castillo, widow of Federico García Lorca's painter friend Miguel Ruiz Molina, described early twentieth-century Granadine social life as completely divided along gender lines: "En aquel entonces, Granada era una ciudad mora, morísima, y los hombres y las mujeres en su mayoría no alternábamos juntos ... como ahora es costumbre" (Higuera Rojas 24). Thus we can imagine the culture shock Lorca would have experienced when, in 1919 at age 21, he left Granada to study in Madrid. Contrary to Andrew Anderson's observation that "in Spain in the 1930s feminista was a small, marginal movement" (Yerma 76), feminist manifestations (if not a movement) were increasing in the capital from the 1890s onward and had received a significant impetus during the First World War (1914-18), when many more Spanish women entered the workforce. Geraldine Scanlon has amply documented the breadth and depth of what she calls the "polémica feminista." In the years immediately before the proclamation of the Republic in 1931, feminism was definitely a movement that had achieved major government legislation under the Republic. The fact that there was, from the second decade of the twentieth century forward, a virulent antifeminist backlash among Spanish male writers signals the prominence of the movement in the public consciousness. (1) It was, however, as Anderson rightly notes, primarily an urban phenomenon. After the First World War, the "New Woman," who worked, lived an independent life, and manifested her modern status in her dress and hairstyles, was beginning to make an impression in the Spanish public sphere.
The purpose of this article is to place Lorca's major plays with female protagonists--Mariana Pineda, Doña Rosita la soltera, Bodas de sangre, La zapatera prodigiosa, Yerma, and La casa de Bernarda Alba--within the context of the feminist discourse circulating in Spain just prior to and during the composition of these works. (2) I take a cue from Paul Julian Smith, whose book The Theatre of García Lorca inserts "García Lorca's work into a broader conceptual arena" (13), although Smith does not include many references to the feminist thought in that arena. While Lorca was not a declared feminist, his major plays reveal an acute awareness of women's status within Spanish society, especially regarding class, education, work, and marriage, that contrasts sharply with antifeminist attitudes on these issues manifested by key male writers of immediately preceding and contemporaneous generations. The comparisons I will make later in this essay focus on works by Miguel de Unamuno, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and Gabriel Miró, because there are a number of striking resemblances between some of their characters and themes and Lorca's, but many others could have been included. While Lorca's literary strategies differ greatly from those of most Spanish feminist women writers of the early twentieth century--Carmen de Burgos, María Martínez Sierra, Margarita Nelken, Rosa Chacel, and María Zambrano--his critique of Spanish society's legal and cultural treatment of women coincides more with theirs than with positions taken by prominent male writers. (3) Some critics have suggested that Lorca's standpoint as a homosexual man in a strongly masculine-biased society positioned him to understand women's condition and to empathize with it, even that he projected his own personal dilemma into that of his female characters. (4) Such may have been the case, but my interest here is to show how certain of Lorca's theatrical works synchronize with the feminist discourse of his day and how some of his women characters reflect the problems real Spanish women confronted in a highly misogynist milieu. That Lorca was an incredibly sensitive writer who drew inspiration consciously and unconsciously from his surroundings, his vast reading, his musical knowledge and talent, and his myriad friends and acquaintances is beyond dispute. I contend that feminist discourse and new women, some of whom were his friends, were a significant part of Lorca's world when he was composing plays in the 1920s and 1930s. In what follows, I will 1) briefly establish Lorca's ample and sustained contact with new women who exemplified the radical changes feminist thinking had wrought in some Spanish women's lives; 2) outline some of the major ideas of Spanish feminist theory in the early part of the twentieth century; and 3) analyze the major plays with female protagonists within the context of Spanish feminism.
Oddly, Lorca's biographers have focused on his male friends, slighting his many and important female acquaintances. (5) While the Residencia de Estudiantes where Lorca lived in Madrid from 1919 to 1928 did not admit female residents (women had a parallel institution in the Residencia de Señoritas, where Lorca's sister Isabel lived in the mid-1930s), several notable "liberated women," such as the poet Concha Méndez and her friend the painter Maruja Mallo, moved in artistic circles associated with the Residencia. Concha Méndez was a classic new woman--a great sportswoman (she won a swimming competition), a "rebelde innata" (Mangini 168), and in her own words "inconforme con mi medio ambiente" (Mangini 169). She was for a time the girlfriend of Lorca's friend, the misogynistic Luis Buñuel, who did not want her to participate in the artistic world he inhabited. Fortunately, Méndez realized in time that, if she remained with Buñuel, she would become a typical bourgeois wife with no life of her own. In Lorca, however, she found a supportive friend who encouraged her artistic dreams (Mangini 171). Méndez had an epiphany about her poetic vocation when she heard Lorca recite his poetry in 1925. In 1929 Méndez received Lorca in her London home as he traveled through the British capital on his way to the United States. Lorca frequented the Madrid apartment Méndez shared with her poet-husband Manuel Altolaguirre; he attended their wedding and was present at the birth of their child, on which occasion Lorca consoled Méndez, who thought she was dying. (6)
Méndez's friend Maruja Mallo likewise inspired her to write. With Mallo, who lived an even more scandalous "modern" life, carrying on visible and stormy affairs with a number of well-known artists and writers, Méndez "llevaba a cabo sus transgresiones callejeras de flâtneuses modernas" (Mangini 171). (The modern woman's association with the street, rather than the home, is an important motif in Lorca's theater.) Lorca, who stole from Maruja Mallo Emilio Aladrén one of her many boyfriends, once referred to Mallo's "pimiento picante" (Epistolario completo 580). Lorca and Maruja Mallo's sometime lover Rafael Alberti were also friends, and Lorca was doubtless a witness to Alberti's despair at Mallo's promiscuous approach (by conservative Spanish standards) to male-female relations. Surely, Lorca also knew militant Republican advocate María Teresa León, whom Alberti married. Lorca coincided in various activities with playwright, feminist essayist, and Republican activist María Martínez Sierra, estranged wife of Gregorio Martínez Sierra, with whom he worked on several theatrical projects. It was well known in the Spain of the pre-Civil War period that Gregorio Martínez Sierra's many and very successful plays, as well as his feminist speeches and books, were composed by his wife, María. She was also a collaborator and confidante to Lorca's friend Manuel de Falla, who resided in Granada. Both Lorca and María worked for the Misiones Pedagógicas under the Republic (María traveled across Spain speaking in favor of the Republic, work that she chronicled in Una mujer por caminos de España, one of the few books signed with her own name), and María's signature follows immediately after Lorca's on a group letter signed by a number of artists to the mother of Luis Carlos Prestes, a Brazilian Communist who was jailed in 1936 in a wave of political repression (Epistolario completo 823). Lorca also worked with the actress Catalina Bárcena, Gregorio Martínez Sierra's lover and later his wife, and he was further involved with women and theatrical production as co-director with Pura Ucelay of the Club Anfistora, sponsored by the Asociación Femenina de Educación Cívica (Mangini 190-91).
Lorca would surely have met Carmen de Burgos, a high profile feminist writer, who left her profligate husband in Andalusia to live independently in Madrid; Burgos was the long-time lover of Lorca's friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The themes and ominous tone of Lorca's rural tragedies have much in common with some of Carmen de Burgos's feminist novelettes (she wrote her own Andalusian rural tragedy titled Los inadaptados [1901]). From 1927 forward Lorca worked closely with the actress Margarita Xirgu, a quintessential woman professional, and in New York in 1929 he met Mexican writer and cultural activist Antonieta Rivas Mercado, with whom he planned collaborations; Rivas Mercados' dramatic suicide in 1931 in the París Notre Dame Cathedral cut these collaborations short. (See Vicky Unruh 115-34 for a fascinating account of Rivas Mercado as a new woman.) In the 1930s Lorca became friends with Argentine intellectual Victoria Ocampo and the Argentine actress Lola Membrives. Lorca surely knew María Zambrano, a philosopher and political activist in the 1920s and 1930s, once engaged to Miguel Pizarro Zambrano, Lorca's intimate friend from his Granada days. María Zambrano mentions Lorca and his short-lived literary magazine Gallo in her autobiographical Delirio y destino. Both Lorca and Zambrano were presentat Concha Méndez's wedding to Manuel Altolaguirre. According to Shirley Mangini (204-05), Lorca attended tertulias in the home of Margarita Nelken, an ardent feminist who wrote and lectured on art history and was one of the first women to hold a seat in the Spanish Cortes during the Second Republic. Mangini suspects that, given Nelken's intimate portrait of Lorca in her unpublished memoir "Presencias y evocaciones," Lorca and Nelken were good friends and that he had read her book La condición social de la mujer en España (email message, August 29, 2007). Nelken was a living model for the new woman who appeared so frequently in literature by both men and women in the 1920s and 1930s; she was a career woman, had a child out of wedlock, and later lived with a married man.
At the Residencia de Estudiantes, Lorca would have come into contact with Krausist and Institutionist ideas about the importance of education for women, a cornerstone for the progress of the Spanish nation. In the interest of furthering...
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