Catalonian Nationalism and Feminism - Literature review Example

The fictional and non-fictional writings of Montserrat Roig, popularly recognized as the quintessential representative of Catalonian nationalism and feminism, are singularly devoted to the recovery and revival of Catalonian history. Aiming towards the unveiling of Catalonian traditions, myth, history and language, Roig ‘s works unfold through a set of binary oppositions – the male versus the female; the public versus the private; the oppressor versus the oppressed; and official history versus the authentic her-story. As such, her fiction invariably unfolds within a domestic setting and her protagonists, and voices, are female and distinctly feminine. Roig’s identification of the female as both carrier and purveyor of Catalonian language, traditions, myths, history and nationalism was circumstantially predetermined by the experiences of this quasi-national community during the Franco years. To understand Roig’s works as something other than a feminist treatise and to fully appreciate their complexity, an understanding of the politically history which informed and incited them, is necessary. In brief, throughout the four decades of General Franco’s dictatorship, the Catalan community, as were the Andalusia, Basque and Castilian, was oppressed through the government’s determined efforts to forcibly impose the Spanish culture and language upon all. The Catalan language and culture were outlawed, with the hope being that their de-legitimisation would, over the generations and years, lead to their obliteration. Both, however, were kept alive within the private and feminine space of the home and, both were kept alive through the efforts of Catalan’s women. It was, thus, that Catalonian women played a fundamental role, not only in the rescuing of the national culture and historical memory but, in the survival of Catalonia herself. Within the socio-political history which informs Montserrat Roig’s works lays the key to the understanding of her literary productions. Binary oppositions assume political significance, with the private representing the national space and the public symbolising the oppressive dominance of Franco’s Spain; with the private and the feminine representing oppressed and the public and the male symbolising the oppressor. Indeed, as one who lived during Catalonia’s traumatic linguistic and cultural experiences under Franco, Roig’s works can only be fully understood from this perspective and can only be fully appreciated as a product of a literary mind which, itself, had been borne of a nation’s cultural and linguistic trauma. That she should select Catalonian as her linguistic medium of communication is, in itself, a political and feminist statement, as it is a reclamation of both her national heritage and an homage to the women who kept that heritage alive. The ethno-political historical circumstances, as outlined in the introductory paragraphs, are the impetus behind L’Hora Violeta. The dominant feature of this particular literary work is the relationship between feminism and nationalism, between Catalonia and her-story, as oppose to history. La Hora Violeta, which unfolds within the private sphere, is expressive of “la voluntad de trovar una solución comuna a la lluita catalanista I lluita feminista.”1 In this work, as in all of Roig’s literary productions, she gives voice to both a repressed national identity and an oppressed gender in a suppressed language. Written in Catalan, Roig’s ethnic mother tongue, a language which had been kept alive by women, L’Hora Violeta may be interpreted as a determined effort to recover and express Catalonian her-story within the boundaries of fiction. Indeed, in this novel, Roig engages in the recuperation of Catalonian women’s history within an inter-generational fictional matrix, ultimately recreating Catalonia as the gendered nation; a nation whose survival, historical memories, culture and language were dependant upon her daughters. Roig’s works, especially Adeu Ramona, El Temps de les Ciereres and L’Hora Violeta – her trilogy and feminist saga - are intent upon the resurrection of Catalan history and memory and, more specifically, on the recuperation of Catalan her-story. Throughout the mentioned works, Roig excavates the fragments of her-story which had been buried, but nevertheless preserved, within the houses of Eixample, a Catalan neighbourhood. The focus on her-storical memory is evidenced from the very first pages of L’Hora Violeta, when Natalia contends that “calia salvar per les paraules tot allò que la historia, la Historia gran, o sigui la dels homs, havia fet imprecís, havia condemnat o idealitzat.”2 The act of expressing her-story is synonymous with the act of remembrance. In L’hora Violeta, the expressed female/feminine/national memory assumes the form of a literary discourse. Roig’s history is a previously unexpressed and violently suppressed, one both within the context of Franco-ism and patriarchal culture. It is a hidden and silent history without referent and which, despite literary expression, is a profoundly subaltern one, both because it is Catalonian within Castilian national boundaries and matriarchal within an uncompromisingly patriarchal culture. As it is subaltern, without referent or precedent, the literary strategies with which this silent her-story are communicated seek the conveyance of the aforementioned and, as such, are secret personal diaries and fragmented memories. The outcome is a labyrinthical narrative, suggestive of a fractured and lost world which has only survived in the depths of personal memories; a broken, fragmented and convoluted literary discourse which parallels, according to Roig, the workings of individual and collective memory: “La memòria mai no es cronològica, o sigui, no es primer capítol, segon capítol, tercer capítol … no es coherent, no esta estructurada així – desprès en una novel, la intentem de posar ordre en aquest desordre – sinó que la memòria es radial.”3 The radial movement which Roig refers to in the preceding quotation is her-story, female history, as opposed to the dry and unimaginative, chronological his-tory. The first is more expansive than the second, embracing both the private and the public spheres and expressing both silenced memories and public discourse. Certainly, memory is disjointed and its expression tends towards the convoluted but, as Roig herself indicates in the preceding quote, that is the very nature of her-storical memory, the peoples’ history, as opposed to official his-tory. Seminal dates in Catalan history appear in the novel but rather than look towards their strictly political implications, Roig focuses on the effects they had upon women. She expresses those events from the perception of Catalan women and highlights their consequences upon the private sphere, as opposed to the public realm. As one question Roig’s treatment of her-story, one finds that it is premised on the conviction that “la recuperació de la historia de les dones requereix forçosament una visió històrica que no es límit a l’àmbit públic, al poder o a la macropolitica. Una part significativa de l’experiència històrica femenina s’ha realitzat en l’espai privat de l’àmbit domèstic, de la llar.”4 A close and critical reading of L’hora Violeta lends to the realisation that while the novel is narrated in what is seemingly a realistic manner, switching between third and first person narratives, streams of consciousness and interior and exterior dialogue, it is an intensely subjective reading of history. In essence, the novel can best be described as a disrupted narrative which expresses Catalonian history through the story of several women, with the inference here being that national history exists within the memory and life of L’hora Violeta’s female characters. The novel’s female character, all of whom are members of two of Catalonia’s bourgeoisie families, Ventura Claret and Miralpeix, spans four decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. The novel opens as Norma, the writer, receives a letter from her friend, Natalia, along with Natalia’s mother’s, Judit’s, diaries and Kati’s, her mother’s friend, letters. Along with these written her-stories, Natalia also sends Norma her personal notes about her aunt Patricia. Natalia’s request is as straightforward as it is complex; she wants Norma to write a novel based upon these documents – an her-storical novel about the generation of women which preceded theirs; the generation of Catalonian females who lived through the Second Republic, the war and Franco’s regime: “La meva tia m’ha donat tota la paperassa I m’ha dit que en faci el que vulgui. He pensat que et podrien servir. M’agradaria que escrivissis alguna cosa sobre la mama I la Kati. De la mateixa manera que ho faries sobre tu I sobre mi.”5 As Norma writes the novel, the narrator weaves the diaries into the text, along with fragments of Homer’s Odyssey. In so doing, Roig establishes a clear parallel between such mythological female figures as Penelope, Circe, Calypso and Athena, and the two generations of L’hora Violeta’s women. Expressed through such a narrative strategy, her-story emerges as cyclical; across the span of western history, the role of female appears to be in a constant state of repetition, creation and recreation. Penelope/Agnes/Judit have been waiting for their Ulysses over the millennia; Circe/Norma/Kati are forever trying to distract Ulysses away from his Penelope, from his home, through their sexuality; Calypso/Natalia/Kati, while isolated in their private spheres are also in search of Ulysses and on a quest to conquer him. Roig’s female characters are, thus, descended from the great female characters of history and myth and, as such, in the present are echoes of the past. In commenting upon this narrative strategy, Ordonez describes it as an “exhilarating recurrence of female heroes embarking upon heroic quests for matrilineal identity and myths for women,”6 comparable to Virginia Woolf’s notion that a “woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”7 It is a strategy which simultaneously affirms the continuity of the female lineage and the female as the purveyor and creator of history. While L’Hora Violeta presents history as her-story, projects womanhood as the focal point of nationhood and presents the female as the guardian of the national memory, Spanish feminist have launched an unmitigated and relentless attack upon L’Hora Violetta and Roig’s literary fiction and non-fiction. Falcon, one of the Spanish Feminist Party’s founders accuses Roig of engaging in the perpetuation of biased female stereotypes, and most especially that of gender duality which projects the female as fragile and insecure and the male as strong and secure.8 Indeed, Chown maintains that numerous Spanish feminist have, with specific reference to L’Hora Violeta, criticised Roig for her seemingly anti-feminist narrative discourse. L’Hora Violeta, as these feminists and critics claim, disparages the feminist ideology insofar as it represents dependant middle-class women who are either in perpetual wait, or quest, for a man and, in the absence of a male figure, become nostalgic and depressed.9 In an interview with Geraldine C. Nicols, Roig responds to her critics and clarifies her intent and purpose: “No quise hacer un panfleto feminista, pero si quise hacer una novela que explicara la crisis de la mujer que quiere ser fuerte y no lo es, que quiere vivir como un ser independiente cuando su subconscient todavía esta dominado.”10 While there appears to be an incontrovertible conflict between Roig and some Spanish and Spanish-American feminist critics, the above quote quite successfully allows one to understand that L’Hora Violata may not be a feminist pamphlet but, it is a feminist narrative. The novel does not, as feminist critics have suggested,11 perpetuate the myth of female passivity and dependence but, instead seeks the redemption of figures such as Penelope. She may have waited for Ulysses, just as Agnes chooses to wait but, theirs is not a passive waiting, nor is it a sign of dependence. Indeed, as some critics have emphasised, the fact that they survived the waiting is an affirmation of their independence and throughout their period of waiting, they actively engaged in the development of their inner strength and control so that, when Ulysses/male finally came back, they were the ones who controlled them – the female controlled the male and not vice-versa.12 The narrative sources and strategies which Roig deploys further affirm the fact that the accusations launched against her by feminist critics are founded upon a misreading of L’Hora Violeta. In recovering Catalonia, in resurrecting the nation, Roig eschews official/male/public history and, instead, turns to the female experience, with her sources being women’s diaries and letters. Even though we know that these diaries and letters are fictional, that is hardly important. What is important is the nature of her sources, suggesting as they do that authentic history is her-story, that history began with women and is carried through them and, most importantly, through the female memory.13 It is precisely because of this that Judit’s diaries assume special significance and demand more critical attention. Read More