Ibsen and the Doll’s House dictator: how Francoism Curbed Nora

ABSTRACT

This essay presents and studies Francoist state censorship of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) from 1940 until 1966. It argues that A Doll's House is a paradigm case to understand, first, how Francoism dealt with emancipatory foreign high culture, and second, how Francoism operated its radical rupture with values and practices of the Spanish Second Republic. Under Franco, Ibsen’s play was banned, or rewritten, or contained in several other ways, and Nora’s behavior was de-normalized as madness. From the mid-1960s onward, conversely, there are signs that prominent opponents of Francoism, such as Alfonso Sastre and Carmen Martín Gaite, made efforts to rehabilitate Ibsen as a counterfigure to Francoist culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Francoism
• Ibsen
• feminism
• Doll’s House
• censorship
• Politics of translation

Acknowledgments

I thank the audiences of the research seminar Ibsen in the World (2016, University of Oslo) and the International Conference of Censorship in Literature and the Media (2017, University of Valencia) for valuable feedback on respectively the international reception of Ibsen and the control of theater under Franco. Special thanks to Giuliano D’Amico (Center for Ibsen Studies) for his enthusiastic response to an early version of this paper, to Purificación Meseguer (University of Murcia) for additional information on one censorship file, as well as to Pilar Godayol (University of Vic) for her bibliographical recommendations about the Catalan reception of Ibsen. Finally, I thank Lieve Behiels for valuable bibliographical information, and Mieke Neyens for her fine comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jeroen Vandaele teaches literary translation (Spanish-Dutch) and Hispanic literatures at Ghent University (UGent, department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication). From 2008 until 2017 he was professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo (Norway), where he taught cognitive poetics, translation studies, discourse analysis, and academic writing skills (MA). His main research interests are Ideology in Translation; Francoism; Comedy in Translation; Poetics; Cognitive Literary Studies; and Narratology (including Film Narratology). His forthcoming project, funded by the Special Research Fund at Ghent University, is ‘Totalitarian Translation: Francoist Techniques of Text Stabilization.’ [email protected]

Notes

1 My short characterizations of Ibsen’s plays here refer to insights offered by Bjerck Hagen (2015).

2 Unsurprisingly, de Beauvoir and Friedan were also met with hostility during Francoism (see Godayol, 2017 for a detailed discussion).

3 The term woman-handling was coined by Barbara Godard to signal that ‘[t]he feminist translator, affirming her critical difference, […] flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text,’ which involves ‘the replacement of the modest self-effacing translator’ (1990, p. 94).

4 For details on the institutional set-up, working, and evolution of Francoist theater censorship I refer to the excellent accounts by Pérez López de Heredia (2004) and Muñoz Cáliz (2005).

5 Throughout this essay the first number refers to the current AGA archival system, the second to the Francoist archival system.

6 It was Minister Manuel Fraga himself, the highest official of state censorship, who had to personally authorize that Basque translation (73/09432; 54/63).