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Abstract
In the mid twentieth century, the role of women in the Spanish nation was contested by people with different ideological and political affiliations. During the Second Republic, progressive legislation was passed to introduce women's suffrage, civil marriage and divorce, but right-wing traditionalist groups were also active in encouraging women and engaging their support. This article uses popular literature—in particular Jesús García Ricote’s bandit ‘bestseller’ Juan León, el rey de la serranía—to examine ways in which the relationship between womanhood and the nation was explored by writers and their readers through the medium of the bandit story. The well-established models of the pious mother and the evil temptress were used in Juan León to demonstrate the importance of traditional mothering in the destiny of the Spanish nation. However, the depiction of womanhood—and specifically motherhood—in Juan León goes beyond these models and ambiguities were explored through the relationship between the bandit hero and his adoptive gypsy mother. It is argued here that the exploration of complexities and ambiguities in popular literature reflects the critical and sometimes subversive way in which a wide readership consumed politicized ideals of womanhood.
Notes
* I am grateful to Professor Alison Sinclair and to Dr Samuel Llano for inviting me to the workshop entitled ‘Heroes and Heroines of Wrongdoing’ at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 9 December 2012, and for the helpful comments and suggestions they and the other workshop participants made. Dr Cathy McClive also provided valuable comments on this article.
1 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000), 1.
2 Ben Dodds, ‘Representations of Bandits in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 207–25.
3 William Sherzer, ‘Ideology and Interpretation in La familia de Pascual Duarte’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 55:2 (2002), 357–69.
4 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Gender and Nation’, in Women's History in Global Perspective, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 229–74 (p. 247).
5 Sinha, ‘Gender and Nation’, 238, 247, 258.
6 Mary Vincent, ‘Spain’, in Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45, ed. Kevin Passmore (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2003), 189–213 (pp. 191–96).
7 Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco's Spain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois U. P., 2000), 20–22.
8 Vincent, ‘Spain’, 201–05.
9 Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar, ‘Shaping Women: National Identity through the Use of Language in Franco's Spain’, Nations and Nationalism, 7:1 (2001), 75–92 (p. 79).
10 Mary Vincent, Spain 1833–2002: People and State (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007), 170.
11 Mary Nash, ‘Un/contested Identities: Motherhood, Sex Reform and the Modernisation of Gender Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain’, in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders & Pamela Beth Radcliff (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999), 25–49; Mary Vincent, ‘The Martyrs and the Saints: Masculinity and the Construction of the Francoist Crusade’, History Workshop Journal, 47 (1999), 69–98 (p. 75); Shirley Mangini, Memories of Resistance: Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1995), 80–81, 84; Frances Lannon, ‘Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1 (1991), 213–28.
12 ‘El enorme triunfo de las derechas y la actuación electoral de la mujer’, ABC (Madrid), 21 November 1933, p. 1; ‘Actividad y entusiasmo femeninos durante toda la jornada electoral. Algunas mujeres en actitud de espera a la puerta de una sección’, [photograph by José María Díaz Casariego], El Heraldo de Madrid, 20 November 1933, p. 1.
13 Jo Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal in Spanish Cinema of the Early Franco Period: The Missionary Film and the Folkloric Musical’, Screen, 38:3 (1997), 215–31; Eva Woods Peiró, White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012).
14 Helen Graham, ‘Popular Culture in the “Years of Hunger” ’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995), 237–245 (pp. 239–41); Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Crónica sentimental de España (Barcelona: DeBolsillo, 2003), 35–39.
15 Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal’, 216–17, 225.
16 Jesús García Ricote, Juan León, el rey de la serranía (Madrid: Editorial Castro, [1946]). I am grateful to Laura Carrillo Caminal at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid for guidance on the date and provenance of Juan León, el rey de la serranía. Further references will be given in the body of the article.
17 Catálogo general de la Librería Española, 1931–1950, 4 vols (Madrid: Instituto Nacional del Libro Español, 1957–1965), II, 352.
18 José Ramón Serrano-Piedecasas, ‘La pena de muerte en tiempos de guerra’, in La pena de muerte y su abolición en España, ed. Amnistía Internacional (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 1995), 125–32 (p. 125).
19 José Ignacio Ferreras, La novela por entregas 1840–1900 (concentración obrera y economía editorial) (Madrid: Taurus, 1972), 225, 242.
20 Salvador Cordón, Pueblo en sombra, La Novela del Pueblo 4 (Barcelona: Publicaciones Mundial [1927]), reproduced in Brigitte Magnien ‘ “La Novela del Pueblo”: analyse d’une collection de nouvelles publiées sous la dictature de Primo de Rivera’, in L’Infra-littérature en Espagne aux XIXe et XXe siècles: du roman feuilleton au romancero de la guerre d’Espagne, ed. Victor Carrillo et al. (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), 261–92 (p. 261).
21 See, for example, Enrique Zumel, Diego Corrientes ó el Bandido Generoso. Drama en tres actos y en verso, Galería Dramática Malagueña No. 19 (Málaga: La Ilustración Española, 1856), II.vi.
22 Ramiro de Maeztu, Defensa de la Hispanidad (Madrid: Gráfica Universal, 1934), 8, 14–15, 22–23, 303.
23 Photograph by Zapata at the top of an article by César González-Ruano, ‘El maestro paralítico de las Peñuelas; cuarenta años sentado en un sillón’, Estampa (Madrid), 17 April 1928, p. 33.
24 Personal communication to the author from Pilar Arrúe García, granddaughter of Jesús García Ricote, August 2011.
25 ‘Vida académica. Real Academía de Ciencias Morales y Políticas’, ABC, 27 January 1943, p. 8; ‘Real Academía de Ciencias Morales y Políticas’, ABC, 14 July 1959, p. 40.
26 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: HarperPress, 2012), 27–28.
27 Manuel Fernández y González, Diego Corriente (Madrid: La Novela Ilustrada, c.1910 [1st bound ed. 1866–67]), 90.
28 Vincent, ‘The Martyrs and the Saints’, 88–89; Mangini, Memories of Resistance, 129, 130.
29 Anja Louis, ‘Melodramatic Feminism: The Popular Fiction of Carmen de Burgos’, in Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice, ed. Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2002), 94–112 (pp. 102–03, n. 3); Carme Molinero, ‘Mujer, franquismo, fascismo: la clausura forzada en un “mundo pequeño” ’, Historia Social, 30 (1998), 97–117 (p. 111).
30 Ángeles Carmona González, La mujer en la novela por entregas del siglo XIX (Sevilla: Caja San Fernando, 1990), 239.
31 Antonio Contreras, Genoveva de Brabante (Madrid, Editorial Castro, [1942]). The date of the first publication of Genoveva is unclear. The Biblioteca Nacional de España holds a second copy of the work, published in Barcelona by B. Baseda, which is undated. Other works by Contreras, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest the original edition of Genoveva predates the 1942 Editorial Castro version.
32 F. L. Parreño, Jaime Alfonso, el Barbudo: novela histórica (Madrid: Oficina Tipográfica del Hospicio, 1873), 3–16.
33 Lannon, ‘Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War’, 215.
34 Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (University Park: The Pennsylvania State U. P., 2004), 179–238.
35 Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal’, 222–24; Woods Peiró, White Gypsies, 206–07.
36 Woods Peiró, White Gypsies, 145–48 (p. 146). I am grateful to Professor Sally Faulkner for pointing out the relevance of Woods Peiró's work to me.
37 Jordi Gracia García & Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, La España de Franco (1939–1975): cultura y vida cotidiana (Madrid: Síntesis, 2001), 25.
38 Carolyn P. Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1997), 170.
39 Andrés Nieto Conesa, ‘La mujer en el campo de Cartagena’, Revista Murciana de Antropología, 10 (2004), 177–203 (p. 186).
40 Helen Graham, ‘Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Graham & Labanyi, 182–95 (pp. 187–88).
41 In 2008, ‘Octavio’ recalled that when he was a child Juan León was the equivalent of a television soap opera in the village of El Cerro de Andevalo near Seville, passed around amongst the villagers: <http://www.pueblos-espana.org/usuario/263/mensajes/2309/> (accessed 28 September 2015). In 2011, ‘Rafael’ remembered his father reading, and making his children read Juan León in the village of Reina near Badajoz in the 1960s: <http://es-la.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=166973983328027&topic=378> (accessed 22 August 2011). In 2010, Juan Gutiérrez recalled Juan León and José María ‘el Tempranillo’ being read aloud to men, women and children in Benínar near El Ejido: <http://beninar.blogspot.com/2010/11/el-triste-o-alegre-invierno.html> (accessed 23 August 2011).
42 This is a memory of ‘rosa-laura95’ posted in 2011: <http://www.librodearena.com/post/enlabasilica/bandoleros-a-la-carta-curro-jimenez-ni-curro-ni-de-ronda/4381586/4367> (accessed 23 August 2011).
43 Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás (Barcelona: Destino, 1978), 64.
44 Sally Faulkner, A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2006), 85.
45 Woods Peiró, White Gypsies, 148.
46 Jo Labanyi, ‘Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain’, in Alternative Voices in European Cinema, ed. Margaret Topping & Guyda Armstrong, New Readings, 8 (2007), 1–24 (p. 23), <http://ojs.cf.ac.uk/index.php/newreadings/article/view/23> (accessed 28 September 2015).
47 Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal’, 216.
48 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 69, 108.
49 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 27–28.
50 Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco's Spain, 1939–1975 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 60–61.
51 Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal’, 225.
52 Labanyi, ‘Race, Gender and Disavowal’, 224.
53 Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo, ‘Una guerra que no dice su nombre: los usos de la violencia en el contexto de la guerrilla antifranquista (1939–1953)’, Historia Social, 61 (2008), 109–26 (pp. 113–18).
54 ‘Importantes servicios de la Guardia Civil: dos bandidos muertos. Contrabandistas heridos y detenidos’, ABC (Madrid), 6 December 1946, p. 10.
55 Francisco Moreno Gómez, ‘Huidos, maquis y guerrilla: una década de rebeldía contra la dictadura’, Ayer, 43 (2001), 111–37 (p. 115); Fernando Bravo Conejo, ‘Brescia Burgos, Francisco’, Todos (…) los nombres, Asociación Andaluza Memoria Histórica y Justicia, <http://www.todoslosnombres.org/content/personas/francisco-brescia-burgos> (accessed 28 September 2015).
56 ‘El entierro de los cuatro Guardias Civiles muertos’, ABC (Madrid), 6 December 1946, p. 10.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.