Molecular rareza: reading science in literature with Rosa Chacel's Memorias de Leticia Valle

ABSTRACT

This article has two aims: to argue for use of the Spanish term rareza as a critical concept, and to explore the relation between popular scientific discourse and gendered ways of being and feeling in the world. The first aim is premised on curiosity about where new critical and theoretical lenses might emerge from in Spanish cultural studies. In turning to the concept of rareza, I build on the figure of the chica rara, a term originally coined by Carmen Martín Gaite in the 1980s to refer to girls who did not fit the gender expectations of the early Franco dictatorship: I posit that this Spanish cultural term could be developed to think about the strangeness of gender outside of its original context. Here, I read Rosa Chacel's 1945 novel, Memorias de Leticia Valle, specifically analyzing the construction of its young protagonist's gendered strangeness. To do so, I turn to scientific discourse popularized in the early decades of the twentieth century in Spain – when the novel is set and when Chacel, born in 1898, was formed intellectually – to understand what it might mean to think about the gender of young women as materially, relationally, affectively and perceptually strange. My consideration of the molecular chica rara as one whose experience of gender can be understood as shaped by scientific ideas is one way to rethink rareza beyond the term's original context and to consider its relevance alongside today's theorization of queerness.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender studies
• science studies
• chica rara
• Rosa Chacel
• materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am indebted to Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology (2006) for her reading of orientation, which is an experience in the physical world with consequences that are felt on many levels.

2 There have also been against-the-grain readings of novelas rosa: see, for example, O’Byrne (2008).

3 While many of the popular-science texts I cite in the section “Shifting and imperceptible matter” were in fact being translated and published in Spain well into the 1930s and 1940s, the science itself was not necessarily brand-new. (Chacel herself left Spain, living in exile in Brazil and Argentina following the Spanish Civil War: the first chapter of Memorias would be published in Buenos Aires before she arrived there, but the writing was spread over several years throughout the 1930s and 1940s [Mateo 1993, 77–78]). The editors of Vibratory Modernism argue that modernist authors continued to pick up on older scientific frameworks in part because the rapidly developing science of the time was not able to offer constantly up-to-date authoritative theories, in part because some scientists continued to put forward older concepts and in part because of the resonance that loosely interpreted scientific notions found outside of the discipline (Enns and Trower 2013, 15). Darwinism, as studied by Pratt (2001), Landry (2013) and Grosz (2011), is a paradigmatic case of a scientific theory with long-term aftereffects.

4 See, for example, Otis (1999, 2001). Beer (1996, 2009) couples readings of wave theory and Darwinism with British literature, while Grosz (2011) structures creative genealogies that arc from Darwin to Irigaray. Cavanaugh (2013) reads Lorca through a scientific lens. The essays in the volume edited by Davis and Cerezo Paredes (2017) examine scientific and pseudoscientific ideas, or what they call “fringe discourses”, that existed side by side in nineteenth-century Spain, in many cases in relation to literary works. There has been significant recent work done on Spanish science fiction as well as the presence of scientific ideas in Spanish literature. See, for example, López Pellisa's work on Spanish science fiction (2018), especially her coedited anthology of Spanish science fiction written by women (López Pellisa and Robles 2018). See also Gómez (2019) and Rueda (2019).

5 That is not to say we can't find evidence of explicit interest in science by nonscientists: Pratt's chapter “‘Muy siglo XX’: Science and Culture” explains that in the early twentieth century, José Ortega y Gasset would depart from nineteenth-century uses of science but continue to embrace the field: “Ortega had a reasonable (and in some cases remarkable) grasp of scientific theories both past and present, and he readily co-opted them to promote his ideas and to enhance his style” (2001, 158). Chacel herself had a close working relationship with Ortega and we could imagine that she had access to similar scientific sources, though her writing, specifically Memorias, does not have an explicit scientific bent (see Mateo 1993).

6 For more on the development of chromosomal science and preceding models, see Richardson (2013). For the development of medical and scientific discourses in relation to gender roles and gendered behaviors in Spain, see Aresti (2001). For Gregorio Marañón's approach to sexuality at the time, see Cleminson and Vázquez García (2009).

7 The copy of this edition that I consulted is housed at NYU's Bobst Library.

8 The observer effect is frequently confused with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle does not state that our being there and carrying out an experiment changes its outcome. Nor does the observer effect mean that purely by standing by and contemplating a phenomenon we necessarily intervene in it. And yet the confusion surrounding these concepts generally gives rise to the notion that our mere presence – not just physical but necessarily mental – holds some kind of sway over the material world. For more on both topics, see Hilgevoord and Uffink (2016) and Bogen (2017).

9 See, for example, Pérez-Magallón (2003) or Murphy (2010).

10 A 2016 Vice article by Dora Mortimer asked, “Can Straight People Be Queer?” (9 February 2016), and Helen Betya Rubinstein's Modern Love column in the New York Times on 27 October 2017 was originally published with the headline “Is There Something Queer About Being Single?” Later queer in the headline was revised to odd, but in the text of the piece the author explicitly compares being single and being queer, writing: “There was something queer about being single: queer in the sense of ‘strange’, yes, but also in the sense that connotes a threat to the conventions around which most people arrange their lives”. The piece was received with a good deal of criticism, with Autostraddle, for example, a website aimed at lesbian, bisexual and queer women, publishing a post in response titled “Is There Something Queer About Being Single (Narrator: There Is Not)”. (Interestingly, the New York Times offers a Spanish-language version of the article in which the declaration “I felt queer” becomes “Me sentí rara” and the “queerness” of the “queer community” becomes “la extrañeza” in relation to “la comunidad LGBT”.)

11 For what can be read as an example of patently nonqueer “queering”, see Daggett (2015).

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Tess C. Rankin

Tess C. Rankin received a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University and currently serves as the managing editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She has published “La segunda vida de Isidora Rufete: Insomniac Dreams of Self in La desheredada” in Decimonónica and a translation of selected editorials from the periodical Mujeres Libres in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation. Her translations of narrative nonfiction, poetry and short fiction have appeared in Huck Magazine, jubilat and Precog Magazine. Email: [email protected].