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Abstract
Zezé, the 1909 novella by neglected modernist writer Ángeles Vicente, has recently attracted renewed interest, not least for its celebratory depiction of same-sex desire. Holloway explores the affinity between the figure of Zezé, the cupletista at the heart of Vicente’s novella, and the archetypal picaresque narrator. The text’s presentation as a record of a first-person narration to a single confidante, who invites comparisons with Vicente herself, anchors it within a longer tradition in Spanish literature. This study explores the possibility that that Vicente frames her feminist critique of societal conventions with a clever play on literary tradition.
Notes
1 Carmen de Burgos & Sofía Romero, Confidencias de artistas (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Librería, 1916), 139–40.
2 Rosa Chacel, ‘Transfiguración’ (first published in Ofrenda a una virgin loca: cuentos y relatos [Xalapa: Univ. Veracruzana, 1961]), in Obra completa, 9 vols (Valladolid: Fundación Jorge Guillén, 1989–2004), VII (2004), Narrativa breve, ed. Carlos Pérez Chacel & Antonio Piedra, prólogo de Ana Rodríguez Fischer, 187–202; Terenci Moix, Garras de astracán (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1991).
3 Paul Julian Smith, Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960–1990 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1992), 3–4.
4 Modernist writers were quick to capitalize on the potential of the new forms of travel; in her analysis of Modernist spaces, Mary Lee Bretz acknowledges ‘Trains, Planes, Theaters and Cabarets' as sites for cross-cultural communication, and indeed amorous encounters. Some of the stories which explore the potential of these new spaces include Leopoldo Alas ‘Superchería’, Antonio Machado, ‘En tren’, Azorín, ‘Los pueblos' and Pérez de Ayala, ‘Tinieblas en las cumbres’ (Mary Lee Bretz, Encounters across Borders: The Changing Visions of Spanish Modernism, 1890–1930 [Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2001], 320–28).
5 For more details on how Vicente disappeared from public record, see Francisco J. Díez de Revenga, ‘Ángeles Vicente, escritora modernista olvidada’, in Magazine Modernista, 9 May 2011, <http://magazinemodernista.com/2011/05/09/angeles-vicente-escritora-modernista-olvidada/> (accessed 8 November 2016): ‘No conocemos mucho más de la escritora ni sabemos de sus últimos pasos. Desaparece del censo de habitantes de Madrid mediados los años veinte. En Granada, en 1929, todavía publica algún cuento, pero después no queda ningún rastro de ella. Ángela Ena [Bordonada] continúa las investigaciones sobre Ángeles Vicente mientras reedita otros libros suyos, y, sin duda, nos ofrecerá en el futuro nuevos datos sobre esta atractiva escritora, cuya recuperación tanto celebramos’.
6 Zezé was originally published by Librería de Pueyo y Fernando Fe, a prestigious editorial which disseminated the work of many notable literary figures of the early twentieth century. As well as her recent edition of Zezé, which includes a detailed introduction, Ángela Ena Bordonada has also edited critical editions of Vicente’s collections of stories. See Ángeles Vicente, Zezé, ed. & estudio preliminar de Ángela Ena Bordonada (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2005). All references are to this edition of the text. See also Ángeles Vicente, Los buitres, ed. & prológo de Ángela Ena Bordonada (Murcia: Editora Regional de Murcia, 2006) and Ángeles Vicente, Sombras. Cuentos psíquicos, ed. & estudio preliminar de Ángela Ena Bordonada (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2007). A recent doctoral thesis by Sara Toro Ballesteros has presented a more complete picture of Vicente's corpus, in particular her short fiction, ordering, editing and analysing the short stories and articles published in newspapers and magazines. Toro Ballesteros’ research has also brought to light valuable biographical information on the author. See Sara Toro Ballesteros, ‘Viaje al mundo de las almas: la narrativa breve de Ángeles Vicente’, doctoral thesis (Universidad de Granada, 2014).
7 Montserrat Alás-Brun notes the persistence of the notion of a male ‘Generación de 98’: ‘La tendencia a la revisión y expansión del canon del 98 (o de los movimientos finiseculares en general) dista de ser general todavía’ (Montserrat Alás-Brun, ‘Las mujeres del 98 y el canon’, in Modernisms and Modernities: Studies in Honor of Donald L. Shaw, ed. Susan Carvalho [Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006], 47–72 [p. 49]).
8 See, for example, La otra Edad de Plata: temas, géneros y creadores (1898–1936), ed. Ángela Ena Bordonada (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2013).
9 Ángela Ena Bordonada, ‘Espiritismo, hipnosis y locura: los cuentos de Ángeles Vicente’, in Los márgenes de la modernidad: temas y creadores raros y olvidados en la Edad de Plata, ed. Dolores Romero López (Sevilla: Punto Rojo Libros, 2014), 213–42 (p. 213).
10 Sara Toro Ballesteros, ‘Esculpir la niebla: ocho cartas inéditas de Ángeles Vicente a Miguel de Unamuno’, Journal of Hispanic Modernism, 2 (2011), 1–20, <http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/18840/1/Esculpir_la_niebla.Cartas_in%C3%A9ditas.pdf> (accessed 3 November 2016).
11 See, for example, Professor Maite Zubiaurre of UCLA’s website, A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early Twentieth Century Erotica in Spain; and in particular the following article, ‘ # 7. Eduardo Zamacois. Amar a obscuras. La Novela Picaresca.pdf’, <http://sicalipsis.humnet.ucla.edu/items/show/937> (accessed 22 July 2016).
12 In 1910 two volumes of these interviews were published as Confesiones de artistas, (Madrid: V.H. de Sanz Calleja, 1910) while later a single volume, with a prologue by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, appeared entitled Confidencias de artistas (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Librería, 1917).
13 See Mª Dolores Ramírez Almazán, ‘El lado más humano de la Diva en Confidencias de artistas de Carmen de Burgos’, in In corpore dominae: cuerpos escritos/cuerpos proscritos, ed. Mª Dolores Ramírez Almazán (Sevilla: Arcibel, 2011), 171–221. See also José García Templado, ‘Confidencias de artistas de Carmen de Burgos’, Arbor, 186 (2010), 125–38.
14 Ángeles Vicente, review of El hipnotismo prodigioso by Alfredo Rodríguez de Aldao (‘Aymerich’), Ateneo, 13:6 (1912), 272–74 (cited in Ena Bordonada, ‘Espiritismo, hipnosis y locura’, 211).
15 Due to Zezé's recounting of her early erotic encounters, which include a frank depiction of an orgasm, the novella is rightly labelled ‘pioneering’ by Ena Bordonada. In European literature, the novel may have been preceded only by Idylle Saphique (1901) by Liane de Pougy. Gertrude Stein's QED appears to have been completed in 1903, although Stein suppressed this text until many years later.
16 ‘For all its satirical effects and social critique, the narrative keeps the pícaro in his place. The butt of the humour—and the victim of the irony—is, when all is said and done, the man whom the reader could presume to be in control. The very rhetoric that should be the ally of the narrator betrays him.’ (Edward H. Friedman, ‘Trials of Discourse: Narrative Space in Quevedo's Buscón’, in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, ed. Giancarlo Maiorino [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996], 183–225 [p. 190]).
17 Carroll B. Johnson, ‘Defining the Picaresque: Authority and the Subject in Guzmán de Alfarache’, in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, ed. Maiorino, 159–82 (p. 165).
18 Edwin Williamson, ‘The Conflict between Author and Protagonist in Quevedo's Buscón’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 2 (1977), 45–60 (p. 59).
19 Anne J. Cruz, ‘Sexual Enclosure, Textual Escape: The Pícara As Prostitute in the Spanish Female Picaresque Novel’, in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher & Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1989), 135–60 (p. 136). Marcia Welles agrees with the lineage Cruz identifies: ‘There is no doubt that the pícara has a past—nothing, after all, is created ex nihilo, and we can perceive prototypes in the Arcipreste's Trotaconventos, in Rojas's Celestina, in Delicado's Lozana Andaluza’ (Marcia L. Welles, ‘The Pícara: Towards Female Autonomy, Or the Vanity of Virtue’, Romance Quarterly, 33:1 [1986], 63–70 [p. 63]). Bruno Damiani also reads the Lozana andaluza as a forerunner to the picaresque, in ‘La Lozana andaluza As Precursor to the Spanish Picaresque’, in The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale, ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels & Michael Zappala (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1994), 57–68.
20 Edward H. Friedman, The Antiheroine's Voice, Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1987), 72; my emphasis.
21 The biographical correspondences between the narrator and Vicente have been noted by both Ena Bordonada (‘Prológo’ to Zezé, ed. Ena Bordonada, ix–lvii [p. xiv]) and Toro Ballesteros, ‘Viaje al mundo de las almas’, 29.
22 To some extent, similar metafictional devices are at work in more recent novels such as Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), which features at least two inset competing narratives. Sugar is seen to undertake the authorship of an unflinching depiction of the realities of prostitution. Her fictional narrative promises to be a bracing corrective to the other novel within the novel, the objectifying fictional ‘More Sprees in London’ (a ‘manual’ for the Victorian gentlemen in search of prostitutes in which she is also featured).
23 Friedman, The Antiheroine's Voice, 203–19 (p. 205). Erica Jong's Fanny is also analysed in relation to the picaresque in James Mandrell, ‘Questions of Genre and Gender: Contemporary American Versions of the Feminine Picaresque’, Novel, 20:2 (1987), 149–70 (pp. 166–67).
24 María Moliner defines the term as follows: ‘Españolización del término francés couplet que se aplica a ciertas cancioncillas ligeras y, generalmente, picarescas, que se cantaban en el primer tercio del siglo XX en los espectáculos de variedades’ (Diccionario de uso del español [Madrid: Gredos, 2000], 404).
25 Zezé’s words may even carry an echo of Lázaro’s somewhat hollow declaration at the close of Lazarillo de Tormes: ‘Pues en este tiempo estaba en mi prosperidad y en la cumbre de toda buena fortuna' (Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico [Madrid: Cátedra, 2008], 135).
26 In Carmen de Burgos’ Confidencia de artistas most of the women interviewed indicate they pursued a career in performance out of necessity—very few seek to identify as artists through choice (see Ramírez Almazán, ‘El lado más humano de la Diva en Confidencias de artistas, 18). Ana Cabello García also notes the expression of necessity as a constant in the portrayal of these women: ‘La protagonista de Zezé confiesa que se hace cupletista por necesidad—esto es común a todas las cocotas’ (Ana Cabello García, ‘El escenario como espacio de libertad: la imagen de la cupletista en las novelas de Fernando Mora y Ángeles Vicente [1909]’, in Mujer, literatura y esfera pública: España 1900–1940, ed. Pilar Nieva-de la Paz, Sarah Wright, Catherine Davies & Francisca Vilches-de Frutos [Philadelphia: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2008], 95–109 [p. 103]).
27 Pepa Anastasio provides examples of allusions to the dominant perception of the cupletista as a threat to conventional morality within the lyrics of the cuplé. In ‘Mi debut en provincias’ written by Consuelo Vello, ‘La Fornarina’, in 1912, the cupletista appears an unwelcome role model for the decent young provincial lady: ‘Cuando voy a provincias / me suelen anunciar / en carteles muy grandes / por la localidad. / Las madres de familia / sienten gran inquietud / prohibiendo a sus hijas / la asistencia a mi debut. / Y si me ven pasar, / me miran con horror / y dicen en voz baja / con gran indignacion: / Es una indiana / la llaman Fornarina, / ella sola alborota una ciudad / y a las gentes espanta / si sus canciones canta. / ¡Ya no hay Tranquilidad!’ (Pepa Anastasio, ‘¿Género ínfimo? El cuplé y la cupletista como desafío’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 13:2–3 [2007], 193–216 [p. 203]).
28 Cruz, ‘Sexual Enclosure, Textual Escape’, 140–41.
29 Cabello-García observes a contrast in the portrayal of the possibilities of the cuplé as depicted by Vicente and by Fernando Mora, whose Venus rebelde was also published in 1909. She argues that Mora presents a negative portrait of the cupletista: ‘La diferencia esencial radica en que la mirada masculina de Fernando de Mora lo toma como elemento censurable, frente a la opción que desarrolla Ángeles Vicente, como elogioso comportamiento por parte de la mujer’ (‘El escenario como espacio de libertad’, 106).
30 Serge Salaün, El cuplé (1900–1936) (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990), 79 (quoted in Anastasio, ‘¿Género ínfimo?’, 195).
31 Anastasio, ‘¿Género ínfimo?’, 207.
32 Adela del Barco, who adopted the stage name ‘La Bella Lulú’ or ‘Adelita Lulú’, seems a potential model for Vicente's creation Emilia del Cerro, ‘La Bella Zezé’. The star was listed in Camilo José Cela's Encyclopedia of Eroticism: ‘ADELITA LULÚ. Nombre de guerra de Adela del Barco, famosa canzonetista madrileña de principios de siglos, procedente del género ínfimo’ (Camilo José Cela, Enciclopedia del erotismo, in Obra completa, 17 vols [Barcelona: Destino, 1962–1986], XIV [1982], 142).
33 For example, Friedman notes that Teresa de Manzanares’ expulsion from her mother's bed is presented as a turning point: ‘Así se enlazó en ambos una firme amistad, que la obligó a hacer expulsión de mí, acomodándome a dormir en la cama de la criada, cosa que yo sentí en extremo, y aunque niña, bien se me traslució la causa por que se hacía aquella novedad conmigo, con lo cual tuve ojeriza al huésped, que no le podía ver delante de mis ojos, de suerte que su presencia me helaba en lo más sazonado de mi humor’ (Friedman, The Antiheroine's Voice, 106). See Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Teresa de Manzanares, natural de Madrid, in Novela picaresca española, ed. Alonso Zamora Vicente, 3 vols (Barcelona: Editorial Noguer, 1974–1976), III (1976), 154.
34 Ena Bordonada, ‘Prológo’, in Zezé, ed. Ena Bordonada, lv.
35 Angie Simonis’ reading is more celebratory, situating the success of the novel in its dismantling of the stereotypes which abounded in male-authored portrayals of lesbian desire: ‘La novela de la época que más se acerca a la tradición lesbiana es Zezé (1909), de Ángeles Vicente, donde se nos brinda un retrato totalmente sorprendente y una visión nada estereotípica sobre las relaciones homoeróticas entre mujeres. Esta novela es la prueba temprana de que las estrategias contra el estereotipo social comenzaron casi simultáneamente a la creación de éste mismo por parte de la cultura hegemónica, aunque no tuvieran la misma suerte de difusión ni de influencia mediática’. Joaquín Belda's La Coquito (1915) is cited by Simonis as a paradigmatic example of depictions of lesbian episodes as transient or experimental, merely serving the function of titillating the male spectator. Notably, Belda's novel also deals with a cupletista. See Angie Simonis, ‘Retratos en sepia: las imágenes literarias de las lesbianas a principios del siglo XX’, in Ellas y nosotras: estudios lesbianos sobre literatura escrita en castellano, coord. Elina Norandi (Barcelona/Madrid: Egales, 2009), 13–35 (pp. 19–21).
36 In Emilia Pardo Bazán's ‘Sud-Exprés’ (1902), originally published in El Imparcial in 1902 and later in the 1909 collection given the story's title, the narrator is a voyeur of an illicit embrace (Bretz, Encounters across Borders, 322).
37 Claudio Guillén, ‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’, in his Literature As System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1971), 71–106.
38 Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) is perhaps the most famous intersection of pseudo-autobiography and lesbian experience within modernism. Stein re-imagines auto-biographical convention by writing her own life story in the voice of her life partner, Toklas.
39 Marilyn Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York U. P., 1996) (quoted by Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism [Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003], 116).
40 On the publication of Waters’ bestseller, Mel Steel of The Independent questioned, ‘Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel?’ (‘Books: Fiction in Brief’, The Independent, 22 March 1998, p. 33). Waters has often reflected on her appropriation of the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction. See Jodie Medd, ‘Encountering the Past in Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, ed. Hugh Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2010), 167–84. Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White also has a brief interlude in which Mrs Castaway's brothel is taken over by the ‘Sapphists’.
41 María Elena Soliño, ‘Revealing Beauty/Revealing History in El sueño de Venecia’, Hispanic Review, 76:4 (2008), 335–59.
42 Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Rico, 111.
43 Juan Pedro Gabino describes the episode as follows: ‘Celestina se presenta ante Areúsa como “una enamoradora tuya”, mira su desnudez con gozo y tienta a la joven con la excusa de inspeccionar sobre el dolor de matriz de esta, al par que lanza loas sobre el cuerpo lozano aquel con inefable delectación’ (Juan Pedro Gabino, ‘Erotología femenina en la literatura medieval castellana’, in Los territorios literarios de la historia del placer, ed. José Antonio Crezo, Daniel Eisenberg & Víctor Infantes [Madrid: Huera y Fierro Editores, 1996], 91–105 [p. 100]).
44 Sherry Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2011), 63–64.
45 On ‘The Lieutenant Nun’ as depicted on the Early Modern stage and page, see Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain, 70–83, and her The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2000). Velasco points out that Erauso is referenced in Alonso de Castillo Solórzano's picaresque novel of 1637, Aventuras del Bachiller Trapaza, as part of a scheme to make money from the celebrity of this singular figure by impersonating her (The Lieutenant Nun, 64).
46 ‘The Girl lov’d me to an Excess, hardly to be describ’d’, ‘We talk’d it over sometimes in-Bed, almost whole Nights together’. Ardila also highlights a passage wherein Roxana praises Amy's beauty and then insinuates ‘the rest was to us only that knew of it’ (Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila, La novela picaresca en Europa, 1554–1753 [Madrid: Visor, 2009], 190).
47 John Cleland, Memorias de Fanny Hill (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos, 1900).
48 Felski, Literature after Feminism, 110.
49 We find the promise of a sequel (which fails to materialize) in Quevedo's El Buscón and later in the female picaresque, in La pícara Justina and Teresa de Manzanares.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.