Images of the mujer moderna in the Works of Maruja Mallo and Norah Borges

Abstract

The emergence of the figure of the new woman marked one of the most significant social changes of the twentieth century. Although expressed in the singular, the term embraces a whole host of subjectivities and is associated with a range of symbols and identities, all of which were negotiated by individuals in their own way. Maruja Mallo and Norah Borges present images of the mujer moderna that show the ways in which that particular identity was negotiated by Spanish and Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s. Both artists, albeit in very different ways, reject a simplistic depiction of the modern woman and refuse to reduce her to a rebellious figure; instead they show her position in relation to wider society. Their images celebrate the new found freedoms of women and place these within a trajectory of women’s history, whilst simultaneously problematizing the ways in which women in Spain and Argentina were caught between tradition and modernity.

Key words:

• Maruja Mallo
• Norah Borges
• new woman
• mujer moderna
• Spanish Avant-Garde
• Argentine Avant-Garde

ORCID

Eamon McCarthy http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3891-5823

Notes

1 I refer broadly to the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. Public life is understood in the widest possible sense and includes, but is not limited to, university education, universal suffrage and cultural activities, such as writing and painting. Although I draw upon wider images of the new woman throughout this article, I do so whilst recognizing and accepting the significant body of work that has problematized the concept of modernity in Spain, an overview of which is provided in Elizabeth Smith Rousselle, Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature 1789–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–8. This broader focus on the wider influences of European cultures in Spain is in keeping with the arguments presented in Beatriz Celaya Carrillo, La mujer deseante: sexualidad femenina en la cultura y novela españolas (1900–1936) (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006), 56–57, and in Gayle Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (New York: Oxford U. P., 2012).

2 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 1997), 5. Throughout this article I use the term ‘modern woman’ as it has emerged in more publications in relation to Spanish women than the term ‘new woman’. See Shirley Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid: las grandes intelectuales españolas de la vanguardia (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2001), and Nerea Aresti Esteban, ‘La mujer moderna, el tercer sexo y la bohemia en los años veinte’, Dossiers Feministes, 10 (2007), 173–85.

3 Nuria Cruz-Cámara provides a succinct yet broad overview of these tensions in La mujer moderna en los escritos de Federica Montseny (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2015), 14–19.

4 Throughout this article I will refer to Norah Borges by her first name as the surname Borges is inextricably linked with her brother and is impossible to use in an unmarked way. Norah began her career in Spain, where she lived until 1921 when she returned to her native Argentina. She returned to Spain in 1923–1924 and again in 1932–1936 (‘Cronología de Norah Borges 1914–1940’, in Norah Borges, ed. Roberta Quance & Fiona Mackintosh, Romance Studies, 27:1 [2009], 1–6). I consider her works reflective of both Spanish and Argentine contexts, yet recognize that the Argentine environment was more conservative than the Spanish. Beatriz Sarlo makes this argument in Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1988). Mallo’s career is equally transnational, but in this article I explore early works completed in Spain in the late 1920s.

5 Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid, 75.

6 Susan Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España: 1898–1931 (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), 221.

7 Bridget Aldaraca, ‘El ángel del hogar’: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991). Chapters 1 and 2 are particularly relevant as they deal with the figure of the perfecta casada and how that model of behaviour was incorporated into and differs from the ángel del hogar.

8 ‘No ayudaba tampoco que la mujer hubiera cambiado su aspecto en la posguerra. La moda, el deporte, el cine norteamericano y la propaganda consumista ponían en peligro la “feminidad” de la mujer. La ropa moderna desenfatizaba las curvas naturales que revelaban la única misión de la mujer en la vida: la maternidad. Se temía que si estos seres andróginos—sólo una de las muchas etiquetas que les ponían a las modernas—podía competir con los hombres y reemplazarlos en el trabajo, ¿no sería posible que también les quitarán el poder supremo algún día?’ (Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid, 98).

9 Mangini analyses the text in some depth and notes that it was published in 1920 (Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid, 103–05).

10 Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément, ‘Sorties. Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous & Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 63–132 (first published in French as La Jeune née [1975]).

11 ‘Woman is being identified with–or if you will, seems to be a symbol of–something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is “nature” in the most generalised sense. Every culture, or, generically, “culture”, is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artefacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest. We may thus broadly equate culture with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e. systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature’ (Sherry Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male As Nature Is to Culture?’, in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo & Louise Lamphere [Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1974], 68–87 [p. 72]).

12 Elena Laurenzi, ‘Desenmascarar la complementariedad de los sexos: María Zambrano y Rosa Chacel frente al debate en la Revista de Occidente’, Aurora, 13 (2012), 18–29 (p. 23).

13 Antonio Méndez Casal, ‘Exposiciones recientes’, Blanco y Negro, 10 de marzo de 1929, pp. 6–9 (p. 8). My thanks to Roberta Quance for passing on this reference.

14 Méndez Casal, ‘Exposiciones recientes’, 8–9.

15 Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’, in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude & Mary Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 292–313 (p. 294).

16 José Luis Ferris, Maruja Mallo: la gran transgresora del 27 (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2004), 89–90.

17 Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España, 227.

18 Juan Manuel Bonet, ‘Hora y media con Norah Borges’, Renacimiento, 8 (1992), 5–6 (p. 6).

19 Shirley Mangini notes that Mallo attended the Pombo tertulia in Madrid (Shirley Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde [Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010], 40). It should be noted that Norah’s remarks refer to 1919–1921 and Mallo attended tertulias in the later 1920s. Roberta Quance argues that questions of respectability are paramount in a consideration of Norah’s lack of attendance at these gatherings (Roberta Quance, ‘Espacios masculinos/femeninos: Norah Borges en la vanguardia’, Dossiers Feministes, 10 [2007], 233–48 [pp. 234–37]).

20 See Ferris, Maruja Mallo: la gran transgresora del 27; and May Lorenzo Alcalá, Norah Borges: la vanguardia enmascarada (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2009).

21 Fernando Huici & Estrella de Diego, Fuera de orden: mujeres de la vanguardia española—María Blanchard, Norah Borges, Maruja Mallo, Olga Sacharoff, Ángeles Santos, Remedios Varo [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: Fundación Cultural MAPFRE VIDA, 1999), 73 & 93.

22 Linda Nochlin, ‘Foreword: Representing the New Woman—Complexity and Contradiction’, in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto & Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2011), vii–xi (p. vii).

23 For a reproduction of this image, see Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, plate 1.

24 Shirley Mangini, ‘The Gendered Body Politic of Maruja Mallo’, in Modernism and the Avant-Garde Body in Spain and Italy, ed. Nicolás Fernandez-Medina & María Truglio (New York/London: Routledge, 2016), 151–73 (p. 156).

25 María Soledad Fernández Utrera, Visiones de estereoscopio: paradigma de hibridación en el arte y la narrativa de la vanguardia española (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), 145.

26 Cited in Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 65.

27 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 65.

28 María Alejandra Zanetta, La otra cara de la vanguardia: estudio comparado de la obra artística de Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos y Remedios Varo (Lewiston/New York/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 54.

29 Shirley Mangini, ‘Españolas en París: el caso de Remedios Varo, Maruja Mallo y Delhy Tejero’, in Remedios Varo: caminos del conocimiento, la creación y el exilio, ed. María José González Madrid & Rosa Rius Gatell (Madrid: Eutelequia, 2013), 161–79 (p. 171).

30 For a reproduction, see Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, plate 2. Mangini translates the title as Christmas Verbena.

31 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 66.

32 For a reproduction, see María Alejandra Zanetta, La subversión enmascarada: análisis de la obra de Maruja Mallo (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2014), figura 9. This image is known simply by the title Verbena.

33 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 66.

34 See Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, plate 3. This is known as La verbena and is held in the Reina Sofía Museum.

35 Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España, 250.

36 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 67.

37 Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España, 250–51. Mangini also notes this tension, see ‘The Gendered Body Politic of Maruja Mallo’, 159.

38 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 67.

39 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 68. For a reproduction, see La verbena in Zanetta, La subversión enmascarada, figura 11.

40 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 78, n. 21.

41 Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde, 69.

42 Roberta Quance, ‘The Theatricalised Self: Women Artists in Masquerade from 1920 to the Present’, in A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, ed. Xon de Ros & Geraldine Hazbun (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011), 257–72 (p. 265).

43 Quance, ‘The Theatricalised Self’, 266.

44 Lorenzo Alcalá, Norah Borges, 76.

45 Lorenzo Alcalá, Norah Borges, 77.

46 Lorenzo Alcalá, Norah Borges, 77. See Roberta Quance, ‘Un espejo vacío: sobre una ilustración de Norah Borges para el ultraísmo’, Revista de Occidente, 239 (2001), 134–47.

47 See the article by Francisca Lladó in this present volume: ‘Una isla a su medida: Norah Borges y la práctica de la vanguardia desde Mallorca’.

48 Other examples of prints with figures adopting a similar pose include Las tres hermanas, Horizonte, I, 1 de octubre de 1922, front cover; Arlequín, Baleares, 131, 15 de febrero de 1921; Untitled, Ultra, I:2, 10 de febrero de 1921, front cover. This same pose is also seen in Norah’s earliest works such as La Verónica (1918) and the paintings Bodegón con figura (1919) and La anunciación (1919–1920).

49 Eamon McCarthy, ‘ “El jardín de los Borges que se bifurcan”: The Image of the Garden in the Early Work of Jorge Luis and Norah Borges’, in Norah Borges, ed. Quance & Mackintosh, 30–44 (p. 42).

50 Humberto Núñez-Faraco argues that time is the central preoccupation of this poem, which may help explain the incongruity of the two figures in this print. See his Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 76.

51 Alys Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong & Tani E. Barlow, ‘The Modern Girl As Heuristic Device: Collaboration, Collective Comparison, Multidirectional Citation’, in Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. Alys Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong & Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2008), 1–24 (p. 2). In the Introduction, this research group carefully explain their use of the word ‘girl’, which overlaps nicely with Norah’s images of adolescents.

52 Quance, ‘The Theatricalised Self’, 266.

53 See, for example, the similarities between this print and the untitled print that was published in the mural magazine Prisma, 2 (1922). Also see many of her later paintings, such as La anunciación (1941), La Galeria (1949), Las quintas (1965). For reproductions of these works, see Ana Martínez Quijano, Norah Borges, casi un siglo de pintura [exhibition catalogue] (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Borges, 1996), 42, 49, 55. Marta Sierra underscores the importance of viewing the spaces in Norah’s work as dynamic and performative. See her ‘Espacios diferentes: las cartografías imaginarias de Norah Borges’, in Geografías imaginarias: espacios de resistencia y crisis en América Latina, ed. Marta J. Sierra (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2014), 74–105 (pp. 89–90).

54 The Borges family returned to Argentina in March 1921 so this print was either completed in Argentina and sent back to Spain or was left in Spain by Norah before she set off on the trip.

55 Guillermo de Torre, Eliche: Poesie 1918–1922, ed. Daniele Corsi (Arezzo: Bibliotheca Aretina, 2005), l. 16, p. 148.

56 In his article, Sergio Baur catalogues many other instances of Norah being cast in the role of muse. See ‘Norah Borges, musa de las vanguardias’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 610 (2001), 87–96.

57 Rita Felski argues that the whole modernist movement operates with a masculine bias. See her The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1995).

58 Roberta Quance notes that, in El marinero y la sirena, Norah moves from the Romantic leitmotiv of love between siblings or soul mates to a more carnal expression of desire. See Roberta Quance, ‘Las sirenas de Norah Borges: el sexo inocente’, Boletín de la Fundación Federico García Lorca, 35–36 (2005), 96–114 (p. 108).

59 See, for example, Retrato de Guillermo (1924), in Patricia Artundo, Norah Borges: obra gráfica 1920–1930 (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1994), 57. There are also strong physical similarities between the figures in these paintings and the image of Guillermo in his study. See Guillermo de Torre (1929), reproduced in May Lorenzo Alcalá & Sergio Baur, Norah Borges: mito y vanguardia (julio–agosto en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Neuquén; septiembre–octubre en el Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, 2006) [exhibition catalogue] (Neuquén: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes/Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2006), 26.

60 I base my reading of this painting on Roberta Quance, ‘Norah Borges y Ramón Gómez de la Serna: revisiones de lo cursi’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 28:1 (2003), 71–85 (pp. 78–80).

61 Ledger, The New Woman, 5.

62 See Quance, ‘Las sirenas de Norah Borges’, 110–12.

63 Quance gives these paintings as examples of Norah’s use of a cursi aesthetic and she shows that they are examples of what might be termed cursi bueno by Norah’s contemporaries (Quance, ‘Norah Borges y Ramón Gómez de la Serna’, 76–78).

64 Quance notes that: ‘las sirenas evocaban tanto la esquivez como el poderoso atractivo físico de la mujer, pues la desnudez de la sirena prometía el placer, mientras que la cola de pez advertía del fracaso; la ambigüedad era tan poderosa que acaso hiciera que la sirena se convirtiese en el más cabal de los emblemas del deseo imposible’ (Quance, ‘Las sirenas de Norah Borges’, 103).

65 Artundo analyses the composition of this painting in detail and shows how ‘la disposición de las figuras y el predominio de las líneas oblicuas sobre las horizontales y verticales, incrementaba la dinámica de la superficie que se ocultaba tras un aparente estatismo’ is characteristic of Norah’s later style (Artundo, Norah Borges: obra gráfica 1920–1930, 98–100 [p. 100]).

66 The sexuality of the figure of the mermaid stands out within Norah’s body of work. Apart from depictions of the mermaid, the only other nude figures that I am aware of are a small unpublished drawing and the painting Desnudo en un paisaje (1954), which was published in Ernesto B. Rodríguez, ‘Para el Orión del recuerdo’, Lyra, XVI:171–173 (1958), n.p., and also in Félix M. Pelayo, ‘Norah Borges’, Nuestra Arquitectura, 345 (1958), 41–42.

67 Quance, ‘Las sirenas de Norah Borges’, 114.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.