| This dissertation examines female subjectivities in the post-Franco narrative of Esther Tusquets, Clara Janés, and Montserrat Roig and explores how the primarily female characters created by these writers struggle to situate their selves in the context of traditional hierarchies primarily governing gender. These situating acts reflect the emergence of feminism in Spain and the destabilization of social roles in the post-Franco era, which no longer permit a static female self. Written against various norms, the post-Franco texts of Tusquets, Janés, and Roig present idiosyncratic, anti-Master Narratives.; Tusquets explores the flux of female subjectivity through shifting narrative strategy, intertextuality, gender, and genre. The texts, like Tusquets' protagonists, struggle to be whole and propose menopause as the state in which the female self regains agency lost in marriage and motherhood. Janés' protagonists perform active readings that literally rewrite male-authored texts as a way to resist being narrated. Consistently critiquing the textual and visual aspects of subject/object relations, Janés' narrative methodology enacts a self in process. Roig's “journaliterary” concern with (re)constructing the testimonial genealogies of barcelonines leads to an analysis of the binary tension between interior and exterior spaces. Querying the margins of gender through her doubled, outward/inward, male/female vision, Roig moves not so much to a reconciliation between the sexes as toward an implicit theory of sexlessness, or perhaps all-sexedness, a female-gendered subjectivity that is somehow beyond female sex.; The post-Franco narrative works of Tusquets, Janés, and Roig—characteristic of Kristeva's second generation of feminism—enact textual explorations of self that consistently extol women's sexual difference and at times query essentializing dichotomies, approaching Kristeva's third generation, their rejection. |
