| My dissertation investigates connections between intersectional theories of dirt, the abject and chaos, and the fictional representations of everyday life during the Spanish Civil War (1936--1939) and Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939--1975) comprising three canonical postwar novels: Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945), Merce Rodoreda's La placa del Diamant (1962), and Carmen Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atras (1978). I incorporate Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject, Mary Douglas's work on dirt, and studies on literary and scientific chaos in order to posit that Andrea, Colometa and C.---each of these texts' first person narrators---employ different narrative strategies through which accounts or representations of disgust, dirt and disorder are revelatory, symptomatic or metonymic of taboo, repressed or traumatic female lived experiences during the war and throughout Francoism. Specifically, my project highlights how the abject, the dirt and the chaotic doubles as narratorial vehicle and critical lens through which to gain a deeper understanding of Francoist order, and of the individuals, beliefs and practices inhabiting and expressing themselves from its margins.;My study is based upon three female-authored-and-narrated novels, all from different decades. I argue that these texts---two of them approved by Francoist censors and the other published shortly after Franco's death---depict and decry Francoism's rhetorical obsession with national and female purity by narrating everyday life in terms of messes, dirt and chaos: In Nada, Andrea's experience of the abject in terms of her year spent in Barcelona elucidates the daily horrors of starvation, shame, violence and misery rampant in the immediate postwar; in La placa, Colometa relies on descriptions of cleanliness and dirt to narrate the war's violence and outcomes and to depict, denounce and humanize her own, as well as Spain's, collective and traumatic past; in El cuarto, C.'s chaotic memories stand up to Francoism and effectively reclaim the right and need to narrate the past. As a result, my research reveals an innovative connection between the everyday and symbolic dirt present in these novels and the evolution of counternarratives they present that serve to challenge, reformulate and ultimately denounce hegemonic Francoist discourse. |
