The constant crossing of borders between the private and the public spheres is a characteristic of the development of feminism. Women have broken the boundaries that relegate them to the home, but also the ones that have kept women’s suffering from sexual violence hidden in silence. The #metoo movement that shook societies around the world in 2017 and 2018 was an example of this on a global scale. There, the global met the intimate, challenging conventional barriers between the public and the private in the manner described by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner in The Global and the Intimate. In the
In Latin America and Spain, the protests of #cuéntalo, driven by a gang rape in Pamplona in Spain in 2016, were a parallel to #metoo in its denouncing of the public blaming and silencing of the victims. Both movements created platforms where women together and collectively returned to the intimate spaces of their past in order to publicly share traumatic moments of their lives. They did so to combat prejudice about rape and sexual violence, such as the idea that the passivity of the victim is a sign of consent (McGregor) or that male sexuality is an incontrollable force of nature.1
The novelty of the #cuéntalo and #metoo movements was their global impact, which was made possible by the communication technologies of today. However, as the writings of the Spanish author and women’s rights activist Carmen de Burgos (1867–1932) demonstrate, the phenomenon of women writing about their own experiences of sexual violence and sharing them publicly is not new. In this chapter I will focus on representations of sexual violence in two novels by Carmen de Burgos, Los inadaptados [The non-adapted] from 1909 and La malcasada [The badly married woman] from 1923. In these novels, Burgos returns to her own intimate childhood spaces of the Almería province in southern Spain to share experiences of sexual violence in fictional form, blending it with autobiographic elements. She recounts the experience of rape from the victim’s perspective, sketching a realistic portrayal of the traumatic moment.
Both novels depict a young woman whose name is Dolores, which means pain in Spanish. The women are both young and both become victims of sexual violence, but despite these similarities they are women of different backgrounds and social classes. This simultaneously connects them and distances them from the author’s own background. As Burgos’ biographer, Concepción Núñez Rey, points out, the author’s childhood spaces play an important part in many of her novels. Throughout Burgos’ career, she recreated the environments of the Almería province to explore various problems related to women’s existence in the world. Núñez Rey has called this literary endeavour the Rodalquilar cycles (Núñez Rey, “Introducción”). The works recall the village of Rodalquilar, where Burgos’ family used to spend their summers at the family
In both Los inadaptados and La malcasada, Carmen de Burgos depicts the protagonists as women who traverse spaces, both socially and geographically. Both her versions of Dolores cross spatial boundaries in their attempts to accomplish a happy life as married women and make a place for themselves as loving and desiring subjects in their intimate relations. The novels also depict sexual violence as a part of the patriarchal customs that prevent women from having free and fulfilling love relations with men. A common and peculiar feature is the final vengeance scene of the novels, where the male perpetrator dies. This motif reverses that of the death of the fallen woman, common to French realist novels of the nineteenth century, such as La Dame aux camélias or Madame Bovary, which in many ways constitute Burgos’ literary background. The vengeance motif is also a parallel to how today’s global movements against sexual violence break the victims’ silence and instead channel the collective anger towards the perpetrators.
My life is complex; I have changed phase many times; so many that I seem to have lived in many different generations … and I too have changed my ideas … my thoughts … What do I know! … I laugh at the unity of the self, because I carry many selves within myself, women, children … Old people …2
“Autobiografía” 40, original italics
In this chapter I will show how Carmen de Burgos’ novels achieved an effect similar to the #metoo and #cuéntalo movements in the way the collective storytelling characterized them, which permitted a universalizing of the experience of sexual violence. In Burgos’ case, this was achieved by fictionalizing the intimate spaces of her own past, as well as by the multiplication of her own self through two different fictional versions of the suffering Dolores, which both mirror Burgos’ own self and evade any such recognition. The fragmented narrative creates the voices of a myriad of selves, rather than just one, telling the story of the powerless rape victim and transferring it from the private sphere into the public space.
As we have seen, Carmen de Burgos herself avoided writing her autobiography, and after her death the Franco regime in Spain (1939–1975) made serious efforts to wipe her memory off the face of the earth (Núñez Rey, Carmen de Burgos 624–25). Nevertheless, thanks to the assiduous efforts of scholars and archivists documenting her life and work during the last four decades, we may now have a glimpse of a life that was truly worthy of being fictionalized. She was born into a liberal bourgeois family in Almería, and spent her summers in the village of Rodalquilar and winters in the provincial capital, Almería. As we will see, she maintained this contrast between the rural and urban spaces of her childhood in her literary portrayals of them. She married young, at only sixteen, and little is known about the details of her life as a young married woman in Almería. However, there is reason to believe it was not a happy marriage, but no documentation exists that could prove that the depiction of sexual violence in Los inadaptados and La malcasada is based on Burgos’ own experiences.
Burgos separated from her husband when her only surviving child was born, managed to get a teaching degree in Granada in 1895 and moved to Madrid
Through her newspaper columns and popular short stories, Burgos became a well-known public figure in Spain, where she strenuously fought for women’s right to divorce and suffrage. She also put much effort into the fight to abolish the ‘passionate crime’ clause in Spanish legislation, which permitted mitigation of the sentence for husbands who went on trial for killing their unfaithful wives. She even wrote a short story on this issue, with a title referencing the legal clause, El artículo 438, and an epigraph quoting the text of the clause (Burgos, El Artículo 438). In what follows, we will observe how Burgos wove traces of her early life experiences into the two novels where she portrayed experiences of sexual violence, as well as elements from her later political activism in Madrid.
1 Los inadaptados (1909)
The centre of the action of Burgos’ first full-length novel, Los inadaptados, is the young village woman Dolores, who lives in the village of Rodalquilar and is happily married to Víctor with whom she has a child. When Víctor is arrested by the authorities, Dolores decides to leave the safe environment of her village to visit their landlord in the main town of Níjar to plead for Victor’s release. The landlord then rapes Dolores, who gets pregnant and gives birth to a sickly boy who later dies of lung disease. The rape creates a split between Dolores and Víctor, when Dolores avoids telling him about it, but they continue loving each other. Nevertheless, the couple’s intimate life ceases after the incident with the landlord, and after the boy’s death Victor’s resentment grows. He then ends up killing the landlord in what appears to be a hunting accident, with the whole village giving its silent approval of his act of revenge.
The creation of the fictional Rodalquilar as an archaic projection of Burgos’ own feminist ideals is further developed with the absence of the Christian concept of honour among the villagers, in the sense that married couples who do not love each other may dissolve their relationships freely by mutual consent and find new partners. This is based on the honesty that Carmen de Burgos held out as the secret of the harmonious equality that ruled the love life of her fictional Rodalquilar. Lying is not accepted between spouses, because men should not have to work to provide for the children of other men: “What was not tolerated was deception or lies. The woman who did not love her man should tell him, but not make him work to support the offspring of others” (Burgos, Los inadaptados 143).4 This view of infidelity as a betrayal of men’s efforts to support their own offspring is reflected in Víctor’s rage against the landlord towards the end of the novel, when the silence that surrounds the
This archaic bliss of Rodalquilar stands out as an image of eternal harmony, a backdrop to the tension Burgos creates between the harmonious village life and the outside world. This enters the village like a foreign menace when the landlord’s violation of Dolores becomes the centre of the action. Burgos made use of a true event for the origin of the disastrous course of the novel: the shipwreck of the steamer Valencia on the coast of Almería in 1892 (Núñez Rey, “Introducción” 15). In Los inadaptados, the steamer Valencia, a harbinger of the modern outside world, is wrecked on the beach of Rodalquilar on its way carrying oranges from the Spanish east coast to the foreign consumer markets of Europe.
Go back, go back home, poor woman. Behind these mountains misery lurks … There are great cities … civilization … educated men. You don't know what that is! … No, do not go there … They are worse than the beasts …5
burgos, Los inadaptados 118
A cold veil rose from her heart to her head, she no longer felt anything … she vanished, inert, between the arms that oppressed her.6 (128)
In sharp contrast to her romantic portrayal of the arcadian, prehistoric bliss in the village, Carmen de Burgos offers a realistic portrayal of Dolores’ psychological reaction to being raped by the landlord: the victim shuts down her feelings, mentally vanishing from the scene. The way that Burgos lets the victim freeze instead of fighting back demonstrates her insight into the behaviour of a victim. Research in trauma psychology has identified such behaviour as common in women facing the threat of sexual assault (Mason and Lodrick). Even today, women’s rights activists around the world are trying to transmit this knowledge about the behaviour of rape victims to legislators in order to subvert the idea of the inert victim’s passivity as tantamount to assent to sexual intercourse (McGregor).7
With the representation of rape in the novel, the author herself broke the taboo of silence around sexual violence that has accompanied women throughout history (D’Cruze), but she let her protagonist, Dolores, stay in silence throughout the novel. The secret exacerbates the split between Dolores and her husband after the rape and it also deviates from the honesty that characterizes the love relationships of the villagers in Burgos’ novel.
Her second child was to her like a constant rebuke. His degenerate blood made him blond, pale, and with dark circles stretching over his face like
burgos, Los inadaptados 151lily petals, instead of showing off his brother’s cheeks and his brick-coloured flesh, big, chubby, and rosy. 8
In the features of the dead child and its unfitness for survival, there is an echo of the eugenic notions of race and biological heritage that were common among intellectuals throughout the political and academic spectrum at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Spain this was particularly the case within the anarchist movements (Cleminson; Molero-Mesa et al.). In the context of the novel, however, the features of the dying child reflect the difference between the rural and the upper-class spaces that are being contrasted in the novel. The delicacy of the blond child underlines its position as a wedge of civilization that has been forged in the village where it cannot survive.
The wedge of civilization that tears Dolores and Víctor apart in the novel is also illustrated by the cold atmosphere of Catholic morality that reigns in their new home on the landlord’s estate, in contrast to the vibrant and passionate life of the villagers. In the midst of the cold and incommunicative atmosphere between the spouses, Burgos depicts a longing for love and desire between them, a yearning that also involves the dead child, and that finally builds into a strong desire for vengeance in Víctor. The deadlock between the spouses is not released until Dolores breaks her silence. Then, Víctor confesses to his wife that he is waiting for the right moment to vent his anger and kill the landlord (Burgos, Los inadaptados 216–18).
When Victor finally manages to carry out his vengeance plan in what appears to be a hunting accident, where the landlord falls into a well and dies, the whole village gives its silent approval to the deed and implicitly justifies the symbolism of Víctor’s name, as ‘victory’. Burgos offers her reader a final scene, where Victor is standing close to his wife, as an impressive and frightening image of “the magnificent beauty of the gods of Rebellion and Revenge” (245).9 In placing the revenge in the hands of Víctor in her first full-length novel, Burgos lets the husband act out the cathartic vengeance on behalf of the violated woman. As we will see, she would choose differently later in her career, letting the violated woman herself get even with her perpetrator.
2
By the time of the publication of La malcasada, Carmen de Burgos’ sixth full-length novel, the author was at the height of her career: a well-known writer, activist and much coveted contributor to magazines and journals in Spain. In 1923, Primo de Rivera initiated his era of dictatorship in Spain but, despite that, intellectual life flourished in the country’s metropolis and the women’s movement, with Burgos at centre stage, pushed forward with demands for suffrage, gender equality and legalized divorce.
In her 1923 novel Carmen de Burgos returns to the intimate spaces of her native Almería, but this time to the city of Almería itself and not to the countryside of the province. La malcasada has been interpreted as Burgos’ most autobiographical work in its representation of a young, unhappily married woman in Almería (Sales Dasí). The novel lacks the romantic, naturalist beauty that characterized her first full-length novel, Los inadaptados. In La malcasada she focuses instead on Almería city, revelling in the kitschy details that highlight the pettiness of the provincial bourgeoisie. She seems to have used the whole toolbox of her melodramatic style of writing, developed during many years as a best-selling author, to denigrate the rich and wealthy in the city where she spent her early years. It seems as if the novel’s entire gallery of characters was created to reflect “ugly feelings” as Ngai calls them, of revenge and anger. As we will see, Burgos also let her political message about the necessity of divorce shine through quite clearly in La malcasada, and especially in its ironic and bloody ending.
In La malcasada, the protagonist’s name is also Dolores, but in this case, she is the opposite of a village woman. This time, Dolores is depicted as a young woman of a wealthy Madrid family who falls in love with a rich young man from Almería, whom she marries, believing his charming behaviour to be the harbinger of a blissful future. Soon after the marriage he turns out to be quite the opposite: a gambler, a drunkard, and the local womanizer, who spends his nights in bed with other women. Antonio abuses Dolores, but Burgos does not let his sexual criminality be limited to his wife. Towards the end of the novel, Antonio even starts abusing his mistress’ fourteen-year-old daughter with the mother’s silent permission (Burgos, La malcasada 244).
She remained silent, frozen, suffering those kisses, which hammered painfully in her brain; but she had no energy to reject it. Her will fell asleep even to the extent of accepting this abjection. She was like a thing that belonged to that man. (53)10
Once again, Carmen de Burgos offers a realistic description of the psychological response to trauma due to sexual violence in the way that Dolores, in the passage above, detaches herself from what is happening to her, letting her will fall asleep and becoming a thing belonging to that man. Trauma research has made evident that dissociative mechanisms like those described by Burgos – in Dolores when she distances herself from what is happening, or in the protagonist of Los inadaptados when she is raped by the landlord – are common in victims of repeated sexual violence and are likely to result in severe psychological trauma (Levine, 136–39; Mason and Lodrick).
No one in Antonio’s family shows any compassion for Dolores’ situation in her loveless marriage. The only exception is the rich and beautiful Aunt Pepita, the foremost matriarch of Antonio’s family, a widow elegantly dressed in black. When Dolores decides to leave her husband, Pepita is the only family member who shows her some tenderness, even though the separation of the spouses goes against the aunt’s Catholic faith (Burgos, La malcasada, 178). The widowed matriarch appears as a sort of portent of the novel’s deadly ending, but Aunt Pepita may also be interpreted as an ironic wink on the part of the author. Through Aunt Pepita’s list of merits – five dead husbands – Burgos managed to pinpoint widowhood as the only possible career path for a woman in Spain at the time that would grant her a life of independence. In the novel, Dolores even shares with Pepita the thought that she would sooner be divorced than wish her husband dead. Pepita does not object to this, but only responds, first with silence and then with tender resignation: “Oh, my dear! It is useless to seek the ideal in marriage. Dreams are always superior to reality” (178).11
As mentioned earlier, the legalization of divorce was one of Burgos’ principal struggles and in the 1923 novel she informs her readers of their limited legal rights through Dolores’ lawyer Pepe, a young man who also becomes the target of the protagonist’s fantasies of true love and intimacy. Pepe explains to Dolores that there is no way of getting a legal divorce in Spain, only separation,
The rootless state where Burgos puts the separated Dolores in the novel leads to a situation of constant fear, which is maintained by the men in her proximity. This is almost an illustration of the patriarchal rape culture that Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will from 1975, would describe as a “process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (15, original italics). Instead of being set free to create her own life, Dolores is set aside, first in the household of her husband’s brother, Luis, where she becomes a family pariah. Dolores is seen as the prey of any woman-hunting man in Almería, where even a trusted member of her husband’s family, Uncle Eduardo, takes advantage of her situation and tries to abuse her sexually. He is then followed by Luis, who tries to seduce Dolores and threatens her when she rejects him (Burgos, La malcasada 202–09). After separating from Antonio, Dolores is left with no space for a life of her own in a society where a woman’s life depends on the protection of a man. Here, Burgos transmits the experience of the so-called fallen women of her time, the ones who end up outside of the protected space of belonging to one man. Such a woman must see a perpetrator in any man she encounters, since she instead of belonging to one man belongs to them all. When Dolores leaves Luis’ house, finding refuge in the home of an old widow, Doña Anita, the sexual abuse continues in the form of indecent letters from a great number of men who find in her “the woman of whom no marriage ambush was to be feared” (228).12
Dolores finally surrenders to the impossibility of getting a legal divorce and decides to reunite with her husband, with the single demand that he will leave her alone, to which he agrees. In this way Dolores ends up in what is described as the tiny space of alleged freedom that is offered to an unhappily married woman: the liberty of not having to endure the unwanted intimacy of an unendurable husband (245). In the final scene of the novel, however, even this tiny space is infringed, when Antonio comes home drunk one night wanting his wife’s intimacy, to which she responds that she prefers death to his caresses (249). The narrator then describes the one sentiment that, before he tries to take Dolores by force, dominates the rapist’s mind: the necessity for him “to impose his marital authority, his male dominance” (250).13 By this remark, the author pinpoints that power and dominance are the motivating forces behind sexual violence, rather than love or desire. Burgos here shows an insight into
Similarly to Los inadaptados, Burgos ended La malcasada with the death of the perpetrator, although in the latter she let the victim herself perform the action by killing her husband with a pair of scissors in an act of self-defence at the end of the passage where Antonio comes home drunk and tries to force himself on her. The final death of the abusive husband echoes the motif of the widow personified in Pepita earlier in the novel, as a morbid and blood-soaked representation of the contemporary woman’s only way to individual freedom, through the cathartic killing of her husband.
3 Conclusion
As stated in the introduction to this chapter, there is no way of proving that the experiences of sexual violence portrayed in Los inadaptados and La malcasada correspond to the author’s own, even though they might well have done so. Nevertheless, considering the political ardour that characterizes Burgos’ lifelong struggle against the legal and social injustice experienced by women, to limit the analysis of violence in the novels to the author’s own biography would surely be reductive. The context of Burgos’ role as a public figure is just as important here as her life in Almería, since it put her in a position to give voice to a shared experience of sexual violence, whether her own or belonging to the vast collective of Spanish women she addressed in her writings.
The Dolores characters in the novels are both young women though of different social class and origin. Despite their differences, both appear as the author’s doubles, as young women who break spatial and social boundaries in their search for love and happiness in life. Dolores in Los inadaptados has a different social background to the author but shares the life in the village of Rodalquilar. Dolores in La malcasada, on the other hand, has a different local origin from Burgos herself, but shares her social background. Through this mixture of autobiographical doubling and fictionalization, the author achieves a fragmenting effect similar to the collective storytelling of the #metoo and #cuéntalo movements. There the intimate spaces of the individual past are manifested in public space though a mixture of voices that break the taboo of silence regarding sexual violence.
In her novels, Carmen de Burgos gives proof of a deep knowledge about the experience of being a victim of sexual violence in her realistic portrayals of it. However, this experience is not tied to her own person through any
The definition of rape used in this chapter is ‘sexual intercourse with an individual against her or his will’. Sexual violence is understood as a broader concept that includes rape and any other acts of sexually intimidating or harming another person.
“Mi vida es compleja; varío de fases muchas veces; tantas, que me parece haber vivido en muchas generaciones diferentes … y yo también he cambiado de ideas … de pensamientos … ¡Qué sé yo!… Me río de la unidad del yo, porque llevo dentro muchos yoes, hombres, mujeres, chiquillos … Viejos …”. All translations from Carmen de Burgos’ original texts in this chapter are my own.
In many ways, the detailed accounts of the village people’s work and habits bring to mind the literary constumbrista style of nineteenth-century Spain. This was a type of literature focused on everyday life motives, which was refined by Mariano José de Larra, the subject of an acclaimed biography by Burgos, entitled Fígaro and published in 1919.
“Lo que no se toleraba era el engaño o la mentira. La mujer que no quisiera a su hombre que se lo dijera, pero que no le hiciera trabajar para mantener hijos ajenos.”
“–Vuelve, vuelve a tu casa, infeliz; detrás de estas montañas acecha la desdicha … Hay grandes ciudades … civilización … hombres cultos. ¡Tú no sabes que es eso! … No; no te acerques allí … Son perores que las fieras …”.
“Un velo frío le subió del corazón a la cabeza, ya no sintió nada … quedó desvanecida, inerte, entre los brazos que la oprimían.”
For instance, in the rape case that provoked the #cuéntalo uprising in Spain, the lack of physical resistance on the part of the victim made the court find the five perpetrators not guilty of rape, since they had not forced the victim with physical violence (Beatley).
“Su segundo hijo era para ella como una constante reconvención. Su sangre degenerada le hacía rubio, pálido, de ojeras que se tendían sobre su rostro como pétalos de lirio; en vez de ostentar los mofletes y la carne color de barro cocido de su hermano, cachigordete y coloradote.”
“La belleza magnífica del dios de la Rebeldía y la Venganza.”
“Permanecía muda, helada, sufriendo aquellos besos, que martilleaban dolorosamente en su cerebro; pero no tenía energía para rechazarlo. Su voluntad se dormía hasta para aceptar aquella abyección. Ella era como una cosa que le pertenecía a aquel hombre.”
“¡Ay, hija mía! Es inútil buscar el ideal en el matrimonio. Siempre es superior el sueño a la realidad.”
“la mujer de quien no había que temer la asechanza matrimonial.”
“de imponer su autoridad de marido, su dominio de macho.”
Works Cited
Beatley, Meaghan. “The Shocking Rape Trial That Galvanised Spain’s Feminists – and the Far Right.” The Guardian, 23 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/23/wolf-pack-case-spain-feminism-far-right-vox. Accessed 21 August 2020.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Ballantine Books, 1993.
Burgos, Carmen de. “Autobiografía [Autobiography].” Prometeo: Revista social y literaria [Prometheus: Social and literary magazine] 2, 10 (1909), 40–46.
Burgos, Carmen de. El Artículo 438 [Paragraph 438]. Publicaciones Prensa Gráfica, 1921.
Burgos, Carmen de. El divorcio en España [Divorce in Spain]. 1904. Bibliobazaar, 2008.
Burgos, Carmen de. La malcasada [The badly married woman]. 1923. Renacimiento, 2016.
Burgos, Carmen de. La mujer moderna y sus derechos [The modern woman and her rights]. Sempere, 1927.
Burgos, Carmen de. Los inadaptados [The non-adapted]. 1909. Cuadernos del Vigía, 2018.
Cleminson, Richard. Anarchism, Science, and Sex: Eugenics in Eastern Spain, 1900–1937. Peter Lang, 2000.
D’Cruze, Shani. “Chapter 1: Sexual Violence in History: A Contemporary Heritage?” Handbook on Sexual Violence. Ed. Sandra L. Walklate and Jennifer M. Brown, Routledge, 2012, 23–51.
Eller, Cynthia. “Making Matriarchal Myth Work: Communists and Feminists Discover the Mother Age.” Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900. University of California Press, 2011, 98–127.
Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. University of California Press, 1990.
Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. North Atlantic Books, 1997.
Mason, Fiona, and Zoe Lodrick. “Psychological Consequences of Sexual Assault.” Best Practice & Research: Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology 27, 1 (2013), 27–37.
McGregor, Joan. “The Legal Heritage of the Crime of Rape.” Handbook on Sexual Violence. Ed. Sandra L. Walklate and Jennifer M. Brown. Routledge, 2012, 69–89.
Molero-Mesa, Jorge, et al. “Neomalthusianismo y eugenesia en un contexto de lucha por el significado en la prensa anarquista española, 1900–1936 [Neo-malthusianism and eugenics in a context of struggle for meaning in the Spanish anarchist press].” História, Ciências, Saúde–Manguinhos [History, science, health–Manguinhos] 25 (2018), 105–24.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Núñez Rey, Concepción. Carmen de Burgos Colombine en La Edad de Plata de la literatura española [Carmen de Burgos Colombine in the Spanish Silver Age]. Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2005.
Núñez Rey, Concepción. “Introducción [Introduction].” Los inadaptados [The Non-adapted], by Carmen de Burgos, Cuadernos del Vigía, 2018, 7–24.
Pratt, Geraldine, and Victoria Rosner. “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate.” The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time ,Columbia University Press, 2012, 3–27.
Sales Dasí, Emilio José. “Introducción: una existencia novelesca [Introduction: A Novelesque Existence].” La malcasada [The badly married woman], by Carmen de Burgos. Renacimiento, 2016, 7–27.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. University of Minnesota Press, 1992.