The Gothic Fiction of Adelaida García Morales: Haunting Words (Monografías A)

173 Pages·2006·0.82 MB·English

by  Abigail Lee Six

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Colección Támesis
SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 223
THE GOTHIC FICTION OF
ADELAIDA GARCÍA MORALES:
HAUNTING WORDS
This first in-depth and holistic study of Adelaida García Morales’s
fiction approaches her works as a contemporary incursion into the
Gothic mode. In order to highlight features common to García
Morales’s texts and the Gothic classics, each of the novels studied is
paired with an English-language Gothic text and then read in the light
of it. The focus of each chapter ranges from psychological aspects,
such as fear of decay or otherness, or the pressures linked to managing
secrets, to more concrete elements such as mountains and frightening
buildings, and to key figures such as vampires, ghosts, or monsters.
The usefulness of such an approach is that new light is shed on how
García Morales achieves probably the most distinguishing feature of
her novels: their harrowing atmosphere.
ABIGAILLEESIXis Professor of Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway,
University of London.
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ABIGAIL LEE SIX
THE GOTHIC FICTION OF
ADELAIDA GARCÍA MORALES:
HAUNTING WORDS
TAMESIS
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© Abigail Lee Six 2006
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
The right of Abigail Lee Six to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published 2006 by Tamesis, Woodbridge
ISBN 1 85566 123 3
Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Great Britain by
Cambridge University Press
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
List of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1 El Sur, seguido de Bene(1985) and Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890/1891):
Physical and Moral Decay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 El silencio de las sirenas(1985) and Ann Radcliffe,
The Mysteries of Udolpho(1794): The Sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3 La lógica del vampiro(1990) and Bram Stoker,
Dracula(1897): Vampirism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4 Las mujeres de Héctor(1994) and Henry James,
The Turn of the Screw (1898): Ghosts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5 La tía Águeda(1995) and Horace Walpole,
The Castle of Otranto(1764): Frightening Buildings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
6 Nasmiya(1996) and Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
(1938): Fear of the Other (Woman). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
7 El accidente(1997) and Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(1886):
Keeping Guilty Secrets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
8 La señorita Medina(1997) and Wilkie Collins,
The Woman in White (1859–60): Discovering Guilty Secrets. . . . . . . . . . 119
9 Una historia perversa(2001) and Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein (1818–31): Creating Monsters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Haunting Wordscould not have been written without the ongoing support of my
College, Royal Holloway, University of London. Equally indispensable was the
goodwill of departmental colleagues, who enabled me to take sabbatical leave
when I needed it by shouldering my share of administration at a time when we
were particularly short-staffed. My students provided a valuable forum for the
exchange of ideas on El Sur in particular, and Spanish women’s writing in
general. Finally, a special thank you is due to my husband and children, not only
for encouraging me to neglect them in order to write the book, but also for many
interesting conversations about the English-language Gothic novels.
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ABBREVIATIONS
Texts by Adelaida García Morales
A El accidente
B Bene
B/tr Bene(English translation)
HP Una historia perversa
LV La lógica del vampiro
MH Las mujeres de Héctor
N Nasmiya
SM La señorita Medina
SS El silencio de las sirenas
S El Sur
S/tr El Sur(English translation)
TÁ La tía Águeda
Gothic Novels in English
CO Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
D Bram Stoker, Dracula
F Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
JH Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
MU Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
PDG Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
R Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
TS Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
WW Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Other Abbreviations
CUP Cambridge University Press
MUP Manchester University Press
OUP Oxford University Press
UP University Press
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Introduction
This book has twin aims: one is to offer a deepened understanding of
Adelaida García Morales’s fiction through reading her texts as Gothic,1for it
is my contention that such a reading can shed new light on how she achieves
the extraordinary haunting effect of her narratives. The second aim depends
on the success of the first: it is to demonstrate by this example of one writer
the usefulness of the Gothic label to Hispanic Studies generally and as such,
the present monograph is the first in a larger research project which hopes to
put the term Gothicon the Hispanic map, beyond its current very occasional
or limited uses.2
The notion of Gothic is well established in English studies and yet there is
no critical consensus on a precise definition of it.3Different criteria have been
1 The adjective has been used to refer to single texts, such as Elizabeth J. Ordóñez’s
reading of El Sur (Voices of Their Own: Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Women
(Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1991), pp. 180–81), the article by Kathleen Glenn, ‘Gothic
Vision in García Morales and Erice’s El sur’(Letras peninsulares (spring 1994), 239–50)
or the jacket notes for La tía Águeda, and a comparative Ph.D. dissertation by Shoshannah
Holdom (Manchester University, 2003 unpublished) uses the term in its title: ‘Gothic
Theatricality and Performance in the Work of Adelaida García Morales, Cristina
Fernández Cubas and Pilar Pedreza’; but the full implications have not yet been explored
in the light of García Morales’s oeuvre as a whole and considered in its own right.
2 The term is found in Spanish eighteenth-century criticism. See, for example, Guillermo
Carnero, Estudios sobre teatro español del siglo XVIII (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de
Zaragoza, 1997), pp. 144–55, which argues for the recognition of ‘elementos góticos’[Gothic
elements] in Spanish novels and drama of that century, taking as its example text LaHolandesa
(1787) by Gaspar Zavala y Zamora. On the other hand, Spain is conspicuous by its absence in
Neil Cornwell’s article on ‘European Gothic’, which limits itself to discussion of France,
Germany, and Russia (in A Companion to the Gothic(ed.) David Punter(Oxford: Blackwell,
2000), pp. 27–38. The term makes an occasional appearance in nineteenth-century studies; see,
for example, Stephen M. Hart, ‘The Gendered Gothic in Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa’,
in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain(ed.) LouCharnon-Deutsch & Jo Labanyi
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 216–29. On the other hand, an otherwise very informative
article on the folletín, despite obvious and significant overlap with Gothic concerns, makes
no mention of the term (Elisa Martí-López, ‘The folletín: Spain looks to Europe’, in The
Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present(ed.) Harriet Turner
andAdelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), pp. 65–80).
3 Fred Botting opens the Preface to his edited collection of essays with the words:
‘These days it seems increasingly difficult to speak of “theGothic” with any assurance.