The road not taken: Portrayal of women in ten French novels on the Spanish Civil War (1936--1939).
Item
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Title
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The road not taken: Portrayal of women in ten French novels on the Spanish Civil War (1936--1939).
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Identifier
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AAI3325372
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identifier
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3325372
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Creator
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Bralove, Alicia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William Sherzer
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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Scholars have remarked that World War I offered women possibilities that were not available to them prior to the war, and one can ask oneself if the same statement can be made about the Spanish Civil War. This thesis begins by exploring the question of the extent to which these options are and are not reflected in the representation of female characters in ten French novels written between 1938 and 1968. While Spanish literature has provided intricate, vibrant portraits of women and gender relations, the texts I will discuss maintained traditional, home-bound, nurturing, supportive and non-combatant roles for women, whose lives remained centered around domesticity and/or the men in their lives. This is what I refer to as "the road not taken" in these authors' works.;The use of force against undefended civilian targets during the Spanish Civil War, to an extent not seen previously in modern Western Europe, created a fundamental change in the landscape of war. One famous reaction to this was Picasso's well known painting Guernica, which was created in part to foment sympathy for the Republican cause. The painting depicts the bombing of a marketplace, and in it, Picasso provided the articulation through art of a suggestion that in this conflict, there were no boundaries left between the home and battle fronts. This perspective was not mirrored in the work of novelists such as Andre Malraux, Robert Brasillach, and Michel del Castillo, among others, who continued to represent the war as delineated along traditionally established gender and combat boundaries.;In the analysis of "the road not taken", this dissertation takes into account the biographical elements, personal, political, and intellectual, that underlie the connection between writer and work, and what light this might shed on the way authors have treated gender, and most significantly, what they have not said in their novels in this respect.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
