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Malevolent Fathers and Rebellious Daughters: National Oedipal Narratives and Political Erasures in El laberinto del fauno (2006)

2012; Routledge; Volume: 89; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2012.712323

1478-3428

Ana Vivancos,

Spanish Culture and Identity

Abstract El laberinto del fauno (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) offers a vision of post-Civil War Spain halfway between history and myth. The film denounces Francoist violence from the perspective of gender division, presenting victimized or rebellious women and men who represent extremely violent versions of patriarchy. However, in spite of its condemnation of dictatorial power, the film appears to be trapped in a paradox. Although it shows the public and private victimization of women, its denouement presents female sacrifice as necessary for the survival both of democratic ideals as well as of male offspring. Guillermo del Toro's own position is strangely similar to the little boy who survives at the end of the film, who will be able to explain his experience of the Francoist regime from exile. Del Toro is also an exile from Mexico, and, therefore, familiar with the narratives of violence told by the Spanish republicans who escaped to his country. His voice, masculine and peripheral, seems to be the only one capable of explaining this history of female sacrifice. Notes 2Chris Perriam, Michael Thompson, Susan Frenck and Vanessa Knights, A New History of Spanish Writing, 1939 to the 1990s (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000), 68. 1According to the digitalized archives of the daily La Vanguardia, ‘Franco padre de Alava’, 17 October 1942, . 3Perriam et al., A New History, 68, 69. 4Helen Graham, ‘Gender and State: Women in the 1940s’, in Spanish Cultural Studies, an Introduction, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995), 182–84 (p. 184). 5Mark Kermode, ‘Interview with Guillermo del Toro’, The Guardian, 21 November 2006, , 9. 6Jo Labanyi, ‘History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period’, in Disremembering the Dictatorship. The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramón Resina (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000), 73. 7Tabea Linhardt, Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2005), 1. 8See Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi Azpurua, Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 51. 9Jane Hanley, ‘The Walls Fall Down. Fantasy and Power in El laberinto del fauno’, in Studies in Hispanic Cinema, 4:1 (2007), 35–45, . 10Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 10. 11Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Las huellas de la Guerra Civil. Mito y trauma en la narrativa de la España democrática (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2006), 188. 12Linhard, Fearless Women, 4. 13Linhard, Fearless Women, 93. 14Hanley, ‘The Walls Fall Down’, 37. 15Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition. From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York/London: Norton & Company, 2001), 190. 16Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 195. 17Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 543. 18Karl Kerenyi, Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 175. 19See Zipes’ The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, where he describes folk tales in which beast bridegrooms play a major role, as Madame d'Aulnoy's The Beneficent Frog or Madame de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast (787–88). 20The toad in El laberinto del fauno evokes other toads in fiction. But the one that rings with the same sexual undertones appears in Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta. The novel's protagonist, Ana Ozores, is victimized by the sexual desire of two men of the Church, Fermín de Pas and Celedonio. As Stephanie Sieburth and Noel Valis point out, the representation of the toad is invested with a combination of malevolence, sexuality and scatology (i.e., the bodily fluids of the toad). In the final sentence of the novel, Ana, disgusted by Celedonio's kiss, felt ‘sobre la boca el vientre frío y viscoso de un sapo’. Likewise, while daydreaming about Don Fermín, Ana is startled by a chorus of frogs sounding like ‘un himno de salvajes paganos a las tinieblas’. Thus, the image and the sound of frogs appear as warning signs of the dangers of men's sexually predatory moves. See Stephanie Sieburth, ‘Kiss and Tell: The Toad in La Regenta’, in ‘Malevolent Inseminations’ and Other Essays on Clarín, ed. Noël Valis, Michigan Romance Studies 10 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1990), 286, and Leopoldo Alas, La Regenta (Barcelona: Noguer, 1976), 929. 21Interview in Twitch, . 22Ann Davies, ‘The Beautiful and the Monstrous Masculine: The Male Body and Horror in El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)’, Studies in Hispanic Cinema, 3:3 (2007), 135–47 (p. 137). 23Marsha Kinder, ‘The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 8:2 (1983), 57–76. 24A central example of the Spanish version of the Oedipal drama is the film Raza (Sáenz de Heredia, 1941). The film is an historical drama, based on a supposedly autobiographical novel written by Franco himself, which includes a familial narrative that reveals the dictator's own investment in Oedipal narratives. The story revolves around the adventures of the adult children of the family Churruca, who fight on both sides of the Civil War. Ideological propaganda is conveyed by situating the paragon of loyalty on the side of the brothers on the Nationalist side, while positing the concepts of treason and the abandonment of family values on the Republican side. But over the children looms the shadow of the deceased father, who died heroically in the Spanish-American war, a war that marked the end of the Spanish colonial empire. This epic of the first postwar years exposes how the Oedipal narrative intersects with national discourse in the dictatorship's ideological propaganda. 25Kinder, ‘The Children of Franco’, 58. 26Kinder, ‘The Children of Franco’, 65. 30Juan Ignacio Francia, ‘Cine fantástico para explicar la postguerra’, La Vanguardia (magazine), 15 October 2006. 27Hanley, ‘The Walls Fall Down’, 39. 28Guillermo del Toro interview, ‘Mi abuela me exorcizó dos veces de pequeño’, Idea Digital, . 29See interview in Idea Digital.