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Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World by Maria-José Blanco Claire Williams

2019; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2019.0001

2222-4270

Deborah Madden,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Portuguese Studies vol. 35 no. 2 (2019), 244–52© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Reviews Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the LusoHispanic World, ed. by Maria-José Blanco and Claire Williams (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2017). xiv+ 369 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Deborah Madden (University of Manchester) Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the LusoHispanic World is an edited collection of fifteen chapters that identify ‘women who have written or expressed their sense of identity’ (p. 3) through a diverse range of genre and media. It skilfully and effectively eschews two fundamental critical concerns of gynocentric scholarship: the potential to imply a homogenous female experience and the resulting inference that women’s output follows similar generic traits; and forming subcategories that, not unexpectedly, are not afforded the same critical currency as those associated with men. Including chapters on poetry, diaries, autobiographies, biographies, travel writing, memoirs and visual art, the volume offers thought-provoking critical analyses that critique, unpack and contest — both implicitly and explicitly — androcentric cultural and critical practices. With a focus on artists and texts from Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries, geographical regions justifiably deemed by the editors ‘proudly, gloriously patriarchal’ (p. 1), this volume manifests its political agenda to confront the social, cultural and political legacy of societies that assumed women had ‘no individual intellectual purpose’ (p. 1) by only including female critics. The editorial decision to include such a diverse range of material not only makes for an intriguing, intellectually engaging piece of scholarship, but also exemplifies the need to allow the selected texts and authors to self-represent; a critical approach that underpins all of the analyses. The reader is aided by an informative introduction that provides crucial cultural, critical and sociopolitical context, detailed textual analyses and concise historical summaries to inform the discussions. Though helpfully organized into six sections that broadly categorize the primary texts by genre — writings during religious incarceration, diaries, memoirs, poetry, fictional (auto)biographies and visual biographies — it is the intriguing points of comparison that arise throughout the collection that exhibit the strength of this work. The innovative critical approach of Feminine Singular is exemplified by its opening chapter: an examination of trauma and desire in writings by Teresa de Ávila, Carmen Laforet and Rosa Chacel that offers a fresh perspective on three (of very few) canonical Spanish women writers by astutely juxtaposing their works. The critical benefit of crossing geographical, temporal and thematic boundaries becomes abundantly clear when comparing the ‘cathartic and Reviews 245 restructuring potential of autobiographical writing’ (p. 61) explored in texts by Antónia Margarida de Castelo Branco and D. Leonor de Almeida Portugal, both Portuguese aristocrats confined to convents against their will, with an analysis of Olga Alonso’s more overtly political Testimonios, deemed a ‘cathartic response to the traumatic gap between her expectations of revolutionary participation and the reality of her time in rural Cuba’ (p. 109). The self-conscious critique of gender, genre and representation that underpins this collection informs many of the analyses, including chapters dedicated to Fernanda de Castro’s Ao fim da memória, Margarida Tengarrinha’s Quadros de Memória and Agustina Bessa-Luís’s biography of her close friend, the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva; it is also explored in Laura Freixas’s first-hand reflections on editing, translating and authorship — an unexpected but welcome addition to the volume that exemplifies its unorthodox selection criteria. Thought-provoking examinations of Liliana Lara’s Abecedario del estío and poetry by Adília Lopes explore how the politics of authorship are indexed in literary conventions and generic traits, while examinations of scrapbooks produced by Carmen Martín Gaite and Julia Fons — the latter perhaps as unknown as Martín Gaite is famous — demonstrates the importance of examining a diverse range of creative forms if we are to augment our understanding of female creativity and (self-)representation. It is, therefore, only fitting that a chapter on Helena Almeida’s self-portraits, produced under the claustrophobic environment of the Estado Novo, is the final analysis in the collection, as her photographs delineate how she uses her body as ‘an active participant...