Author: Maria Del Mar Soria Lopez

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Published: 2010

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My dissertation demonstrates how three aesthetic and ideological movements0́4 such as costumbrismo, realism, and avant-garde0́4construct characterizations of urban female workers in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature and culture as symbols of middle-class anxieties and desires as a reaction to experienced social and political instability in turn-of-the-century Spain. Costumbrismo, realism, and avant-garde highlight as the main social category from which writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, María Martínez Sierra, or Ramón Gómez de la Serna fashioned fictional urban working women0́9s gender and work identities and their trajectories in various narratives. In particular, I claim that in these texts, the working woman0́9s class conflicts with gender in the process of narrative signification, producing a multiplicity of contradictory meanings that expose turn-of-the-century bourgeois anxieties about women0́9s emancipation and working-class unrest. My analysis of urban female working characters reveals that middle-class representations of working women result from a dominant conceptualization of class and gendered spaces in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain. For that reason, my thesis draws a geography of urban female labor through the analysis of the symbolic condensation of class, gender, and space in the cultural representations of urban working women. By doing so, I shed light on the ambivalent cultural location that working women have occupied in cultural representations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Even though the construction and development of modern Spain could not have taken place without the participation working women0́9s labor, this segment of the population has been 0́−out-of-place0́+ for too long in literary and cultural criticism. It is my hope that this dissertation will reposition these marginalized characters to their legitimate place in critical discourse.