Conclusion Modern Spanish Subjects

Abstract

Examination of literary texts by major female and male Spanish writers from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century reveals these Spanish authors’ solid inscription into modernity that other Europeans and Spaniards themselves had denied. Modern Spanish literature belies the claims that in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries Spain resided principally outside the walls of modern existence, that Spain represented the Middle Ages, or that Spain’s main purpose was to offer material for the musings of romantic European and American writers. Female and male Spanish authors contend with issues uniquely dealing with Spain, such as a strong allegiance to Catholicism, a version of feminism based on relational issues rather than individual rights, and the inferiority and difference of women explained by the Church and later by science, but they also confront the modern influences of the changing roles of women and men, the perils of positivism, the empty promises of science, and the gendered implications for modern individualism. The process of “gendered disillusion” affects not only Spanish women writers of modernity but those of other Western countries as well, but this process is even more delineated in Spanish society because of the lingering influence of the throne and Church in Spain. Modern Spanish women do not express the same reasons for disillusion or the same unbridled disillusion as male modern subjects, for their concerns are often limited to issues of marriage, domesticity, their greater alliance with religion, and their position as objects of science. Meanwhile, male subjects experience the disillusion brought on by the radical changes of modernity and its implications for the destabilization of the subject previously controlled by the tenets of the ancien régime such as undeniable faith in religion, uncontested obedience to monarchical authority, and fixed gender roles for women and men.