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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Constancy and evolution of an engaged writing : the work of Carmen de Burgos, journalist, essayist and novelist

subject

description

Carmen de Burgos died in 1932, leaving behind a considerable amount of written material: thousands of articles published in different newspapers, essays, novels and hundreds of “novelas cortas”. The works and the memory of this women’s rights activist were doomed to oblivion during Franco’s dictatorship. This thesis aims to rediscover and analyse these works from its various perspectives. We have been looking for the constant trends but also the evolutions. Carmen de Burgos has indeed evolved in her conception of the woman’s role and of the rights she had to acquire. In the early stages of her fight, she had been mainly focusing on the acquisition of equalitarian legal and social rights. She claimed a better education for girls; education that would allow them to work with dignity and gain economical independence. She was campaigning for the right to divorce. Nevertheless, she soon understood that change could only occur through the ballot boxes and would thus very openly stood in favour of women’s right to vote, up to the point of organising the first street demonstration in favour of women’s vote. The fictions she wrote were, in general, considered activist literature, without a great literary interest. That’s why after having studied in which ways the plots, the denouements and the construction of the characters were serving the cause of women, we tried to evaluate the literary quality of the work, which appeared to us to have some significance. We also wanted to determine if her fiction work was just a tool serving the causes she was defending or if it offered some really good quality literature.