Carmen Martin Gaite: Life, Works, and Literary Analysis
Carmen Martin Gaite
Carmen Martin Gaite (1925-2000) was a prominent Spanish author. She won the National Prize for Literature for The Back Room and the National Prize for Letters.
Between Curtains: Title Significance
The title refers to “room” as a physical space, the game room associated with the protagonist’s childhood. This room had been, for the children, a chaotic place, conducive to games and imagination. After the Civil War, it was transformed into a pantry, a useful and organized space. This room, which then physically disappears, becomes a space that exists only in the memory of the protagonist and, finally, is revealed as a metaphor for her own childhood.
Novels
- Between Curtains
- Retahilas
- The Back Room
- Variable Cloudiness
- The Strange Thing Is to Live
- Los Relationships
Short Stories
- The Spa
Children’s Stories
- Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan
Essays
- Uses of Eighteen in Spain
- Love, Love Uses Postwar Spanish
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is a continuous device in Gaite’s work. In the subjective consciousness of the protagonist, textual fragments of various cultural discourses are absorbed, internalized, and filtered. These fragments increasingly operate as a nexus of the particular story that is told.
References to fantastic literature thread the trajectory of the protagonist, not to mention the structure of assimilated romance novels, whose romances are emulated ironically in the relation between the two main characters.
Examples include:
- Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
- Stevenson: Treasure Island
- Kafka: Metamorphosis
- Cervantes: The Gitanilla
- Allan Poe: Horror Stories
- Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Postwar Narrative
Years 30 and 40
There was lying to humanization and commitment. The works take place outside of literature in Spain and generally strongly tartan past issues such as Spain or the individual situation of the exiles. After the war, there is evident rupture of the natural evolution of literature. The novel cannot link to the social novel of the 30s, with Franco banning wl poe, nor with the aesthetics of the 20 dehumanized. Three types of stories abound: ideological, realistic, and humoristica. The decade of the 40 cases there is only excepcionalesy aislados.
Years 50
Spain begins to overcome its isolation. The tourism industry develops and brings some economic recovery and changes in lifestyles, such as migration of peasants into cities. The youngsters who have experienced war as children or adolescents considering war and postwar perspective diferentey appear critical attitudes toward power and the division of society into winners and Spanish vencidos. Estas positions are reflected in labor and academic circles. The novel contains the new social concerns and leave the existentialist vision, offering a merciless vision of postwar Madrid society. Over the decade intensified realism in 54.
Years 60
Signs of fatigue begin to manifest and x domiante realism that the authors begin to take more into account the contributions of the great foreign novelists.