By Angela Acosta
The Speculative and Surrealist Origins of Spanish Modernism
Ángeles Santos’s painting, Un mundo [A World] (1929), is a large surrealist composition one may easily miss if one is too eager to reach Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum. In 1929, at the age of seventeen, Santos presented Un mundo at the Ninth Autumn Salon of Madrid where prominent Spanish intellectuals like Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Vicente Huidobro, and Federico García Lorca noticed her work. The three-by-three metre painting projects a surrealist world not unlike literary utopias of the early twentieth century. A world in the shape of a cube hangs suspended by angels in the sky. Female figures clad in dark dresses race down a staircase, reaching towards stars that serve as anchors for this small world. The image is equally precarious as it is carefully crafted. Santos painted the self-sufficient world with the same dark, muted palette as the cloudy blue sky. There, one can see into buildings as miniature humans go to work, play sports, and ride the steam train that snakes its way across each side of the cube. What lives do these people lead? What references to modern Spain can be found in this painting and similar works of literature? How might we recognize the contributions of women within this milieu?
Spanish women actively participated in the Silver Age of Spanish Literature, yet they have often been excluded from anthologies, tributes to modernist writers, and Spanish literature courses. During the Second Spanish Republic (1931-9), women gained the right to vote (1931), the right to divorce (1932), and abortion was legalised in 1937 thanks to Minister of Health, Federica Montseny. Although women benefited greatly from new leisure activities and technologies like street cars, aeroplanes, and film, they also faced limitations living in a society that subjugated women. Despite her initial success as a young artist, Ángeles Santos suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930 and she was sent to a sanatorium. María Alejandra Zanetta surmises that her crisis can be attributed to vehemently misogynistic male intellectuals and the bad reception of her paintings at an exhibit in Barcelona, all of which precipitated a stylistic change towards painting landscapes and portraits with ‘a soft style with happy pastel tones’ (116). Put another way, Santos was left adrift from the very oneiric settings, dark palette, and representations of women that defined her artistic vision. Her surrealist artwork was perhaps too intuitive of the state of women who, in Tertulia [The Gathering] (1929), stare defiantly at the viewer. While artists like Salvador Dalí and Picasso painted politically informed, surrealist compositions and writers like Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre imagined new worlds in their poetry, women have largely been left out of the conversation about Spanish modernism on account of their personal and artistic identities.
Spanish modernist women cultivated experimental and speculative writing techniques in response to rapid social and technological changes taking place in Madrid and other urban centres. In what follows, I will analyse two science fiction short stories by Ángeles Vicente and Halma Angélico, titled respectively ‘Cuento absurdo’ [‘Absurd Story’] (1908) and ‘Evocación del porvenir. Homenaje en España a la Madre en el año…’ [‘Evocation of the Future. Tribute in Spain to the Mother of the Year…’] (1930). These authors construct dystopian societies that mirror the lack of control women experienced prior to the Second Spanish Republic. I will provide a brief overview of Spanish speculative modernism followed by a textual analysis of both stories. I argue that the dystopian settings and experimental narrative techniques found in these stories are the speculative methods chosen to grapple with the contradictions of modern society’s technological progress and emerging authoritarianism. These women faced the double marginalisation attributed to género, the word for both ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ in Spanish. They are known as ‘sinsombreristas’, and part of the ‘hatless’ modern women active in the cultural milieu of early twentieth-century Spain yet systematically excluded from the literary canon for decades.
Teaching and researching multi-hyphenate marginalised writers of the ‘other Silver Age Spain’ in an American context is a continuous process of translation and cultural mediation. I often get asked to name significant Spanish women writers and explain why it is important to study them, if such a niche field cannot compare to the literary juggernauts of the American and British canons. I, too, assumed that Spanish science fiction of the early twentieth century was too esoteric and would yield few search results. While it is true that more research is needed in this area, I believe the common keywords myself and other scholars use have a lot in common with the border-crossing, community-based lives many modernist Anglophone writers lived: transatlantic, experimental, translation, female liberation, queer futures, cross-media, and collaboration. In fact, this way of understanding the inherent experimentalism, queerness, and political commitments of Spanish modernist writers leaves little doubt that speculative writing, especially science fiction, abounded during Spain’s Silver Age.
Avant-garde artistic communities emerged out of the nascent modernism and redefinition of Spanish national identity during the first third of the twentieth century. The period from 1898, the point at which Spain lost its remaining colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States, and 1936, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War is recognized as the Silver Age of Spanish literature. New technologies came into use, and neuroscientist and occasional science fiction writer Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine, a first for Spain. Artists and writers experimented with dreamlike and symbolist techniques like surrealism and ultraism, leading to an increase in fantastical work. For example, the journal Blanco y Negro [White and Black] organized a contest for fantastic stories in 1903 (Ana Casas 359). As Nil Santiáñez-Tío notes in the introduction to his anthology of Spanish science fiction from 1832 to 1913, works by Spanish writers were not included in contemporary Spanish literature anthologies or English language anthologies of science fiction. Of course, the question of translation and circulation is never far from mind, as works by Jules Verne became bestsellers in nineteenth century Spain (9).
The tropes of utopia and dystopia gained popularity in Spanish speculative fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for they became a vehicle for writers to examine human morality and spirituality. Well-known Spanish writers like Emilia Pardo Bazán, Miguel de Unamuno, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna also wrote speculative work even if they are better known for their realist fiction, newspaper articles, and essays. Juan Herrero Senés explains in his 2021 anthology, Mundos al descubierto: Antología de la ciencia ficción de la Edad de Plata (1898-1936) [Worlds to Discover: Anthology of Silver Age Science Fiction (1898-1936)], that science fiction was a minor genre during this period and lacked visibility, thus making it difficult to point to ‘a strong science fiction tradition native to Spain’ (17). He characterises Silver Age science fiction by its caution and pessimism when confronted with new social realities, leading to a prevalence of dystopias in which the authors confront the fear of losing civil liberties and being thrust into a future Spanish society gone awry. Science fiction at the time was judged as not having much aesthetic merit, but Herrero Senés does point to journalists Nilo María Fabra, José de Elola, and Jesús de Aragón as active writers of science fiction. José de Elola published more than twenty science fiction novels between 1919 and 1927 under the pseudonym ‘Coronel Ignotus’, forming the fictional-scientific library within the Sanz Calleja editing house.
Unsuspecting Dystopias: Spanish Women Writers of Science Fiction
Teresa López-Pellila and Lola Robles’s 2019 two-volume anthology of posthuman and dystopian fiction by Spanish female authors shows the diversity of speculative work by women writers. While the anthology primarily includes the term ‘science fiction’ in reference to the genre, these stories are speculative in a wider sense. They include fantastic and absurd stories, modern myths, and mad scientists. As López-Pellisa traces a female speculative modernist tradition in the prologue, she points out how such writing has often not been classified as science fiction. One such example is Emilia Pardo Bazán’s 1879 novel, Pascual López, about a medical student who develops an alchemical process to turn coal into diamonds. Throughout the stories included in the first volume, readers will find dystopian environments depicting the dailiness of futures constructed in the minds of writers who witnessed how emerging authoritarianism and new technologies threatened to pull people and cities apart.
Dystopias are rife with contradictions and attempts by individuals and societies to establish control. Ángeles Vicente and Halma Angélico’s stories exemplify what James Reitter, Robert Stauffer, and William Gillard describe as the sociological side of dystopias masquerading as utopias in their ‘Utocalypse’ chapter of Speculative Modernism (2021). They do not mention Spanish or Latin American writers or texts in the chapter, however Spanish writers also wrestled with the role of the individual in society and the use of new technologies. Vicente and Angélico’s stories align well with the imperatives of works like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which Gillard et al consider ‘utopian in nature but creates a rather sinister world that is utterly intolerant of other “impure” races or even biological impulses’ (32). This sense of establishing control by documenting daily life is something Spanish writers have been doing since the nineteenth century through the literary and artistic tradition of costumbrismo.
I propose that Vicente and Angélico’s stories represent ‘cuadros de costumbres’, vignettes of everyday life, that detail the dailiness of life in dystopias presented as utopias. Costumbrista stories have morals represented by different character types (tropes) and situations as the narrator guides the reader through the city. For example, in ‘Vuelva usted mañana’ [‘Come Again Tomorrow’], Mariano José de Larra writes of an impatient Frenchman aptly named Monsieur Sans-delai who tries to complete his business in Spain over the span of a few days only to become annoyed by the constant refrain of the story’s title.
Daily routines and habits can be found in speculative poetry and fiction across cultural and historical contexts. Spanish speculative stories remind me of the ones I recently read as a juror for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers grants. All the excerpts had a strong sense of place informed by real, or imagined, languages and cultures. 2023 Diverse Writers grant winner Ysabelle Cheung’s story ‘Please, Get Out and Dance’ comes to mind as a fantastic example of immersing the readers in a world where the characters must leave a disappearing city. Characters get swept up in the momentum of these disappearances, which showcase the power of grief and loss while bringing mundane routines and objects, especially food, into view. There is a sense of finality in Cheung’s story of evacuation and goodbyes that carries over across cultures and historical periods, reminding me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ (1976), and Vicente and Angélico’s depictions of men and women searching for rules and meaning in literal and figurative ruins.
Ángeles Vicente’s ‘Absurd Story’ (1908)
Vicente’s body of work includes social commentary in support of women’s rights, scientific and science fiction, and Zezé (1909), the first Spanish novel with a lesbian protagonist that predates Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). She writes of medical students tormented by dreams of the souls of cadavers (‘La trenza’/‘The Braid’), reinterprets the popular Spanish myth of Don Juan from the female perspective (‘La derrota de Don Juan’/‘The Defeat of Don Juan’), and writes about man and machine in ‘Historia de un automóvil’ [‘History of an Automobile’]. Vicente was born in Murcia, Spain and grew up in Argentina to Spanish parents. She would later settle in Madrid with her husband. Unfortunately, details about her life beyond 1920, including the date of her death, remain unknown. ‘Cuento absurdo’ [‘Absurd Story’] exemplifies the dailiness of staging the apocalypse in a modern Spanish city frozen in time. These vignettes of life depict the dangers of human greed and the threat of annihilation when a new society falls back on old traditions.
Guillermo Arides, an anarchist scientist, wants to destroy humanity with his invention that would annihilate all living beings. After honestly professing his knowledge of physics and ability to annihilate the world, he must appear before a judge, only to be laughed at by those who believe he is simply a mad scientist. Once free, he calls his loyal followers to his lab, all too eager to destroy tyrannical society with his invention. He triumphantly yells the Latin phrase, ‘Consumatum est!’ [‘it is completed’], the same words attributed to Jesus Christ dying on the cross (48). His loyal followers can only imagine what destruction may await them beyond his lab. Perplexed by their own survival, the survivors wander the city and witness scenes of transit systems, funeral processions, and domestic life frozen in time. Once they complete their tour of the city, they return to the lab where Arides proceeds to make the frozen people and animals disappear. From there, the survivors must forge on and make a new society out of the wreckage, which does not go according to plan. Using costumbrista generic conventions to represent daily life and customs, the survivors fall back on old human vices and their society quickly becomes a dystopia. Fighting breaks out and Arides becomes incensed by the displays of egoism and cruelty, resolving to destroy the city altogether by the end of the short story.
Vicente repurposes the sense of dailiness and satire achieved by costumbrista literary techniques in this dystopia to represent the societal fears brought about by scientific advancement and civil liberties. The story opens as follows: ‘The social problem was resolved once and for all by Guillermo Arides, the most terrible and brilliant anarchist of the past, present, and future’ (47). As an anarchist scientist, he thrives on social disorder to envision a stateless society of his own creation. The opening teases that a solution to the social problem was created by Arides himself, leaving readers wondering what aspects of this modernist urban society with its street cars, striking workers, and soldiers could have given rise to a ‘social problem.’ To destroy humanity, Arides will utilise ‘ignored interplanetary fluids’ (47) subjected to great pressure in his machine to destroy all living beings except for him and his ‘correligionarios’, or followers. Arides then delivers an impassioned speech to his followers:
Siblings, Arides called to his followers, I have called you here because the time has come to end the existing tyranny, with its privileges and infamies. In a second, many centuries of evil work will be destroyed, and there will be no inhabitants on this planet other than us, we who are gathered in this conveniently isolated area. We will no longer have more laws than our own instincts. You who remain will be tasked with the high mission of founding a new humanity. Our freedom will be our happiness. (48)
Arides professes a disdain for the ‘many centuries of evil work’, indicating a fear of technological progress and perhaps Western civilization itself. Arides calls on his followers to celebrate a new humanity built on the ashes of the old. Instead of joyously yelling and clapping after the speech, his followers stand in silence, wholly unmoved by his charisma. In what ways would this machine create a new world? The men and women fearfully look aroundl before finally shouting, ‘Yes!’ when asked if they are ready for a new humanity to rise out of the ashes. For Arides, the destruction is beautiful and necessary, a chance to reclaim an Edenic sense of paradise on Earth. Little do his followers know that they have willingly become his test subjects.
To see the devastation, survivors must take to the streets to witness human life frozen in time. There is an echo here of Spanish costumbrista literature, insofar as the narrator would stroll through the city and observe what people are doing: the bad deals they make, decisions that will cause shame to their family, and other scenarios used to make a moral argument. Arides instructs the survivors to tour a city with sprawling avenues reminiscent of Madrid’s Gran Vía. The survivors witness a dystopian scene in which people remain at their job posts and reveal the world in all its imperfections:
The scene repeated: rigid and inert bodies appeared everywhere. Some had fallen and others maintained the position in which they were surprised by the catastrophe. In the stores, merchants and sellers remained grouped in their different activities, some of them smiling, others serious and phlegmatic, as if they were ready to continue their conversations. In the homes, the inhabitants appeared committed to their domestic tasks. Were it not for the collapsed bodies and the rigidity of those that remained in their lifelike state, one could still doubt the cataclysm. (49-50)
The dailiness of Vicente’s dystopia is striking, for there is nothing particularly abnormal about the composition of these scenes. Merchants are in the middle of making sales and servants clean homes as their wealthy owners sit reading nearby. This very dailiness is what the anarchist scientist most abhors, the mundanity of social inequities. As in other costumbrista works, social classes can be identified through descriptions of behaviour, dress, and occupation. Vicente’s descriptions of city life are not surprising for the early twentieth century insofar as Arides’s meddling brings the city to a standstill and turns living beings into corpses. The survivors view these scenes up close, and they begin to recognize the flaws that plagued modern society. To this end, Arides directs their attention to protesters gathered in a plaza, ‘many of them standing and with expressions that showed as if they were still listening to a silent speaker who extended his arms from a large balcony’ (50). Evidently, class differences incited rebellions and raised discontent. Arides then asks his followers, ‘Are all of you now convinced by the success of my work?’ (51).
The survivors return to the lab and Arides turns his machine on again to remove the frozen cadavers while leaving the buildings and other material objects intact. From there, he tells the group to do as they please but to not accumulate wealth or to otherwise recreate old traditions. Unfortunately, little time passes before someone sets up residence in the royal palace and the group begins arguing about work productivity. Men fight over Esther, the prettiest woman of the group, and Arides goes home that evening upset about the failure of his project. In her doctoral dissertation on Vicente’s short fiction, Sara Toro Ballesteros reads ‘Cuento absurdo’ as a ‘the satire of a socialist utopia’ (249), pointing to these arguments as evidence of infighting among those with socialist ideals. Finally, Arides realises a solution to humans lapsing into their old customs. He jumps out of bed and exclaims, ‘I should have thought to transform, not society, but man’ (56). Why then could he not annihilate everyone, if all the survivors are doing is oppressing one another? With that, he sets the city ablaze, destroying all sentient life as if to prove that no version of humanity can escape these mortal and moral flaws. Vicente ends with an ellipsis, as if even the words themselves were swallowed whole by flammable gas.
Halma Angélico’s ‘Evocation of the Future’ (1930)
Arides’s ‘utopia’ could not last even a year, let alone a lifetime, but Angélico’s story builds on the work of generations. No longer are decisions as humorous and, at times, flippant as Vicente’s absurd story. In ‘Evocation of the Future. Tribute in Spain to the Mother of the Year…’ (1930), Angélico takes the threats to female autonomy and the political activism of her generation to create a story set in the future. Halma Angélico and Ana Ryus were pseudonyms María Francisca Clar Margarit signed her short stories (the former) and theatre (the latter) with. She spent her early childhood in the then-Spanish colony of the Philippines before moving to Madrid in 1898 (López-Pellisa and Robles 59). As a young adult she worked in well-established newspapers like ABC and El heraldo de Madrid [The Madrid Herald], and Clara Campoamor and María de la O Lejárraga’s feminist press Mujer y Cultura integral y femenina [Women and Culture Integral and Female]. Angélico does not often get cited alongside other female modernists despite being as politically active as María Teresa León and Carmen Conde, having served as vice-president of the Union of Spanish Women and Female Spain and president of the Female Lyceum Club. In 2019, Ivana Rota published critical editions of Angélico’s short story collections El templo profanado (Pro mater) (1930) [The Defiled Temple (For the Mother)] and La desertadora [The Deserter] (1932). Her speculative work trends on the side of dystopian, with her 1938 comedy Ak y la Humanidad [Ak and Humanity] taking inspiration from the play of the same name by Russian writer Jefim Sosulia to showcase a political dystopia that premiered during the Spanish Civil War.
What would you do if you were charged with ‘crimes against Maternity’ (67), as in Angélico’s story? How far would you go to defend the utopia your foremothers created?
‘Evocation of the Future’ is an eerie tale that steadfastly defends a society celebrating its annual tribute to the mother of the year. Even if the rituals seem strange at first glance, many parallels exist between this dystopia masquerading as utopia and the status of human rights in the twenty-first century. The violence women continue to face happens at such high rates that the word ‘feminicidio’ in Spanish refers to women being murdered because of their gender, sex, and/or sexuality. As in Angélico’s other work, the story introduces themes of maternity and female autonomy approximately two hundred years after 1930. As Rota describes in her article, ‘Halma Angélico: Una mirada hacia la maternidad desde la España de 1930’ (2018), Angélico has created a future society ‘in which the institution of family and the presence of partners has disappeared entirely’ (30). An elder gives a speech declaring how much society has improved since moving on from its former, uncivilised ways. He speaks out against what the society considers the horrors of abortion, which was illegal at the time, and he is met with raucous applause.
If the dailiness of Vicente’s speculative modernism draws from scenes of a modern Spanish city, Angélico replaces technology with a filter of beauty and glamour that obscures the oppression the young characters experience. The story begins with a scene of an enormous atrium filled with beautiful architecture and music:
In the centre of the atrium, a large podium stands covered in silks embroidered with gold and stones. Before it, lies an Altar of rosy marble and embossed bronze. All around, palm leaves sway their monumental fans; the ground, made of glass and marble, covers itself in roses… A far-away chorus of boys sings and, softly, the melodies of a fantastic organ that sharpens or flattens its sounds with rhythms and melodies unknown to us, reaches the lodge and inundates it with its voices… It is a temperate day. The bells that seem to be made of gold have just sounded; it would be ten in the morning in our time. Now choirs of girls arrive. They are all dressed the same. (61)
This setting with its marble altar and embroidered silks evokes a certain timelessness reminiscent of church ceremonies. This is not a site of excess, but one of adoration. Palm leaves sway, children sing, and bells ring as the community gathers to celebrate maternity in this locus amoenus, or ‘pleasant place’. Even the weather is favourable, and the narration has a certain celebratory flair to it, drawing readers into this supposed utopia. The narrator even helps readers interpret the scene, pointing out music not known to us, and telling time for those who are not native inhabitants of this society.
It soon becomes apparent through the ordered procession of children that the dailiness of this society leaves no room for individuality, and instead is designed to protect its version of ‘el hogar’, meaning both ‘hearth’ and ‘home’ in Spanish. As Rota notes, the ‘white pale woman’ (Angélico 62) who speaks with the children follows Christian values when condemning individuality and promoting equality. Following the initial procession, the children bicker amongst themselves, and the teacher chides them for being rude to their ‘siblings’. When a girl only identified as number 14 cries, the woman asks, ‘A woman as healthy as you is crying?’ (62). The girl gives an embarrassed look at her guardian and wipes her eyes. Every child has a number, something carried over from dystopias like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), to keep the children from becoming too individualistic. They must follow the three principles of virtue, talent, and work in this society based on mutual respect and cooperation. Like the disagreements in Vicente’s story, these moments show points of tension within these societies and the small ways daily life discourages independence and individuality.
The oldest elder raises his hand to begin his speech on this most solemn day for the nation: ‘We are gathered here to pay tribute to the Mother; Mother!, the highest hierarchy of woman and nation’ (63). He praises Maternity and Mothers, thanking God for the Mothers of past and present. The elder serves as our anthropological guide to the story, recounting the mythic origins of this annual celebration. Tributes are common cultural events in Spain as people gather to pay their respects to an individual or group of people at a location of significant cultural or personal importance. This case is no different as the elder explains, ‘Each year, as you all know, we gather at this site … to offer to the Mothers of the Nation this tribute of our admiration, love, and respect… No one Mother is honoured, because doing so would be to forget the unknown one, whose abnegation is impossible to verify or assess’ (64). The word ‘abnegation’ denotes a level of selflessness that can only be attained when a woman devotes herself fully to others, such as serving as a mother. He continues by celebrating how this society has conquered the barbaric ideas of the twentieth century that rid society of the false equality of inclusion.
From here, the façade of a beautiful, enlightened society unravels as readers begin to see the true nature of this sanctity of motherhood. By the end of the story, the elder elicits gasps from the crowd upon mentioning ‘crimes against Maternity’ (67). He leaves no doubt that the perpetrators of these crimes are women who ‘kill their children before or after being born’ (68). Most importantly, the story does not leave room for the perspective of women or dissidents, instead carrying out its worldbuilding through the speech that lasts most of the story. The most drastic measure and one so invasive so as to echo present legal means of controlling women and other marginalised groups is the strict control over fertility: ‘In no other way now, since our medical inspection, before and after [sexual] unions, periodically monitors and determines the citizens’ impossibility of frauds in births, thereby punished by us with the hardest of sanctions, as you all know’ (67). The audience reacts with raucous applause in praise of women who were martyrs in their era for protecting the sanctity of children and fertility, and the elder reminds them that their society is compensation for those dark times. The population supports and is already well acquainted with the idea of surveillance of sexual unions, worded in such a way as to connote social support. While each child and adult may be cared for, the flagrant violation of privacy and autonomy offers a direct social commentary about women’s rights in Spain at the time, which were only a few years off from a short window of time when women’s suffrage, divorce, and even abortion were legalised.
Angélico’s speculative tribute to motherhood ends in an ordered procession with pleasant music. Scented herbs are placed in the fire and the story ends as mysteriously as the final ellipses. I wonder if the female figures in Santos’s Un mundo are participating in a ceremony that keeps the odd cubed world spinning in the sky. They seem to – a group of women wearing identical long dresses, playing music for the denizens of this small world. Speculative traditions were so ingrained in the literature and art of modernist Spain, yet speculative stories and storytellers faced erasure due to their genre (and gender) being perceived as less serious. Vicente’s literary work remains understudied yet her ‘Cuento absurdo’ exemplifies the nascent science fiction of Silver Age Spain through which writers reimagined the potential dangers of Spain’s burgeoning modernity in recognizable apocalyptic cityscapes. Couched within the backdrop of a mad scientist set on making a new world, Vicente’s story reveals anti-capitalist and anarchist tendencies of collective action and communal living that would gain traction among anarchist political groups in the leadup to the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, both stories urge readers to pay attention to one’s surroundings and avoid lapsing into the mundanity of traditions when other ways of living are possible. The next time you pick up a worn copy of a book by a modernist writer you know and love, ask yourself if there’s something a little speculative about their work that you might have overlooked before.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Sturgeon Symposium: Celebrating Speculative Communities hosted by the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas where a version of this project was presented on a virtual panel in Fall 2022.
Author Bio
Angela Acosta is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College with a PhD in Spanish from The Ohio State University. She has published on Spanish modernism, female life-writing, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is co-editor with Rebecca Haidt for a forthcoming Special Issue of Feminist Modernist Studies on Spanish Sapphic Modernity (2024). She is a 2023 Utopia Award Finalist, 2023 Rhysling Finalist, and 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honourable Mention. Her speculative poetry and short stories have appeared in Shoreline of Infinity, Space & Time, Radon Journal, and Apparition Lit. She is author of the Elgin nominated speculative poetry collection Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and chapbook A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023).
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Vicente, Ángeles. Zezé, ed. Angela Ena Bordanada, Ediciones Lengua de Trapo, 2005.
Zanetta, María Alejandra. ‘Ángeles Santos (Portbou, Gerona, 1911).’ La otra cara de la vanguardia: Estudio comparative de la obra artística de Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos y Remedios Varo, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006, pp. 111-155.
[1] See José Carlos Mainer’s seminal essay on the creation of the Silver Age of Spanish literature, La Edad de Plata (1902-1939): Ensayo de interpretación de un proceso cultural (1968).
[2] All English translations in this article are my own.
[3] See Tània Balló’s 2015 documentary Las Sinsombrero: Sin ellas la historia no está complete for an introduction to these modern women and the term ‘sinsombrerismo’ coined by Ramón Gómez de la Serna during the 1920s.
[4] See Ángela Ena Bordonada’s book La otra edad de plata. Temas, géneros y creadores (1898-1936). These writers, including Carmen Conde, María de la O Lejárraga, and Lucía Sánchez Saornil, were othered due to their gender, genre, and political and aesthetic commitments.
[5] See his short story collection Cuentos de vacaciones: Narraciones pseudocientificas, first published in 1905. .
[6] The nineteenth and twentieth-century Spanish women writers in this first volume include Emilia Pardo Bazán, Ángeles Vicente, Halma Angélico, Condesa de Campo Alange, Alicia Araujo, María Guéra (co-authored with her son Arturo Mengotti), Magdalena Mouján Ontaño, Teresa Inglés, Roser Cardús, Rosa Fabregat, Blanca Mart, Mayi Pelot, Elia Barceló, Rosa Montero, and Lola Robles.
[7] See Michael J. Hartwell’s article “Nineteenth-Century Spanish Costumbrista Writers” for an overview of costumbrismo in Spain and notable costumbristas Mariano José de Larra, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Serafín Estébanez Calderón, and Cecila Böhl von Faber.
[8] For a complete list of stories and Vicente’s speculative work, see Mercedes Barranco Sánchez.
[9] There are only a handful of scholars of Vicente’s work at present, but interest is growing. For those who can read Spanish, I recommend Angela Ena Bordanada’s 2005 critical edition of Zezé and Ana Fernández González’s doctoral dissertation on Vicente’s writing.
[10] Rota also notes in ‘Entre utopía y distopía: el cuento “Evocación del porvenir. Homenaje en España a la Madre en el año…” de Halma Angélico’ that birthrates in Spain declined from 1900-1930 as a result of the development of contraceptives (226).
[11] In fact, there are so few mentions of futuristic technology that the most notable one Rota points out is the sound system that allows everyone within and outside of the temple to hear the tribute (220).
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