El amor lesbiano como sustituto del amor materno en cuatro novelas españolas

Reviewed by: El amor lesbiano como sustituto del amor materno en cuatro novelas españolas: Julia, El amor es un juego solitario, Efectos secundarios y Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes by Dolores Martín Armas Nancy Vosburg Martín Armas, Dolores. El amor lesbiano como sustituto del amor materno en cuatro novelas españolas: Julia, El amor es un juego solitario, Efectos secundarios y Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Lewiston: Mellen, 2014. Pp. 158. ISBN 978-0-77344-478-2. El amor lesbiano como sustituto del amor materno en cuatro novelas españolas constitutes a methodical application of psychoanalytic theory to explicate the representation of lesbian desire in four Spanish novels published between 1968 and 1998. Dolores Martín Armas has selected novels that represent milestones in the evolution of Spanish lesbian literature, all recognized for their literary quality: Ana María Moix’s Julia (1968), El amor es un juego solitario by Esther Tusquets (1978), Luisa Etxenike’s Efectos secundarios (1996), and Lucía Etxebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998). The selection of texts spanning thirty years from dictatorship to post-transition Spain allows the author to demonstrate an evolution in the representation of lesbian desire, even while linking the novels through the lens of a common denominator based on psychoanalytic theories of the development of lesbian identity. Martín Armas’s introductory chapter is an overview of the book’s contents along with a succinct history of lesbian literature in Spain. She concludes the introduction by articulating her goal that her book “aportará al lector una nueva perspectiva de la lesbiana como ser íntimo” (13). While this is a laudible goal, her exposition of lesbian desire as a substitute for maternal love has the effect of reducing lesbian identity to a single psychological process that may inhibit our understanding of the many ways that lesbians can experience desiring and being desired apart from a desire for maternal love, both in fiction and in fact. Chapter 1 is an exposition of Martín Armas’s theoretical framework, which centers primarily on psychoanalytic, specifically object-relations, theory as developed by Melanie Klein. Klein’s work focuses on an individual’s evolution starting from the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-oedipal stage. Martín Armas traces the development of object-relations theory from Freud and his contemporaries (Helene Deutsch and Klein) through the feminist theories of Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin, and the lesbian theories of Teresa De Lauretis, Charlotte Wolff, and Suzanne Juhasz. The author begins this chapter by stating that it is necessary “comprender el proceso por el que se conforma la subjetividad lesbiana” (15). For those who subscribe to psychoanalytic theory, this seems like a logical starting point, but this reader cannot help but wonder if there is only one process conditioning lesbian subjectivity, as her statement suggests. Might there not be other processes, perhaps genetic, biological or cultural, by which a young girl comes to identify as lesbian? Nevertheless, Martín Armas presents a convincing argument that the lesbian subjectivity of the fictional characters in the novels studied is conditioned by or reflective of the relationship of these characters to their mothers, even though one could argue that this is not necessarily the case in all Spanish lesbian novels. Martín Armas dedicates the next chapter to Moix’s Julia. Drawing on the novel’s extant criticism, Martín Armas demonstrates how Moix’s novel perfectly illustrates the development of a never explicitly expressed lesbian subjectivity, connected to (the absence of) maternal love. The primary theorists invoked in the analysis are Suzanne Juhasz, who postulates the need for motherly “recognition,” and Charlotte Wolff, whose work revolves around the emotional disposition of lesbian desire and the loss of maternal love. She draws on Wolff’s theories again in the next chapter in analyzing the relationship between Clara and Elia in Esther Tusquets’s El amor es un juego solitario. It isinteresting that she chose the second novel in Tusquets’s trilogy to [End Page 348] analyze, since Tusquets’s first novel, the much better known El mismo mar de todos los veranos, could also be studied in the context of the mother/daughter relationship. I

Art · Humanities · Lesbian · Sociology · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Gender and Feminist Studies · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies