Resumen de Thresholds and margins in Rodoreda's El carrer de les Camèlies
This article uses the writings of two key theorists of liminality -the social anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner- to explore a novel considered by many to be a study in marginality: Rodoreda's prize-winning El carrer de les Camèlies (1966). The idea of process, paradox, and metamorphosis associated with the liminal is contrasted with the static, closed, and binary concept of the marginal. Through the subsequent analysis of Rodoreda's often harrowing account of Cecília Ce's picaresque journey from the threshold on which she is abandoned as a baby to her relative stability at the novel's close I propose new interpretative perspectives. Instead of viewing the protagonist as confined to the margins, permanently at one remove from the centre, a liminal reading repositions her temporally and spatially: she is at the heart of a process of transition, midway between separation and reincorporation; and she is similarly located at the midpoint between two centres, in a third liminal space that subverts the margin/centre duality.
