Resumen de Domestic disturbances: breaking the mold of female comportment in Caterina Albert i Paradís' "Pas de Comèdia"
While the public persona of Caterina Albert i Paradís (1869–1966) maintained the propriety expected of the “senyoreta del poble,” her authorial voice, symbolically named “Víctor Català,” wrote against late nineteenth-century Catalan nation-building rhetoric by addressing such polemical topics as infanticide and domestic strife. Her short story “Pas de comèdia” (1948) is representative of the themes that drove her to write under a masculine pen name. In this story, she vividly narrates the travails a prototypical, rural Catalan woman faced while living with a condescending and abusive husband whose animalistic treatment leaves her bruised, but not defeated. Maria, the protagonist, finds encouragement through her supportive neighbors and discovers her own strength to resist and revolt. Through Maria, Albert addresses the grave social problem of domestic violence and works to subvert patriarchal authority and domination. She also points to a solution, which resides both in community involvement and in the forging of a culture of female autonomy and strength. In this article, I revisit Albert’s contemporary critics and employ current feminist theory to show how Albert adroitly negotiated between traditional ways of life and carefully disguised feminism. In “Pas de comèdia” Albert provides a model for female comportment in literary society based on strength and wit, reflected by the behavior that occurs in the home of the protagonist. This study of a short story never before analyzed in depth explores how the paradoxical and dual authorial identity Albert/Català may not be as dichotomous as once imagined
