Resumen de Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Almudena Grandes’ Los aires difíciles
In Almudena Grandes’ 2002 novel, Los aires difíciles, the protagonist Sara is adopted and socialized in an upper-class household, but at the age of sixteen, is returned to her parents by her benefactress, Doña Sara, who ‘había cansado de jugar de mamás y papás’. Sara’s resentment at this abrupt severance from her former life leaves her with an intense hatred of Doña Sara, and a desire for both the recuperation of her former status and vengeance. In fashioning an adoptive mother figure, Doña Sara, as the transmitter of class norms, Grandes hypostasizes the artificiality of the mother’s role in reproducing intractable social edicts. In other words, the reproduction of class in this novel is demonstrated to be a social construct associated with maternity, not a natural outgrowth of the mother-daughter relationship. Departing from a theoretical basis of fashion studies and contemporary Spanish history, I analyse the maternal transmission of class in this novel. My analysis consists of two parts: an initial theoretical scrutiny of the relationship between class, clothing and motherhood, while the second part will examine this motif in the work in question.
