Stillborn dreams: infant loss and maternal identity in Gaite’s "Lo que queda enterrado"

• Debra C. Ames ^[1]
  1. [1] Valparaiso University
• Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 43, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Imaginarios económicos en la literatura y el cine de España y Latinoamérica), págs. 84-96
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The developing field of motherhood studies has led scholars to re-examine the complex nature of maternal identity, yet only recently has attention turned to the figure of the childless mother—the woman who has experienced pregnancy and perhaps childbirth but who has no living children. The silence surrounding infant loss has greatly limited representations of this maternal figure, making Carmen Martín Gaite’s story “Lo que queda enterrado” an illuminating, poignant, and rare psychological portrait of parents coping with the death of their daughter and the social erasure of their identity as parents. Here I analyze the story through the lens of scholarship on the trauma of infant loss as the key to understanding the characters and Martín Gaite’s perceptive depiction of their experience. I also examine the Franco regime’s normative models of female subjectivity and masculinity during the late 1950s to show how these rigid expectations inform the characters’ expressions of grief and the meaning of parental identity for them. Although María and Lorenzo appear to be exemplary citizens eager to comply with national pressures to have children, Martín Gaite exposes the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of human reproduction, and with it, the absurdity of the link between family size and commitment to Spain’s future implicit in the regime’s discourse on procreation