The female subject from the periphery: An analysis of domestic spaces in the last two novels by Ana María Matute

Abstract

In this paper we will focus in the last two novels of Ana María Matute: Paraíso inhabitado (2008) and Demonios familiares (2014). Based on the study of the novel’s domestic areas and the place that the female subject occupies in them, we will review together the categories of genre and nation starting with the female subject’s situation in the family home. Far from the classic analogy that assimilates home with country, we will try to propose innovative and more complex ways of analysing the relationship between this space with language, tradition, territory and genre, reading in the novels a potential nomadism (Braidotti, 1994) that it develops in the intersection between female genre and Catalan national/cultural identity with the Spanish Civil War and the post-war as a background.