Desde el espacio interior : habitaciones propias y ventanas abiertas en Virginia Woolf y Carmen Martín Gaite

Abstract

Virginia Woolf and Carmen Martín Gaite are two canonical figures within the English and Spanish literary panorama of the twentieth century. Both devoted their lives to writing and placed an especial emphasis on the constrains of a patriarchal society that had silenced the voices of many literary women. This is the subject matter of Woolf's "A Roomof One's Own" (1929), an essay that, as Martín Gaite has claimed, clearly inspired her to write "Desde la ventana: enfoque femenino de la literatura española" (1993). Their attempt to re-construct the history of female writing in the literary traditions of England and Spain, together with their concern with the search for the "écriture féminine", has tumed their discourse into an appropriate arena from which feminist critics have developed their theories. The purpose of my article is to demonstrate, firstly, that the function and content of Martín Gaite's essay parallels Woolf's, and, secondly, that her position with regard to female writing should be analysed in the light of this literary precedent.