Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Women’s Fiction

Front matter

feeling strangely in mid-century spanish and latin american women's fiction gender and the scientific imaginary tess c. rankin

Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures

Series Editors L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Niamh Thornton, University of Liverpool

Introduction

1. ¿Qué es la materia? / What's the Matter? Material Rareza and Memorias de Leticia Valle

2. (Un)Toward Magnetism: Relational Rareza and Personas en la sala 3. Self-Centered Worlds: Perceptual Rareza and Nada

4. Difference and Desire after Darwin: Animal Rareza and Perto do coração selvagem

Conclusion Works Cited

Index

19 63

139 173 179

Introduction

— Clarice Lispector, Perto do coração selvagem'

M ay they make a harp out of my nerves when I die. This sentence of Lispector's expresses a wish for bodily unraveling—and for music. I have chosen it to open this study of literary constructions of gender through the lens of scientific discourse both for its reference to nerves and for its wedding of scientific and artistic images—but mostly for its beauty: for its beautiful depiction of desire. It is desire formed in the body but not contained by its form, the desire of a living woman for a new way of being in death. In the chapters that follow, I will argue explicitly for the prominence of scientific vocabulary and ideas and their relevance for reading the construction of gender in a set of mid-twentieth-century novels. Not all of the depictions of the gendered experiences of the young protagonists in these novels are beautiful: many are even violent or painful. But they are all similarly evocative and imaginative. Undergirding my argument about how we can read these novels in the light of scientific ideas is another argument about precisely the style these authors use to construct novels about young women's experiences. That argument advocates for understanding gender through the moments in literature that resist narrative distillation. As we

1 Clarice Lispector, Perto do coracdo selvagem [1943] (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1998), 172, [164]. All quotations in English are from Alison Entrekin's translation: Near to the Wild Heart (New York: New Directions, 2012). Sources date the publication of this novel to both 1943 and 1944. The English translation identifies the original copyright date as 1943, and a write-up published in O Jornal on December 31, 1943, suggests that the novel was already released by that time. See Adonis Filho, “Perto do coracao selvagem,” O Jornal, December 31, 1943, 7. Published translations are enclosed in quotation marks throughout with while my own translations in parentheses are not. Pagination of translated passages appears in brackets in in-text citations.

will see, Lispector's protagonist offers up many such moments, and it is her reflection above that I hope might productively set the tone for what follows. Along with Perto do coração selvagem from 1943, I read Rosa Chacel's Memorias de Leticia Valle (1945), Norah Lange's Personas en la sala (1950), and Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945).

All four novels were written by women about young female protagonists. I pick up on Carmen Martín Gaite's term chica rara to examine the strange protagonists of these four novels? It is important to situate this term historically, though I will argue that it can do important work outside of its original context and may indeed be useful for feminist thought today. Martín Gaite used chica rara to refer to the sort of protagonists that emerged in opposition to the chaste, Catholic, romantic heroines of the novela rosa, who were meant to become the perfect wives and mothers envisioned by Franco's regime. In Desde la ventana, Martín Gaite describes Carmen Laforet's protagonist Andrea, in Nada, as the prototypical chica rara. In Usos amorosos de la postguerra espafiola, she also observes that rara was a term used to censure young women's nonconformist behavior or explain their social failures (remaining single, for example). Though this figure is usually limited to her appearance in postwar Spain, Debra Ochoa has referred to chicas raras beyond the postwar period, and even post-Franco, to discuss female protagonists who challenge gender norms or whose femininity registers some sort of chafing strangeness of gender.

In some senses, the chica rara as Martín Gaite conceived her might seem to set the bar for rareza rather low for nonconformity or strangeness. And indeed, Andrea could read as a fairly conventional protagonist with a moderate rebellious streak. I believe, however, that that is a good thing: rareza need not manifest itself in radical challenges to conventional gender roles. Rather, we will see it on a fine-grained level pervading even the smallest exchanges, perceptions, and thoughts that mark these young women and affect how they incorporate the world around them, and how the world treats them in response. Another key aspect of rareza in Martín Gaite's original

2 Carol Maier translated Chacel's novel as Memoirs of Leticia Valle in 1994; however, all translations here are my own. I will cite Charlotte Whittle's translation of Lange's People in the Room (Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2018) and Edith Grossman's translation of Laforet's novel, also titled Nada (Nothing) (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).

3 See Carmen Martín Gaite, Desde la ventana: Enfoque femenino de la literatura española (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987), 101.

4 Carmen Martín, Usos amorosos de la postguerra española [1987] (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011).

5 Debra J. Ochoa, “Critiques of the ‘Novela Rosa’: Martín Gaite, Almodóvar, and Etxebarría,” Letras Femeninas 32, no. 1 (2006): 189-203.

usage and relevant here is howit reflects observations, often by other women, about something odd going on in women and girls. She noted that women were labeled raras by those around them (the inescapable strangeness of certain single women captured by phrases like “Esta va para solterona” [She's going to end up an old maid]): these judgments suggest observers” (often other women's) ability to catch a glimpse of gendered strangeness—a wrong gesture or odd interest (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos 38). In that sense, such judgments register and organize categories around real, material behaviors and expressions of affect. Meanwhile, scientific ideas were at work also shaping how people categorized and saw their own experiences.

The first decades ofthe twentieth century saw an abundance of publications describing scientific discoveries to lay audiences. Texts in French, German, and English were translated in Spanish and Portuguese, and autochthonous scientific and pseudoscientific writing spread through Spain and Latin America. Through everything from Darwinism to Umwelten to magnetism, scientists asked their readers to consider a world in which solid matter dissolved into a blur of interacting particles, our senses misled us, and the boundaries of the self and the human fell away. The dissemination of these reimaginings touched every area of human experience—from politics and governance to social mores and culture—and new scientifically inspired possibilities and anxieties seeped into all manner of social, political, and cultural formations. While some scientific-political and scientific-cultural pairings in the Spanish and Latin American contexts have been examined, in the study that follows I turn to gender, understanding it as a felt experience entrenched in everyday life and shaped by how we imagine our material and affective relations in and with the world—relations that were being fundamentally reshaped by contemporaneous scientific advancements. Guided by affect theory and new materialist theory, I consider our sensorial and affective feelings as influenced by discourses that help us understand the world, particularly oft-overlooked scientific ones, which escaped from their scholarly confines and filtered into the public imagination.

Such an interdisciplinary tendency has had its critics: Max Eastman, in The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (1931), posits that the prominence of science explains *the whole contemporary agitation among critics and literary professors; it explains the present tendencies in fiction; it explains the ‘modernist’ poets" (whom he generally dismisses as obfuscating and unintelligible despite their attempt to *surrender themselves [...] to the mere uninterpreted qualities of experience"). This takedown seems to me

6 Max Eastman, The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science (New York: Scribner, 1931), 11, 85.

rather promising. The fact that the prominence of science was, in Eastman's eyes, responsible for everything he disliked about literature and literary studies among his contemporaries suggests that the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond saw the burgeoning impact of scientific ideas. But before detailing my methodology for reading literature in the age of science, I want to set out my approach to the topic 1 will be examining through literary and scientific lenses—gender and its construction.

As A. Finn Enke sets out succinctly on the first page of Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies:

Feminist, women's, and gender studies grew partly from Simone de Beauvoir's observation that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Transgender studies extends this foundation, emphasizing that there is no natural process by which anyone becomes woman, and also that everyone's gender is made: Gender, and also sex, are made through complex social and technical manipulations that naturalize some while abjecting others.”

Gender is made, and people become women in a messy and never complete process. In what follows I will focus on femininity, rather than womanhood, treating it as an open, gendered field that may tilt subjects into becoming always-imperfect women. Judith Butler cites Aretha Franklin's singing “You make me feel like a natural woman” to discuss gender as constructed and performative.* I take femininity to be an exercise in feeling like. Feeling like means asymptotically approaching and never arriving; it speaks to the imperfect and never complete nature of gender. It sometimes means veering away from social norms into a zone of estrangement or alienation.

Gender manages to function as a category that is strictly policed while (perhaps because) its boundaries are porous and difficult to define. Even as gender is produced through a largely binary system, it not only leaves evidence of that system's constructed nature but also constantly registers its affective-material openness to other modes of being. The felt experience of gender thus includes feelings of its unsettledness. To try to speak of what individuals feel their gender to be runs us quickly into narrative and linguistic boundaries. I am grateful, then, to be able to turn to such eloquent, perplexing novels as those I study here. Novels do not necessarily mirror

7 A.Finn Enke, Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 1.

8 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 317.

scientific thought, nor do they even necessarily refract it through literary language. Nonscientific writing may in fact prove to be anticipatory, pushing at the edge of a possibility or anxiety that is coming onto the horizon of the public's imagination even before its scientific theorization.

While I do note some of the “social and technical manipulations" that construct gender, I am primarily interested in how all social experience is internalized as gendered and in how those resultant gendered feelings can shift based on shared ways of imagining the world. Gender is everywhere: itis in the process of being formed in every action and interaction. Whereas gender roles may be easier to spot, I discuss gender as a felt experience, created in part by what society assigns as roles, certainly, but also shaped by patterns of acts, affective modes, and discourses that determine how we think about, move through, and internalize the world around us. One such discourse, largely neglected in relation to gender, is scientific discourse. While art and gender, literature and gender, politics and gender, law and gender, and many other such pairings abound in contemporary scholarship, science and gender is often circumscribed by a narrow understanding of their potential relationship, defined by scientific research on the topics of sex and gender. While biomedical science has been mined for its perspective on sex and gender—and its disciplinary control over them—other, less apparently pertinent fields are often neglected.? Reading early to mid-twentieth-century scientific writing for popular audiences, I draw out the trends, anxieties, possibilities, and models for understanding the world that would have reached their readers and an even wider swath of the popular imagination. Along the way, I find science and literature asking similar questions about how we sense or perceive our environments, how we delimit bodies and matter and humanness, and how we relate and communicate.

In all cases, I use feeling in multiple senses, informed by affect theory and new materialism, as well as by the scientific texts I study. While we might think of emotions as the socially structured and defined forms that affect takes, leaving an unincorporated, felt remainder (picking up on Brian Massumi), I tend toward an affection for the term feelings. Feelings hint at the importance of material sensation, and they allow us to look for insight in both pre-organized states (we can feel a rush of adrenaline, it, too, a material thing) and in the everyday expressions of emotion (I feel bored, I feel anxious) whose interrogation might yield unexpected insight into who or what we feel we are at that moment. I choose feelings over emotions in order

9 Seechapter 1 for a discussion of early twentieth-century biomedical discourses on sex.

to sidestep the affect/emotion divide that has persisted in some affect theory and to allow for the aspect of materiality implicit in feeling.

Writing on the very process by which affect has both a social and bodily existence, Teresa Brennan uses the term “transmission of affect” “to capture a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect."^ John Protevi, in Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, writes that “affect is concretely the imbrication of the social and the somatic, as our bodies change in relation to the changing situations in which they find themselves.”* Texts such as Elizabeth A. Wilson's Gut Feminism or Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling explore precisely that overlap, that inextricable connection between body and society that affect theory often explores. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes spaces as “like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.”” Thus the body is shaped by what it finds close at hand, by the motions it goes through, by what is made easeful and what is made difficult by the space it inhabits.

Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter sets out a philosophical/political project to think through the commonly accepted "partition of the sensible" (via Ranciére) into dull matter versus vibrant life, reworking this division in favor of vital materiality. She draws on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, Deleuze, Bergson, and Driesch, contesting the idea that “materiality” should be thought of as purely Marxist and not include Foucaudian bodies and pleasures or Deleuzian assemblages.? Bennett's turn to sympathy picks up on the presence of affect in her work on materiality. In the chapter “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman” in Material Ecocriticism, Bennett attempts to extend the notion of sympathy to nonhuman and inorganic bodies, reworking it as “an impersonal ontological infrastructure, an undesigned system of affinities (which persist alongside antipathies)

10 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. She cites processes like chemical or electrical entrainment as scientific examples of how affect is transmitted: they are processes “whereby one person's or one group's nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another's” (9). The feelings I explore in this book are sometimes shared, but other times one person's feeling is internalized in a very different form by the other. Brennan refers to feelings as “sensations that have found the right match in words” (5). My own use of feelings is a bit broader and includes experiences not fully expressed in language.

11 John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xiv.

12 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.

13 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.

between and within bodies” and “a material agency, a power of bodies human and nonhuman, a mode of impersonal connection, attachment, and care that proceeds from below subjectivity and into subjectivity.”* From this definition, sympathy becomes inclination, the gently cocked head of the nonchalant listener or the plant turned slightly toward the sun. Mimetic posture is one way into recognition that crosses into and out of the human, and that is key for Bennett's understanding of affect, highlighting again the physicality of feelings. These tendencies in recent scholarship generally orient my approach to what it means to think about gender as felt—as simultaneously affective and material, as relational, as incorporating human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic bodies. My theorization of how gendered processes of feeling, relating, and desiring occur is based on scientific writing contemporary to the novels I study.

How we think and talk about ourselves shifts through metaphor, analogy, or more oblique uses of language or imagery that can arise from any number of areas. In Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity, Lee Scrivner describes this vividly:

When we change the technologies or materials through which we analogize ourselves—whether we see ourselves as creatures made of clumps of earth, or of humors in and out of balance, or of temperatures and pressures of blood; whether our mental activity is conceived through the image of a filing cabinet or an Internet search engine— each respective self-imagining will suggest and then incite adjustments in our outlooks, fixations, values, and behaviors.”

Thus Laura Otis examines metaphor in Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (1999) as a way of tracking the possibilities opened up by scientific thought (as well as the political and social concerns that shaped scientific investigation). Otis convincingly argues for the mutual influence of scientific and literary imaginaries underlain by common political anxieties, largely in the work of literary authors who have an explicit scientific interest.

It is instructive to examine the ways in which the field of science studies has in recent years established various methodologies for considering the interaction and occasionally the blurring of science and literature.

14 Jane Bennett, "Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman," in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 239-40, 50.

15 Lee Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24.

Sometimes science fiction joins the two fields directly, but often science is seen to pass out of a disciplinary structure, through a sociopolitical anxiety or an imaginative metaphor, and then into literary expression. Through a number of productive and creative readings of literature, critics have contributed to how we think about that middle space, and what its productive possibilities are.

In Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction, Gillian Beer writes: “Most major scientific theories rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor. [...] When it is first advanced, theory is at its most fictive."^ I argue that both during that period of fictiveness and during the time when once-novel scientific theory has solidified as common sense, scientific ideas do not just influence what we think and believe about the world but how we experience it and how we feel ourselves to be in it.

Beer moves deftly between scientific and literary texts when she writes on Darwin's imagination and empathy; Elizabeth Grosz structures creative genealogies that arc from Darwin to Irigaray (see chapter 4). Beer, Gross, and Otis have most provocatively shifted the ground for the study of science and literature, but they stand alongside numerous other critics who take up instances of scientific language in literary work, trace lines of influence out of the hard sciences into popular discourse and back again, and more generally track the possibilities of new scientific paradigms beyond the strictures of a single discipline.

The scientific writing I examine comes from books, magazines, and newspaper articles and is mostly aimed at a general reading public. Some of the narratives have wandered so far afield from their underpinning scientific inspiration that they become pseudoscience (see popular books on magnetism and the occult in chapter 2). In other cases, articles attest to the widespread knowledge of certain important concepts that extends beyond even a literary or literate public (as with Darwinism, examined in chapter 4). I am less interested in highly specialized scientific discourse circulated within the confines of scholarly journals, and more interested in the translations and mutations of scientific ideas out of the academy and into the popular imagination. However, the divide between the two is not entirely rigid, with scientists themselves addressing broader audiences

16 Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1; emphasis in original.

in general interest publications. While my sources are textual, I highlight how certain ideas reached the public in other ways, be it through talks and museum exhibits or images in newspapers. I hope to show that these novels, despite being *high-brow" cultural products whose readership would have been limited, in part by factors like class, are a creative response to ideas that circulated more widely.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientific-literary relationship is usually figured through patterns in language that make that relationship apparent. Sometimes metaphors in scientific writing make clear the sociopolitical and/or literary influences of its author; other times literary works pick up vocabulary that originated in a scientific field. It is tempting to jump at each mention of vibrations or atoms in a nonscientific text as evidence of the traffic in scientific ideas and their ability to permeate the popular imagination. Gaining access to a wider scientific repertoire allows us to be attuned to echoing implications of metaphoric structures that we might otherwise overlook: we might recognize that an allusion to evolution does not just connote change or progress but emits a static-electric anxiety that touches on the randomness of variation, the unperfected state of humanhood, and the openness of the species. Some rhetorical figures may have dulled to commonplaces with time while others might always have carried a literary burnish that obscured their scientific sides. And indeed the appearance of such words and concepts does make an argument for the ubiquity and productivity of scientific ideas outside of their original disciplines. But taking a broader view of what kind of thinking and feeling vibratory or atomic theory, for example, made possible allows us to see their presence in more abstract ways that perhaps more fundamentally shaped contemporary texts even in the absence of telltale linguistic markers.

Lisa Blackman, in Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation, carefully brings scientific concepts into the realm of affect theory. While that move can be a tricky one— critics are often accused of a lack of rigor in approaching the scientific material—her reading of concepts in neuroscience, including those that have fallen out of favor, attends to the underlying debates and methodologies in the field that may prove suggestive and fruitful for affect theorists in the humanities exploring questions of consciousness and embodiment. She is also able to trace concerns that resurfaced in scientific conversations over decades and even centuries, pursuing an approach to chronology that suggests the persistence and continued relevance of ideas in scientific and nonscientific debate.”

17 See Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (London: Sage, 2013), 181.

Regarding the timeline of the reception of scientific ideas, the editors of Vibratory Modernism"^—a volume that pairs a scientific concept with a literary movement—argue convincingly, citing Michael Whitworth, that even though earlier certain concepts they examine had been discredited by the 1920s, modernist authors continued to pick up on "outdated" scientific frameworks in part because the rapidly developing science of the time was not able to offer constantly up-to-date authoritative theories of quantum physics, in part because some scientists continued to put forward older concepts, and in part because of the resonance that loosely interpreted scientific notions had found outside of the discipline.” This lag effect is

18 Something of an anomaly, Anglophone modernism with its aesthetic innovations for portraying perception and the visible and invisible world, and human consciousness— particularly works by Virginia Woolf—has attracted the attention of scholars looking at the interface of science and literature. One such exploration is Holly Henry's Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). While such modernism differs from Spanish-language modernismo, the works examined in this study might be said to be participating in an international conversation and to maintain some relationship with English-language modernism. I do not wish to position these or other Spanish and Latin American works as in any way derivative of a British or US tradition. (Apparent consonances often awaken a desire to search for influence: see chapter 4 for more on Clarice Lispector's insistence that she had not read James Joyce when a phrase from his work was suggested as the title for her own.) Rather, I believe there may be some value in considering modernism-modernismo writ large: Susan Kirkpatrick describes modernism as the aesthetic response to processes of modernization (see Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España (1898-1931), translated by Jacqueline Cruz, [Madrid: Cátedra, 2003]). Jonathan Flatley uses the term to refer to the “range of practices that attempt in one way or another to respond to the gap between the social realities of modernization and the promises of the project of modernity,” making modernism for him the symbolic space of contestations of modernity (Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], 32). Scientific advances indeed form part of processes of modernization, but we will see in a number of social and political contexts how those processes often entailed constraining women's possibilities. The novels in this study may be considered modern due to their aesthetic and formal innovation, but they also emerge from contexts in which women's roles in modernity are being shaped in concert with national narratives, bringing women's actions under scrutiny and increased control. The chapters that follow will explore the anxiety awakened by the need to forge women's place in modernity, a restrictive process that often called upon scientific discourse for justification. For a recent comparative study that locates Spanish modernism in a European context, see Katharine Murphy's *Spanish Modernism in Context: Failed Heroism and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Pío Baroja and Joseph Conrad,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97, no. 5 (2020): 807-29.

19 Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15.

helpful to keep in mind when attempting to trace the paths that scientific thought took through time and through various disciplines.

The felt experience of gender might be defined or structured by countless categories, but here I propose just four that, broad and overlapping as they are, allow me to explore a wide range of scientific thinking that filtered into popular understanding at the time—scientific discourses and narratives, and even fragments of scientific ideas, comprising a more overlooked influence in analyses of gender in literary studies. These four categories are materiality, relation, perception, and desire. I argue that understandings of these categories shifted with emerging scientific concepts. That meant a shift in the potential ways gender was constructed through those same categories. Fascination with Darwinism, for example, rattled the human-animal division, and women—seen as serpentine, feline, or simply monstrous— could be made to answer for resultant anxieties.”

Atoms and molecules broke down solid matter and with it the limits of bodies and objects. These and other scientific narratives propagated for a nonspecialist audience will be explored in four chapters that each examine a different novel: ¿Qué es la materia? / What's the Matter? Material Rareza and Memorias de Leticia Valle; (Un)Toward Magnetism: Relational Rareza and Personas en la sala; Self-Centered Worlds: Perceptual Rareza and Nada; and Difference and Desire after Darwin: Animal Rareza and Perto do coragáo selvagem.

Published within a ten-year span, these four novels share in a specific historic moment, but from the perspective of diverse geographical locations and linguistic traditions. I am able to trace how related ideas circulated between Spain and Latin America, both through the publishing market and the effects of exile following the Spanish Civil War, resulting in shared referents on both sides of the Atlantic. I also address the distinct historical contexts affecting women, and women authors, in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil when these books were published. In all three countries, social restrictions on women were tightening after an earlier moment of expansion. I look at the specific challenges these authors faced as women writers, particularly in the creation of authorial personas that were heavily gendered

20 Kyla Schuller focuses on another way the human species relates to other species by looking at Lyme patients and “arguling] that spirochete illness exposes how the human sensory and emotional apparatus doesn't pertain to a singular subject but to a complex microbial choreography of which the human is one part." Schuller's analysis is a good example of how the scientific possibilities I raise in separate chapters—the openness of the human body in chapter 1, and the openness of the human species in chapter 4—overlap and coexist. Kyla Schuller, *The Microbial Self: Sensation and Sympoeisis,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5, no. 3 (2018): 53.

and that they could not entirely control themselves. 1 do not posit these specific experiences as broadly shared even by other women within their own countries, as their identities were shaped by their race, class, relatively privileged positions, and the act of authorship itself. The social and cultural experience of something like Darwinism, which sparked so many racist and eugenicist responses, would be different for Black or Indigenous authors. I do suggest that their works register some of the cultural and philosophical questions about how we experience the world in gendered ways that cut across social sectors.

Fundamentally these authors are connected by their innovative use of language in their narratives of unusual young women. While Lispector is considered part of the terceira fase do modernismo in Brazil, Lange formed part of the Argentinean avant-garde, Chacel, a member of the Generación del ’27, would go into exile in Latin America, and Laforet would continue to write under the dictatorship in Spain, I refer to all four as participating in the broad context of international literary modernism with works whose experimental prose styles engaged modern societal shifts, in this case with regard to gender. Not only do these authors explore the construction of gender through their young women protagonists but their use of language pushes against narrative formats. Descriptions, details, and fragments seem to collide with plot and even character development. Their prose styles are experimental in varying degrees, but in all cases their language seems to create affective confusion: readers must ask why these protagonists seem to feel as they do. And what are the pertinent details that make us understand who people are in the world and how they act? In all cases, narrative seems secondary to the creative unfolding of textual material.