Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women

In her first book Lou Charnon-Deutsch looked at the representation of women in male-authored texts. This book deals with women-authored texts of the same period. While women are unveiled as monstrous and are chastised or abandoned in male-written texts, novels written by women teach women how to deal with abandonment and undeserved punishment. In approaching her subject, Charnon-Deutsch draws on modern theorists such as Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Lawrence Lipking, Luce Irigaray, Carol Gilligan, and Teresa de Lauretis. Charnon-Deutsch explores women's domestic fiction as the product of a patriarchal society dependent upon the enforcement of certain sexual arrangements to sustain itself. She contends that the production of sexual identity is crucial to the exercise of power by a conservative patriarchy and that the domestic novel was a particularly productive genre in this regard. At the same time, she argues that feminine desire accommodates itself even within the most repressive power relations that women writers sometimes imagined as fostering rather than hindering feminine maturity. With a recognition of the contradictions inherent in women's fiction, she examines different psychological desires underlying the cult of domesticity. While some desires seem subversive to the ideal of femininity as promoted in Spanish culture, Charnon-Deutsch concludes that most promote sexual arrangements that reinforce repressive norms of feminine conduct.