concha méndez's feminist third space in surtidor

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CONCHA MÉNDEZ’S FEMINIST THIRD SPACE IN SURTIDOR

MEGAN BRIGGS MAGNANT University of California, Berkeley

Concha Méndez’s unique brand of feminism in her poetry, particularly in the 1928 collection Surtidor, addresses funda-mental questions that have accompanied feminist thought in Spain and beyond, questions that can often separate dif-ference feminists and equality feminists. Is Méndez creating a space of her own, searching for an escape for women, devel-oping a feminine writing, celebrating feminine difference? Or is she striving for equality and inclusion, trying to gain access for herself and her female colleagues to the public spaces that aren’t available to them, working to end the exclusion? I pro-pose a reading of Surtidor that does both, by identifying and analyzing the manifestations and complications of various feminist theories that circulate today: she subtly and dis-creetly navigates her way through and around them, creating a special model of feminism that is all her own. Close read-ings of poems will show evidence of her maneuvering, and will also demonstrate Méndez’s ingenuity in creating and carving out a new direction for feminism, one that combines, supports, complicates. She straddles the lines that divide theories, thus connecting them avant la lettre in a holistic and hybrid new feminism—a kind of Bhabhian Third Space. This careful crafting allows her poems to fit into various views of feminism, while simultaneously evading complete adherence to one or another, so that her poems resist being read in one simple manner.

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Much recent scholarship has attempted to rediscover the work of women writers from Spain, including Méndez, writers who have been excluded despite, in many cases, their active involvement and relationships with writers who are now unquestionably part of the Generación del 27, for exam-ple. In his book Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990, John C. Wilcox explains that women writers “have been marginalized because the phrase ‘Spanish poetry of the 1920s’ is synony-mous with an androcentric style” (87). Rationales to explain their exclusion include their marriages to other writers, which relegated them to a subordinate position; their exile; and/or the general misogynistic culture of Spain. In reality, Catherine Bellver has shown it was probably a combination of these factors.1 Regarding Méndez’s case in particular, she notes:

Before the Civil War, Concha Méndez was a recognized poet and a full participant within cultural circles, but the war that forced her into exile also virtually erased her from the literary annals. She is not mentioned in most postwar histories of literature, and she is excluded from the landmark bio-bibliographical work on Spanish women writers published in 1986 by Carolyn L. Galer-stein. In her youth, however, she was well-known for her vitality, athletic prowess, and independence. (“Exile” 28)

Méndez and her contemporaries, however, were not simply left out of the canon because they married or because they left Spain—they were removed from these circles later “because the tendencies inherent in the process of canon formation to dismiss their coincidences with male literature as derivative and to disparage their gynocentricism guaran-teed their passage from marginalization to oblivion” (Bellver, “From Illusion to Disappearance” 220).

As critics have undertaken a rediscovery process, many have attempted to place Méndez and other female writers alongside their male contemporaries, often by reading them with different standards. Wilcox, for example, argues for a gynocentric view of these poets because, simply put, “tradi-

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tional reading practices could not do justice to the originality of the poetry written by women in Modern Spain” (2). In a gesture reminiscent of affirmative action policies, he advo-cates that we change the way we read and evaluate female poets, a stance both noble and problematic. Gregory K. Cole’s book Spanish Women Poets of the Generation of 1927 as-sumes this same inclusionary move: in his introduction he examines Méndez and other poets against “Julius Peterson’s eight requirements for a generation” (15), determining that they do constitute one (19). Insisting that women be a part of a canon or a generation, however, is too simplistic, and relies on too many assumptions. But the process of reading wo-men’s work and then inserting them into the canon, or even restructuring a canon, is also an inherently gendered and backward-looking act.3

This debate over the canon, and whether to retroactively insert women writers into it (and if so, how), reflects a larger feminist question—one that I believe can be illuminated through Méndez’s poetry, where she subtly examines some of these concerns before we had even formulated them as such. To inquire into the appropriate space for women writers with regards to well-established masculine generations raises the larger question of the appropriate space, more generally, for women in a well-established masculine world. In Surtidor, Méndez experiments with various roles for her female voices: her poems advance at times an agenda of separation and cele-bration and at other times one of inclusion. Her poems dance around and among varying views of feminism to pre-emptively offer a complex and hybrid view very much ahead of its time.

I propose thinking of this new space that Méndez’s poems occupy as a Third Space. Let us first imagine a feminist spec-trum: at one end lies Hélène Cixous’ argument for l’écriture féminine or for feminine difference, and women’s needs or desires to create a Woolfian space of their own; at the other end lies a demand for complete inclusion and equality, perhaps for androgyny or for the ignoring of gender. Instead of situating her poetry on this spectrum, Méndez sidesteps it

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altogether, which this article will demonstrate through close readings of some of her poems in Surtidor.

For Homi Bhabha, the Third Space is a complicated and hybrid one, an in-between space that values motion and dynamism. While he obviously did not write this description with Méndez in mind, her poetry nevertheless evinces some of the same ideas. First, the act of writing is itself a way of resisting the “strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation” (Bhabha 2391). Instead of re-maining the object to be explained, women who write are be-coming active agents. And while poetry is not necessarily “lit-erary theory” per se, it can certainly promote a critical agen-da, which Surtidor does. Effective critique, Bhabha writes, “overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speak-ing, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics” (2385). In the present case, Méndez constructs a fluid conceptualization of women’s role.

Moving away from a dialectic model, Bhabha also empha-sizes “the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic in-stances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle” (2385), which is a move that Méndez makes as well. In Surtidor, she blends feminist theories that seem to oppose each other, proposing a new space in which women are equal to men, but still do celebrate their differences and their unique strengths. Women can write their bodies, and/or they can be androgynous. Bhabha also writes, “Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other” (2395). The feminine, despite Cixous’ insis-tence, can never be reduced to one unified identity, opposed to the masculine. As we shall soon see in Méndez’s verse, the Other that is the woman is not a singular Other, but rather a diverse and complex one. Méndez’s representation of female voices in Surtidor is highly complex, and the voices can seem at times contradictory in their desires and opinions. This


hybridity and richness in Méndez’s work will lead us through poems that speak from “a space of one’s own,” poems that invade male spaces, poems that evade gender—and finally to the Third Space, which I believe is the most suitable model for encompassing the great variety of voices and opinions.

L’ecriture féminine in Surtidor

To begin, let us explore the idea of feminine difference, of l’écriture féminine, as it takes root in Méndez’s poetry. In many ways, Hélène Cixous’ staunch demand for women to find their own writing and to write their bodies, was already suggested half a century earlier in the poems of Méndez. Cixous implores, “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (2039). One could easily argue that Méndez has done just that; she has prefigured Cixous’ battle cry. Cixous also la-ments the way in which women have been conditioned to hate and reject their bodies which, in turn, affects their opinions of their own writing. She urges women to simply write, saying, “I wished that woman would write and pro-claim this unique empire so that other women, other unac-knowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of-songs” (2040). Woman writing herself will give other women the courage to follow her.3

In many of Méndez’s poems, she indeed exemplifies the feminist poetics of writing the body. One prime example is the poem “Nadadora” (31):

Mis brazos: los remos

La quilla: mi cuerpo.

Timón: mi pensamiento.

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(Si fuera sirena, mis cantos serían mis versos).

The swimmer’s gender is immediately specified in the title, and, anticipating Cixous’ demands, her body is the cen-ter of attention. The desires of the body in the poem are clear: it sings of travel and adventure out on the open sea. The speaker’s female body is strong and able to achieve new feats; it becomes a boat itself, one that is steered and powered by her own thoughts. Thus, the female body re-mains, importantly, non-sexualized; instead, as Persin has emphasized, Méndez foregrounds the “strength, agility and movement” of these “female bodies [that] glide, soar, and pulse with creative power” (198). Méndez formulates a sub-version of the traditional blason, so that the female body is presented more for what it can think and do, and less for how it appears. Instead of dissecting the female body and admir-ing each part for its beauty, as in classical poetry, she instead dissects and admires the parts of the boat, which allows for travel. Verse by verse, the metaphor unfolds: her arms are “los remos,” her body is “la quilla,” and her thoughts are the “timón.” Instead of a male captain, Méndez writes that “mi pensamiento” is at the helm. The nadadora’s arms are strong enough to power this boat; her thoughts control where she goes and how quickly she gets there, instead of being con-trolled by a man. Here and throughout the collection, the open sea suggests the infinite opportunities available to the swimmer.4 In her article analyzing the representation of the siren in Méndez’s poetry, Nicole Altamirano writes that the female body in the poem “is a vehicle for physical liberation, and for liberation from the trappings of the masculine config-uration of the female icon” (49). This is a body to be celebrated for its possibilities rather than only for its beauty, “a discrete, mobile being who travels across [space] freely and without intimidation” (Bellver, Absence and Presence 45).5

Méndez closes “Nadadora” with a significant parenthe-tical strophe: “(Si fuera sirena, / mis cantos / serían mis ver-sos.)” Again we are reminded of Cixous’ words: “my body


knows unheard-of-songs” (2040). While Méndez’s use of parentheses leads us to question the strength of her state-ment, her use of the subjunctive tells us that she is decidedly not a sirena and that her cantos are not her versos. The speaker’s desires move beyond that of captivating and seducing men to the more individually-focused desires to travel. And her intellectual capabilities move beyond the siren’s creation of song to be, here, the creation of a poem.6 She dismantles the traditional trope of the siren that offered women the binaries of seductress or prude, demon or angel. Méndez refused those options, replacing the siren with a twentieth-century female swimmer whose body is an object of strength and intellect.

A Dreamspace of Her Own

The originality of Méndez’s poetry anticipates mid-twen-tieth-century poetics of innovation, expressed in Adorno’s claim that “the poem proclaims the dream of a world in which things would be different” (27). The nocturnes and dreamscapes in Surtidor envision and explore a world where women can do as they please, serving a similar purpose as the sea did in the previous poem. This dream state exemplifies another direction that Cixous’ feminine writing can travel. Various poems in the collection display the importance of the dream world, which becomes, perhaps, the only place that provides true freedom for women. Even in poems that are not explicitly oneiric, Méndez still manages to create an imagi-native, almost unreal state by allowing her speakers to fly and sail, as planes and boats—or at least to attempt these feats. For example, in the poem “A la luna,” she declares, “¡A la Luna en avión. / O, dentro de un proyectil / disparado de un cañón!” (19). The speaker again flies in “Volando” (24), whose aviadora is explicitly a woman. The poem “Alas” tells the story of a speaker who had wings, lost them to the wind, and searches for an aviator from whom to borrow new wings, this time from a plane (23). In the continuously referenced dream world of the open sea or the open air, women can use their bodies in ways that were not allowed—socially or physically—down on solid ground. This usage of the female

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body again recalls Cixous’ later encouragement of women writers to write their bodies, but Méndez attempts it in these poems only in a dream state—is this to be the space of one’s own? If so, it seems to leave something to be desired, since she suggests that the only possible place for a woman to ex-perience freedom is one that is removed from reality. Is the dream the only place in which she can figuratively find free-dom?

The poem “Nocturno” (12) is another prime example that displays the importance of the nighttime and the dream in Méndez’s rendition of l’écriture féminine. The speaker begins to penetrate, in the dream, the more masculine space of the city street, moving away again from a feminism that searches for a space of one’s own. Méndez immediately sets the scene for a dreamscape by opening the poem with a simple descrip-tion, almost like stage directions of a screenplay: “una calle larga / en una noche blanca.” In this space the subject says, “Sueña la noche,” reemphasizing the dream state as well as the speaker’s solitude. First, the speaker’s heart is turned off by the “luz de faroles,” only to be turned back on later by the “luz de mi alma.” Both these transitions are emotionally wrought: “¡Ay, que se apaga mi corazón!” and “¡Ay, que se enciende mi corazón!” But the speaker is thriving in her own world, one which is lit up within herself and not from out-side. Here, her body sings in a visual (rather than auditory) manner. The only sound we hear comes at the end of the poem, and is created by her body, too: “el concierto / de mis pisadas” interrupts the stillness of this nighttime dream-scape. With these lines, we become aware of the presence of a speaker, so that the poem moves beyond a simple description; we also understand that the figure is alone in the nightscape, as is true of most of the poems in Surtidor, which would have been unheard of for women at the time. The contrast to real-ity reinforces the dreaminess of the scene.

With “Nocturno,” the solitary yet mobile female figure makes her first of many appearances in Surtidor. In his in-terpretation of Méndez’s modernity, Iker González-Allende conceives this wandering figure as a “flâneuse,” the feminine of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur (99). According to González-


Allende’s explanation of Benjamin, the flâneur “recorre la ciudad como solución a su aburrimiento, sintiéndose cómodo en las calles, como si estuviera en casa” (100). But the role was decidedly masculine. He explains that the (feminine) flâ-neuse’s ability to move around spatially in a city “suponía una transgresión” (100). In “Nocturno,” then, the night serves as, on the one hand, the most subversive time for a woman to be wandering alone, since only prostitutes would have done so, and, on the other hand, a time to more inno-cently imagine and dream about such wanderings without ac-tually performing them. González-Allende reads this con-ceptualization of the flâneuse as a desire on the part of Méndez to “buscar un mundo propio” (100), which would align with certain ideas of feminism, but Méndez’s desire here and in other poems is more complex. Why wander in the city, traditionally a masculine sphere, if the intention is to create a feminine space of one’s own? Again, I see Méndez’s poem evading such an explicit and well-defined choice, opting instead for a more unique solution. The “pisadas” lead us not into a feminine space separate from the masculine, nor do they intrude into a masculine space—they lead us, instead, to somewhere new but uncharted.

Méndez’s treatment of these solitary females is worth pursuing further, in the light of Linda E. Chown’s work that emphasizes a key difference between Anglo-American femi-nism and Spanish feminism with regard to solitude. She writes, “American feminists have certain culturally inherited presuppositions about solitude, time, and the right to progress. These notions run counter to presuppositions cen-tral to the Spanish historical and cultural tradition” (98). Ac-cording to Chown, Anglo-Americans, in general, “believe that solitude is a sign of loneliness” (98), and that time and progress will lead us out of it and into a more liberated state; “in contrast, the Spanish authors conceive of solitude as a necessary and potentially productive given of the human condition” (99). The poetic voice’s solitude in Méndez’s poems is not a lonely one. There is revelry in being alone and free to do as one pleases, especially when it allows the imagi-nation to travel to places where women might not be ac-

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cepted in reality. This serves as one example of how Méndez carves out a Third Space for women that, instead of erasing the traditional dichotomies, transcends them.

While Méndez’s poetry is certainly adventurous and unique in certain regards, such as in this penetration of mas-culine spaces or celebration of the female body for its capabil-ities, her writing, whether “feminine” writing or not, is also quite conventional in other ways. For the most part, she fol-lows formal rules of meter and rhyme scheme. Her poems do not initially shock the reader, at least upon first glance, in the way that, to give just one example, the poems in Gui-llermo de Torre’s 1923 Hélices would, with their mathemati-cal equations, vertical text, or what appear to be nonsensical blocks of words. Compare his daring forms to the more tra-ditional look and tone of the poems in Surtidor, many of which also employ a standard rhyme scheme and meter, and which do not experiment radically with syntax. Méndez’s dis-cretion in the structure of her poems serves as evidence for her ingenuity, and a key feature of her poetry. Her adherence to traditional poetic practice and usage of plain, simple lan-guage point to a poet who very consciously made decisions that would allow her to be a part of literary circles of her time—as other critics have outlined, Méndez indeed col-laborated extensively with her contemporaries.7

We must ask then, to what extent Méndez is employing a strategy for acceptance, and to what extent she is creatively and purposefully exploring l’écriture féminine. If Méndez’s stylistic elements are, indeed, purposefully anti-subversive and are aimed mostly at acceptance into a man’s world, then this idea again problematizes Cixous’ theories about feminine writing. Cixous tells women simply to write their bodies, to celebrate themselves. Has Méndez succeeded here? Has she even attempted to do so? She has certainly repurposed the female body, so that it becomes a vehicle for the female’s drives and triumphs, as we have seen in “Nadadora” and in the suggestions of a female flâneuse. In her own poetic way, Méndez celebrates femininity and feminine difference, thus paving the way for the ideas of Cixous that would come later.


Is it an anachronistic reach to link Méndez with Cixous? In her astute article “Spanish Feminist Theory Then and Now,” Roberta Johnson, “in an effort to assess the current state of U.S. feminist criticism of twentieth-century Spanish literature” (11), surveys articles published in key journals since 1980. She questions the abundance of French and Anglo-American feminist theory being used to analyze Span-ish literature written by women, wondering “if Spanish femi-nist criticism has become a de facto colony of Anglo-American feminist scholarship” (13) and noting that, “Oddly, very little has ever been made of the application of Anglo-American feminist models to Spanish literature” (13). Further trou-bling for feminism in Spain is the pervasive distaste for the term feminist. In another article, “Issues and Arguments in Twentieth-Century Spanish Feminist Theory,” Johnson explains, “‘Feminist’ has been a troubled category” because Spaniards are “reluctant to be called such” (245). During the first wave of feminism in Spain that was the scenery for Sur-tidor, “the theoretical nature of Spanish feminist thinking […] is often covert rather than overt” (Johnson, “Issues” 244). Because of Spain’s very different progression of femi-nism, it is important to consider Spanish women writers and Spanish feminists in their own particular context.

We must also keep in mind, however, that the application of Anglo-American theory to Spanish works is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the field of feminism but in many lit-erary analyses, stretching across various fields and time periods. Perhaps we have not paid enough attention to the Anglo-American monopoly on feminist criticism because it is a monopoly that mirrors what we also see in all literary criti-cism: literary critics simply use what they have read. In the case of feminism, what feminist scholars around the globe have read is the canonical body of work produced by the likes of Cixous, Kristeva, and Gilbert and Gubar. Johnson also asks, “Is this genuflection toward Butler a kind of shorthand for an American audience?” (17). I would answer affirma-tively, but also point out that Butler, or another famous Anglo-American feminist theorist, is a kind of shorthand for any audience—even, as Johnson admits, for a Spanish one.

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Reclaiming Male Space, Celebrating Androgyny

That said, in contrast to the Cixousian celebration of the feminine and l’écriture féminine in Méndez’s poems, there is another feminist thread running through Surtidor, one which seeks to blur the separations between male and female instead of celebrating them. This is manifest in Méndez’s minimization of the sexualized female. Champourcin, though cited above describing how femininity inhabits poems by women, is also one of those who argues for the equality and inclusion of female poets. In that same manifesto, she writes of the five female poets she is introducing: “No se llaman poetisas. Los críticos y ellas mismas rechazan ese nombre. Son únicamente poetas, como sus colegas masculinos, poetas, claro está, buenos o malos, igual que ellos” (331). There is no need to differentiate female poets from male poets—we should read them all as, simply, poets. Female poets don’t need to be judged or received any differently. Here we arrive at the other end of the feminist spectrum from the idea of honoring the woman and writing the feminine body: women and men are equal, and should be treated as such, with no special attention paid to their differences.

Both Altamirano and González-Allende have pointed out that Méndez downplays femininity and womanhood in many of her poems in Surtidor, creating a more androgynous sub-ject who moves freely among both feminine and masculine spaces. For Altamirano, the sirena becomes a more modern-ized swimmer capable of travel; for González-Allende, the flâ-neuse is capable of wandering urban spaces without a set destination, just as her male counterparts would have done. These examples suggest that the poems champion a shared space for all genders instead of a space of one’s own for women—a non-gendered poetry instead of l’écriture féminine.

But the most striking evidence in Surtidor for the idea of androgyny is the abundance of poems that prevent readers from knowing for sure whether subjects are male or female, as well as of poems that have nothing at all to do with gen-der. This evasion contradicts, in some ways, the idea of l’écri-ture féminine because, in Surtidor, whether the writing is feminine or masculine does not matter—it is a question that


does not come into play. Méndez’s collection of poems is not defined by her womanhood, and femininity is not the only topic in Surtidor. For example, she dives into and portrays modernity with a vigor that echoes that of other contempo-rary poets, no matter their gender.

This non-gendered celebration of modernity is evident in the poem “Cinelandesco” (96-97), Méndez’s fragmented and Cubist representation of urban life. She emphasizes the vital-ity and energy of the city by listing its noisy and bright ele-ments: “clamor de bocinas,” the “ritmo de pisadas,” and the “jazz-band” lit up by the “luz de los escaparates” and “luce-ros.” Her references to jazz and cinema, whether direct or implied, also impart a sense of hyper-modernity as she creates “un espectáculo cinematográfico” (González-Allende 99). There is constant movement as we jump from one meta-phor to the next and as “el carrusel de la noche / gira entre claros-oscuros.” As in other urban poems of the collection8, Méndez has again emptied this scene of people—an inter-esting choice that here heightens our sense of the vitality of the city itself, even without the liveliness of its inhabitants. The only mention we get of humans is of their footsteps. Without these people, the lights, movies, jazz, and shop win-dows truly shine and sing, becoming the main focus.

Along with this celebration of modernity, another of Mén-dez’s recurring themes that appears in “Cinelandesco” is the constant reference to sports and physicality: she writes, “Por el gran Estadio vuela / el gran balón luminoso / de los equipos nocturnos.” While the stadium is a traditionally masculine sphere, there is no reason to believe that the speaker is a man; at the same time there is no strong evidence to suggest it is a woman invading masculine territory, either. In this poem the mention of sports represents, as stated before, a pure exaltation of modernity. As we have seen, this poem thus represents many themes that Méndez explores that have nothing to do with gender; femininity and masculinity are not an issue in this poem.

Instead of seeing her as a woman poet who writes about women in the city, we should see her as a poet who writes about the city. Méndez writes about much more than woman-

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hood and feminism, showing that she does not need to be classified as a poetisa, as Champourcin has championed. Ac-cording to Johnson, “an idea central to some Spanish femi-nist thought is that the sexes are absolutely equal in abjec-tion of all sorts” (“Issues and Arguments in Twentieth-Cen-tury Spanish Feminist Theory” 246). This idea contrasts Cixous’ emphasis on feminine difference and Wilcox’s re-reading of women writers, opting instead for equality and equal treatment.

In Méndez’s poetry, we see a desire to penetrate mascu-line spaces most of all in her continuous references to the sea and the air, and in her poems’ descriptions of navigating through them. Women take on the traditionally masculine roles of explorer, pilot, or captain. As Margaret Persin has shown, these are “women who inhabit bodies equal to the task of self-assertion, adventure, exertion, and challenges physical as well as intellectual, and who defy the mandate of ‘docile bodies’ posited by Foucault” (193). Female poets like Méndez, says Champourcin, “son tan audaces y tan entusias-tas como sus compañeros. Volante en mano, sin faldas que recojan el polvo del camino, sin imitar a nadie, lograrán conquistar ‘su poesía’” (332). They are taking control the way only men were previously allowed to do.

For example, the poem “Mapas” (30) provides evidence of Méndez’s insistence on women’s inclusion. The speaker dreams about a future of adventure while pondering the static maps presented to students at school. The poem opens, “Los mapas de la escuela, / todos tenían mar, / todos tenían tierra.” By specifying school as the location of this inspira-tion, and by closing the poem with the nostalgic line “¡Oh, sueños de la escuela!,” we can assume that this is an adult speaker reminiscing about childhood dreams. The speaker then declares, “¡Yo sentía un afán / por ir a recorrerla!” The antecedent here is unclear, as is the gender of the speaker. It is easy to imagine either a little boy or a little girl fascinated by a map.9 Whether male or female, the androgynous speaker longs to explore as s/he studies the map: “Soñaba el corazón / con mares y fronteras, / con islas de coral / y misteriosas selvas.” In literature and in history, we more often see men


with the power to gaze at foreign lands and the power to then explore and conquer them. By erasing gender from this poem, Méndez suggests that these activities are no longer just for men, which “presents the possibility for women of trans-gressing a cultural boundary, since they are regularly forbid-den the power of thought and reason” (Persin 194). So, whereas some of Méndez’s poems celebrate the feminine and display Cixous’ écriture féminine, this one does just the oppo-site: we move away from difference and toward similarities, so that men and women are on equal footing and are equally capable of exploring—in a similar fashion to the way she has evaded gender in the poem “Cinelandesco.” In both poems, and in others in the collection, gender does not determine who can inhabit a city, or what a child’s future will hold.

González-Allende, however, shows that women invading spaces traditionally occupied by men represents in fact a double bind for women, as has been discussed above. Even as we make progress toward including women in the canon, as evidenced in the 1990s’ re-discovery of many female poets, in-cluding Méndez, these poets were then ascribed, for the most part, to the Generación del 98 or the Generación del 27, alongside their male counterparts. Injection into this andro-centric canon is a bit of a shortcut or afterthought. So, while we might celebrate their inclusion, González-Allende also writes:

Aunque esta revisión de la crítica literaria busca el reco-nocimiento de la participación de estas escritoras en la cultura española, también implica una reafirmación del modelo masculino de la generación, ya que parece que las escritoras deben pertenecer a una generación para que sean consideradas merecedoras de estudio y formen parte del canon. (91)

Bringing women into masculine spheres is not the final solution—this inclusion, just like Cixous’ suggestion for segregated and sacred feminine writing, fails to address the feminist demands and desires of poets like Méndez. Further-more, González-Allende finds the separation into generations an imperfect model, particularly for these female poets, be-

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cause “en sus obras no se halla tanto una ruptura generacio-nal como en realidad un continuum en la lucha por los dere-chos de la mujer en una sociedad patriarcal” (92). While his argument for a more continuous reading of poets at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries is appealing, I think it can also be reductive simply to group women into their own category separate from the men in the Generación del 27. Therefore, neither segregation nor inclu-sion can provide the appropriate or desirable space for female poets, because neither can provide the adequate solution. In both these models, there is something left to be desired.

Méndez’s Feminist Third Space

This brings us back, then, to the Third Space, one that re-moves itself from the options previously available and that promotes hybridity and change. As Altamirano pointed out with her analysis of the sirena, Méndez avoids placing the figure of the siren into either of her previously prescribed categories; she creates a new sirena. Wilcox had similarly claimed that Méndez “transforms myths associated with sirens and mermaids into a symbol for her individuality as a woman. […] The siren above is not the woman as Other. She is a symbol of an inviolable female self with which the woman poet is in contact; a self that is autonomous, not one deter-mined by androcentric thought” (111). On a larger scale, Méndez avoids selecting one of these previously outlined categories of feminism (a space of one’s own or an invasion of the masculine space). She also avoids placing herself at some point between the two extremes and instead sidesteps the spectrum altogether. She creates a new, revolutionary space for women writers to inhabit—a Third Space, where she is “neither the one nor the other” (Bhabha 2385).

Considering this hybridity in relation to the poem “Lo peor es” (61) illuminates and deepens ideas about the Third Space:

Antes y ahora, y quizá luego,


mi corazón… mi cerebro… ¡Pero un día habría en que se pongan de acuerdo! (Lo peor es si entonces, entonces, ya no existe mi cuerpo…)

Here Méndez combines disparate elements and examines how they might combine and shift together. It is unclear in which temporality to place this poem, since the speaker refers to many times: “Antes y ahora, / y quizá luego.” In contrast to a concrete separation between past, present, and future, the speaker floats through all of them, inhabits all of them. Méndez similarly unites “mi corazón” (the feminine) with “mi cerebro” (the masculine), though here we get a sense of her hope for the future more than a description of reality, as she declares, “¡Pero un día habrá / en que se pon-gan de acuerdo!” This forward-looking statement maintains an optimism with the use of the future tense. Our ideas about what is female and what is male must converge and blend—this blending is not an easy task, though. There is certainly an element of uncertainty and even fear about the project. Opening the line with “Pero” indicates that the poem opposes something. And at the end of the poem, we reach another possible obstacle in the blending of these elements: “(Lo peor es si entonces, / entonces, / ya no existe mi cuer-po…).” Méndez utilizes parentheses to simultaneously soften, offset, and draw attention to this last thought. The ellipses indicate an ongoing project, but the parentheses also contain the venture. Discouragement tempers the sense of hope.

Méndez’s two poems titled “Navegando” (39, 47) delve into similar convergences and fears. Both poems show how she questions and complicates gender binaries, as well as tra-ditional concepts of feminism, opting instead for a Third Space that allows for and fosters hybridity. In the two poems, along with many others, we don’t necessarily know who is male and who is female. But this confusion differs from the

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androgynous subject because it more explicitly refers to tradi-tional gender roles—and breaks with them. The repetition of titles, together with the use of the gerund, reinforces the idea that the feminist project and the creation of a Third Space is an ongoing and incomplete one. For young travelers and ex-plorers, for newly minted conquerors of a new Third Space, this is an exciting work-in-progress.

In the first poem titled “Navegando” (39), the speaker em-phasizes ownership and control of “mi camarote,” which she repeats twice. The speaker asserts herself confidently, saying “yo voy” and “yo tengo.” The poem closes with, “Yo tengo en mi camarote, / luminoso el corazón.” She celebrates both the distance from the shore and of the connection with the loved one (“mi amor”) despite that removal from land. In the sec-ond poem of the same title (47), some of the ownership, established with the repetition of the possessive “mi,” has faded away. Now the captain is “un corazón marinero.” We don’t know to whom this heart belongs, nor what kind of agenda it has. There is no poetic I speaking; instead verbs are indefinite: “Navegando va un velero. / Lo conduce—capitán— / un corazón marinero.” And we have returned to a more problematized depiction of the siren who is now “la sirenilla gitana / que es cantaora y morena.” Méndez’s use of the dimi-nutive suggests a kind of care or nurturing of this figure; at the same time the siren is the one who “le escolta,” again with an indefinite antecedent that could be “un velero” or the “capitán.” The eroticized siren here, while it might con-tradict Altamirano’s reading of Méndez’s sirens as modernized, and while it might also disappoint Cixous’ hopes for feminine writing, instead adds even more to the multiple layers of the Third Space. This Third Space allows room for all kinds of difference and hybridity, all kinds of complex feminism—a thought that brings us back to what I see as Méndez’s feminist project. Her feminism, her embodiment of a feminist Third Space, combines and blends many different views and discretely pursues its hybrid agenda under the guise of a simple, safe, and rule-abiding writing.


NOTES

1. See her excellent article “From Illusion to Disappearance: The Fate of the Female Poets of the Generation of 27” for a com-prehensive overview of the involvement and later critical treatment of Méndez and many of her contemporaries. 2. Maryellen Bieder explores this process of retroactive reinsertion

in her article on twentieth-century novelists, “Woman and the Twentieth-Century Spanish Literary Canon. The Lady Vanishes.” 3. Similarly, one of Méndez’s contemporaries, Ernestina de Cham-

pourcin, argued in her 1929 essay “3 Proyecciones” that “la femini-dad honda, verdadera, impregna la obra del poeta mujer como su esencia más íntima” (331). While Cixous and Champourcin use dif-ferent imagery, they both encourage women to turn inward for inspiration, and to use their uniquely feminine bodies to create a writing that expresses and celebrates this femininity. 4. See Bellver’s chapter on Méndez in her book Absence and

Presence, where she explores the sea as a “utopian space of love and joy” in early works and, later, “an escape route” (52). 5. Bellver has also explored the “correlation between sport, the sea,

and poetry” in this poem (153) in her book Bodies in Motion. 6. According to Altamirano, Méndez “dismantles the conventional

sirena figure, effectively subverting the gender codes of masculine hegemonic discourse” (48). Instead, Méndez presents “a modern woman of the water, one who frees herself from the restrictions of the male subjectively” (Altamirano 48). Altamirano goes on to exam-ine Méndez’s other uses of the siren figure, ultimately concluding that the poet posits the siren as neither the “dainty demure one” subject to “male hegemonic discourse” nor “the condemned lethal seductress of ancient Greek legend” (57). Thus, “Méndez opted out of the restrictive traditional female iconography and its implicit gender encoding, perhaps at the same time inadvertently writing herself out of the canon” (Altamirano 57). 7. See Bellver’s “From Illusion to Disappearance,” Cole, González-

Allende, and Nieva de la Paz for more biographical information. 8. “Nocturno” (12), “Paisaje” (32), “Melancolía” (33-34), “Paseo”

(82), “Nocturno de la ciudad” (91), “Calle desierta” (92), “Nocturno invernal” (95), and “Paisaje urbano” (99-100) are other examples in Surtidor of cityscapes that have been emptied of their inhabitants. 9. In contrast to Persin’s reading, I don’t think that the reader is

(necessarily) “encouraged to identify the lyrical ‘I’ of the text with the poet herself” (193). This is one possible reading, but the poem remains more open to interpretation if we do not conflate poet and poetic voice.

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WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor. “Two Essays on Poetry and Society.” Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009.

Altamirano, Nicole. “Out of the Glass Niche and into the Swimming Pool: The Transformation of the Sirena Figure in the Poetry of Concha Méndez.” Mirrors and Echoes: Women’s Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain. Ed. Emilie Bergmann and Richard Herr. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. 46-60.

Bellver, Catherine G. Absence and Presence: Spanish Women Poets of the Twenties and Thirties. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001.

__________. Bodies in Motion: Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2010.

__________. “Exile and the Female Experience in the Poetry of Concha Méndez.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contempo-ránea 18 (1993): 27-42.

__________. “From Illusion to Disappearance: The Fate of the Fe-male Poets of the Generation of 27.” Monographic Review / Revista Monográfica XII (1993): 205-26.

Bhabha, Homi. “The Commitment to Theory.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2377-97.

Bieder, Maryellen. “Woman and the Twentieth-Century Spanish Literary Canon. The Lady Vanishes.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 17 (1992): 301-24.

Champourcin, Ernestina de. “3 Proyecciones.” Síntesis 30.XI (1929): 329-35.

Chown, Linda E. “American Critics and Spanish Women Novelists, 1942-1980.” Signs 9.1 (1983): 91-107.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2035-56.

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González-Allende, Iker. “Cartografías urbanas y marítimas: género y modernismo en Concha Méndez.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 35 (2010): 89-116.

Johnson, Roberta. “Issues and Arguments in Twentieth-Century Spanish Feminist Theory.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 30 (2005): 243-272.

__________. “Spanish Feminist Theory Then and Now.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 28.1 (2003): 11-20.

Méndez Cuesta, Concha. Surtidor. Madrid: Argis, 1928.


Nieva de la Paz, Pilar. “Voz autobiográfica e identidad profesional: las escritoras españolas de la Generación del 27.” Hispania 89.1 (2006): 20-26.

Persin, Margaret. “Moving to New Ground with Concha Méndez.” Monographic Review / Revista Monográfica XII (1993): 190-204.

Wilcox, John C. Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990: Toward a Gynocentric Vision. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.

concha méndez's feminist third space in surtidor

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