Deaf Screams from a War: The Image of Women in the Short Stories by María Luz Morales and Manuel Chaves Nogales

Abstract

Literature allows reflection upon collective questions that become the reflection of values from a certain period. One of which is the role played by women within society through their representation in texts, an echo of our history. The concept of femininity is therefore not an isolated issue, but concerns the sociocultural legacy of civilisations, each succeeding the last –not exclusive to modernity– informing art itself and, as a result, becoming a mirror image of those sensibilities, which are bound by a particular weight of tradition. This study aims to briefly discuss the role of women in the Spanish Civil War in two volumes of short narrative forms in which we will find diverse female roles that range from those that are more linked to their historic dependency on men, as in the case of Manuel Chaves Nogales’ work (1937), and other examples that are clearly more emancipated, as in the work of María Luz Morales (1962).