Biografies. Una perspectiva de gènere. Dues propostes: Una vida, de Maria-Mercè Marçal i Fragments d’una vida de Maria Antònia Salvà

Lluïsa Julià Capdevila

doi:10.14198/itaca.31104

Authors

Lluïsa Julià Capdevila Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1172-2282

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/itaca.31104

Keywords:

biography, catalan literature, female subject, gender studies, new biography, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, Maria Antònia Salvà, Maria-Mercè Marçal

Abstract

The article delves into the reasons why women writers—and women in general—were largely excluded from biographical writing until the 1970s and 1980s, a period marked by the rise of feminism that challenged the essentialist view of women and their socially prescribed domesticity role. The historical figures of Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette embody a long-standing paradigm in which women were cast as either saints or witches—sacrificial icons offered up to their nation. It was a model that demanded rupture. At the same time, this symbolic tension mirrors the broader evolution of the biographical genre itself: the emergence of the «new biography» in the 1920s and 1930s, when fiction’s narrative techniques began to infiltrate biographical writing, paving the way for the theoretical reflections of the 1980s and beyond that ultimately redefined biography as a hybrid form. The study then turns to Catalan literature, where the near absence of biographical narratives devoted to women writers in historical collections becomes striking—with the notable exceptions of Caterina Albert (Víctor Català) and, above all, Mercè Rodoreda. Gradually, however, this silence has been eroded through the literary reclamation initiated by women authors themselves, who have sought to recover and reimagine their foremothers. This recovery has since been nurtured by publishers eager to promote autobiographical and previously unpublished texts, responding to a steadily growing curiosity among readers. At its core, the study offers a gender-based reading of two contemporary biographical works: those dedicated to Maria Antònia Salvà (2023) and Maria-Mercè Marçal (2017), texts that invite reflection on the evolving relationship between women, memory and the art of biography. The central section of this study undertakes a gender-oriented analysis of the biographical texts devoted to Maria Antònia Salvà (2023) and Maria-Mercè Marçal (2017). It examines the silences and omissions that have contributed to constructing these writers as compliant, unexceptional figures aligned with the norms of heterosexual domesticity. In contrast, the discussion underscores the critical importance of recuperating these women as complex historical and creative subjects. It argues for the development of nuanced narrative strategies capable of capturing the fullness of their personalities, the historical periods they traversed, the networks of relationships that shaped their lives, the evolution of their literary trajectories and the reception of their work within the broader cultural canon.

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