Fragmented Autobiographies: a Style of Writing or Self-Perception? The Case of Pilar Primo de Rivera

Abstract

Recently published contributions to theories of literary criticism have revealed the richness and distinctiveness of women’s autobiographical production, greatly advancing research by tracing apparently similar linguistic and literary phenomena which seemed to rupture the “traditional” genre of men’ autobiographical writings. But at the same time they once again simplified the complex reality which lay behind such phenomena by attributing them mostly to the general condition of women’s self-perception as subjects, at times losing sight of the specific historical and cultural conditions in which each process of self-representation was grounded. In the paper that follows I will examine such points of rupture and contradiction in the autobiography of Pilar Primo de Rivera, Jefe Nacional of the Feminine Section of the Spanish Falange. By locating the differing discourses of identity with which Primo de Rivera engaged, and by finding out how exactly the category of gender operated in each of them, I will try to understand the nature of such ruptures, as well as the relation between the author’s self-perceptions and her techniques of self-representation.