ABSTRACT
Concha Espina's narrator melds vanguard imagery with the protagonist's desire to forge a better world through women's united efforts. Women writers of the 1920s and 1930s incorporated many of the elements associated with male vanguard prose—visual imagery, metafiction, and theoretical reflection—but these qualities almost invariably serve a social as well as an aesthetic end. Women novelists of the vanguard era—Carmen de Burgos, Espina, Maria Martinez Sierra, Margarita Nelken, Federica Montseny, Rosa Chacel, and Maria Zambrano—likewise narrated imagined women. Many women political and social theorists found in narrative fiction a means to work out the practical problems of a society based on equality between the sexes and alternatives to the old kinds of relationships between them. Like many other female vanguard novelists, Espina weaves a social theory into her narrative fabric. Female novelists created humanized characters who are sexually liberated and intelligent companeras.
