LAW, MORALITY AND DECORUM IN SPANISH FEMINIST THEATER IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

This article studies the little known contribution made by the playwright Manuel Linares Rivas to the Spanish feminist movement, within the so called “theater of social concern” at the beginning of the XX Century. To these ends, we recover three of his most controversial plays: Aire de fuera (1903), La espuma del champagne (1929) y Fausto y Margarita (1999 [1936]) –widely acclaimed in their day, but successfully sequestered and silenced soon afterwards by the Francoist dictatorship, inasmuch as they posed a threat to the laws, the morality and the decorum of ‘National-Catholicism’. In this regard, our analysis dedicates especial attention to the socio-historical criticism of the role of women –daughter, wife and mother, modelled on the virtues of the Virgin Mary– within the thriving bourgeois society of late XIX Century, opposing her to a new model of a liberal and freethinking woman, who was expected to lead Spanish society in that new and promising European XX Century.