El protagonista infantil como alegoria de compromiso social en la narrativa corta de Ana Matute

Ana María Matute’s collection of short stories and fairy tales portrays an obsessive preoccupation with the social and economic factors underlying the physical and psychological violence of Spain’s Civil War, and Franco’s dictatorship of almost four decades. As a witness to both events, Matute’s stories contain a social protest through a theme that prevails in each one of them: the isolation of the Other, depicted through the child-protagonist. My dissertation discusses Matute’s expression of her strong social criticism of the dictatorship through her short stories and fairy tales by using the Marxist approach—supported by the multiple autobiographical references throughout her discourse. Thematically, Matute’s tales incorporate a broad spectrum of socioeconomic problems, and denunciation of the marginalization suffered by the outsider child. Her short narrative exhibits numerous instances of isolated children, at times rejected within the household by their own parents or relatives. These children not only experience a series of communal traits such as isolation, exploitation and solitude, but can also possess physical imperfections or faults that only contribute to raise their social rejection. Contributing to increase the state of debauched and moribund reality of the stories are the rich and appallingly visual descriptions of wretched social conditions thanks to her use of decadent and dark adjectival constructions in persistent physical spaces —the small village and the nature that surrounds it. At the same time, Matute portrays the moral emptiness of a nation rotten by the cainismo: the hostility and battles between compatriots, capable of taking the field against each other. This representation of the Spanish people during franquismo by way of distressing caricature, and the mutual disdain between most of Matute’s characters, tends to have death as the final outcome in most of her stories. The final goal of the Marxist doctrine is to reach a fair society where individualism, capitalist isolation and social stratification disappear, and give way to equal treatment among its members. Beyond entertaining her young and not so young readers, Matute’s primary goal is to point the way to an unprejudiced and egalitarian society. By inserting a Marxist foundation to her short stories, which repeatedly emphasizes class differences, Ana María Matute describes the meagerness suffered by those who were part of the so called generation Los niños de la Guerra as well as depicts the meagerness of those harmed by Franco.