The “Ethics of Care” in the Testimonial Narrative of Spanish Republican Exiled Women

Abstract

This article aims to study two works belonging to the testimonial narrative of the Spanish Republican exile of 1939 –Sola (1954), by María José de Chopitea, and Los diablos sueltos (1975), by Mada Carreño. These testimonial novels were written by women who survived the exodus through the northern border of Spain after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the subsequent experience of concentration camps and other concentrationary places located in the south of France, and the exile to México. Based on his reading of the Shoah literature, Tzvetan Todorov argues that women were more susceptible to helping each other and building spaces of solidarity and collective support. This “ethics of care” that Todorov identifies can be observed in these works of exiled Spanish women. Therefore, this essay studies how the “ethics of care,” following the concept of Carol Gilligan, is reflected in these stories with the objective of detecting certain specificities of the female experience of the Republican Spanish exile. Through this study, we will demonstrate that the voice of surviving women is essential to fully and deeply understand the process of territorial dislocation that the Republican community suffered after the Civil War, as well as to assess the contribution that these female narratives have made to the processes of social remembrance.