La Plaza del Diamante: memoria de lo innombrable

Abstract

The object of this article is an attempt to analyze the relation between women, memory and war in Mercè Rodoreda's novel, La Plaza del Diamante. In this article I elucidate specific aspects of the novel related to the dynamics of memory and History-specifically the Feminist History-and the context of the Spanish Civil War in which the novel is narrated. In the pages that follow, I reflect upon the ways in which the Feminist History has been constructed-from the legitimating of women as subjects worthy of history only as active subjects and interventionists in the public and social space-and how the same Feminist History has understood the past: a comprehension of the past that tends to obliterate memory. In this article I elucidate which are the notions of time and memory in which the protagonist of La Plaza del Diamante, Natalia, is immersed during the Spanish Civil War-notions of time and memory that are strictly related with the things that dwell in her space-in comparison with those that have been validated by the Feminist History.