Reparation to the Ghostly Mother in Carme Riera'sLa Mitad Del Alma

Abstract

Carme Riera's La mitad del alma (2003), whose protagonist recollects images of her dead mother, is part of the current movement in Spanish literature to reactivate memories of the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Postwar women authors in Spain symbolically demonstrated the repression of females during the dictatorship by eliminating the mother in many of their works. The continued invisibility of mothers in more recent Spanish fiction by women suggests a ghostly apparition-present but unseen. La mitad del alma repeats the thematic search for identity in postwar narratives with young, motherless protagonists, but it centers on a mature woman haunted by the unknown past of her deceased parent. Riera's narrative adds another facet to current fiction that focuses on healing wounds and exorcising ghosts of the past: it calls for reparation of the erasure of matriarchal heritage in postwar Spanish society to recuperate identity.