At the end of the twentieth century, film director Pedro Almodovar (b. 1949), in La flor de mi secreto (1995), and writer Lucia Etxebarria (b. 1966), in Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, una novela rosa (1998), continue to analyze the novela rosa, a project begun by Carmen Martin Gaite in El cuarto de atrás (1978) and Usos amorosos de la postguerra (1987). Martin Gaite argues that women of her generation were victims of the Francoist ideology found in popular romance novels. Like many others, including Franco's own daughter Carmen, she received a limited education that did not allow women to pursue a future other than marriage. Almodovar critiques society's need to escape reality while erasing the assumption that women are the exclusive consumers of the novela rosa. In his 1995 film, Angel, a journalist for El Pais, admits to enjoying what he calls literatura sentimental. Etxebarria exposes the detrimental effects of the genre's "happy ending" through her character Beatriz, who narrates the failure of her parents' marriage. Almodovar and Etxebarria establish a criticism of the novela rosa at the end of the twentieth century.
(Apologies for all the lost accents. They didn't come out when I copied and pasted and they're a bit time-consuming to add using my keyboard. I did add one, because there was a typo in the transcription of the original so I had to make a change anyway).
Here's the abstract:
(Apologies for all the lost accents. They didn't come out when I copied and pasted and they're a bit time-consuming to add using my keyboard. I did add one, because there was a typo in the transcription of the original so I had to make a change anyway).