7 - “La imperfecta casada” or the Making of an Ideal Wife in Luisa-Maria Linares’ Un marido a precio fijo

Summary

According to post-war novelist and playwright Julia Maura, one of the shortcomings of the novela rosa's rendering of feminine experience is that it ends where “real” life for a woman begins: in marriage. What the arbiters of feminine mores, authors of novelas rosa, and novelists like Maura agree on is that female representation is inconceivable without reference to men. Most prescriptive texts divide women's life experience into three phases: el noviazgo (courtship or engagement), el matrimonio (marriage), and la maternidad (motherhood). In keeping with Maura's assertion, the popular romance novels see the first phase as their legitimate domain and, in contrast to narratives like Maura's own Ventolera (1943)—which situate the male–female dynamic within matrimonial bonds—use the allure of love to disguise the complex, hierarchical nature of gender relations. Luisa-María Linares’ 1941 romance novel, Un marido a precio fijo, manages to inhabit two of the aforementioned domains through the taming-of-the-shrew masterplot that characterizes many of her novels (Galerstein 178). While the “taming” in Linares’ novels iterates and reinforces patriarchal authority, the very nature of the confrontation that underlies these narratives (the necessary disruption of the traditional order) lends itself to multiple readings, and substantiates the earlier hypothesis that any reading of dissent in the selected texts is grounded in their conformity (epitomized by the novels’ conventional prefiguring of marriage and motherhood). If “the internal composition of a given text is nothing more or less than the history of its struggle with contrary forms of representation for the authority to control semiosis” (Armstrong 23), then even those narratives, which seem to be interested in promoting a single point of view, are neither univocal nor impervious to internal contestations.

Ingeniously conceived as a charade of marriage, Un marido a precio fijo is a story of apprenticeship. Estrella Vilar, the adoptive daughter and heiress of tycoon Nicolás Mendoza, is prey to her own self-centeredness and frivolity. Her flawed character, we are told, is a consequence of her upbringing and the reason she is unfit to assume the role of domestic angel.