JANET WINECOFF DÍAZ

[Matute's serious illnesses as a child seem] to have caused her to withdraw deeper into the childhood world of fantasy and imagination, which (combined with the necessary inactivity) may have stimulated her precocious literary and artistic inclinations…. The childhood illnesses are perhaps unconsciously reflected in [her] not infrequent use of the sick child, and the still more frequent mention of children who die. And the large element of fantasy in her works may well originate with these same experiences. (p. 140)

[Matute's] illness at the age of eight was particularly important for her interest in, and understanding of, the Castilian landscape, for she was sent to live with her grandparents during an extended convalescence, thus becoming acquainted with a countryside different from that of her summers, with new aspects of life, with the misery, poverty, and struggle for existence…. These elements appear in the sullen, resentful villagers of Los Abel and Fiesta al noroeste, and in the tensions between landowners and those who work the soil in the above-mentioned books, as well as in Historias de la Artámila and Los hijos muertos. The novelist's first vivid encounter with injustice belongs to this same stay in the country, and is recalled in "Los chicos," one of the tales of Historias de la Artámila. (pp. 140-41)

Except for the months in the village school when she was eight, Ana María until the age of ten studied alternately in Madrid and Barcelona in colegios run by French nuns. The experience seems to have been largely unpleasant: she has confessed that she considered the colegio a torture and went most unwillingly. This attitude is reflected in the character of Soledad (protagonist of En esta tierra) and her relationship with the nuns of her colegio. Without being thoroughly autobiographical, this character shares with the novelist a similar age, family background, and education prior to the war, and Soledad's sentiments of alienation and rebelliousness were probably common to both. The Matute family's frequent shifts between Madrid and Barcelona caused Ana María to have the feeling of always being an outsider, of belonging somewhere else…. The constant sensation of solitude in her works, the numerous lonely, estranged and misunderstood children, may originate in these experiences. If so, the colegio years acquire additional importance because of the overwhelming number of solitary and alienated characters in her works, and the preponderance of such themes as loneliness, incommunication, and the most extreme solitude. (p. 142)

An autobiographical element dating from early years is the theme of dolls, puppets, the marionnette theater and related motifs (the titiritero, the cómicos ambulantes, even gypsies and the circus). One of Ana María's favorite pastimes as a child was her marionnette theater…. This became an even more important distraction during the war years. It is evidently more than a mere coincidence that Pequeño teatro, her first novel in order of composition, is in its entirety a complex symbol based on the analogy between theater and life, reality and farce, human beings and puppets. The marionnette theater also appears in Fiesta al noroeste, Primera memoria, Tres y un sueño, and other works, including some of the juvenile fiction.

Despite the importance of autobiographical settings, of rural and agrarian themes, of the themes of solitude and alienation, and of the world of marionnettes, the greatest input of autobiographical elements in Matute's work may come from another source. The importance of the Spanish Civil War, both for the novelist personally, and for her writing, cannot be overestimated. (p. 143)

While she lost no family or close relatives during the war, one of Ana María's professors was killed attempting to escape to France. But the constant sensation of loss in her works is the result of a loss much more fundamental and irreplaceable: the loss of childhood, of innocence, of beliefs, of a whole world and the values on which it was based…. That moral ambiguity, to which some critics have objected in Matute's works, is evidently a result of the Civil War….

Although she has some novels which deal directly with the war as such (En esta tierra, and parts of Los hijos muertos), Matute from her earliest published works associates the Civil War with the symbol of Cain and Abel, the conflict between brothers. The very title of Los Abel indicates this preoccupation, and the symbolic strife is carried to the limit of murder. (p. 144)

The theme of hate and love between members of the same family, a constant in Matute's work, is found … in Los hijos muertos, reaching its maximum expression in the Civil War, when Daniel and César Corvo fight on opposing sides. (p. 145)

The dominating concern with the Civil War is definitely of autobiographical origin, and where descriptions of the war are offered, they often have an autobiographical basis, as the novelist experienced bombings, witnessed shootings and burnings and other horrors of war. The Cain and Abel theme is not autobiographical in the most literal sense (of reflecting personal experiences or the family life of the writer), but insofar as it represents Matute's personal interpretation of the war which she experienced, it also is of autobiographical origin.

The most important of the remaining themes in Matute's work are the social theme, and those of the child and adolescent. Here, her interests are the result of personal experiences, but the themes themselves cannot properly be considered autobiographical. The social preoccupations are, on the one hand, common to a majority of writers of this generation, and on the other hand, a logical outgrowth of the combination of her interest in the campesino, her sensitivity to injustice, and her experiences during the war. Much of Matute's insight into the world of the child and adolescent, her ability to reproduce the world of fantasy and imagination, her understanding of the things by which children are wounded, undoubtedly must have an autobiographical basis. But at the same time, the presence of a good deal of invention is obvious.

When Matute herself was questioned about the autobiographical elements in her work, she first stated that, in her opinion, there were none…. She is aware, however, that her writing is extremely personal and subjective, which may contribute to produce the impression of being autobiographical. (pp. 145-46)

An interesting aspect of the question of Matute's utilization of autobiographical material is her apparent concentration on the early part of her life. The autobiographical elements mentioned heretofore … come from the period ending with the close of the Civil War, and are thus taken from only the first thirteen years of the novelist's life. From this point on, she uses almost no autobiographical materials. The one important exception is "La Oveja Negra," third story in the volume Tres y un sueño, whose protagonist undoubtedly represents Matute herself. Although so transformed by fantasy, imagination, and the surrealistic atmosphere as to seem to the surface to have little or no basis in reality, the events in effect constitute a lyric and symbolic autobiography of the novelist up to the moment of that writing. This is the only case where she has referred in print to any aspects of her adult personal life, most of which she would prefer to forget…. These feelings explain, at least in part, why Matute does not recreate the later period of her life, its settings, people and events, as she does those of her childhood.

Drawing, then, almost exclusively on her childhood years, Matute uses frankly autobiographical settings in a majority of her works, and her slim volume of memoirs, El río, can be considered autobiographical in its entirety…. [With] the exception of the work of fantasy, "La Oveja Negra," her plots and major characters are taken from imagination and not from life. It is noticeable … that the utilization of autobiographical elements decreases in her more recent works. In the trilogy, "Los mercaderes" … the autobiographical content and the degree of the author's involvement or "presence" in the works are considerably lessened. The two strongest autobiographical elements are those things which the novelist herself has recognized as the most important influences for her writing: the campo castellano and the Civil War, both experienced before her adolescence. (pp. 147-48)