AUTHOR: Marilar Aleixandre
PUBLISHER: Editorial Galaxia
GENRE: Novel
READER’S NAME: Lorena Paz
DATE: May 30th, 2022
Bad Women is a choral narration that offers a portrait of different female characters whose lives revolve around a women's prison located in northern Spain. The story takes place in the year 1863, when real historical characters such as the famous writer and lawyer Concepción Arenal and the Countess Juana María de la Vega fought for incarcerated women to have decent conditions of hygiene and education during their stay in prison. Through a polyphony of different voices (imprisoned women, the prison visitor, women of the town) in which historical facts and fiction are mixed, Marilar Aleixandre manages to offer an overview of how a precarious and patriarchal judicial and social organization system is to blame for making the lives of lower class women even more miserable and undignified. From among this multiplicity of voices, the voice of Sisca, a 15-year-old girl unjustly imprisoned through whose eyes readers will empathize even more with the experiences of injustice towards women, will stand out in the second part of the novel.
Despite being set at the end of the 19th century in Spain, the novel touches on deeply topical issues that may interest a transnational audience: physical and psychological violence against women, the right to abortion, unequal opportunities, the doomed destiny of the family and the home, and the penal and social consequences of rebelling against an unjust system. Women's lives during incarceration is a topic that has been little explored but has aroused much interest in recent years and is relevant to the demands that call for a feminist approach to fictions (as shown by the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black, 2019). By setting the plot in the 19th century, an era to which today's readers do not belong, Aleixandre gives us a historical perspective on the evolution of feminist debates around biopolitics and women's bodies, allowing us to see the continuities with present debates and their differences. The chosen subject and the treatment given to it, of maximum actuality, make this novel a highly recommendable work for its translation and commercialization abroad.
Bad Women is written in a very dynamic style that intersperses different points of view of different characters, which gives agility to the reading. Without diminishing the quality of the work, the novel is written in a simple and clear language that is in line with the current of Spanish post-war tremendismo, where the artifice of the language is not the most relevant, but simplicity prevails over ornamentation, where the important thing is what is being told, since it is about true and stark realities. In the first parts of the novel there are alternating fragments of oral literature in Galician (regueifas) and Galician expressions that may pose a slight challenge to a translator, but should not represent any serious obstacle to translation.
