CIGARRERAS

Emilia Pardo Bazán enjoyed a degree of recognition during her lifetime which, for better and for worse, placed her in the literary and social forefront of her epoch. But over time, and the distortion produced by Franco’s regime, she was unfairly protrayed as a simplistic, stiff and conservative writer. This performance, in the context of the First Centenary of her death, vindicates a controversial and contradictory but highly suggestive writer, of prime relevance in the evolution of feminism and literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This work, Cigarreras, combines the tone of an individual and collective drama such as La Tribuna, the novel on which it is based, with others that are fresher and lighter, even comic at times, so characteristic of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s narrative. She was a writer and a woman who, as weapons of defence and attack, frequently resorted to irony, sarcasm and humour. Cigarreras, although it draws significantly from the aforementioned novel, is a literary-dramatic product derived from it but independent of it.

The play is set in the Fábrica de Tabacos de A Coruña (Marineda in the novel). This was one of the first industries to employ a massive female workforce, constituting one of the first areas of collective socialisation for women, who thus transcended the domestic environment in which they had traditionally been confined.

If the plot is the story of a socially impossible relationship between a proletarian woman and a bourgeois man, the work can also be read as a testimony to the political crisis that led to the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in 1868 and the proclamation of the First Republic in 1873. It was a confusing and convulsive period in which many echoes of the present day resound. Gestation and birth synchronised with the vicissitudes of the protagonist, who, while giving birth to her bastard child, hears the voice of a crowd in the street shouting: Long live the Federal Republic!