Auto-fiction and Identity in Esther Tusquets’ Trilogy

This thesis investigates personal development and identity formation in Esther Tusquets and the female protagonists in her trilogy, composed of El mismo mar de todos los veranos (EMM) (1978), El amor es un juego solitario (AJS) (1979) and Varada tras el último naufragio (VUN) (1980).

Recent autobiographic publications had made it possible to shed light on the author behind the literature and had provided indications that supported a hypothesis of life influencing literature.

This thesis approaches the question of identity formation primarily through the female protagonists in the trilogy. Their emotional and sexual development, analysed in Chapter 2 and 3, is seen as indicatory of a similar developmental path taken by Tusquets. Chapter 2 and 3 therefore focus on the protagonists’ identity development in emotional and sexual terms and elicit further parallels that exist between the literary plot and the author’s life by complementing the analysis with a conceptual background on autobiography, auto-fiction and psychoanalysis in women’s development. The backdrop of auto-fiction suggested that textual analysis of Tusquets’ autobiographic literature should also allow for a margin of scepticism regarding the reliability of its content. The conclusions derived from Chapters 2 and 3, were seen as paramount because they allowed for putting the later analysis of the author on issues, such as love, sex, motherhood, career, solidarity, individuality and independence, into context. The objective of Chapter 4 was to extract Tusquets’ perspective on womanhood and identity put forward in the trilogy. To do so, her definition of femininity, evidenced by her autobiographic works and her novels, was analysed against the backdrop of patriarchal history, thought and theory provided by Marilyn French, Kate Millett and Gerda Lerner.

All this led to a conclusive portrait about Esther Tusquets’, her identity and development in regards to womanhood, as well as, a renewed analysis of her protagonists and their identity formation process