Carmen Martín Gaite is one of the internationally renowned Spanish writers of the twentieth century. Throughout her literary career, she devoted her attention to the injustice between men and women in Spain, both in society and in the fam- ily. During the political transition period, Gaite used her narratives as a messenger conveying the insecurity of Spanish women waiting to break free from social, tra- ditional, and family pressure by means of searching for the salvation of an ideal interlocutor.
Retahílas (1974), the long novel published during the political transition, shows an unexpected conversation between the two protagonists, Eulalia and Germán. In the meantime, the confession they exchange becomes, without real- izing it, the expected salvation that they have been seeking for years. Throughout her literary trajectory, the search for an ideal interlocutor is the most prominent and recurring theme that appears in her works. For this reason, we realize not on- ly the importance of communicating with an adequate interlocutor, but also the importance of the power that words carry, as they are able to heal the wounded mind.
This article will apply not only the theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, but also the theory related to the closed relation between mythology and archetypes proposed by one of Jung’s follow- ers, Jean Shinoda Bolen. Through these theories, this study aims to materialize the “personas” of Eulalia and Germán, and then, to discover how the archetypal power interprets the problems they encounter, and another self hidden in the unconscious by means of locating their “shadow.”
