Entre el jardín y el mar: la identidad femenina escindida en Rumbo (1935) de Maruja Falena

Maruja Falena is the pseudonym with which the Aragonese poet María Ferrer Llonch, born in 1905 in Zaragoza, signed herself in several of the poetic magazines of the 1930s, such as Isla. Hojas de Arte y Letras, from Cádiz; A la Nueva Ventura, from Valladolid and Ágora. Revista de ensayos, from Albacete. This author, who only published one collection of poems, Rumbo (1935), had a relevant role in the context of the Aragonese literary avant-garde, especially through her collaboration with one of its cultural epicenters, the magazine Noreste. However, after the outbreak of the civil war, traces of it were lost. From this second stage of his life, only some data remain, the authenticity of which is difficult to verify. Although we do not know much about her poetic career, the few samples that have been preserved show us an artist gifted with her own, original and interesting voice. In that sense, her reflection on feminine identity is especially relevant, which she presents in her verses as a brittle and changing entity based on identification with animals and plants deprived of strength or freedom. In his collection of poems, the lyrical subject is shown to be affected by an existential crisis that is channeled through the choice of certain themes (love, sexual desire, travel or social awareness), the updating of traditional poetic symbols (the falena, the tree or the pirate) and the dissolution of the popular metric forms,that predominate throughout the first part,in the free verse, adopted towards the middle. For this reason, it has been considered pertinent to study how Falena articulates the investigation into the depths of the self in Rumbo.