My initial reactions throughout the first two thirds of Mercé Rodoreda’s “The Time of the Doves” was one of a character whose agency is constantly in question. The novel is structured almost as though our protagonist Natalia is simply recounting the events of her life. As the narrator, she often describes events in her life with a passing disinterest and she very rarely explicitly states how she feels about most situations aside from extreme circumstances that truly test her patience such as her decision to finally rid herself of the doves that were plaguing her home. If anything this moment served to solidify my first impression, that this was a story about a woman being taken advantage of by the people around her and being forced into a state of passivity. Natalia is placed in many of the same social boxes that character’s from previously covered works are (in particular I thought of how trapped Maria Griselda from Maria Bombal’s “The Shrouded Woman” felt and compared that to Natalia’s situation). This is why the scene of her revolution against the doves feels so salient emotionally, as it is a visceral reaction against the constraints caging her in and ruining her life. The narrative takes a great deal of time to establish the conditions of Natalia’s life, both the positives and negatives, in order to dash them completely when the Spanish nationalist insurrection reaches all out warfare. Once the war begins the narrative violently tears down everyone’s life to the extent that everyone is made to barely even subsist let alone truly live. This moment serves as a point of contrast between Natalia’s life before the war and her current existence. While Natalia is presented as borderline apathetic in many instances before the war, with her emotional state being inferred through her projection of feelings onto her environment, after the war that apathy is, almost paradoxically, dialed up to its extreme. In this way, the narrative presents the barren existence of war-torn Spain as fostering an apathy that was not dull like a flat wine, but corrosive like a deadly acid. This form of apathy is not one of boredom or disinterest but an apathy where one realizes that their life is empty and everything has already been ripped away from you so you no longer have anything to lose. This metaphorical acid turns literal, as Natalia finds resolution in her second act of retaliation against her situation as she decides to use acid to kill herself and her children. This horrid act arouses conflicting feelings that are not truly lost on Natalia, and are presented almost as an act of mercy in which death is greater than a life not truly being lived. However once the fighting stops, Natalia and her family must look towards somehow stitching her life back together, and while nothing is ever quite right she can somehow try and return to a life that is worth living.

My question to those reading is how would you compare Natalia’s life before the war to that after the war? Did you feel she had significantly more agency before the war as compared to it? What are your thoughts on the conditions of war and what led to Natalia’s decision with the acid?