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In The Time of Doves, Rodoreda tells a story of Natalia’s life entirely from her own perspective, and also reflects how the Spanish society was back in the time. This novel didn’t dramatize the confusion and suffering in life, but simply described the facts. I think that’s why this novel makes us feel moved.

People always say, a small detail of a man could show a huge red flag. In this novel, how Quimet changes Natalia’s name into Colometa is such a big red flag. Quimet is the kind of person who never views other people as having the same status as himself; he views them as tools, as objects. He renamed Natalia very early in their relationship, which seems like he is tagging this woman, this “thing” into his, just like tagging someone’s luggage. Moreover, he never respects what Natalia thinks. Natalia wants her name back, but he just laughs and insists that she can only have one name: “little dove”, Colometa.

In some literature I’ve been reading recently, there are authors who romanticise the act of a male being really possessive in a relationship. Just like Quimet, these male characters never listen to the female character, touch her, define her, lock her up, or force her to stay with them in the name of love. It seems that everything a male has done, even violent acts, can be rationalized after being called by love. As a form of literature, I don’t deny that such content has its own audience. However, it should also be undeniable that this constitutes a lack of respect for another person’s subjectivity and amounts to the objectification of human beings. The reason I like The Time of Doves is that it didn’t romanticize this kind of possessiveness. Quimet is not presented as “a man who doesn’t know how to love, but loves her too much so it’s reasonable for him to do such things”. Instead, the novel shows how Natalia’s life has been manipulated and changed because of his control. After being with him, Natalia isn’t happy; she is forced to leave Pere, forced into marriage, takes care of the doves just because Quimet loves doves, and so on. Even after Quimet died in the war and Natalia met Antoni, when Natalia later walks through Plaça del Diamant, the place where everything began, memories flood back. The square becomes a reminder that the past cannot be fully erased.

Discussion question: The act of Quimet renaming Natalia makes me think of the cultural tradition of women taking their husband’s surname after marriage. Is there a meaningful difference between Quimet’s act and changing surname, or do both raise similar questions about identity within marriage?

As a woman, I really enjoyed this novel empathetically. There are two different lines that are worth talking about, one is about the narrator’s funeral, and the other is about the narrator herself.

I think I’ll start with Ana María herself. If I’m gonna describe her in simple sentences, I would say: she was a good girl, trapped within the society and expectations of patriarchy, so that eventually the only word that could be used to describe her was good. As a woman, and even more so as a person, her dream was to be admired, be remembered, be beautiful; for this, she tried her best. When she was young, she chased her true love; when she got married, she tried to be a good wife, a good mother. But eventually the story was sad, she was ignored, hated, annoyed.

Her whole life was so deeply controlled or impacted by patriarchy, which, as a woman myself, felt so sad about. She lived in a family where the father ruled everyone and everything, being suppressed from being a “good woman”, and her life goal should only be finding a man, marrying him, and raising his kids. In this case, her personality was ignored; she was only valuable as tags like “unmarried, useless woman that would eventually leave the house” marked by her father, “the wife that should be taking care of my whole family and not stepping further to care about my own business” marked by her husband, “wonderful pure wife model” marked by Fernando, “mother that should take care of the whole family and be caring and considerate” marked by her children. I can see she tried not to obey those rules by finding a man herself: Don Ricardo. Was Ricardo a good man that can be relied on? No, personally no. The narrator described him as a “cruel torturer”, so naughty that he grabbed others’ attention by making fun of others; and more so, I see the patterns of his abusive/tough father on him. But she loved him so much. Is that love? She said that was a “strange desire” that she eventually categorized as love, but what I see is that the desire came from the obedience of men’s power. She feared this man’s forceful command, yet simultaneously hoped that this intimidating strength could safeguard her identity as a woman — it was the admiration and dependence of a woman oppressed by patriarchy toward a powerful figure. On the other hand, she also glimpsed his vulnerable and fragile side, and this contrast gave rise to a tender, protective affection — much like a mother cherishing her own child. These complex emotions became entangled, eventually rationalized into love.

People say the relationships between your parents really affect their children in terms of their views on love and marriage.

In this case, Zoila became the projection of her template for how to live in the future. She could see that Zoila wasn’t doing well, or at least wasn’t living a life where everyone commonly considered to be “happy.” But within the framework and concepts of that world at the time, Zoila got married, had children, and took on the responsibilities of a mother — and that was called “happiness”. She was strict yet tender-hearted toward her child. When the narrator “made foolish mistakes”, Zoila would rather take the blame herself than be overly scolding her. However, becoming such a role of “a competent woman” demanded the sacrifice of her own personality, the surrender of her freedom, transforming her into a “wife” and a “mother”. The narrator seemed to have a complex mix of upset and pity towards Zoila. On one hand, she didn’t like her current state and didn’t recognize her as her mother; on the other hand, she felt pained by Zoila’s diminished self after such excessive sacrifice. To be honest, in some corner of my heart, I’m quite glad that the narrator still calls her Zoila rather than “mother”. At least in that world, beyond being remembered as someone’s wife or someone’s mother, she remains as Zoila — her own Zoila.

This is merely my personal view: One of the saddest aspects of the past patriarchal society is that most people ultimately find themselves forced into the very roles they dreaded most. Sons despise their fathers’ brutality and autocracy, daughters loathe their mothers’ weakness and subservience—yet in the end, most are still pushed by society into becoming those fathers, those mothers.

After marriage, the narrator seemed to have transformed into Zoila. Only she carried more pain, more confusion. She didn’t receive sufficient respect or love from her husband, so when it came time for her to love her children, her confusion and helplessness were projected onto them alongside her affection.

As a woman herself, her daughter Anita witnessed her mother’s endurance and sacrifice as both a wife and a mother within this household — just as the narrator once observed Zoila. Anita feared of becoming like her mother, a person disciplined into numbness. So she chose to keep away from her mother, withdrawing with ruthless detachment to avoid becoming another replica of “Mother.”

I’ve heard someone talking about a phenomenon that when a wife cannot receive the respect and love from her husband, she projects these longings onto her son, fantasizing that he might “become her husband.” And so another child, Fred, assumed this role. At the height of her isolation in marriage, the narrator found a sense of understanding in Fred. But Fred was just a child—he neither had the capacity nor the responsibility to bear and rescue his mother’s pain and loneliness. So the only thing he could do was to withdraw.

Her other son, Alberto, was the child who most resembled his father. As I mentioned in previous paragraphs, patriarchal society often forces many people to become the kind of person they hate most. Yet as the party with greater authority, men ultimately benefit more from this system. Consequently, some individuals neither question this power structure nor hesitate to willingly become part of it. Alberto was such a child. In this case, his dislike for his mother becomes clear: he never saw her as an independent person, but rather as an identity serving him. He was careless of her concessions and sacrifices; as the dominant party in society, these seemed to him both justified and insignificant.

Such a society is unsolvable and painful. Within this rigidly structured framework, some may benefit, but somehow it still seems no one truly finds happiness. What I find most valuable about this piece is how it shifts focus from traditional male-centered narratives to reveal the lived experience of a woman’s entire life. I am grateful to have been born a woman in an era striving harder for equality, yet I also feel deep empathy and gratitude toward the women who endured oppression in the past.

So sorry I think I wrote too much and didn’t have the time to elaborate about my thoughts on the funeral part… 🙁

Question: If you got to pick your style of life, which one would you choose: to be attached to someone extremely powerful/wealthy/famous, or to live independently without recognition/fame/money?

From my perspective, Combray, written by Proust, is a wonderful mental journey back into the memories of the past. It all started with the narrator lying on the bed, half-dreaming, half-recalling the moments when he was still in Combray during his childhood.

It was not a hard book to read for me, but since the narrator is in a state similar to daydreaming, the flow of the paragraph is a bit hard to catch for me. But surprisingly, I felt related to the narrator after finishing reading the book. Walking between the past and the present, re-experiencing what had already happened to once again feel the strong emotions and sensations, which creates the feeling of “alive”.

Through the daydreams, through the past of the narrator, I feel like the narrator was staring at the world not with eyes, but with the heart. When mentioning a place, a person, or an episode, the narrator didn’t just make those landscapes reappear in the mind, but shape the past through different sensations: smell, touch, taste, atmosphere, and emotions (well, emotions don’t usually count as sensations, I acknowledge).  Each of the sensations becomes a key to the past, which allows the narrator access to the past through the present, and re-experience what had been experienced in the past. Like the taste of medeleine, the familiar taste brought a strong sense of emotion to the narrator before he had recognized it. I actually had a similar experience just a few days ago (I think I’m allowed to share it here?). A friend of mine had given me a mini size perfume about half a year ago, and I haven’t applied it since then. A few days ago, I found it in my drawer, so I decided to put it on. As soon as I sensed the smell, one thing immediately popped into my mind: an athame. I was so confused at first: what does an athame do with a bottle of perfume? I smelled it again, and the athame popped out of my mind again. Like the narrator did, I forced myself to rethink hard until I finally reached the point of memory. I received that perfume a few weeks before my birthday last year, and eventually I decided to get myself a beautiful athame as a birthday present. I was in such a bad mental state during that time that I couldn’t celebrate my birthday with anyone, so I bought myself a cake, took the perfume and the athame with me, hid myself on an island where nobody knows me, and when midnight was reached on the day of my birthday, with the perfume on me, I used the athame to stabbed open my birthday cake and enjoyed it. The smell of the perfume becomes a doorway, pulling me back to the day of my birthday. I see myself again sitting in front of the cake under dim light, trying to cheer another year of life in some weird sense of ceremony. But on the other hand, I also felt the girl who was celebrating her 20th birthday shortly came to the future. The crash between the two girls occurred in different landscapes of time, which really brings me a second of chaos and confusion.

Psychologically speaking, smell goes directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, which are related to emotions and episodic memories. That’s why when people smell things, something deep in their memories flashes through their minds. As I really emotionally related to Combray, now I slowly find the amazing part of literature. I didn’t expect people would experience or voluntarily do things that I also do, and express them in such an immersive way.

I might be so much off topic, not writing what I should write… I’ll work on that in the future lol.

Hi~ my name is Vincie, currently a 3rd year majoring in linguistics and minoring in psychology. This is actually my first time writing a blog, so I feel kinda excited lol.

I’m from China, and I speak both Mandarin and Cantonese as my first language. Besides that, I actually quite enjoy acquiring and communicating in other languages, despite the fact that I don’t like the process of learning… lmao. I also speak English (of course lol), Korean, and a little Japanese. I think that’s why I chose linguistics as my major, I love discovering interesting parts about language, and some interesting cultural aspects that influence how language is used. As mentioned during the lecture, “Literature is a form of writing that forces us to pay particular attention to how language works and the mechanisms of representation.” Part of the reason I took this course is that I need to fulfill my literature requirement for Bachelor of Arts, but I also want to get in touch with more literature stuff, taking a closer look at “how language works”. On the other hand, through the words of a book or a novel from another language, although it has been translated, you can still see the reflection of the unique culture and the shape of society that is associated with the original language, which is also a really attractive point to me.

I love reading, but only those interesting novels, most other books or novels or essays are really just strong melatonin to me lol. In the previous two lectures of the first week, we talked about what literature is. I said, literature pieces are serious readings, they are deep, heavy, and mostly contain some sort of reflection on one’s life or society. Like almost all the required readings in elementary school or high school, my stereotypes to literature are the most meaningful ones, and to a non-native speaker of English, the most hard to understand ones and even boring ones (I think I should apologize using the word “boring” since it is my fault that I didn’t understand the text so that makes it boring, but I couldn’t find another word for it). But in the lectures, I found out that what I thought was so one-sided, and the world of literature is wonderful and amazing. There are interesting ones that don’t require the reader to reflect on something or what (although most of these literature pieces are said to be rubbish… is that another stereotype?). As I plan for my readings for this course, I really hope that I can find some interesting pieces that make me fall in love with reading again, and hopefully keep me awake for at least an hour…?

Anyways, I’m a messy writer, I write whatever comes to my mind. That’s not literature. But it can become literature somehow… right? If I improve my wordings, if I use complex sentence structures, if I tell a good story, if I reflect on my (boring) life, if I am the reincarnation of Shakespeare (jk), I can create literature!