Estudios
Between “the promise of happiness” and emigrant’smelancholy: Xohana Torres and Eva Moreda
The aim of the present paper is to compare two novels of Galician female writers, Xohana Torres’ Adiós María 1971 and Eva Moreda’s A Veiga é como un tempo distinto 2012. Both novels describe the phenomenon of Galician migration to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, seen from the female point of view. The migratory experience is contrasted — in Adiós María the protagonist stays at home while her parents go to France, and in Eva Moreda’s book Elisa goes to London herself — but its fundamental to the construction of identity of both women, who are moving between their expectations of better life “the promise of happiness” and the inevitable, although often silenced, feeling of loss that demands time and space for mourning and grief.