Los hijos muertos:The Spanish Civil War as a Perpetuator of Death

Much critical attention continues to be focused on Ana Maria Matute's trilogy, Los mercaderes, especially on the first volume, Primer a memoria. While that aspect of Matute's work certainly merits all the accolades given it, another deserving novel has been virtually ignored by critics. When Los hijos muertos won the Premio de la Crftica in 1958 and the Premio Nacional de Literatura the following year, it was met with a brief flurry of reviews. Since then, however, the work has been overlooked or has usually been treated only as one part of studies done on all of Matute's novels. In his study La novela espanola de la Guerra Civil, Ponce de Leon fails to mention the book while he writes at some length about the first two novels of the trilogy. Eugenio de Nora summarily dismisses the work as a "step backward" for Matute, adding that it is too verbose and should have been less than half its length (Nora 272-73), Janet Perez includes a brief chapter on Los hijos muertos in her book Ana Maria Matute, and Margaret Jones discusses the novel in the contexts of adolescence, old age, and the Cain-Abel theme. Berta Savariego and Michael Atlee discuss the work briefly in their respective studies on the enigmatic quality of Matute's works and the correspondence of pro tagonist and nature in several of the author's novels. One recent article by Townsend Shelby concentrates on retrospection in Los hijos muertos and En esta tierra. None of these examines thoroughly the significance of the title and its implications in the novel, an analysis which is crucial to an understanding of the novel and of its place in the literature of the Spanish Civil War. In this study, it will be shown that the "dead children" are not only those who were killed or maimed during the Spanish Civil War, but also those of the subsequent generation. Psychological "death" affects the surviviors and their offspring. All hope is lost, and there is no future