Introduction

Chapters 2 and 3 explored three characters in three of Martín Gaite's works who, through unawareness or ego, were unable to live as fully as they might. None of them shared the Spanish writer's perspective on the interaction between the supernatural and everyday worlds. In this chapter and the next, the stories of the two protagonists of Martín Gaite's 1992 novel, Nubosidad variable, will reveal a much more positive presentation of the writer's spiritual consciousness. Both characters value life lived as though the two worlds are one. So, despite their one-sidedness at times, which causes unhappiness to both women, by holding onto this underlying value they are each able to undertake an inner journey that leads them into a creative and more fulfilling way of living. Both women make an inner descent through writing and, in both stories, the motif of ancient, mythological journeys appear in the working out of the plots of their ordinary human lives. The mythological patterns that are revealed reflect the stories of the descent of the goddess Inanna to the underworld and, in Chapter 5, the myth of Demeter and Persephone.

The title of this chapter is taken from the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna's descent to the underworld, related in the poem ‘The Descent of Inanna’, which Joseph Campbell quotes in his 1949 study, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This warning to Inanna from Neti, the chief gatekeeper of the underworld kingdom, which forms the refrain of each verse, is among the few notes Martín Gaite made following her reading of Campbell's book in the early 1960s. In Nubosidad when, in one of her letters to her friend Sofía, Mariana León is recalling her student days and particularly her growing interest in specialising in psychiatry after graduating in medicine, she depicts her vocation in an echo of Inanna's journey and the refrain in the ancient myth, which represents a challenge to the gatekeeper's words: ‘¡Oh, investigar los caminos tortuosos del mundo interior!’ [Oh, investigate the winding paths of the inner world] (216). At the time of deciding on her career, Mariana assessed her choice as being between attending to her own inner world and that of others (315). Some thirty years later she is called to turn her attention to her inner self and make her own descent into the underworld.