... with Ena and her wealthy family in Madrid. In style, Nada could be said to resemble a pastiche of inverted fairy tales, which seemingly culminate in the happy ending eluded so many times throughout the book. For many critics, Nada appears to endorse the bourgeois patriarchal discourse of the time, which was of fundamental importance to the new regime in 1940s Spain. Post-war Spanish society was highly fragmented, and in dire need of reconstruction, which from a Francoist perspective entailed the re-establishing and buttressing of patriarchal family relations. "The patriarchal family was seen as representing the corporate order of the state in a microcosm. So by reconstructing or reinforcing it, Francoism would, in theory, be able to operate in an atomised post-war society to build up the 'new order'."1 The war, aside from ensuring the destruction of the revolutionary working class, had also displaced some pockets of the bourgeoisie ...

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