El vestuario en El tiempo entre costuras de María Dueñas: aproximación semiológica
Authors: Khemais Jouini 
Published: September 2023

The Wardrobe in The Time in Between Seams by María Dueñas: Semiological Approach   

El tiempo entre costuras (2009) by the Spanish novelist María Dueñas quickly became one of the best-selling novels in Spain in recent years, even more so after its television adaptation. With the adaptation-transposition of the novel, we witness a kind of "transformation-translation", or what we call an inter-semiotic translation. In this case, the literary text and the audiovisual text are formed by different semiotic systems, with a verbal basis for the first and a visual basis for the second. The analysis will address the divergences and / or coincidences between the literary text and its television transposition as two autonomous works of art with their respective semiological systems of expression. The novel represents an opportunity to explore how clothing accompanies the changes that the protagonist undergoes in her growth and maturity, thus constituting the most extensive, most conventional means of defining the human individual and his environment. The dress thus suffers a loss of its primary function of covering and protecting the human body. The objective of semiology is to observe the significance and the process of communication that is behind all those elements with which we live daily, that is, all the systems of signs, whatever the substance and limits of these systems. In this aspect, semiology has given a new perspective to the study of dress as a communicative element, since it allows us to read in depth the signs that are hidden in the outfits. Barthes studies, specifically, the written dress or rather what is described, transformed into language, i.e. the written dress expressed by language that is nothing more than the translation of clothing into language whose materials are the words governed by a syntactic relationship of verbal structure, unlike the dress-image, whose materials are shapes, lines, surface, colors, and the relationship is spatial. The union of the signs of the dress ends up generating a language and the dress works as well as a sentence or text-discourse on the body that must be read and interpreted. By taking the costume as a communicative entity and the semiological theory of Barthes as a tool of analysis, this study aims to analyze and demonstrate how the dress, despite not being a verbal form of communication, is loaded with meaning, allows the configuration of the personal identity of the protagonist, whose vital growth and social ascent are manifested through clothing. One can look for a meaning in the clothing a certain character wears and how the character wears it; because this is how you can create a signifier of what the character is, his philosophy, his environment and above all his identity. This is on one hand, on the other hand, it will show how clothing becomes a cultural reference to contextualize the era in which the events of the novel take place. Indeed, clothing is the faithful reflection of an era, from which one can analyze even the political or economic system established in society and reflect the changes that occur in it. We conclude by saying that the semiological analysis of the literary text, if it adds value to the understanding and interpretation of the meaning, is more than necessary in translation, both in its interlinguistic and inter-semiotic aspects. It is more than an assimilation and transference of everything that has a meaning from one system of signs to another system of signs, whether the latter is verbal or non-verbal.