Maria de los Milagros, known as Milagrosa, is the daughter of a dominant mother, a woman who terrorises the family with her often opportunistically simulated hysterical fits, who exploits everyone around her, and for whom her daughter is no more than an adjunct to her social status. Coddled, repressed, suffocated, Milagrosa never grows to independent womanhood, never manages to cut the psychological umbilical cord. Mercedes Deambrosis's portrait of an overpowering mother, a monstrous tyrant, is both splendidly ironic and vividly humorous. It paints a devastating pictureof the pretensions of the Spanish bourgeoisie. On another level, it can be read as a satirical allegory of Spanish society under General Franco. (Milagrosa's mother dies at the same time as the Generalissimo).