Accounts of the evolution of narrative forms in Spanish literature often hinge on an unacknowledged notion of progress in which expressions of pride accompany resentment at the world’s failure to recognize national achievements. A glorious start (Cervantes, the picaresque novel) was followed by a period of decline (the unpatriotic eighteenth century, the underdeveloped local-color piece, the contemptible serialized novel), then a reawakening (to use Menéndez Pelayo’s term) during the nineteenth century with the emergence of the great masters of realism, notably Pérez Galdós. As Alda Blanco has argued, this trajectory is often narrated as a sexualized competition, in which “feminine” forms, linked with mass culture, are despised or ignored, while more “virile” forms are held up to compete with the work of celebrities such as Balzac or Zola. In describing this narrative trajectory as a response to anxiety over legitimacy, both sexual and national, feminists today are engaged in a healthy critique of literary standards and the evaluative rhetoric of evolution that implies literary perfectibility.1
The process of reassessing a feminine tradition begins with a search, discovery, reediting and reevaluation of what has been excluded from the predominantly male canon. In the case of Spain this process is still in its initial phase, although considerable impetus has come recently from the collection of women writers edited by Castalia in conjunction with the Instituto de la Mujer (‘Institute for Women’s Affairs’). The goal of this series, explained on the Castalia website, is to “recover women’s literary contributions” and “recover a lost memory.” In addition to important poetry collections by Concepción Arenal, Carolina Coronado, and others, the series has begun recovering neglected works of prose fiction such as Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Dulce dueño (‘Gentle Master’) and Angela Grassi’s El copo de nieve (‘Snowflake’). Similarly the publishers horas y HORAS, in conjunction with Dirección General de la Mujer de la Comunidad de Madrid (‘City of Madrid General Office for Women’) has embarked on an ambitious project, outlined on their book jackets, to “show, with scientific rigor and elegance, the authentic contribution of women throughout human hisbory.” Finally Cátedra, in cooperation with the University of Valencia’s Instituto de la Mujer, has translated important works of feminist literary criticism. With a focus on archive work, this series is bringing to light long-forgotten documents essential for the reassessment of Madrid’s urban feminine culture.2
Coinciding with the publication of recovered texts and documents there has been a more refined critical evaluation of women’s writing. Styles formerly judged negatively, such as lachrymose sentimentality or melodrama, are vindicated or at least reinterpreted. Themes that before seemed pedestrian or unimaginative – religious education, domesticity, feminine intuition, rewards for perseverance, devotion, obedience, maternity – are being reassessed either as evidence of alternative social values and cultural practices or for their role in shaping those values and practices. Traditionally, women writers were either categorized as “exceptional brains,”3 like Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro who are often held up to compete with a male standard, or grouped among the minions or lesser luminaries whose flaws justifiably excluded them from established canons. Now, however, it has become important to investigate the politics of canon formation; “to study not just how power relations are embedded in texts, but also the social and political institutions and processes through which aesthetic standards are established.”4 In other words, now that the “archaeological labor”5 of uncovering actual writers and texts has begun, it is time to problematize the text called “literary history.”
It is also important to understand not only what political and ideological pressures prevented these lesser women writers from competing with their male counterparts, but also to assess the considerable appeal that such novelists as María del Pilar Sinués de Marco (with her 73 books one of the most prolific of women authors), Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, Faustina Sáez de Melgar, and Angela Grassi held for their now forgotten readers. The 1990s saw a rise in the publication of criticism resituating the work of women writers in its proper literary context: Marina Mayoral’s Escritoras románticas españolas, followed by Susan Kirkpatrick’s Las románticas and Íñigo Sánchez Llama’s Galería de escritoras isabelinas; Alda Blanco’s essays on, among others, Sinués de Marco and Sáez de Melgar; Maryellen Bieder on Gimeno de Flaquer and Emilia Pardo Bazán; John Sinnigen on Catherine MacPherson, and my survey of women novelists, Narratives of Desire.6
In reevaluating women’s fiction, critics in the US and abroad have relied heavily on Anglo-American as well as non-Spanish continental theory, compensating for a void in critical work on gender and representation in Spain. Anglo-American criticism has been particularly useful for the analysis of nineteenth-century texts. One of the reasons for this is the conviction that the pressures on women writers of the Victorian era mirrored those experienced by women in a very Catholic nineteenth-century Spain that had constructed a religion out of family values. Although applying this theory to Spanish women writers can be problematic, certain texts have contributed greatly to the understanding of Spanish domestic fiction. Denise Riley’s Am I That Name?, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic are but three of the works that have influenced the way that we approach nineteenth-century Spanish women’s texts.7
Another trend in Anglo-feminist criticism may also prove useful as the examination of women’s writings enters a new stage. Victorian women writers are coming under scrutiny for their unrecognized role in the ends of empire and in the class stratification that have been the subject of numerous critiques by male writers. As victims of a repressive patriarchy, women writers had somehow constituted themselves as a class apart, immune to accusations of class bias, imperialism, and racism since they did not finance or fight in wars, determine factory wages and working conditions, or enforce repressive laws. Increasingly, an awakened consciousness of the hidden scenes of collaboration, a vital concern of third wave feminist critics, has shifted the focus away from women’s marginalization and victimization towards women’s participation in various imperialist projects and in the forging of the modern capitalist state.
It would seem at first that this criticism is not particularly useful to critics of Spanish women writers: Spain’s imperial star was in decline by the time Britannia ruled the waves, and its bourgeois class less entrenched. While England was relocating itself “within a much larger circle of the world map,”8 Spain was focusing attention on ever-smaller circles of influence and power, not only among its colonies, but among nations like France and England, formerly regarded as equals. However, a brief sampling of texts shows the degree to which Spanish women writers constructed their narratives of feminine victimization and self-sacrifice on unchallenged differences of class, race, and ethnicity. Although any number of works would serve to illustrate these issues that complicate the study of gender in novel and narrative, in what follows I focus on four representative samples: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), María del Pilar Sinués de Marco’s La senda de la Gloria (‘The Path to Glory’, 1880), Rosalía de Castro’s El caballero de las botas azules (‘The Gentleman in the Blue Boots’, 1867), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa, 1886).9 My purpose is not to heap blame on writers who were blind to their class bias or racism, but rather to suggest a contrapuntal dialogue between the way nineteenth-century women wrote about themselves and their struggles, and, on the other hand, their patterns of writing about the working classes and the subjects of Spain’s former colonies.
Heralded as the first Hispanic anti-slavery novel, Avellaneda’s Sab is also notable for anticipating the explicitly feminist argument of Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa, in which the danger for women lies not in books or the public sphere, as writers of domestic fiction feared, but behind the doors of the family home. A domestic drama tending towards the Gothic, Sab narrates the trials of an ingenue who marries her true love only to discover that her husband is a mean-spirited tyrant. This anti-marriage plot, borrowed from George Sand,10 is infrequent or at least disguised until the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Carlota’s post-marriage dilemma represents a departure from conventional women’s fiction that championed the ideal of the home as women’s socially assigned place.11 On the other hand, the point of many women’s texts, especially those in the decades following Sab when the popularity of the domestic novel peaked, is that domestic bliss is rarely achieved or at best can only be earned through great personal sacrifice, a kind of strategic masochism that has its rewards. Undeniably Sab’s anti-slavery rhetoric is a departure from mid-century fictions in which a pro-slavery rhetoric (as far as women’s slavery is concerned) predominated. What it shares with conventional women’s fiction of its day, however, is the conviction that the reward for suffering feminine slavery can only come in the next life, and a recognition of the inextricable relationship between a woman’s marketability and her dowry.
Following the model of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Avellaneda negotiated the pressure points and limits of ideal femininity by associating the marriage contract with the notion of feminine subjugation. Appropriating the handy colonial rhetoric of freedom and slavery, she constructed her heroine as a slave in the guise of a wealthy and spoiled white Cuban creole. Sab, Carlota, and to an extent Teresa, the other woman slave of the novel, are endowed with superior sensitivity and capacity for altruism and passion; all wear the “chains” that bind them to the world of a ruthless, white male mercantilism. On her deathbed Teresa offers Carlota, suffering under the yoke of her avaricious and indifferent husband, a world of consolation through shared suffering: unloved slave, unloved nun, and unloved wife create a “secret fellowship of superior souls as a way of mitigating the isolation of the feeling subject in an alien world.”12 All three are forced into submission to a new and ruthless order linked to a British colonialism that curiously evades the issue of Spanish exploitation. All three will have to await their rewards in another world where, as the Biblical phrase quoted in the text predicts (Sab, p. 212), they will at last be enfolded into the arms of the Lord and relieved of all burdens and cares.
By closely intertwining their destinies, Avellaneda insured that for any one of the three slaves to be truly understood, the oppressed conditions of all three must come into play. Sab is enslaved by the needs and desires of a white man of means but he is penniless and dependent like Teresa. His love of beauty, justice, and knowledge is a useless and involuntary attribute given his status. But he is a slave not just for the chains that bind him (he is in fact never chained) but because he has no country or family and is unloved by Carlota. Carlota is a slave not just because she married a man incapable of love but because she must, as a dutiful wife, serve interests and ideals that are abhorrent to her. Sab complains that Carlota’s husband has purchased her just as one would a slave: “like a piece of merchandise, through calculation, convenience . . . engaging in a shameful speculation on the most holy tie, the most solemn undertaking. She, who would give him her soul!” (p. 222). A squalid and hateful pack of regrets pursues women when once they wed, the wise slave continues; “like slaves, they patiently drag their chains and lower their head beneath the yoke of human laws. With no other guide but their credulous and ignorant hearts they select a master for life” (pp. 270–1). Sab’s melodramatic diatribe reveals that the seemingly anti-slavery stance of the novel is a form of colonization of the mulatto slave’s subjectivity and that “the issue of slavery was from the start secondary to that of women.”13 A slave can buy his freedom, suggests Sab, while a woman can only be freed by death; hers is an “enslaved freedom” (p. 261) while “the slave at least can change masters, he can hope that by saving his gold he will some day gain his freedom” (p. 271). This act of staking a claim for a more authentic status as victim, implausibly spoken by a true slave who describes his status as circumstantial since it can be terminated, if nothing else, invites readers to ignore the unenviable conditions of the freed slave in societies where slavery was still legal. As Jerome Branche has demonstrated, Sab is not a true abolitionist text; its insistence on the ambivalence of Sab, and its failure to vindicate black women, demonstrates Avellaneda’s allegiance to the dominant order.14
Reminiscent of the anti-slavery rhetoric of Sab or the poetry of Carolina Coronado,15 fledgling feminist novelists of the mid-century such as María del Pilar Sinués de Marco enlisted oppressed classes to redefine what they perceived as the general oppression of even the most elite classes of women in a patriarchal society. In keeping with their bourgeois myopia, however, they often cordoned themselves from the working classes at the same time as they claimed an equally oppressive enslavement. An award-winning work of art by the heroine of Sinués’s La senda de la gloria graphically illustrates this point. After she has been abused and beaten by her worthless husband, Julia, her husband’s “slave,” produces her most ambitious work. In “Egoism” she juxtaposes the greed and indifference of the wealthy towards the working classes with the cruelty and indifference of a husband faced with the suffering of his family.
In the background of the painting a storm rages, fishermen struggle with their sails, and a stricken sailor lies across the bow of his boat, blood gushing from his chest. In the center a corpulent man sits on a veranda beneath a canopy of vines, suggesting he is on holiday. He raises a fork to his mouth with a piece of fowl on it, while before him spreads a sumptuous dinner that he alone is enjoying. He is equally oblivious of the agonized visages of the fishermen, the emaciated dog begging a crust of bread at his feet, and his delicate and beautiful wife holding a sickly child to her breast. The bond uniting the neglected wife and child and the floundering fishermen in the background is forged by the couple’s servant, who stares in horror at the stricken fisherman while at the same time holding the sick child’s hand with a gentle and intimate gesture: “to signal that the state of the child also caused a great part of her pain” (p. 209). Beyond the horror of the struggling fishermen, the desperation of the abused wife, the servant’s tender gesture, the suffering of the sickly child and the “cruel egoism” of the rich bourgeois, however, Julia’s painting also carries the equalizing message of an earlier generation of women writers who confounded the exploitation of the domestic angel (whether rich or poor) with that of the servants, housekeepers, wet-nurses, and other victims of class disparity with whom the domestic angel shared her bondage.
Just as it is possible to read Sab as domestic fiction, Rosalía de Castro’s El caballero de las botas azules can be read as an anti-slavery novel. On the back cover of the novel, Ana Rodríguez-Fisher asks readers to discard any notion of Castro as a fragile, sweet poet. El caballero, she suggests, is “urbane, social, satirical, Cervantine, realist and fantastic, rupturist and protean. A novel that foregoes the plaintive and launches a message of protest and liberty.” In her introduction, Rodríguez-Fisher complains that Castro has been mischaracterized as a romantic voice forever bound to her “feminine condition” (p. 11). Implied is her conviction that El caballero has been unjustly overlooked by critics like Menéndez y Pelayo, who classified novels written before 1870 as “drivel and monstrosities,”16 when in fact it competes with the more energetic prose that characterizes the realist novel. It is not difficult to see why this corrective is warranted when we compare this novel with the works of Castro’s contemporaries or even with her other productions such as La hija del mar (Daughter of the Sea, 1859). This is all the more reason, however, to subject it to the same critical scrutiny usually reserved for authors whose works have generated the most critical acclaim and attention.
In El caballero de las botas azules, a desperate author conjures up a muse named Novelty to guide him to literary fame. Novelty transforms the erstwhile author into the Duque de la Gloria (Duke of Glory), who makes a stunning entrance into Madrid society wearing blue boots and a bizarre eaglet-feather cravat and brandishing a wand studded with diamonds and bells. Rumors abound that the Duke has come to Madrid to publish the “book of books” that will surpass every work of literature previously published. He is so handsome, seductive, and novel that everyone rushes to copy his dress and seek out his company. As one by one women fall under his spell, the Duke relentlessly unmasks their frivolous desires, alienation, and materialism. Censuring women’s failure to distinguish between fiction and reality, he admonishes them “to be resistant readers, to read critically the fantasies scripted for them.”17 Meanwhile, implementing what Kirkpatrick calls a “supremely successful marketing strategy,” he makes men sense their mediocrity and shortcomings, until the very mention of his “book of books” makes them cringe with envy. Finally, when everyone is convinced that Spanish literature and society are worthless, the Duke orders a great pit dug and has every book but his own thrown into it. With all the women gathered around him dressed as his slaves, he delivers a sermon about bondage, arguing that women have been slaves to fashion and crass materialism, bad reading habits, unbridled passions, and inappropriate class aspirations. Having completed his mission of “belling the cat,” he then mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a great stock of his “book of books.”
Generally disliked and misunderstood, El caballero is now finally garnering attention for its subtle problematizing of feminine desire and the cultural production of gender. For example, Kirkpatrick has analyzed its critique of women’s reading habits and the nefarious consequences of a public manipulated by a market-driven press. However, as far as women’s roles are concerned, we are still some distance from understanding the precise relationship between patriarchy and capitalism and perhaps still under the influence of the celebratory phase of feminist recovery of a lost tradition, and thus have not adequately scrutinized the class bias implied in Castro’s text. For example, several questions remain to be explored: What contradictions are implied when, on one hand, women are exhorted to become better readers but are only ever pictured, and only imagine themselves, as morally and sexually degraded slaves of the Duke? What does it mean that the Duke encourages only wealthy women like Vinca Rúa to become better readers, while he exhorts underprivileged women to find and keep their humbler place in a society of non-readers? Finally, are the novel’s complex mechanics of desire a recognition of social manipulation or evidence of desire’s ontological origin, or both?
A focus on feminine desire reveals El caballero to be one of the most fertile texts of Spanish literature, a catalogue of the many dissatisfactions and demands attributable to a decadent society in which the pursuit of pleasure never results in satisfaction or the abatement of desire no matter what other advantages (money, beauty, or class) a woman possesses. It can be argued, then, that the mechanics of desire reveal primary as well as social processes. One of the Duke’s principal missions is to enthrall women sexually and then exploit their obsession in order to ridicule their reading habits, social customs, and lack of productivity. Yet in the process he also reveals important information about the psychological mechanics of desire. Beyond admonitions regarding feminine excess and vanity, El caballero explores the dissatisfactions that define women as subjects because they desire, regardless of the appropriateness of the desired object. For this reason a combined materialist-psychoanalytic analysis of this novel would best explore both its false consciousness and processes of alienation. These themes converge precisely in the description of the goals and production of desire. While a materialist view centers on the economic and political interests implied in the production of desire, psychoanalysis discloses the way material interests depend on the emotional necessities of those driven by impossible desires.
A useful step in analyzing desire as it relates to gender stratification in El caballero is to ascertain its affinity with capitalist exploitation. The Duke demonstrates that women’s desire to identify with him, thus exploiting their creative and sensual nature, is impossible: their romantic fantasies are unrealizable and they mistake sexual degradation for freedom. The parallel with Marxist descriptions of the worker under capitalism is evident: the fundamental capitalist contract implies only two possibilities regarding the buying and selling of labor power, either “selling oneself into bondage or purchasing a slave.”18 On the one hand, the Duke’s boots unchain a feminine passion for spending; there is no end to women’s desire to purchase the precious articles or associate themselves with those who possess such objects. On the other, like Avellaneda’s Sab, the Duke reveals that women themselves are also merchandise, mere slaves who mistakenly imagine themselves to be free. Their slavery highlights the lack of reciprocity between men and women: the longed-for romantic hero turns out to be a slaver instead of a poet come to rescue them from boredom. The Duke is a master teacher but uninterested in overseeing the conditions of his reformed slaves.
The publishing industry banks on the desire of modern societies for the new, which is why Castro appropriately called the Duke’s muse ‘Novelty.’ The reason everyone will always desire her, she explains, is that whatever she becomes for them, whether a steam engine in the present or air travel in the future, will never be enough to satisfy human curiosity. In other words, the muse personifies desire, who, she claims, was her mother. Novelty attires the Duke so bizarrely that his grand entrance into Madrid has much the same effect as queen consort María Cristina’s entrance had on her subjects in 1829. And much like the queen’s admired blue dress and supple leather gloves, the Duke’s blue boots exert a strange, mesmerizing effect over everyone who sees them. The glow of the smooth, unseamed leather boots increases in proportion to the passion with which the Duke is contemplated. For example, when he visits one lady’s boudoir, “the boots discharged a glow that disturbed eyes and thoughts . . . Perhaps they had never looked so handsome” (pp. 698–9).
While psychoanalytic theory leads us to see the desire for these precious commodities as a form of expression of repressed desire,19 a materialist analysis is needed to articulate exactly how the quest to satisfy desire always implies a slave—master relation and how the social and sexual relations of El caballero function within Spanish cultural institutions such as the publishing industry at the time the novel was written. The transactions between the Duke (or the market where he is on sale) and women involve situations of surrender (of sex, money, and labor) and domination that structurally mirror capitalist relationships of domination invoked in Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism. The Duke’s clothes have both a symbolic and a material value; the author casts the craving for them as something universal and natural, an ontological desire to possess secret knowledge, and, beyond that, to repossess the plenitude that is lost to the child at the dawn of subjectivity. But we also need to understand craving as something unnatural, the effect of market strategies creating a demand for inappropriate or impractical material goods. Thus the lack that creates an insatiable desire for what can never be recaptured helps to explain the importance of establishing difference and distinction, especially the class distinctions that are at the core of the novel’s didacticism.
The protagonist’s desire to be a great writer unmasks Spanish society’s frivolous obsession with fashion, novelty, and technological progress – exemplified here as a flying machine – at the expense of social progress. In their quest for the exotic aristocratic women have forgotten how to be of use to society. Middle-class women, instead of helping ends meet by knitting stocking caps, dream of dressing like the queen: “the better off dream and discuss how they can dress like princesses, while the poorer rant about silk and lace” (p. 675). Although the response to them is intensely personal, the blue boots are a collective social object: they produce highly charged emotional responses which the Duke uses to criticize the pervasive decadence of Spanish society. The various forms of obsession, occasioned by the boots, are linked to a desire for something incommensurate with what the Duke poses as healthy social, sexual, and cultural values.
While critics usually focus on Spain’s consumerism and decadence during the period of the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1874–85), already in 1867 Castro condemns the ills of excessive consumerism and novelty-seeking and their link to cultural and sexual malaise, arguing for a more moral and productive society: women should sew and write instead of going to dances; become producers of cultural and material objects instead of mere pawns in the endless exchange of women and goods in a capitalist market. Her critique of these social and sexual ills led her to the brilliant choice of an exotic male figure whose play of masks and precious clothing dazzles every sector of Madrid society. The symbolic complexity of the boots demonstrates Castro’s awareness of both the economic and non-economic (sexual, cultural) processes involved in the working of desire; both are constituent factors in the determination of subjectivity.
The libidinous investment in the Duke’s blue boots qualifies them as a fetish object in both the psychoanalytic and materialist sense. Like fetish objects in mercantile exchanges with Africa and other “exotic” lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they are a cross-cultural object. The narrator emphasizes the fact that the raw materials for the boots and feather cravat come from the mysterious banks of the Jordan. Together with the Arab servant Zuma, the boots symbolize the increasing Spanish obsession with exotic locales and fashions that the magazine Correo de la moda described in 1851 as the height of fashion: “jackets bordered and festooned like those of Turkish and Armenian women, babuchas embroidered with gold, pearls and multi-colored silk.”20
The boots also serve as a cross-class interaction or commerce, an overdetermined signifier of class ascension that the text explicitly condemns as dangerous and debilitating. To the beleaguered bureaucrat, they represent his womenfolk’s unbridled drive to consume and, through the purchase of certain commodities, to indulge in futile attempts to attract men and thereby enhance their exchange value on the marriage market. The narrator condemns this extravagant display as a class-debilitating expenditure: “At the cost of such sacrifices and humiliations, the middle class supports the apparent luxury that debilitates it in its death throes” (p. 732). Castro clearly wants middle-class women to recognize that the blue boots and other accessories, examples of extravagantly expensive clothing, are valued falsely. Belonging to the middle class carries with it the responsibility to be frugal, productive members of society, and to relinquish aspirations of class mobility.
Finally, in classical Freudian terms the blue boots are a phallic fetish. For their would-be possessor they advertise a tantalizing plenitude while at the same time designating a lack, since what they symbolize ultimately cannot be had. The Duke is a walking phallic symbol, a mirage that, like all fetishes, simultaneously negates lack and stands in for what is lacking. The blue boots, feather cravat, and diamond-studded wand the Duke waves in front of everyone’s nose mask emptiness, represented in El caballero as Spain’s lack of an aesthetic sublime. The Duke masquerades as the possessor of something beyond par, deploying beauty, seductiveness, and genius as projections of his sublime book of books whose content he never reveals. As an aesthetic signifier, his clothes symbolize for the men who emulate them what they lack: the chance to gain professional autonomy, a way of distinguishing themselves from the mundane by acquiring an outstanding literary style that is unreproducible or achieving some other professional distinction. Both men and women project onto the boots and cravat the power of realizing repressed desires, even while, as Marxists argue about the drive to possess money, the ultimate object of desire “remains perpetually and tantalizingly out of reach.”21
Conceptualizing the various attributes of the fetish helps to underscore the fact that material, cultural, and sexual needs interlock in El caballero de las botas azules. Above all the Duke shows his slaves that they are enthralled by a simulacrum, a substitute for what society can no longer recognize: truth, aesthetic beauty, duty, and enduring love. At the same time, by casting the boots as a commodity of priceless value, Castro forces readers to recognize that the production, value, and purchase of the boots are linked to specific relations of class, ethnicity, and gender. That is, the novel enjoins us to study more closely the relationship between aesthetic production and consumerism in nineteenth-century Spain.
In addition to the rhetoric of slavery that problematized women’s duties in the domestic sphere, the canon of women’s texts in nineteenth-century Spain offers another perspective: the viewpoint of those who toiled at the heroine’s leisure yet who never gained the rhetorical category of “slave” reserved for more spiritual heroines. Household servants in Spanish literature were despised or demonized by even the most feminist of authors, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose stellar career would not have been possible without the contingent of household servants that catered for her needs. The bourgeois mythology championed in the writing of Sinués de Marco, Grassi, Gimeno de Flaquer, Böhl de Faber, and others advocated middle-class motherhood as a loftier aspiration than literary fame. This stance complicated notions of public and private gender roles and made for odd justifications of the restrictions on women’s activities and movement. Whereas cultural dogma held that children belonged to their fathers even while mothers were supposed to provide their environment, nourishment, and early religious training, women authors, most of whom were also mothers, problematized this Rousseauian notion in a variety of ways.
Rather than directly challenge male supremacy in the family or diminishing women’s material importance, writers like Pardo Bazán exaggerated women’s spiritual role or split women into two classes: those who bore and gave physical nourishment to children, such as Sabel in Los pazos or María Pepa in La quimera (‘The Chimera’, 1905), and those for whom maternity entailed complicated and contradictory aspirations, traumas, spiritual and physical dangers, usually upper middle-class and aristocratic women who stood in sharp contrast to their healthier but less educated counterparts. Setting aside exceptions such as Amparo of La tribuna (Tribune of the People, 1882) or Antonia in La piedra angular (‘The Cornerstone’, 1891), the working-class women whom Pardo Bazán occasionally praised in her feminist essays were not the mothers she chose to feature in her novels. As a result, the ideal of the nurturing, tender, conserving mother figure depends more on class than on gender.22 Only women with leisure time, a stable living environment, and steady male companionship have the luxury and inclination to be good mothers, even though tragedy or ill health may strike and break the mother—child bond. Poor mothers, like Leocadia in El cisne de Vilamorta (The Swan of Vilamorta, 1884), have to make impossible choices that turn them into bad mothers if they are not already naturally inclined to neglectfulness by virtue of their class status.
This double vision of motherhood in Pardo Bazán’s novels reminds us how myopic educated women can be when portraying themselves as victims. Only by acknowledging this can we understand what else is at stake in Pardo Bazán’s concept of feminine subjectivity. For example, in Los pazos, our understanding of Nucha as an outsider who erroneously stumbles in on a cultural wasteland only gains contour by contrast with the native version of the mother, Sabel, who is the most conspicuous outsider in this fiction of the saintly mother. For modern feminist readers such as Gayatri Spivak, Sabel would represent the excluded other woman more than Nucha since her role is to allow the good female subject to emerge as the one worthy of admiration and pity. As one of Nucha’s victimizers, the text marginalizes Sabel to the border where animal and human species are barely distinguishable. By sacrificing Sabel’s subjectivity to the other maternal figure of the novel, Pardo Bazán does more than unmask the category of the natural by revealing the brutality of uncivilized country life; she relegates the servant to the dim field of vision within which members of one class could justify their feelings of superiority over others. Elevating Sabel to a position of power in the Ulloa household does not make readers hope for a rise in her fortunes. Since Sabel is the bad mother, we can only hope that eventually she will be confined to the kitchen with the cook, scullery maids, and the village witch.
As defined by Julia Kristeva, motherhood is associated with the primitive semiotic, prior to the acquisition of speech when the dyadic relation with the mother is seamless. This description is from the point of view of the adult, whose unconscious memory of the early maternal bond keeps threatening the male subject with collapse. At times Pardo Bazán’s representations of motherhood connect to this psychological narrative, especially during the first, most materialistic stage of her fiction. However, even in early works such as Los pazos, we can distinguish two divergent conceptions of mother, one taken from the child’s perspective and the other from a mother’s point of view. For the child, Mother Nature represents the primitive maternal, a remembered maternal presence threatening pre-symbolic non-differentiation and, by extension, the collapse of the civilized. She belongs to the realm of the masculine imaginary rather than representing motherhood as a lived experience. The woman who embodies this fear in Pardo Bazán’s fiction is a woman of inferior caring instincts and often inferior class to which Pardo Bazán feels comfortable assigning the negative category of the mind—body and nature – culture dichotomies. The second and prevalent representation of motherhood, taken from the perspective of those adults who give themselves over to mothering, represents society’s “civilizing” feminine element that fosters a sense of community and intersubjectivity, checking sexual appetites. This is the maternal ideal or imaginary that Pardo Bazán wove into her fictions of motherhood. Women who do not readily accept the responsibility of this type of motherhood – usually poorer or uneducated women in Pardo Bazán’s view – bring death to their children and chaos to their households; they are not, in other words, true mothers.
In the above examples I have argued for a more critical view of feminine production that reflects shifts in late twentieth-century feminist thinking among eminent Hispanists (e.g. M. Bieder, C. Jagoe, H. Gold) who have shared their reflections in private communications. The shift is not the result of a subsiding interest in women writers or gender studies but a response to an uncomfortable feeling about pursuing the “woman-as-victim-of-phallocentrism” (Bieder) line of earlier images-of-women criticism and a general wariness of “theory that isn’t grounded in history” (Jagoe).23 It is clearly no longer sufficient merely to argue that women have been disadvantaged within patriarchy: this truism should be “a point of departure for our research rather than a conclusion” (Gold). Several are turning their attention to issues relating to the “wider spectrum including race and nation” (Jagoe), recognizing especially that “class is fundamental to any study of nineteenth-century women” (Bieder). Rather than teach courses or write books on an individual or even a group of women writers, many now choose to frame gender as “one aspect of a larger theme” (Gold), for example, the role of literature in the construction of national identity or regional ethnicity, the alienated writer or reader and the urban setting, the intermixing of mass culture and elite culture, the presence (or absence) of the colonial figure in realist fiction. Yet a word of caution is in order. Perhaps, suggests Alda Blanco, “in other national literatures, work on women writers has run its course, but this is sadly not the case in our field.” The move in the most recent decade from feminist literary criticism to gender studies to cultural studies and now post-colonial studies has left the pre-twentieth-century Spanish canon largely intact.
1 These statements summarize Blanco’s “Gender and National Identity: The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literary History,” in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain, ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 120–36.
2 Archive research is keeping apace with these publishing ventures, although much work remains to be done. Important stimulus has come also from Giuliana Di Febo’s often-cited article “Orígenes del debate feminista en España” and Geraldine Scanlon’s La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea (1864–1974). The recently published La mujer en los discursos de género: Textos y contextos del siglo XIX, ed. Catherine Jagoe, Alda Blanco and Cristina Enríquez de Salamanca (Barcelona: Icaria, 1998) offers the most comprehensive set of documents to facilitate the study of gender in nineteenth-century culture.
3 E. Martín, Tres mujeres gallegas del siglo XIX. Concepción Arenal, Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán (Barcelona: Editorial Aedos, 1977), p. 211.
4 J. Sinnigen, “Symbolic Struggles: Literary Study, Social History, Value Judgments,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27 (1993), p. 445.
5 A. Blanco, “Escritora, feminidad y escritura en la España de medio siglo,” Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana), vol. V, La literatura escrita por mujer (Del s. XIX a la actualidad) (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1998), p. 10.
6 M. Mayoral, Escritoras románticas españolas (Madrid: Fundación Banco Exterior, 1990); S. Kirkpatrick, Las románticas: escritoras y subjetividad en España, 1835–1850 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989); I. Sánchez Llama, Galería de escritoras isabelinas. La prensa periódica entre 1833 y 1895 (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000); L. Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994), pp. 58–77.
7 D. Riley, Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); N. Armstrong, Desire in Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
8 E. Said, “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, ed. Francis Mulhern (London: Longman, 1992), p. 100. Rpr. from Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, ed. Terry Eagleton (Oxford: Polity, 1989), pp. 150–64.
9 G. Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, ed. José Servera (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997); M. del Pilar Sinués de Marco, La senda de la gloria, 2nd edn (Madrid: La Moda Elegante Ilustrada, 1880); R. de Castro, El caballero de las botas azules, ed. Ana Rodríguez-Fisher (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995); E. Pardo Bazán, Los pazos de Ulloa, ed. Marina Mayoral (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1987).
10 See Kirkpatrick, Las románticas, p. 142, for Avellaneda’s debt to George Sand. For a study of the similarities to Sand’s Indiana, who also depicts herself as a slave to men’s will, see S. Beyer and F. Kluck, “George Sand and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 19.2 (Winter 1991), pp. 203–9.
11 Kirkpatrick, Las románticas, p. 150.
14 J. Blanche, “Ennobling Savagery? Sentimentalism and the Subaltern in Sab,” Afro-Hispanic Review 17.2 (Fall 1998), pp. 12–23.
15 See Carolina Coronado’s poems in Water Lilies. An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth Through the Nineteenth Century, ed. Amy Katz Kaminsky (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 438–47. Avellaneda’s analogy between the bitter plight of the black Cuban slave and the woman enslaved by patriarchy found echo in the poet Coronado, who, like Avellaneda, was a confirmed abolitionist. In her poem “To the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba” (1863), she castigates Spain for not freeing her slaves when even the “mighty eagle” (America) had seen fit to do so. On the contrary, in “To Spain” Coronado imagines Spain not as a cruel master but as a slave in order to draw attention to her country’s diminished position among the great European nations: her enslaved woman-nation languishes in wait for a Cid or Pelayo to rescue her from humiliation – “thus from black slave woman that she is now / will she become Lady Spain” (Water Lilies, p. 441). Elsewhere in Coronado’s poetry, the category of slave is reserved for women suffering under the yoke of patriarchy. In the 1849 poem “In the Salvatierra Castle” she complains bitterly that since the tearful women enslaved by Goths and Arabs rent their veils and consumed themselves in senseless suffering, very little has improved the lot of women: “not one link has time chipped off from our ancient and barbarous chains” (p. 445). Emilia Pardo Bazán exploited the same dichotomy of progress versus stasis later in the century. Echoing Coronado, she complained that worldwide progress for men was widening the gulf that existed between the sexes: “Imagine two people standing in the same place; make one advance and the other remain immobile: as much as the first advances, the other remains behind. Each new conquest for man in the area of political freedoms deepens the moral abyss that separates him from woman, and renders her role more passive and enigmatic. Freedom of education, freedom of religion, the right to assembly, suffrage, parliamentarism, all allow half of society (the masculine half) to acquire strength and activities at the expense of the feminine half” (La mujer española y otros artículos feministas, ed. Leda Schiavo, Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976, p. 33).
16 Blanco, “Gender and National Identity,” p. 122.
17 S. Kirkpatrick, “Fantasy, Seduction, and the Woman Reader: Rosalía de Castro’s Novels,” in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain, p. 88.
18 E. Victor Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic Marxism. Groundwork (New York: Guilford, 1993), p. 308.
19 Charnon-Deutsch, Narratives of Desire, pp. 87–8.
20 Correo de la moda, 1.1 (1 November 1851), p. 127.
21 Wolfenstein, Psycholanalytic Marxism, p. 3–4.
22 See Geraldine Scanlon’s notes in La polémica feminista on the complex interplay of class and gender in La Tribuna. As Scanlon states, Pardo Bazán’s attitude towards Amparo’s role was ambivalent: she was sympathetic to her gender struggle and aspirations while condemnatory and condescending toward her political goals.
23 The comments of Beider, Gold, Jagoe, and Blanco, quoted in this concluding paragraph, are from personal communications with the authors.