Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Jennifer Smith

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781684480340
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas "Clarín, " and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís.The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

Part I

Modern Spanish Women Writers as Activists

Chapter 1

Gender, Race, and Subalternity in the Antislavery Plays of María Rosa Gálvez and Faustina Sáez de Melgar

Akiko Tsuchiya

María Rosa Gálvez’s Zinda (1804) and Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s La cadena rota (The Broken Chain; 1879),1 though composed nearly three-quarters of a century apart, presumably during different periods in nineteenth-century Spanish literary history, have a number of characteristics in common. Both are antislavery plays that explore the intersections of gender, race, and colonialism through the use of melodramatic conventions and both intertwine the antislavery stance with the struggle for the affirmation of female subjectivity and agency. Gálvez’s play, published at the turn of the nineteenth century,2 simultaneously embodied (implicitly masculine) Enlightenment3 values and anticipated Romanticism and its project of liberal reform by seeking to give voice to subaltern subjects: slaves and African women. For its part, Sáez de Melgar’s drama—while composed much later in the 1870s, when Romanticism was already in decline in Spain—draws on the neo-Romantic esthetic of melodrama to advocate for the rights and freedom of the slave.

At the beginning of the century before the Spanish American independence movements, there was already a network of liberals who publicly denounced slavery and the slave trade in their oratory and writings.4 These included the Madrid law student Isidoro Antillón (1778–1814), who, in his 1802 speech, denounced the Iberian Empire for its role in the slave trade; the poet Manuel Quintana (1772–1857), who founded a new periodical to air antislavery views; and of course, the best-known liberal intellectual of the period, the exiled theologian José Blanco White (1775–1841), who, in addition to penning his own antislavery tracts, translated—or, as some have claimed, even rewrote in Spanish—the British abolitionist William Wilberforce’s famous Letter on the Slave Trade (1807). Among this group of Spanish liberal intellectuals of the turn of the century, María Rosa Gálvez was the only woman known to have contributed to antislavery literature at this early date with the publication of her drama, Zinda, in 1804.

According to historian Emily Berquist, the Cortes and the constitution of 1812 were crucial to provoking political changes that led to the emergence of the antislavery movement in Spain. These liberal institutions “gave birth to an incipient ‘public sphere’” in the late Spanish Empire, allowing for greater freedom to question royal policy—including the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself—and to write about them.5 While Spanish liberalism did not guarantee women citizenship or equal access to the public sphere,6 Spanish women nevertheless played a crucial role in the public debates of the state through their participation in civil society. As Susan Kirkpatrick has affirmed, Romanticism, which came on the heels of Spain’s first liberal constitution, granted women a certain authority, and even autonomy, as subjects for the first time in Spanish literary history precisely because of new concepts of self that emphasized the importance of emotions and interiority.7 That is to say, these women combined the language of Romanticism with that of social reform to assert their right to subjectivity and self-expression, even as new lines were drawn, as the century went on, to institutionalize sexual difference and the notion of separate spheres.8

The abolitionist movement that was gathering force in other parts of the world in the 1830s and 1840s coincided with the Romantic period in Spain and provided the impulse for Spanish writers, including women, to take up the antislavery cause. The best-known women Romantic writers of Spain to embrace this cause were Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Carolina Coronado. Cuban-born Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) was the first antislavery novel by a woman to be published in the Spanish language. Carolina Coronado, married to the American diplomat Horatio Perry, became the president of the women’s chapter of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1868 and published three poems (including her famous “Oda a Lincoln” [“Ode to Lincoln”; 1861]) and an essay responding to the U.S. Civil War and denouncing the Spanish Empire’s complicity in upholding the institution of slavery. Later she recited her abolitionist poem, “A la abolición de la esclavitud en Cuba” (“To the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba”), before the members of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in a ceremony celebrating the September 1868 Revolution.9 The feminist writer and social reformer Concepción Arenal won first prize in a poetry competition sponsored by this same organization on the topic of abolition of slavery; her prize-winning poem “La esclavitud de los negros” (“The Slavery of Blacks”) was printed in an anthology titled El cancionero del esclavo (Anthology of Verses about the Slave; 1866), along with the other winners of the competition. As the antislavery movement in Spain gained momentum in the 1860s in response to the U.S. Civil War, women of letters increasingly asserted their presence in this movement through their antislavery activism and writings. Among the members of the women’s chapter of the Spanish Abolitionist Society were many prominent women of letters, including Coronado and Faustina Sáez de Melgar, who, in addition to her play La cadena rota, published columns denouncing slavery in her own periodical, La Violeta (The Violet). In sum, significant numbers of women were engaged in the antislavery cause in Spain throughout the nineteenth century.10

Returning to the female dramatists who are the subjects of this study, Gálvez, adopted and raised by an Andalusian family with military and political connections, was one of the most successful of the very small number of women dramatists of the late eighteenth century who tried to make a living through their writing. While she embraced many of the same Enlightenment values as her male contemporaries, she was unique in highlighting controversial gender issues such as rape, incest, and domestic violence.11 Sáez de Melgar, for her part, was commonly known to be a neo-Catholic writer and editor of women’s magazines in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet she played a crucial role in generating spheres of female action in nineteenth-century Spanish society through her participation in women’s organizations, such as the women’s chapter of the Abolitionist Society and the Ateneo de Señoras (Women’s Athenaeum), of which she was named president in 1869. She was quite vocal in her abolitionist views, as evinced in her uncompromising denunciation of slavery as “el crimen más nefando de los tiempos de la civilización”12 (the most nefarious crime of civilized times). In addition, the periodical La Violeta, founded and directed by Sáez de Melgar in the 1860s, had an important cultural impact among women’s circles, and in spite of what Íñigo Sánchez Llama has called its “feminine format,”13 it served as a forum for expressing antislavery sentiments.

That both Gálvez and Sáez de Melgar’s plays present an implicit analogy between women’s condition and chattel slavery is not surprising given the tradition of abolitionist literature by (white) women for whom slavery became a metaphor for their own subaltern status in a patriarchal society. Yet such an analogy must be rendered problematic precisely because of the Eurocentric, colonial discourse that frames the antislavery narrative. Avellaneda’s Sab exemplifies this problem, as the Creole author’s preoccupation with women’s oppression and social marginalization overshadows the novel’s denunciation of slavery, as several critics have noted.14 In both Gálvez and Sáez de Melgar’s dramatic works, the female subaltern subject—represented by the racial other—must negotiate between the Enlightenment values identified with the masculine, metropolitan subject and the dominant discourses of race and gender that inscribe the colonized woman in a position of subalternity. Departing from Gayatri Spivak’s famous question “Can the subaltern speak?”15 this study will interrogate the notion that antislavery discourse, rooted in the Enlightenment project, necessarily leads to the decolonization of the subaltern subject, or a questioning of colonial discourse.

Zinda is a fictional work that bears the name of the female protagonist, who is the queen of the Portuguese colony of Congo. According to Julia Bordiga Greinstein, Zinda was modeled on Nzinga Mbandi (1583–1663), the legendary queen of the West African kingdom of Matamba (part of present-day Angola) under Portuguese colonial rule in the seventeenth century.16 Nzinga was considered to be the mother of African nationalism, having mobilized the slaves in her kingdom to join the war against the Portuguese slave traders.17 Gálvez’s drama gives center stage to the problems of slavery and colonialism during a historical period when the major European empires were beginning to establish the slave trade, an institution that would, by the eighteenth century, become firmly entrenched and fundamental to the economy of the empires.18 Despite the Portuguese setting of Gálvez’s work, the events clearly serve as an allegory of Spanish colonialism, responsible for the maintenance of the slave trade and slavery until well into the nineteenth century. (The Cuban slave trade was declared illegal in 1867, but slavery itself was not abolished until 1886.)

In both Zinda and La cadena rota, gender, race, and colonialism intersect in complex and oftentimes contradictory ways. The opening scene of the play shows the (black) African warrior Alcaypa ready to execute the Christian (Portuguese) commander, Pereyra, by setting him on fire, thus seeking to take revenge on the white colonizers responsible for the slavery of the black Africans. The queen, Zinda, who enters the scene, intervenes and saves Pereyra from this violent death, affirming that it was the commander h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors