Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-siècle Spanish Literature and Culture

Jennifer Smith, Lisa Nalbone, Jennifer Smith, Lisa Nalbone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315464831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siècle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuña and Belén Sárraga. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.

Part I
Transatlantic relations

1 Challenging pasts, exploring futures

“Race,” gender, and class in the fin-de-siècle essays of Rosario de Acuña, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, and Belén Sárraga

Christine Arkinstall

In the Spanish fin de siècle, “race” was an indeterminate term that drew on conservative pasts but also projected utopian futures. As José Álvarez Junco elucidates, by the mid-nineteenth century, Spain’s early modern obsession with the cleanliness of blood was merging with a new racism anchored in European imperialism and nationalist concerns (247). Throughout that same century, however, the gradual gaining of independence by Spain’s American colonies, abolitionism, and the emergence of movements such as anarchism, socialism, and early feminism fostered more inclusive concepts of nation and “race.” The proliferation of racial theories, then, coincided with the rise of nationalisms, workers’ movements, and feminist aspirations.

Joshua Goode has examined how by the late nineteenth century discourses on “race” in Spain privileged the concept of fusion, embraced by all regardless of political affiliation. However, accounts of how different ethnic groups in Iberia had fused revealed diverse sociopolitical positions. Following the failure of the First Republic (1873–1874), and particularly Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898), liberals looked to the emerging social sciences, especially anthropology, to forge racial theories for Spain’s regeneration, to be founded on scientific education and national unity (Goode 5–16). A counterpoint to this narrative of national progress was one of degeneration, which mapped the parameters of empire, the middle class, and sexual identities through identified deviancies in “race,” the economy, and sexualities (McClintock 44). Hence in the late nineteenth century, allegedly deviant classes were categorized according to a “rhetoric of race,” while supposed hierarchies of “race” also depended on notions of gender (54–55). Then, as now, “race,” class, and gender constituted interlocking sociocultural constructions that marked who should and should not belong to hegemonic groups and nations.¹

The three Spanish-born figures in this study, Rosario de Acuña (1850–1923), Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (ca. 1850–1919), and Belén Sárraga (ca. 1873–1950), have attracted scholarly attention primarily for their feminist writings. A significant proportion of their works also addresses “race” and class, issues that impact on their discussions of gender and highlight startling differences in their sociopolitical visions. Acuña and Sárraga were both freethinkers, proponents of federal republicanism, and connected to workers’ movements. Despite these important similarities, however, Acuña identified primarily with Europe and Iberia and wrote on Latin America without first-hand knowledge, whereas Sárraga’s long residence and extensive travels throughout Latin America between 1908 and 1931 contributed to her rejection of Eurocentricity and affirmation of Latin America’s autonomy and diversity.² As for Gimeno de Flaquer, similarly well-traveled in Latin America, and resident of Mexico from 1881 until 1893, “race” constitutes the linchpin for her radical stance on Latin America’s colonization and her ambivalent position on women from Spain’s former colonies. The essays of Acuña, Gimeno de Flaquer, and Sárraga enrich our understanding of racial thought in Spain’s fin de siècle, because scholarship has tended to focus on the same consecrated writers, principally male, from the “Generation of ‘98” (Goode 80). Among the very few female writers studied in this context, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Carmen de Burgos predominate, although Jennifer Jenkins Wood’s 2014 book brings into the discussion lesser known Spanish authors’ engagement with the Americas, such as Emilia Serrano (ca. 1833–1923), Eva Canel (1857–1932), and María Eulalia de Borbón (1864–1958). Works by Acuña, Gimeno, and Sárraga, little studied with respect to intersectionality, stress how class and particularly “race” invite revision of their respective modalities of feminism and insert women’s voices more firmly into Spain’s fin de siècle debates on racial thought.

Spain’s regeneration and degeneration are central, gendered themes in the corpus of Acuña, a member of the “Generation of 1898,” which embraced an ethos of ethical virility against early modernism’s perceived decadence (Kirkpatrick 119). Acuña evinces similar notions when approaching the degeneration of “race” in her 1887 essay, “Invasión de los bárbaros (cuadro del señor Ulpiano Checa presentado en la Exposición de Pinturas)” (“The Barbarians’ Invasion [a painting by Ulpiano Checa at the Art Exhibition]”): her response to Checa’s painting, La invasión de los bárbaros (los hunos en Roma) (The Barbarians’ Invasion [the Huns in Rome]).³ While conventionally civilization corresponds to imperial Rome and barbarity to the invading Huns, Acuña reverses these equivalences. Epitomizing masculinity, the Huns, with their “curtida musculatura” (honed muscles) are now harbingers of progress, “una raza pletórica de vida, que viene a encauzar la corriente humana por los anchos caminos de la perfección” (1121; a race, bursting with life, that comes to guide humanity along broad paths toward perfection). Conversely, an effeminate, prostituted, imperial Rome symbolizes the degeneration of the former Roman Republic’s pure ideals (1118–19). Acuña’s closing question, which asks who, like Checa, will represent contemporary Spain’s decadence (1123), suggests that the essay mirrors Acuña’s own critique of Restoration Spain, her vindication of a Spanish republic, and her validation of her cultural cohort’s dreams for Spain’s advancement.

Degeneration and gender intersect with class in Acuña’s 1887 essay, “La ramera” (“The Prostitute”).⁴ Drawing on evolutionary theory, Acuña compares the prostitute to a young gorilla as both were said to lack reason (1104). Nevertheless, Acuña rejects the sexual double standard to extend this analogy to the prostitute’s male clients, “una reminiscencia de las razas simias” (a throwback to simian species), declaring that they also prostitute themselves (1105, 1107). For Acuña the prostitute and her client represent an individualistic desire opposed to the family, nation, and “race” (1108). They thus mesh with her critique of the city for its excessive consumerism and social corruption, and her advocation of country life and the industrious family, whose pivotal figure is the scientifically educated wife and mother.⁵ While the prostitute contaminates “el impulso generatriz de la raza humana” (the reproductive instinct of the human race), the educated wife is engaged in an “altísima, pura y redentora misión” (1097; exalted, pure, and redeeming mission). Hence the opposition that Acuña establishes between the working-class prostitute and highly educated wife speaks for the regulation of desire in familial and national interests to eliminate disorder and foster harmonious unity. If, as Anne McClintock asserts, abjection constitutes “that liminal state that hovers on the threshold of body and body politic” (72), the prostitute and her client are incarnations of abject liminality that define who may not belong to a nation.

The final section exposes gender and “race” as arbitrary markers that respectively construct hierarchies within the same “race” and among different “races.” Foregrounding anthropological findings, Acuña affirms that scientific theory uses differences in the size of the brains of European men and women to mark an alleged masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. However, this gendered ordering does not pertain when science considers men and women from so-called savage peoples, whose brain size is represented as similar now that the hierarchy between European and non-European, civilization and barbarity, is founded on “race”:

[L]a ciencia con exactitudes numéricas nos señala una desproporción inmensa, en perjuicio del femenino, entre el cerebro de la mujer europea y del hombre europeo […] y una desproporción insensible y, en la mayoría de las razas, inapreciable, entre el de la mujer y el hombre de los pueblos salvajes […] la cuestión de la inferioridad queda reducida a simple condición de tiempo y de medio (1111–12; science, with mathematical precision, shows us a tremendous difference, detrimental to the female sex, between the brains of the European woman and European man […] and a negligible difference—indeed, indistinguishable in most races—between the brains of women and men from savage peoples […] the question of inferiority boils down to a simple matter of time and environment)⁶

Acuña therefore indirectly argues that inequalities stem from sociohistorical contexts, “time and environment,” rather than a supposedly natural inferiority (522).

In the late nineteenth-century European imaginary, degeneration and progress were mutually dependent concepts. “The distance along the path of progress,” McClintock affirms, “could be measured only by the distance others lagged behind” (46). Acuña’s 1881 piece, “Los intermediarios (boceto)” (“The Intermediaries [A Primitive Model”), centers on those who threaten her vision of an enlightened, liberal Spain: intermediaries or halfway entities who blur the boundaries between progressiveness and conservativism, rationalism and superstition.⁷ Again authorizing her discussion through a framework of evolutionary science, Acuña adopts the traditionally masculine position identified with the seeing subject and represents herself as a kind of anthropologist: an “hábil observador” (211; skillful observer) or “observador racional” (225; rational observer).⁸ While science has unveiled the stages of natural evolution from the ape to man, there does not exist, Acuña contends, a comparable way of measuring differences in rationality among humans: “A partir de esa especie de intermediarios perdidos entre el mono y el hombre, ya no se reconoce ninguna gradación en la escala de los racionales”; she concludes: “[T]odos son hombres; desde el hotentote hasta Miguel Ángel” (207; all are men, from the Hottentot to Michelangelo). Despite her apparently racist reference to the so-called Hottentots or South African Khoikhoi, her concern is not to search for the intermediaries of the human race among different “races” but within the same (208).

Acuña defines intermediaries as “verdaderos híbridos que arrastran su organismo por las esferas de las más nebulosas constituciones”; that is, unformed, low, hybrid creatures between the irrational and man, instinct, and intelligence (207–09), a mere “boceto” (primitive model) of an intelligent, rational being. Again refuting an inferiority identified with the female sex and lower class, Acuña emphasizes that the intermediary is found in both sexes and more likely among the aristocracy (210–11), in keeping with her critique of a decadent nobility. Affectation and an indiscriminate gaze characterize the male intermediary (213). His lack of discrimination extends to national affiliation in that he lacks an identifiable nationality—“no tiene patria conocida”—due to his cosmopolitanism, interpreted as his need to denigrate his country and contaminate his native tongue with foreign imports. The result, Acuña declares, is a “mezcolanza monstruosa” (monstrous mixture) and a “carcoma cosmopolita que invade el habla castiza y peculiar de cada nación” (216–17; cosmopolitan woodworm that invades the purity and distinctiveness of a nation’s language). This criticism of mixture is surprising in a writer who sought a cosmopolitan federation of nations and shows Acuña as representative of a cosmopolitanism founded more on a universal humanism of common ground than cultural diversity. Her critique also mirrors the belief of Spanish liberals and conservatives that linguistic purity was essential to a distinctive national spirit and underlines Acuña’s privileging of national unity as essential to the liberal project.⁹

Purity reappears in relation to the upper classes: the most dangerous intermediaries are the governing elites or “padres de la patria” (fathers of the nation), whose lack of correspondence between deeds and words results in a “mezcolanza informe y ridícula” (224–25; unformed, ridiculous mixture). Acuña’s own use here of “ridícula” is paradoxical, because earlier in her argument she had highlighted that the female intermediary differentiates herself from others of allegedly inferior class by using specific adjectives like “ridículo”: “[T]odo lo que no sea ella es cursi, vulgar, estrafalario, ridículo, provocativo […] aquella que usa en su conversación los adjetivos expresados es esencialmente intermediaria del racional” (220; all that she is not is pretentiously affected, vulgar, eccentric, ridiculous, provocative […] she who uses in her conversation the adjectives indicated is essentially an intermediary of the rational human being). It is relevant that the term cursi, like Acuña’s intermediary, embodied the uncertain composition of fin-de-siècle middle-class society, whose “New Regime,” as Stephanie Sieburth remarks, was “a false middle ground, neither here nor there […] neither developed nor underdeveloped, neither traditional nor modern” (39, 233). The female cursi’s aspirations to an upper-class status beyond her means supported a stratified society inimical to greater social equality, a hierarchical structure that all Acuña’s writings critique.

Although intermediaries mark the stages that humanity must traverse to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction: Intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in Fin-de-siècle Spain
• PART I Transatlantic relations
• PART II Racial recuperation and racial otherness
• PART III Spanish national identities
• List of contributors
• Index