Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature

1789-1920

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137439888
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Using each chapter to juxtapose works by one female and one male Spanish writer, Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature: 1789-1920 explores the concept of Spanish modernity. Issues explored include the changing roles of women, the male hysteric, and the mother and Don Juan figure.

Part I

Disillusion and Optimism in the Age of Enlightenment

Chapter 1

(Dis)Order

Writing Spain’s Chaos in José Cadalso’s Cartas Marruecas and Righting Spain’s Wrongs in Josefa Amar y Borbón’s Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres

José Cadalso’s epistolary novel Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters) and Josefa Amar y Borbón’s treatise Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Discourse on the Physical and Moral Education of Women) reflect aspects of the ethos of the Enlightenment epitomized by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kant described the essence of the Enlightenment as humankind’s true coming of age with people’s courage and commitment to use their intelligence above all else. Kant’s common cry “sapere aude!” or “dare to know!” encapsulated his plea that people access maturity, autonomy, and guidance through their own intelligence. Voltaire expressed ardently antireligious sentiment by stating that theology actually entertained him through its repeated representation of the demented nature of humankind. Hume asserted that sensory perception was untrustworthy and that only mathematical equations expressed certainty, while Montesquieu identified monarchies with honor, republics with virtue, and despotic regimes with constant fear. Rousseau questioned the introduction of private property and the influence of science, culture, and societal conventions in promoting affective and egalitarian bonds between people. Almost all Western European Enlightenment thinkers agreed that political and legal imperatives should regulate society rather than tribal or religious ones (Muñoz Puelles 54–58).

The continued authority of the Spanish monarchy and the Inquisition of the Catholic Church limited the ability of Spanish intellectuals to write freely about their interpretations of the Enlightenment as a promoter of grand political, economic, religious, and cultural change. Cadalso expressed the Spanish writer’s ever-present fear of the Inquisition in the eighty-third letter of the Cartas: “[E]l español que publica sus obras las escribe con inmenso cuidado y tiembla cuando llega el tiempo de imprimirlas” (237; The Spaniard who publishes writes his works with immense care and trembles with worry when the time comes to print them).1 In addition to the pressures of the Inquisition, Western European thinkers’ perpetuation of the Black Legend stereotype of the Spaniard as indolent and intolerant pervaded European writing about Spain. Leandro Fernández de Moratín describes the dilemma of the eighteenth-century Spanish intellectual in a letter to his friend Juan Forner:

Si copia lo que otros han dicho, se hará despreciable; si combate las opiniones recibidas, ahí están los clérigos [. . .] la edad en que vivimos nos es muy poco favorable; si vamos con la corriente, nos burlan los extranjeros y aun dentro de casa hallaremos quien nos tenga por tontos; y si tratamos de disipar errores funestos y enseñar al que no sabe, la santa y general Inquisición nos aplicará los remedios que acostumbra. (quoted in Muñoz Puelles 58)

(If you copy what others have said, it is despicable; if you go against conventional thought, the clerics will be there [. . .] the age in which we live favors us very little; if we follow the tide, foreigners will make fun of us, and even at home we will find that many consider us crazy; if we try to dispel fatal errors and teach the ignorant, the holy general Inquisition will apply its usual corrections to us.)

Cadalso’s Cartas and Josefa Amar y Borbón’s Discurso respond to this problem in ways that vary according to their gender, but both their writings represent the antithesis of eighteenth-century Spanish writer José María Blanco White’s articulation of the negative stereotype of the Spaniard in his book Sobre el carácter nacional (On National Character): “Esta facultad nacional de evadirse de la realidad a la imaginación, de olvidar lo que se es y glorificar lo que se ha sido o debería ser constituye un rasgo peculiar de los españoles” (quoted in Muñoz Puelles 59; This national tendency to escape reality through imagination, to forget what one is presently and glorify what one has been in the past or should have been constitutes a characteristic unique to Spaniards). Cadalso expresses his profound disappointment with what he perceives as Spain’s irreparable decline throughout the Cartas by pointing out endless examples of Spain’s chaos and confusion through the voice of traveling Moroccan Gazel, his mentor Ben-Beley, and his Spanish friend Nuño. Amar y Borbón presents her program for girls’ education based primarily on sources from ancient and modern Western Europe2 and the pursuit of universal and ordering principles of education in the service of virtue rather than particular Spanish characteristics. The juxtaposition of the rampant disorder of Cadalso’s text and the pervasive order of Amar y Borbón’s text provides new ways of analyzing the role of gender in the production of the discourse of disillusion that is omnipresent in the Cartas and latent in the Discurso.

Even though Cadalso had actually composed the Cartas in the 1770s, the work came out in published form in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which the monarchy shielded from Spaniards, and one year before Josefa Amar y Borbón’s Discurso. The Cartas differ from the Discurso in their overriding disillusion, which contrasts greatly with the sense of hope and optimism that pervades Josefa Amar y Borbón’s treatise on women’s physical and moral health. Cadalso’s overall complaint with Spain resides in his native country’s inability to produce coherent organization in government, foreign relations, and religious awareness, while Josefa Amar y Borbón limits her complaints to more easily remedied phenomena such as the lack of emphasis on education of women as well as men in Spain and the need for mothers to nurse their own young. While Cadalso continues mostly to detail Spain’s various disorders without suggestions for curing these ailments, Amar y Borbón endeavors to present particular solutions to the problems she presents.

Cadalso’s Cartas are an epistolary showcase of Spain’s identity crisis in the midst of the European trend of Enlightenment, which encouraged a focused rethinking of religion, monarchy, and provincialism and their relationship to the ills of indifference, superstition, and overall ignorance. During this time, more Europeans traveled to Spain than had in the previous century and offered their responses to what Michael Crozier Shaw has identified as the European “Enlightenment consensus” of Spain as an intellectually and politically backward country (27). Most European travelers to Spain agreed with this consensus; Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Masson de Morvilliers insisted on Spain’s backwardness to the point that they questioned the worth of even knowing Spain. Ironically, this view contrasted greatly with the ethos of empiricism and curiosity of the Enlightenment and was challenged by a minority of European travelers.3 In a similar vein regarding this Enlightenment consensus on Spain’s backwardness, the Cartas profile Spain’s disorders.

On the other hand, Josefa Amar y Borbón’s Discurso provides a guide for the physical and moral education of women that focuses on order in society as its final goal. In the first page of Amar y Borbón’s prologue to the Discurso, she states explicitly education’s conduciveness to order and the greater good of society: “Con razón se ha considerado siempre la educación como el asunto más grave y más importante [. . .] porque si se consiguiese ordenar de manera los individuos, que todos fuesen prudentes, instruidos, juiciosos y moderados; si cada familia fuese arreglada, unida y económica, resultaría necesariamente el bien general del Estado” (i, emphasis mine; With reason education has always been considered the most serious and most important issue [. . .] because if one seeks to put individuals in order so that everyone is prudent, instructed, wise, and moderate; if every family were organized, united, and thrifty, the general welfare of the State would be achieved). Amar y Borbón places particular importance on the role of women’s moral education in ordering knowledge and customs. Amar y Borbón characterizes this education as “perfect,” alluding to her aspirations to describe a more complete and comprehensive conception of education for women in moderation that does not lead to disorder. She states the significant impact that the state of order of families has on the community at large: “[E]l orden o desorden de las familias privadas trasciende y se comunica a la felicidad y quietud pública” (xii, emphasis mine; The order or disorder of private families transcends and reflects itself in public happiness and tranquility). While Cadalso’s narrative centers on the disorder of a nation and keeps him in a constant state of disillusion, Amar y Borbón’s goal of order keeps her focused on the ultimate goal of education for women, justified by its promotion of citizens’ happiness.4

Happiness does not enter the Cartas, as Cadalso’s disappointment with Spain produces an overall cynicism and lack of expectation for any positive change in his narrative. Cadalso holds Spain to the task of measuring up to certain Enlightenment principles such as reason and science that express themselves more fully in other parts of Europe that do not have to contend with the Catholic Church. This lamentation that Spanish Enlightenment does not exist because of an overarching sense of chaos pervades the Cartas and defines Cadalso’s disenchantment with Spain. By contrast, Amar y Borbón’s narrative consistently expresses her underlying optimism about her project of women’s enlightened education by providing specific information from ancient and modern Western sources about how to raise girls who are prepared for marriage or the convent and who will contribute to the order of society. Amar y Borbón praises the obligation of the woman to raise children as a universal phenomenon. She does not take it on herself to describe the current state of the Spanish nation as Cadalso does, for her gender precludes her from entering this kind of public discourse. Instead, she must focus on the particularities of the woman in order to express her goals of Enlightenment, and the Discurso provides the perfect venue for her to engage in a “quiet feminism” defined by Constance A. Sullivan (1993, 49). In the process, she develops a people-pleasing optimism that Cadalso will never access in his true identity as an Enlightenment philosophe, a persona that is unavailable to the Spanish woman of the Enlightenment, who must carefully negotiate her voice.

It is not surprising that Amar y Borbón was endorsing the same types of educational reform that her male contemporaries such as Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Fray Martín de Sarmiento, Francisco de Cabarrús, and others had advocated. Galician monk and scholar Benito Jerónimo Feijóo had published his Defensa de la mujer (Defense of the Woman) in 1726 and aroused much controversy in response to his assertion of female and male intellectual equality. Like Feijóo, Amar y Borbón realized not only the central role of education in the formation of the useful and happy citizen but also her ability as an erudite, aristocratic woman to infiltrate the discourse directed at the education of women. In the Discurso, Amar y Borbón supported Juan Meléndez Valdés’s view that education played a key role in “the general system and fortune and happiness of an entire nation,” Cabarrús’s contention that every child should be raised “as a human being and as a citizen,” and J. A. de los Heros’s affirmation that “education is the workshop where human beings are formed” (quoted in Maravall 76, 86, 89). Throughout the Discurso, Amar y Borbón offers examples of education as a modeling of virtue and the banishment of vices, an idea that her male contemporary Esteban de Arteaga shared in his assertion that “teaching is composed of two parts, one negative, which consists in uprooting vices, and the other positive, involved in the exercise of virtues” (quoted in Maravall 72). Amar y Borbón recognized the Enlightenment as a program and not an achievement, and her Discurso details this plan of action.

Whereas Amar y Borbón believes in education’s potential for changing an individual and by extension a nation, Cadalso appears to subscribe to the baroque view that an individual cannot overcome his or her “national characteristics” (Maravall 48). While Amar y Borbón proposes a specific ordering of individuals and families through girls’ proper education, Cadalso surveys the disordering of Spanish society that has resulted from the many flaws of what he characterizes as specifically Spanish vices, such as afrancesamiento (taking on French characteristics), idleness, gluttony, complacency, and false nobility.5 Instead of proposing implementable solutions to uproot these vices as Amar y Borbón does with education, Cadalso remains mired in disillusion and stagnation. At the same time, Cadalso does at times elevate Spain’s past and as such could be considered a proponent of the patriotism of old glories as opposed to the patriotism of reform promoted by Amar y Borbón (Maravall 49). The contradictory stance of Cadalso’s condemnation of Spain’s backwardness and his simultaneous attachment to it as his homeland reinforces the chaotic nature of the discourse of the Cartas.

Despite his intermittent glorifications of Spain’s past, Cadalso was in fact an eighteenth-century philosophe. Historian Peter Gay’s series of books on the Enlightenment do not translate the French term philosophe, for Gay contends that “in France the encounter of the Enlightenment with the Establishment was the most dramatic.” Gay refers to these scholars as “facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, and secular” (1995, 10). As one of eighteenth-century Spain’s most vocal philosophes, Cadalso exemplified these characteristics. Cadalso’s Cartas demonstrate his loyalty to many of the tenets of the Enlightenment despite the fact that Spain’s incorporation of Enlightenment principles was on a different time table than that of other Western European countries.

However, as Francisco La Rubia Prado has shown, Cadalso exhibits many anti-Enlightenment principles in Cartas marruecas, especially in regard to the relationship between reason and virtue. According to La Rubia Prado, Cadalso believes in the universality of virtue but not in the Enlightenment principle that reason makes virtue universal, or that virtue legitimizes or delegitimizes reason and not the inverse relationship (219). La Rubia Prado even asserts that Cadalso projects a discourse more aligned with postmodernism in the Cartas.6 For La Rubia Prado, the expression of the ambiguity of postmodernism in the Cartas constitutes “el constante replanteamiento de una crisis de identidad [. . .] que no se espera resolver [y] que se ha aceptado como parte íntegra de la condición humana” (229; the constant restatement of an identity crisis [. . .] that does not hope to be resolved [and] that has been accepted as an integral part of the human condition). In his analysis of silence in the Cartas, Michael Iarocci observes the same postmodern quality. Iarocci claims that the economical use of writing in the Cartas acts as a testament to the more truthful presence of the oral tradition of the pre-Enlightenment logos that countered the less reliable temporal and spatial distance marking the post-Enlightenment logos of written language (1997, 161). This postmodern-like ambiguity explains Cadalso’s heightened sense of disillusion, as he is navigating a world without gods, absolutes, or truths.

In stark contrast to Cadalso, Amar y Borbón maintains forward-thinking optimism in the Discurso through the articulation of her plan to enlighten and modernize the state through educated mothers. Throughout her Discurso, Amar y Borbón advocates the educational reform that José Antonio Maravall defines as a “doctrine of unshakable systematicity that serves as a basis for the optimistic assertion of the formative power, endowed with insuperable efficacy, that education exercises in relation to the peoples’ moral and intellectual state and customs” (51–52). Amar y Borbón does not extricate herself from the well-defined boundaries of the orderly mother to enter into any kind of epistemological or ontological zone of uncertainty or malaise the way that Cadalso does in his musings of the state of Spain in the Cartas. Amar y Borbón subscribes to the tenets of the Enlightenment to which she as a Spanish woman is permitted. These include the importance of education, the pivotal role of the woman as useful mother to the state, and the appeal to reliable ancient and modern Western sources in the emerging scientific discourses of hygiene, prenatal care, gynecology, and childcare as well as girls’ education and preparation of girls for the convent or marriage.

In the Discurso, Josefa Amar y Borbón shows her women readers how to engage in the independent learning that distinguished the Enlightenment. Through subdued feminism in the Discurso, Amar y Borbón embraces a version of Kant’s spirit of “sapere aude!” for women and girls. Meanwhile, Cadalso, as an educated man able to permeate the public discourse of the nation, wrestles with the reconciliation of the illusion of Spain’s past glories and its present chaos. The dissemination of the idea of Spain’s political and cultural supremacy in the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has contributed to Spanish society’s inability to let go of this ideal image of an ordered and ordering Spain. Américo Castro proposes that in fact this “Golden Age” is a mis...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Female and Male Modern Spanish Subject
• Part I: Disillusion and Optimism in the Age of Enlightenment
• Part II: (Dis)Enchanted Passion and Critique in Contexts of Romanticism and Realism
• Part III: Psychological, Artistic, and Spiritual Allusions and (Dis)Illusions before and after the Disaster of 1898
• Part IV: Symbols of (Dis)Illusion in the Early Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Works Cited