[In the following essay, Miller and Devermond trace Avellaneda's revision of her sonnet, “A Washington,” as evidence of Avellaneda's evolving political views and self-identification as a Spanish-American writer.]

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda published a sonnet to George Washington in the first edition of her Poesías (1841).¹ It was reprinted in the second edition (1850), and again in a Spanish-language journal in New York in 1852, in both cases without any alteration other than a minor change in punctuation.² The first volume of Avellaneda's collected works (1869) contains what seems at first glance to be the same poem.³ Even the most cursory second glance reveals substantial differences, but their extent has not yet been examined or explained, as far as we know.

The stylistic differences cannot be properly interpreted without reference to the political and intellectual climate of the times, both in Europe and in the Americas. This may seem an extravagant assertion. We propose, therefore, to combine a formalistic analysis with a sociohistorical approach:

1841

          No en lo pasado a tu virtud
                    modelo,
Ni copia al porvenir dará la
                    historia,
Ni el laurel inmortal de tu victoria
Marchitarán los siglos en su vuelo.
          Si con rasgos de sangre guarda
                    el suelo
Del coloso del Sena la memoria,
Cual astro puro brillará tu gloria
Nunca empañada por oscuro velo.
          Mientras la fama las virtudes
                    cuente
Del héroe ilustre que cadenas lima
Y la cerviz de los tiranos doma,
          Alza gozosa, América, tu frente,
Que al Cincinato que formó tu
          clima
Le admira el mundo, y te lo
                    envidia Roma.

1869

          No en lo pasado a tu virtud
                    modelo,
Ni copia al porvenir dará la
                    historia,
Ni otra igual en grandeza a tu
                    memoria
Difundirán los siglos en su vuelo.
          Miró la Europa ensangrentar
                    su suelo
Al genio de la guerra y la
                    victoria. …
Pero le cupo a América la gloria
De que al genio del bien le diera
                    el cielo.
          Que audaz conquistador goce
                    en su ciencia,
Mientras al mundo en páramo
                    convierte,
Y se envanezca cuando a siervos
                    mande;
          ¡Mas los pueblos sabrán en su
                    conciencia
Que el que los rige libres sólo es
                    fuerte;
Que el que los hace grandes sólo
                    es grande!

The text in the 1869 Obras has a footnote—presumably written with Avellaneda's approval, if not actually by her—that says that: “Lo escribió su autora el año de 41; pero lo refundió—tal como está aquí—mucho tiempo después, al visitar la tumba del héroe americano.” Her visit to Washington's tomb must have been in 1864, when, after five years in her native Cuba, she returned to Europe by way of the United States, arriving in May and spending two months there.⁴

Three comments on this footnote of 1869 are necessary. First, it may not be literally true that Avellaneda rewrote the sonnet when she visited Washington's tomb. The visit no doubt recalled the poem to her mind, and suggested a reworking, but this could have been carried out at any time between the summer of 1864 and the publication of Obras, Volume I, five years later. It is likely that it was done in or soon after 1864, but we cannot be certain. Second, although the visit was the occasion of the reworking, the changes made are so drastic that they must have more important causes; we shall show what those causes were. Third, the reference in the footnote to Washington as an “héroe americano” has a deeper significance than has hitherto been realized. In the original sonnet of 1841 Washington is a classical Great Man; in the 1860's version he becomes, in a significant sense, a uniquely American hero—not merely the model leader for the United States, but a symbol of democracy and progress for the entire New World. As was customary, he is contrasted with his European contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte, who in the first sonnet was viewed with a mixture of admiration and disapproval, but in the second becomes an archetypal Old-World imperialistic tyrant.

The title of the sonnet, “A Washington,” and the first two lines are the same in both texts, but from the third line they diverge so sharply that, despite the preservation of some rhyme words, it is hardly possible to speak of two versions of the same poem. These may as well be considered, then, two sonnets with a common point of departure. An interesting parallel, especially in terms of vastly altered poetic statement, is provided by Avellaneda's poem “A él,” written in November 1840 to her lover Ignacio de Cepeda y Alcade, and published in the 1841 Poesías. By 1850 their romance had ended; she had had an intense and ultimately disastrous love affair with the poet Gabriel García Tassara; she had married and had been widowed within a few months; and there had been a brief renewal of her affair with Cepeda. The consequence of these emotional vicissitudes was an extensive revision of “A él” in the 1850 Poesías. In the 1869 Obras there is a further major reworking, producing what is virtually a new poem.⁵ Many other examples of changes could be cited, but three will suffice. Avellaneda's adaptation of Lamartine's “Bonaparte” was composed in November 1838, published in a newspaper in 1840, reprinted in the 1841 Poesías with major changes, substantially revised again in the 1850 volume, and republished in the 1869 Obras with yet another substantial revision. Her play, Alfonso Munio, exists in two markedly different versions.⁶ Finally, the revision of another poem shows a political change not unlike that of the Washington sonnet. In 1843 Avellaneda addressed to adolescent Queen Isabel II an enthusiastically loyal poem (reprinted in 1846 and in the 1850 Poesías), of which the last stanza emphasizes the devotion of Cuba, “la perla de los mares mejicanos,” to Queen and motherland. In the 1869 Obras, the final stanza warns that the distant and forgotten island longs for liberty.⁷

An analysis of the vocabulary in the two Washington sonnets shows a clear change of style. This is least obvious, although still perceptible, in the nouns: the twenty-five nouns of the first text and the twenty-one of the second (if we pass over the common lines 1-2) include only eight that occur in both texts. The remaining seventeen first-text nouns and thirteen second-text nouns give very different impressions. Those of the second include, it is true, a number of high-sounding words (grandeza, genio, conquistador, páramo), but also several plain ones (bien, siervos, pueblos); the 1841 text, by contrast, offers only three unmistakably plain nouns (rasgos, sangre, frente) and many elaborate or grandiloquent ones (e. g., laurel, coloso, astro). Such a classification is admittedly subjective, and there are borderline cases that seem plain in a plain context, but formulaic when conveying a more aristocratic message (for instance, héroe and tiranos). It is significant that even though the vehicles and tenor of the two versions vary greatly, the tone (I. A. Richards' term referring to the reflection in a discourse of the poet's attitude toward his/her audience) is essentially the same, that of a civic poet.

Suppression of the classical allusions present in the 1841 text (coloso, Cincinato, Roma) points to a desire to view, and comment on, history without mythologizing it, without seeing it as cyclical or archetypal. At the same time, however, because of Avellaneda's religious fervor, which appeared in the mid-1840's and was still strong in the 1860's (she spent several months in a French convent after the death of her first husband in 1846, and had a devotional work ready for publication the next year),⁸ Washington is described in the second quatrain as Heaven's gift to the Americas. Further, the addition of the concept of New World vs. Old in the second quatrain, with the explicit Europa / América contrast, implies an increasing sense of a Spanish-American identity, and corrects an image (Cincinato) in which Washington is likened in a neo-classic way to an Old-World Roman general.⁹ The mention of Europa and América also reminds us of the position enjoyed by the United States during the period 1830 to 1860. Despite numerous unresolved social issues, the country's civil rights situation compared favorably with Europe's; the franchise was relatively wide; the government and law courts were largely democratic in organization. The successful development of the young republic stimulated nationalistic feelings and a measure of imperialism (e. g., the extermination of American Indians, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the intervention in Mexico).

Viewed from abroad, the U.S.A. was generally considered to be a model of liberty and progress. In his Viajes of 1849, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento comments sharply on the differences between Europe and America, devoting the largest portion of the text to laudatory discourse on the United States, whose moral values and political system he finds worthy of emulation in Spanish America, especially because of the abiding hatred of Spain, the presence of Napoleon-style dictators such as Rosas in Argentina, and Sarmiento's favorite theme of continuous democratic progress. His Facundo was one of the earliest Spanish-American books known abroad.¹⁰

In both the 1841 and the 1860's Avellaneda sonnets, there is a basic contrast between the European Napoleon (lines 5-6) and the American Washington (lines 7-8). This contrast—expressed, of course, in quite different ways—shows a Latin-American (as opposed to Spanish) pre-occupation with “civilización y barbarie” (sangre, guerra, victoria vs. astro puro and bien) and the problem of tyranny. The theme is present in a variety of contemporaneous Spanish-American literary works, also in much earlier ones, both in verse and prose; for instance, in Olmedo's famous Canto a Bolívar of 1825: “Tuya será, Bolívar, esta gloria, / tuya romper el yugo de los reyes / y, a su despecho, entronizar las leyes.”¹¹

Andrés Bello, in a speech of 1848, relates the political question to literature: “o es falso que la literatura es el reflejo de la vida de un pueblo, o es preciso admitir que cada pueblo de los que no están sumidos en la barbarie es llamado a reflejarse en una literatura propia y a estampar en ella sus formas.”¹² Sarmiento, in his Viajes, looks optimistically to the North for evidence that the problem can eventually be solved:

Educados Ud. i yo, mi buen amigo, bajo la vara de hierro del más sublime de los tiranos, combatiéndolo sin cesar en nombre del derecho, de la justicia, en nombre de la república, en fin, como realización de las conclusiones a que la conciencia i la intelijencia humana han llegado, Ud. i yo, como tantos otros nos hemos envanecido i alentado al divisar en medio de la noche de plomo que pesa sobre la América del sur, la aureola de luz con que se alumbra el norte. Por fin, nos hemos dicho para endurecernos contra los males presentes: la república existe, fuerte, invencible; la luz se hace; un día llegará para la justicia, la igualdad, el derecho; la luz se irradiará hasta nosotros cuando el Sud refleje al Norte.¹³

Further linguistic analysis of the two versions of the Washington sonnet supports our sociohistorical commentary. When we turn to the verbs—ten in the first text, fourteen in the second, again excluding lines 1-2—we find not a single one in common. As with the nouns, so with the verbs; the 1860's text preserves a degree of grandiloquence (ensangrentar, envanezca) and is not wholly different in its diction from the 1841 text (marchitarán, alza), but there is a definite increase in the number of unemphatic, common verbs in the second text: caber, dar (twice), hacer, saber, ser (twice). The most striking difference, however, is in the adjectives, none of which occurs in both versions:

1841

inmortal
puro
empañada
oscuro
ilustre
gozosa

1860'S

igual
audaz
libres
fuerte
grandes
grande

With the possible exception of audaz, which refers to Napoleon, all the 1860's adjectives are words used in everyday, uncultured speech. It is also very significant that all of the adjectives in the 1860's final tercet (four out of the six occurring in the sonnet) may be applied both to Washington and to the American people. In contrast, five of the six adjectives in the 1841 list (above) refer ultimately to individual fame and immortality. In the 1860's sonnet Avellaneda uses the adjective igual, not, admittedly, in a social or political sense. But the choice of word in the context of this poem has ideological connotations and may in itself be indicative of the writer's attitude. A related direction is implied in her new choice of the image, ambiguous in an Empsonian sense, of conquistador (rather than héroe) to refer to Napoleon. Conquistador as a vehicle reminds one of the imperialist Spanish Conquistadores.

The admiration for individual glory, so strong a feature of the 1841 sonnet, is superseded in the 1860's by an idealistic liberal confidence in the people and, consequently, a readiness to judge a leader's greatness from the people's point of view. We do not assert, of course, that Avellaneda's political position was consistently liberal. Study of her letters and other prose writings reveals a number of fluctuations on various issues, and she was on good personal terms with a number of leading conservatives such as General Narváez. Nevertheless, her attitude in the second Washington sonnet is clear. The major thematic change from admiration for the individual to confidence in the people is realized through an iconic transformation: the relatively small gap between qualified admiration for Napoleon and unqualified enthusiasm for Washington in 1841 gives way to a political and moral polarity in the 1860's.

The thematic development we have been outlining is reflected, then, in the formal elements of the sonnets. The consistently ornate vocabulary of the original sonnet is replaced in the 1860's by one which, while still ornate in places, becomes increasingly plain and functional within the progression of the sonnet itself until in the final tercet the style is wholly unlike the original poem. This change extends even to word-length: the final tercet of 1841 contains five polysyllables, six dissyllables, and ten monosyllables, whereas the later version has a majority of monosyllables—fourteen—against nine dissyllables and only one polysyllable.

The parallel development in style and tenor is best apprehended in the sonnets' central contrast between Washington and Napoleon. The first quatrain in each is traditionally civic and grandiloquent. The assertion in lines 1-2 of Washington's unequalled greatness remains, but the reference in lines 3-4 of 1841 to his martial prowess (“Ni el laurel inmortal de tu victoria / Marchitarán los siglos en su vuelo”) and the hackneyed botanical image of the withered leaves are replaced in the 1860's by an amplification of line 2 (“Ni otra igual en grandeza a tu memoria / Difundirán los siglos en su vuelo”). Glossing over the military side of Washington's career intensifies the antithesis between him and Napoleon (“coloso del Sena”). But even in 1841 Avellaneda views Bonaparte with some disapproval (his memory is disfigured by “rasgos de sangre”),¹⁴ whereas nothing obscures the brightness of Washington's glory (“Cual astro puro brillará tu gloria / Nunca empañada por oscuro velo”). However, the disapproval, which in any case is expressed moderately, is further tempered by the allusion to Washington as a soldier. In the 1860's the disapproval is absolute: in place of “rasgos de sangre” that may blemish Napoleon's greatness, there is a stronger and more specific denunciation of his responsibility for vast bloodshed (“Miró la Europa ensangrentar su suelo / Al genio de la guerra y la victoria”). The sullied and suffering Old World is opposed to the fortunate New, and the contrast is sharpened by the syntactic parallel of “genio de la guerra y la victoria” and “genio del bien.” It is particularly noteworthy that victoria, which in 1841 was applied to Washington in a favorable context (“el laurel de tu victoria,” line 3), has in the 1860's become unfavorable: victoria is coupled with guerra as an attribute of Napoleon, is linked inextricably to bloodshed, and diametrically opposed to bien, Washington's attribute. The 1860's sonnet thus is given a firmly pacifist tendency. Just as strikingly, not only is Washington's glory said to have been sent from Heaven (1860's, line 8), but it is the whole nation and the American continent that are thereby glorified; that is, not posterity in the abstract, but a geopolitical entity.

A close reading of the 1841 text based on a more detailed rhetorical analysis than is provided here (e. g., the personification of fama; the personification of América whose lifted frente is an emblem of justified pride; the synecdoche in cerviz; the traditional metaphor cadenas lima) will support the conclusion that the earlier sonnet is atemporal, in fact, that it implies a nearly ahistorical world view, although Avellaneda may not have been aware at the time of this feature of the sonnet (a feature which, given her evident ideological-aesthetic project, must be regarded as a weakness). The fact that the admiration for individual fame and glory in 1841 is placed in the context of abstract fame (posterity) causes all the temporal words to lose their historicity. The 1860's sonnet, by contrast, especially if we begin an analysis with line 5 (“Miró la Europa ensangrentar su suelo”), is far more concrete and historical, even in its allusions (for example, “goce en su ciencia” refers in part to Napoleon's interest in learning and the scientific prestige of France). Thus, similar or identical vehicles in the two sonnets may have very different connotations. One example to illustrate this point is mundo (line 14 in 1841; line 10 in the 1860's). Obviously, Avellaneda's extraordinary ability in the 1841 sonnet to use a large number of temporal words to convey an atemporal message is due in large part to her early study of the Neo-Classic poets.

In the 1860's sonnet the Washington-Napoleon antithesis, confined in 1841 to the second quatrain, is renewed in the tercets, the first condemning Napoleon's pride and ambition, which laid waste the world and betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution,¹⁵ and the second exalting Washington's liberation of his people and founding of a great nation.

There is another important difference between the last tercet of 1841 and that of the 1860's. In the former, Avellaneda says that the presence of Washington in American history inspires the admiration of the world (“Le admira el mundo, y te lo envidia Roma”), world in a very abstract sense, and the envy of ancient Rome. In the latter, these standard criteria of fame are rejected in favor of the judgment of the people (“¡Mas los pueblos sabrán en su conciencia / Que el que los rige libres sólo es fuerte, / Que el que los hace grandes sólo es grande!”). The poet asserts, in a way made more emphatic by the parallel syntax of lines 13-14 (1860's), that true greatness in a political leader consists not in self-aggrandizement, but in devotion to ideals of freedom. This democratic and populist closure to the sonnet coincides with the triumph of plain style, discussed above. Avellaneda's linguistic practice thus matches her political theory, and the thematic change is reflected in an aesthetic adjustment. She thereby carries out a poetic strategy which was adumbrated in the first quatrain of the 1860's, where the traditional “Marchitarán los siglos en su vuelo” was replaced by difundirán, a word connoting wide communication, propagation, and cultural diffusion.

In broad terms, then, the second Washington sonnet is pacifist and democratic. A similar ideological progression may be found in many other writers of this period; in some it was stylish and superficial, in others more genuine. Lamartine's long poem “Bonaparte” of 180 lines, written in 1823 and published the same year in Nouvelles méditations poétiques, has both praise for Napoleon's greatness and censure of his arbitrary rule and violence, inclining now to one view, now to the other, and ending with a suspended judgment:

Son cercueil est fermé! Dieu l'a jugé! Silence!
Son crime et ses exploits pèsent dans la balance:
Que des faibles mortels la main n'y touche plus!
Qui peut sonder, Seigneur, ta clémence infinie?
Et vous, fléaux de Dieu! qui sait si le génie
                                        N'est pas une de vos vertus?(16)

Avellaneda's translation of this poem is included in her 1841 Poesías.¹⁷ There are a few indications that her 1841 Washington sonnet may have been influenced by her Lamartine translation, not only in the balance of praise and censure of Napoleon, but also in stylistic detail.¹⁸ In the text of “Bonaparte” published in the Édition des souscripteurs (1849), Lamartine changed the last two lines to: “Et vous, peuples, sachez le vain prix du génie / Qui ne fonde pas des vertus!”

Guyard's editorial comment is severe: “On donne cette pénible variante, non pour son intérêt littéraire, mais comme preuve de la méfiance durable de Lamartine envers l'idolâtrie napoléonienne: le républicain de cinquante-neuf ans n'a pas renié les sévérités du légitimiste de trentedeux” (p. 1823). Guyard's disapproval is justified, since the new lines, effective in isolation, do not match the remainder of the stanza. He seems, however, to miss the point of the change, which, rather than showing Lamartine's “méfiance durable,” tips the balance—perfectly preserved in 1823—towards censure. It also reflects the evolution of Lamartine's political views and those of his contemporaries: the replacement of an apostrophe to “fléaux de Dieu” by one to “peuples” is significant, and it implies an ideological development parallel to that found in Avellaneda's 1860's sonnet, with its reference in the final tercet to “los pueblos.”

Was Lamartine's change of emphasis the inspiration for Avellaneda's? The hypothesis is a seductive one, but it underrates Avellaneda, and raises a serious textual difficulty: Avellaneda did not change the ending of her “Napoleón” (her free version of Lamartine's “Bonaparte”) in the 1850 Poesías or in the 1869 Obras to correspond to that of the 1849 “Bonaparte.” Despite the major changes which she introduced in both 1850 and 1869, the apostrophe to “ministros de su cólera” (Lamartine's “fléaux de Dieu”) is preserved unchanged from 1841; there is no equivalent to “Et vous, peuples.” On the whole, therefore, we are inclined to reject the hypothesis of Lamartine's influence, even though it has more to commend it, as an explanation of the drastic changes in the Washington sonnet, than the visit to the tomb mentioned in a footnote in 1869. Despite its inadequacy, the latter explanation is still repeated by critics. Raimundo Lazo, for instance, says that: “al visitar su tumba [de Washington] se perfila alguna frase de enérgica síntesis.”¹⁹ Lazo, it is true, does notice the difference between this “enérgica síntesis” and some of Avellaneda's other civic and political poetry, but he does not comment on the rewriting of the sonnet, and his criticism shows no awareness of the historical background: “La poetisa suele ver la historia representada en sus grandes personajes de los tiempos modernos, Napoleón, Washington. Son ocasiones para la ostentación de un habla de oratoria grandilocuencia sin que lo histórico pase de referencias que dictan el ritmo o la rima. … Otras veces, como en los versos al monumento al dos de mayo o al monumento a Colón, lo histórico es sólo motivo de ocasional poetización intrascendente” (p. 36). First, Lazo believes that Avellaneda is merely a writer of sentimental verse (the subtitle of his book is indicative of a belittling attitude), and that when she goes beyond her personal life she is capable only of occasional verse. It is significant that his “Guión cronológico bibliográfico” (pp. xiii-xvi) makes no mention either of her feminist and political essays or of the journals she edited, La Gaceta de las Mujeres (1845; later retitled La Ilustración de las Damas) and Album Cubano (1860).²⁰ Secondly, Lazo is ahistorical in a triple sense: he forgets the evolution of her style; he makes no attempt to place her work in the context of literary history; and he ignores the vitally important historical circumstances of her writings.

It is these circumstances—the political and intellectual climate of the mid-century—that in our view account for the similarity between Avellaneda's change of attitude in her Washington sonnet and Lamartine's at the end of his “Bonaparte.” In any case, an examination of the two poems indicates that Lamartine's attitude changed less than Avellaneda's. While Avellaneda, in her second Washington sonnet, condemns Napoleon on firm moral grounds, Lamartine is still inclined, even in the 1849 version of his ode, to attribute to God a double standard of judgment: “Pour les héros et nous il a des poids divers!” (line 171). In 1840 and 1841 Avellaneda renders this directly: “Un peso diferente / Para los héroes tiene: ¿qué te espanta?” (1841, p. 67). In 1850 she introduces a doubt: “Tal vez, tal vez un peso diferente / Para los héroes tiene: ¿qué te espanta?” (p. 42). And in 1869 the sentence is suppressed.²¹ A shift from approval to disapproval of Napoleon is not, of course, confined to Lamartine and Avellaneda, or even to poets, and examples may be found in Napoleon's lifetime: Beethoven removed the dedication to Bonaparte from his third (Eroica) symphony, in protest against his former hero's decision to proclaim himself Emperor. The transformation of Avellaneda's attitude has, however, greater ideological significance, as we have shown.

The association of Napoleon and Washington was a topos in Hispanic literature throughout the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth as well. To cite one curious example, Benjamín Jarnés repeats in his Escuela de libertad (1942) most of the clichés about the American president found in historians well-known in Spain (omitting any real analysis of Washington's policies and weaknesses) and relates the two legendary figures: “Washington ha sufrido en vida y en muerte de ser lo que nunca quiso ser: un héroe. Le gustaba todo lo sencillo y le desagradaba todo lo enorme. Yo creo que era un enemigo declarado de la impostura. En los tres años y meses que vivió después de su segunda administración, no se ocupaba en formar leyenda de su vida como Napoleón.”²² Jarnés even quotes (without a footnote) Napoleon on Washington:

Es sorprendente el parecer de Napoleón el Grande acerca de Washington. Dice de él que apenas pertenece a los tiempos modernos, ya que “nos comunica las mismas impresiones de los más augustos ejemplos de la antigüedad.” Su obra—añade—“está apenas terminada y ya suscita la veneración que solamente concedemos a las cosas consagradas por el tiempo.” Para el gran Corso, Jorge Washington era un patriarca, al estilo de David, creador de pueblos, pero también legislador. Cultivador de la tierra y de sus hombres. No pasó Washington por el mundo—a la manera de otros conquistadores—como una borrasca, sino como esa lenta y mansa lluvia que es ya rubio trigo cernido, el pan de mañana.

(p. 301)

One cannot but notice, in the penultimate sentence, the submerged image of Washington as a Cincinnatus.

Perhaps Jarnés's most significant comment, and one with more intellectual depth, is the one linking Washington with the subsequent development of a politically liberal romanticism: “Ni puede decirse que en su política—como en todos los aspectos de su vida pública y privada—fuese precisamente un romántico, pero deja bien sembrada la semilla del romanticismo político—el amor a la libertad—a lo largo del gran siglo: semilla que había de fructificar en toda América” (p. 301).

The political legacy of romanticism had by the 1840's assumed two divergent directions. On the one hand, there was the cult of the individual represented most typically in the view of Napoleon found in Stendhal, Nietzsche, and Avellaneda's 1841 sonnet. On the other hand, there was the development from the idea of the Volksgeist to that of the people in a more political sense, leading to liberal romanticism and to realism in literature, a development found in George Sand.²³ This second ideological tendency has, in Avellaneda's 1860's sonnet, eclipsed the earlier ahistoricism and cult of the individual.

In the same year as she wrote the first Washington sonnet, Avellaneda published her anti-slavery novel Sab (which preceded Uncle Tom's Cabin by ten years). Although she made no conscious reference in either sonnet to Washington's ownership of slaves, she may have been uneasy about it, and for that reason may have been careful to associate siervos with Napoleon (line 11 of the 1860's sonnet). In any case, her use of the word is suggestive and demonstrates a liberal concern with constitutional rights. She was widely known, especially in Spain, and active in literary and political circles. She had already begun to read feminist writers (the influence of George Sand has been noted in her second novel, Dos mujeres, published in 1842), and a feminist ideological tendency is apparent in many of her works of this period. In part, as in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft half a century earlier, Avellaneda's egalitarian feminist ideals were a natural extension of those of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as was true of the North American suffragists, Avellaneda was first an abolitionist and subsequently a feminist: in her, as in her North American counterparts, there is a natural intellectual progression from the idea of racial to that of sexual equality. A key word in the 1860's sonnet is conciencia, denoting both social and moral conscience, and consciousness. The conciencia, moreover, is not that of an individual, but is attributed to los pueblos.

Writing about literary ideas in Spain in the 1840's, Salvador García points out that: “De la lectura de las revistas literarias de los años comprendidos entre 1840 y 1850 se desprende una sensación general de crisis: en la sociedad europea y en la española, en la poesía, en la novela y en el teatro. De los diversos juicios críticos de entonces, desalentados los unos, llenos de esperanza los menos, venimos a sacar en claro que los acontecimientos han ido más rápidos que la capacidad de adaptación de la mayoría a las nuevas ideas.”²⁴ Avellaneda was not one of those incapable of adapting. She was in many ways on the literary and intellectual cutting edge for her time and place. That she was nevertheless extremely disturbed by the political events in Europe and Latin America is apparent even in her most personal correspondence. In a letter of 1850 to her former lover, Cepeda, she refers to the European revolution and a general atmosphere of insecurity (“terribles peripecias políticas y sociales”).²⁵

Europe's year of revolutions, 1848, gave to many—moderate liberals like Avellaneda as well as conservatives—a feeling that the social structure of a continent was collapsing. Avellaneda's “terribles peripecias” was one typical view of the events. Moreover, one result of France's 1848 revolution was an ominous sign to those who had long feared a restoration of Napoleon-type dictatorship: the rise to power of Bonaparte's nephew and political heir, Napoleon III. This was to have sinister implications for the New World. More generally, the conservative reaction that followed the revolutions gave many liberals the helpless feeling that henceforth the choice would be between two unacceptable extremes. This situation contributed to the pessimism with which a number of European writers viewed the politics of their continent at mid-century, and it drove many thousands to seek refuge and new hope in the Americas.

The spirit of optimism in the United States contrasted markedly with the gloomy confusion in Europe. A feeling of vitality and purpose was engendered by territorial expansion, and by economic and technological development. A more idealistic side of this abundant self-confidence was represented by two causes important to Avellaneda: feminism and emancipation. The first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls in July 1848, was followed by other conventions in the next few years. In 1860 one of the movement's major goals was achieved in New York State with the passage of the Married Women's Property Act. Emancipation gained ground at the same time, and when Avellaneda visited the United States in the summer of 1864 it was already clear that slavery was doomed.

Although Latin America's political situation was by no means rosy, there was great hope for the future of the Americas as a whole, and for the development of a Spanish-American culture independent of Europe. One manifestation of Spanish interest in the New World was the foundation of such journals as the short-lived Revista Hispano-Americana (1848, under the editorship of José Joaquín de Mora and Pedro de Madrazo), and the expansion in 1845 of Fermín Gonzalo Morón's Revista de España y del Extranjero (founded 1842) under the new title of Revista de España, de Indias y del Extranjero. The most important Americanist periodical, still flourishing when Avellaneda wrote her second Washington sonnet, was La América (1857-1888).²⁶ Another aspect of Spanish concern with Latin America at this time may be seen in Spain's most interesting romantic play, Don Alvaro, o la fuerza del sino (1835), in which the hero is an indiano, one who returns from the New World having made his fortune.²⁷

The politics of the New World and the Old, Avellaneda's ideological concerns and the circumstances of her life, interacted in the few years that preceded the composition of the second Washington sonnet. Avellaneda spent those years in Cuba, which she had left with her mother at the age of twenty-two, and to which she returned with her second husband in 1859. There had been slave revolts in the island in the 1840's, at a time when Avellaneda was already committed to the cause of emancipation: her abolitionist novel Sab (composed in the late 1830's, published in 1841), is set in Cuba.²⁸ In the 1840's and 1850's attempts were made to detach Cuba from Spanish rule and incorporate it in the United States; in 1852 independence was proclaimed, but the revolt was crushed and its leaders executed. This movement was suspect because its chief instigators were Cuban planters who wished to retain their slaves, and politicians from the Southern states of the U.S.A. In the early 1860's, however, the picture changed: in order to win friends in Europe, the Confederacy disclaimed all plans to annex Cuba, the link between independence movements and slave-owning weakened, and when in October 1868 the planters of Eastern Cuba rose against Spain, they proclaimed gradual emancipation.

In another Caribbean island, there came a reminder that rule from the Old World was unacceptable in the New, when the Spanish administrators who had been invited back to Santo Domingo behaved so oppressively that a revolt in May 1865 restored independence. Contemporary events in Mexico created an even more powerful impression: an attempt by European powers to overthrow Juárez's Liberal government culminated in a French invasion of the country. On May 28, 1864, one week after Avellaneda left Cuba for the United States, Napoleon III's puppet Emperor Maximilian landed in Mexico. The first Napoleon had stained Europe with blood (“Miró la Europa ensangrentar su suelo / Al genio de la guerra y la victoria”), and now his heir was doing the same to America. It is hardly surprising that Avellaneda's 1841 disapproval of Bonaparte should have become uncompromising condemnation in the 1860's sonnet.²⁹ Moreover, the conflict in Mexico ran parallel to that between the Union and the Confederacy. The slave-owning Confederates sympathized with the French and the Mexican Conservatives, partly out of political affinity, and partly in the hope of winning European recognition for their cause. Lincoln's government, on the other hand, was seen to favor Juárez. Thus the forces resisting Napoleonic aggression in Mexico had the support of the abolitionist North, where the women's movement had recently gained a notable success. The association, in the 1860's sonnet, of siervos with Napoleon and of los pueblos … libres with Washington may not correspond very closely to the historical reality of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, but it accurately reflects the history and the ideology of the period in which the sonnet was written.

We began by drawing attention to the extraordinary extent of the differences between Avellaneda's two texts. Having examined the changes in style, content, and attitude, we suggest that Avellaneda's Washington sonnets are an exemplary instance of a literary development that can be clearly traced to political and sociohistorical events and to their ideological interpretation by a poet. In regard to the time-honored question of whether Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was a Peninsular Spanish or a Latin American writer (the same question has preoccupied some critics of such authors as Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, León Felipe, and Juan Goytisolo), Avellaneda has clearly chosen in her Washington sonnets—especially in the 1860's text—to be an American poet, and she also wrote novels and plays on American themes. It is impossible to justify Cotarelo's impatient dismissal of this question: “La cuestión nos parece tan pueril como impertinente. La Avellaneda fue una escritora española y cubana, que en aquella época era lo mismo …” (p. 366). If any doubt remained as to the reality of the question and Avellaneda's answer to it, it would be dispelled by a study of the dedications to the three collections of her poetry. The 1841 Poesías is dedicated “A mi respetable y querida madre la señora doña Francisca Arteaga de Escalada.” In the 1850 volume this is replaced by a long and florid dedication to Queen Isabel II,³⁰ but in the 1869 Obras we find: “Dedico esta Colección completa de mis Obras, en pequeña demostración de grande afecto, a mi Isla natal, a la hermosa Cuba.”

It was not only Avellaneda's general political awareness that produced the transformation of the Washington sonnet, but also the immediate historical circumstances and her exposure to the rhetoric of emancipation and of Pan-Americanism. In brief, in the Washington sonnets the change in the poet's world view explains the characterization of the historical figures of Washington and Napoleon, and this thematic change itself had great significance in terms of literary history. Speaking of writers in Latin America, Jean Franco says: “In the nineteenth century, literature was conceived of as being not only an instrument of social protest, but also a way of shaping national consciousness and giving a sense of tradition.”³¹ In the 1860's sonnet, Avellaneda shows a consciousness of her role as a Spanish American writer.

Notes

1. Poesías de la Señorita D^a. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico, calle del Sordo, 1841), p. 159. The date of composition, also 1841, is given at the end of the sonnet. Quoting from Avellaneda's poems, we modernize accentuation, but preserve capitalization, punctuation, and other features of the original.

2. Poesías de la Excelentísima Señora D^a. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda de Sabater (Madrid: Imprenta de Delgrás Hermanos, 1850), p. 101. A more precise date is given for composition: May, 1841. The 1850 Poesías was reprinted two years later (México: Juan R. Navarro, 1852). New York publication was in La Verdad (March 20, 1852).

3. Obras literarias de la Señora Doña Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Colección completa, I (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1869), p. 77. This text is reproduced, with one change of punctuation, in the Centenary Edition: Obras de La Avellaneda. Edición Nacionel del Centenario. Tomo I. Poesías líricas (Habana: Imprenta de Aurelio Miranda, 1914), p. 75. The Centenary Edition is the basis for other editions and selections, including Obras de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, ed. José María Castro y Calvo, I (Madrid: Atlas, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 272, 1974), where the sonnet appears on p. 259.

4. Edwin B. Williams, The Life and Dramatic Works of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1924), p. 32; Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, La Avellaneda y sus obras: ensayo biográfico y crítico (Madrid: Tipografía de Archivos, 1930), pp. 358-60. (This book is a separately paginated offprint from Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 15-17 [1928-30].) Other biographers normally follow Cotarelo: for example, Carmen Bravo-Villasante, Una vida romántica: La Avellaneda (Barcelona: EDHASA, 1967), pp. 221-22. Castro y Calvo indicates the wrong year, 1863 (Obras 1974, p. 111).

5. Poesías 1841, pp. 49-54; Poesías 1850, pp. 78-81; Obras 1869, pp. 56-59. See Cotarelo, pp. 45, 77; Castro y Calvo, pp. 55-56. Castro y Calvo claims there is a further revision in Obras 1914, but the lines he quotes on p. 55 do not correspond to that edition, and his statement seems to rest on several errors in transcription, together with confusion between Obras 1869 and Obras 1914. The textual history of this poem is complicated by the presence in Obras 1869 (pp. 197-98) of a second poem with the title “A él,” written in November, 1845, and published in Poesías 1850 under the title “A …” (pp. 233-34).

6. Joseph V. Judicini, “The Stylistic Revision of La Avellaneda's Alfonso Munio,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 11 (1977), 451-66. For the Lamartine adaptation, see n. 17 below.

7. Poesías 1850, pp. 191-96; Obras 1869, pp. 160-64. Some revision would have been needed in any case, since the repeated praise of Isabel's virginity (“¡Salud, virgen real!” occurs twice, “virgen divina” once), appropriate enough in 1843 and acceptable in 1850, would have provoked derisive merriment in 1869. Isabel had been deposed in the previous year, her sexual notoriety being one of the chief reasons, and Avellaneda wisely substitutes “joven real” for the epithets quoted. Cotarelo discusses the political change (pp. 84-85), accusing Avellaneda of “una grande y notoria falsedad” in pretending that the lines reflecting her views of 1869 were present in the original poem of 1843.

8. Manual del cristiano; nuevo y completo devocionario por la excelentísima señora doña Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda de Sabater, Carmen Bravo-Villasante ed. (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975). The manuscript was thought to have been lost when the publisher went bankrupt, and Avellaneda published a new and longer Devocionario twenty years later. Another sign that her piety was as strong in the late 1860's as in the mid-1840's is that she chose to end Obras 1869 with six religious poems.

9. This comparison is a topos in writings on Washington, and goes back to his lifetime: he was the first President-General of the Society of the Cincinnati, which was founded in 1783 by officers of the American Revolutionary Army to foster the ideal of the citizen soldier who returns to ordinary life as soon as the need for military service is over. We owe this information to Joseph Snow.

10. Other examples of this attitude are quoted by Germán Arciniegas, “From Utilitarianism to Positivism,” in Ralph Lee Woodward, ed., Positivism in Latin America, 1850-1900: Are Order and Progress Reconcilable? (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971), pp. 1-7.

11. José Joaquín de Olmedo, La victoria de Junín: Canto a Bolívar, in Poesías completas, Aurelio Espinosa Polit, ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1947), pp. 122-52, at p. 152.

12. Andrés Bello, Discurso en el aniversario de la Universidad, in Enrique Anderson Imbert and Eugenio Florit, Literatura hispanoamericana: antología e introducción histórica, I, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 259. Similar points are made in many other works by Bello.

13. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa i América 1845-1847, in his Obras, V (Buenos Aires: Felix Lajouane, 1886), p. 334.

14. One of these stains was no doubt, in Avellaneda's mind, Napoleon's occupation of Spain and his brutal repression of Spanish resistance, especially after the Madrid rising of May 2, 1808. She wrote a sonnet “Al monumento del Dos de Mayo” in October 1840 (Poesías 1841, p. 133; reprinted with two changes, Poesías 1850, p. 77; almost totally rewritten in Obras 1869, p. 55).

15. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this may reflect a literary tradition. Byron writes of a Muslim conqueror: “Mark! where his carnage and his conquests cease! / He makes a solitude, and calls it—peace!” (The Bride of Abydos, II. xx. 912-13). As Byron notes in a letter to his publisher John Murray (November 24, 1813), this is a rendering of Tacitus' “Solitudinem faciunt—pacem appellant” (Agricola, cap. 30).

16. Œuvres poétiques complètes, Marius-François Guyard, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 123. This poem was inspired by Alessandro Manzoni's ode “Il cinque maggio.” See Léon Séché, Études d'histoire romantique: Lamartine de 1816 à 1830; Elvire et les “Méditations” (Documents inédits) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), pp. 146-52; Dorothée Christesco, La Fortune d'Alexandre Manzoni en France: origines du théâtre et du roman romantiques (Paris: Éditions Balzac, 1943), pp. 52-57; and Jean Tulard, Le Mythe de Napoléon (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), pp. 55-56.

17. “Napoleón: Traducido libremente de Lamartine,” Poesías 1841, pp. 55-67; 1839 is given as the date of composition. The poem had been published previously in La Alhambra (Granada), 3, no. 16 (July 19, 1840), 184-86, under the pseudonym “La Peregrina.” In Poesías 1841, almost thirty per cent of the lines are changed or wholly replaced; thus the process of major revision began within a few years of the poem's composition. The Neo-Classic poet Juan Nicasio Gallego singles it out for praise in his preface to Poesías 1841 (p. x). It appears with a slightly different title (“Napoleón: Traducción libre de Lamartine”) in Poesías 1850, pp. 34-42; the date is corrected to October 1838, and there are again major changes in the text. There is a further substantial revision in Obras 1869: “A la tumba de Napoleón en Santa Elena: Imitación de Lamartine,” pp. 29-34, and this final version is the one reprinted (from Obras 1914) by Castro y Calvo, Obras 1974, pp. 245-47. Cotarelo (p. 389) wrongly states that Obras 1869 omits it.

18. For example, “Qu'une trace de sang suivra partout son char!” (stanza 26, line 3); “Si con rasgos de sangre guarda el suelo” (Poesías 1841, line 4). The relevant line of Lamartine is not, however, translated by Avellaneda in “Napoleón.” On the other hand, some elements which she adds to her version of the French poem seem to be echoed in the 1841 sonnet: “Tu genio colosal” (Poesías 1841, p. 65, line 25); “Del coloso del Sena” (sonnet, line 6). Verbal debts to another French work, Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique, are suggested by H. Gaston Hall, “Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sonnet ‘A Washington,’” Ball State University Forum, 16, no. 2 (1975), 2-3. Hall knows only the 1860's sonnet, though there are closer parallels between the 1841 sonnet and the Chateaubriand passages he cites.

19. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: la mujer y la poetisa lírica (México: Porrúa, 1972), p. 36.

20. Salvador García, Las ideas literarias en España entre 1840 y 1850 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), pp. 192-93. Beth K. Miller, “Avellaneda, Nineteenth-Century Feminist,” Revista / Review Interamericana, 4 (1974), 177-83, at p. 181; Spanish version in Miller, Mujeres en la literatura (México: Fleischer Editora, 1978), pp. 20-25, at p. 24. The statement on p. 182 of that article (Spanish version, p. 24) that in 1860 Avellaneda became the first woman editor of a Spanish-language journal is incorrect, since, as García's list shows, she undertook such a task long before, in her early thirties.

21. Avellaneda's change of attitude is not consistently applied throughout the final version of her Napoleon ode, in which a change in the order of lines places at the conclusion of the poem a suspension of judgment: “Los hechos pesa la eternal balanza … / ¡Ya el cielo pronunció!. … ¡Calle la tierra!. …” (Obras 1869, p. 34) This lack of consistency is less surprising if one remembers Avellaneda is rendering another poet's work.

22. Escuela de libertad. Siete maestros: Bolívar-Hidalgo-Lincoln-Martí-San Martín-Sucre-Washington (México: Editora Continental, 1942), p. 294. Jarnés is quoting Carlos Pereyra, Bolívar y Washington. See also the essay “Washington y Bolívar,” by the nineteenth-century Ecuadorean Juan Montalvo.

23. Javier Herrero, Fernán Caballero: un nuevo planteamiento (Madrid: Gredos, 1963), Part I, Chapters 2-3; Part II, Chapter 4.

24. Las ideas literarias, p. 8. For a new assessment of the political background to this feeling of crisis, see Carlos Marichal, Spain (1834-1844): A New Society (London: Tamesis, 1977).

25. In Autobiografía 4 cartas, Lorenzo Cruz de Fuentes, ed., 2nd ed. (Madrid: Imprenta Helénica, 1914).

26. García, Las ideas literarias, pp. 160, 186 and 196; Luis Monguió, Don José Joaquín de Mora y el Perú del ochocientos (Berkeley: University of California Press; Madrid: Castalia, 1967), pp. 322-23.

27. For an important discussion of Spanish interest in Latin America, see Mark J. Van Aken, Pan-Hispanism: Its Origin and Development to 1866 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

28. Avellaneda's foreword says that: “Tres años ha dormido esta novela casi olvidada en el fondo de su papelera.” Cotarelo minimizes its abolitionist nature: “Algunos han querido dar a esta obra carácter abolicionista, semejante al de La Cabaña de Tom, de Enriqueta Beecher Stowe. No hay nada de protesta contra la esclavitud, más que el hecho de admitir en el héroe el impedimento de aspirar a su dicha” (p. 75). Bravo-Villasante agrees with him: “No tiene sentido comparar la novela de Sab con La cabaña del tío Tom de H. Beecher Stowe, pues no se propuso la Avellaneda hacer algo semejante, sino pintar la pasión de naturalezas de fuego y los amores contrariados e imposibles. En Sab el elemento abolicionista es lo de menos …” (Una vida romántica, p. 85). These critics are mistaken; Bravo-Villasante, indeed, changes her views in “Las corrientes sociales del romanticismo en la obra de la Avellaneda,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 76 (1968), 771-75. One should not expect an abolitionist novel written by a Cuban in Spain in the 1830's to adopt the same tactics as one written in the United States some fourteen years later. It is significant that the Cuban journal El Museo, publishing Sab in serial form in 1883, prefaces the text with this comment: “Se publicó en Madrid, en 1841; pero la corta edición que se hizo fue, en su mayor parte, secuestrada y retirada de la circulación por los mismos parientes de la autora, a causa de las ideas abolicionistas que encierra. Por la misma causa fue excluida de la edición completa de las obras de la Avellaneda, ya que de seguro se le habría negado la entrada en esta Isla si hubiera figurado Sab en ella.” See Domingo Figarola-Caneda and Emilia Boxhorn, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Biografía, bibliografía e iconografía, incluyendo muchas cartas, inéditas o publicadas, escritas por la gran poetisa o dirigidas a ella, y sus memorias (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1929), p. 77. For further evidence, see Helena Percas Ponseti, “Sobre la Avellaneda y su novela Sab,” Revista Iberoamericana, 28 (1962), 347-57. It is worth recalling at this point that just as Avellaneda's abolitionist views and her awareness of her Cuban identity converge in Sab, so that awareness combines with her feminist convictions in the journal she founded in 1860: Album Cubano de lo Bueno y lo Bello: Revista quincenal de moral, literatura, bellas artes y modas. Dedicada al bello sexo.

29. For Spanish opinion of the Mexican adventure, see Van Aken, pp. 109-11.

30. “A. S. M. la Reina Doña Isabel Segunda. Señora: Al tratar de hacer la publicación del segundo volumen de mis ensayos poéticos, consideré como un deber ofrecerlo a los Reales Pies de V.M., puesto que muchas de las composiciones contenidas en él habían sido dedicadas a ensalzar rasgos generosos del magnánimo corazón de V.M., o faustos sucesos de su reinado.

    V.M. se dignó acoger benignamente aquel pobre tributo de mi profundo respeto, permitiéndome autorizar este libro con su augusto nombre, y yo la suplico humildemente me dispense con tan señalada honra, la de aceptar benévola la sincera espresión de mi eterna gratitud.”

31. The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) p. 19.