The Novels
[In the following excerpt, Harter offers an examination of the characteristics, character types, and themes found in Avellaneda's novels.]
Although Spain, with Don Quixote and the development of the picaresque genre, has good reason to its claim as the “mother” of the novel, the rich vein of novelistic creativity had run dry long before the advent of romanticism to Iberia. By the 1830s and the advent of the romantic period, the works of Sir Walter Scott were widely read, often in poor translations, and there were numerous adaptations and versions of novels taken from the French. Spanish romantic writers devoted their energies primarily to poetry and to the drama, leaving a very slender list of novels. The two best known are Mariano José de Larra's El doncel de don Enrique el doliente (1834) and Enrique Gil y Carrasco's El Señor de Bembibre (1844). Both works belong to the medievalist traditions of the Scott type of novel, and are marked by a tone of melancholy and by descriptions of nature that link the works closely to the poetic writings of their authors.
The date of 1849 is usually given for the renaissance of the novel in Spain as a vital literary form, corresponding to publication of Fernán Caballero's costumbristic novel, La gaviota (The Seagull). Earlier, the scenes of Madrid life in the short writings of Mesonero Romanos, and later on, those sketches of Andalusian life by Estébanez Calderón, are usually cited as the forerunners of the realistic novel which would become the pre-dominant literary form of the second half of the nineteenth century. Clearly, however, a fundamental change in the attitudes and outlook of Spanish society took place around 1840, with the establishment of the regency of General Espartero. Middle-class politics and middle-class tastes were rapidly becoming dominant. The period of romantic intensity that we usually ascribe to the triumph of Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino in 1835 was rapidly modified.
In the early 1840s, as is visible in [Gertrudis Gómez de] Avellaneda's poetry and dramas, romantic excess was already on the wane. The ethical and aesthetic values of a vanished aristocracy could only be found in the remote Middle Ages, where writers such as Larra, Espronceda, and Gil y Carrasco sought the settings of their single historical novel. For la Avellaneda, conversely, the Medieval world was not a vehicle for prose drama. Tula [Avellaneda's nickname] utilized it in such plays as Munio Alfonso and The Prince of Viana, but even in her first theatrical venture, Leoncia, she was far closer to the bourgeois realistic drama than to the plays of her contemporary playwrights of the late 1830s. She was of her time, but was also ahead of it, as is also true of her novelistic production. Her romantic heroes and heroines find themselves more and more involved in a world of bourgeois materialism and implacable social mores, in short, a “prose world” rather than a poetic one. Even Sab, Tula's first novel, for all of its typically romantic figures and story, ends in a very real nineteenth-century world of commerce and burgeoning industry. Eclecticism is the keynote of Gertrudis's novels as also of her drama and her poetry. It has been a generally accepted critical position that la Avellaneda's novelistic production is inferior to her other work, an allegation by no means certain. This may explain why no serious study of her novels has ever been made. With the exception of Sab, none of the novels have been reprinted since the centennial edition of the complete works in 1914.1 The same applies to the shorter prose works, the short stories, legends, and articles.
I GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
The novels do merit more extensive critical attention. Five of la Avellaneda's six works of sufficient length to be included in the category of novel clearly reflect broader developments in the European novel—the French novel in particular—of the middle decades of the century. Only one of the six, Dolores, is a historical novel set in the Middle Ages. In the prologue to Dos mujeres (Two Women), la Avellaneda pointedly informs the reader that the work reflects neither the descriptive historical genre (“género histórico descriptivo”) of Walter Scott or the dramatic novel (“novela dramática”) of Victor Hugo.2 These two authors exercised great influence in Spain during these years but were not the only novelists being read. There were extensive publications of translations of other French authors whom Tula admired: Chateaubriand, Dumas père, George Sand, Lamartine, Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Scribe, Soulié, Madame de Staël, and Eugène Sue. The works of Fenimore Cooper reinforced the exoticism of Chateaubriand's vision of a vast and virgin America; Goethe's Werther ran through several editions. Tula makes no mention of him, but Balzac also was available in Spanish from 1836 on.3 Perhaps la Avellaneda cannot be classed as a prolific or a great novelist, but she does show that novelistic production in Spain before the advent of the costumbristic novel was not confined exclusively to the stereotyped historical novel set in the Middle Ages.
If la Avellaneda avoids excessive neo-medievalism, she remains true to other fundamentally romantic tenets, themes, and characteristics already found in her poems and plays. Love is a constant and predominant motif, appearing as a natural and spontaneous passion, striking with all the force and suddenness of a bolt of lightning, affecting every aspect of the lover's life and feeling. It lifts the individual to the heights of ecstasy and plunges him or her into the depths of despair. Sublime and terrible, it transcends every other consideration, even morality, at least temporarily.
Love also has its price. Society sees to that, for the society reflected in the novels is every bit as mean-minded, petty and vindictive as in la Avellaneda's other writings. Social norm prevents private happiness, and the ideal and the real are in perpetual conflict. Heaven and earth are incompatible on the worldly plane; the capacity for feeling of Tula's heroes and heroines is far greater than their capacity to realize their hopes and their desires. Love's altar is stained with the blood of its victims. Illness, madness, suicide, and destruction follow in its wake, yet it is worth any sacrifice and any degree of suffering. Love's pain as well as love's delights surpass all other feelings. The virtuous are swept along with the culpable, but love is its own deity. Regardless of the disillusionment that it leaves behind, even its memory exalts. Tula's lovers never descend to the crass vulgarity of the Madame Bovaries of novelistic naturalism.
The settings for la Avellaneda's dramas of love vary from the exotic, natural, and picturesque scenes of her own native Cuba to the drawing rooms of Seville and Madrid, from the doomed Tenochtitlán of the latter-day Aztecs to the Rome and Naples of the Napoleonic era, and from fifteenth-century Spain to the eighteenth-century France of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. Only two novels are remote from Tulas's own era; the other four are, if not truly contemporary, at least fairly close in time to the author's own period. In this sense, Gertrudis was following in the footsteps of so-called romantics such as George Sand and Balzac who were already advancing the novelist's art toward realism.
Tula's poetry frequently relies on nature or some aspect of reality to embody or symbolize what she feels. In her novels, however, reality remains cruelly impassive for the most part. Death and suffering may destroy the individual, but society and the machinery of its functioning are indifferent, unaffected. No matter how noble the individual, no matter how great his capacity for love or for creativity, he cannot escape the reality that engulfs him. Sab dies a slave and Espatolino a bandit. Insight and inspiration ennoble the soul, but not the person. The lover perceives through love, but the rest of the world clings to its prejudices and its myopic monotony.
The themes and topics of the six full-length novels are wide ranging. In addition to romantic love, they include slavery in Cuba, the brutality of the Spanish conquistadors, landscapes running the gamut from the exoticism of the New World or the mountains of Italy to the mannered gardens of Versailles, costume and custom, vengeance, matrimony, and even the dangerous subject of divorce. Espatolino the bandit and Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, are equally heroic in the tragedy and nobility of their defeat. Furthermore, in both Espatolino and her novel on the conquest of Mexico, Tula examines the question of power—of nations, of police, or of social classes—of justice, and of public and private morality. Much of what la Avellaneda expresses through Espatolino's words is close to the bitter pessimism of our own day in the postatomic world. Sab and Espatolino have been enslaved by social systems whose laws and justice have no room for compassion or virtue, that destroy the weak and exalt the strong. Poverty, illness, and death are present in all of the works, lending a serious and somber tone. The moments of happiness are short-lived, while violence and suffering are a vital part of all save one.
II TYPE FIGURES
The romantic stereotypes seen in Tula's dramas also appear in her novels, the most predominant being the romantic heroine, naive, trusting, total in her love for, and faith in, the man to whom she gives her heart, always vulnerable and susceptible in matters touching her emotions. She is the “good woman,” physically beautiful but without overt sexuality, whose primary attractiveness is spiritual. Seemingly fragile, she can show great strength and tenacity. A good Catholic, capable of deep abnegation, she believes, and her faith sustains her. Prayer may be her only refuge in time of despair, or, like Dolores, she may enter a convent rather than compromise with the life of the world. She may have a rival who is, in some ways, a worthy adversary in the battle for the heart of a man. The Countess Catalina of Two Women or the Madame Pompadour of The Boatman Artist are talented and worldly ladies who are reputedly “bad women.” Seemingly frivolous and sinful, they too are admirable: like the “good women,” they are capable of deep love. Their superficial cosmopolitanism is only skin deep. The world has corrupted them, and they are doomed because of it, but fundamentally they retain the ability to long for the innocent paradise of Love's Garden of Eden. Even love, however, cannot triumph over the stricture of church and society.
The figure of the mother appears in several guises. As in the plays, a kindly and devoted nurse or servant may take on the maternal role. She may be no more than a saintly memory to be evoked with sighs and tears, as in Sab or in The Boatman Artist, or may appear as a long-suffering and pitiable figure, like Hubert Robert's mother in the latter novel. She may with equal frequency be an odious or even a monstrous character. Doña Leonor in Two Women does everything she can to smother the happiness and natural charm of her daughter. The mother of Dolores, for all of Tula's halfhearted attempts at modification of the character, matches Medea in her unnatural cruelty to her daughter and her heartless treatment of her husband.
The male characters in the novels range from the sensitive and self-sacrificing mulatto slave, Sab, to the heroic and defiant bandit, Espatolino, raised to the heights of the sublime through love, to the relatively prosaic Carlos, whose dilemma is love for two women, and the artistic and thoughtful Hubert Robert. Both Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc are doomed monarchs, the worthy adversaries of the ambitious but not wholly unsympathetic Hernán Cortez. The father figures of the novels are consistently kind and gentle parents, protective of the romantic heroines and trying, with one exception—Josefina's eccentric father in The Boatman Artist—to bring about the “good woman's” happiness. In Sab, there are two marked exceptions: both Carlota's beloved Carlos Otway and his father are materialistic and false, bent on exploiting the innocent heroine.
As in the lyrical poetry and in the plays, la Avellaneda herself is omnipresent behind various fictional roles throughout the novels. In three of the works, Sab, Two Women, and The Boatman Artist, the self-portrait is drawn through separate characters, representations of Tula's ego and alter ego: Carlota-Teresa, Luisa-Countess Carlota, and Josefina-Pompadour, respectively. The case of Dolores is even more curious, in that Tula insists in her prologue to the novel that she has invented nothing, yet proceeds to portray a young woman who historically did not exist but who has la Avellaneda's own baptismal name.
There are various secondary and minor characters, as might be expected, of differing interest and artistic success. Obviously, however, the talented but troubled Gertrudis continued her deep need to probe her own existence, in the novel as well as in the other forms that she cultivated. The phenomenon of her own life projected on a broad screen of fiction, the quest for identity, the unresolved search for absolutes, the struggles between flesh and spirit—the world of parties, honors, nobility, and the periodic withdrawals—the portraits of frustration and alienation, are what make the novels of continuing interest to us today.
Like Tula's other works, the novels partake of the excesses and flaws of the literature of the times. All too often, plot complications border on absurdity and the characters on caricature. Facile description replaces serious study or development of character. Descriptions frequently touch upon the grotesque or overly repugnant, while moments of beauty and happiness are excessive in their exaggeration. Tula is at her best in the novels, as in the plays, when writing in a realistic rather than a romantic vein. Then she is balanced and perceptive, with profound insights not only into the workings of the human heart and mind, but the growing materialism of the new society being formed in the middle years of the past century. The strong stand against slavery that Sab represents and the plea for individual dignity, and for justice for men and women, regardless of station or status, are concepts that have come into their own only in very recent years. In each of the novels, they are persistent and underlying themes. In this, as in so many other ways, la Avellaneda was before her time. The forms of novelistic expression which she used seem inadequate to us today, but the message is surprisingly modern. Tula's insights transcend the melodramatic extremes of her stories; her style and dialogue are frequently brilliant, as are many descriptive passages.
III SAB
La Avellaneda's first novel is, in a sense, her most interesting. It is abolitionist, with impassioned statements about slavery and the degradation of the individual which ring as true today as when Tula was writing them shortly after her arrival in Europe at age twenty-two. In one statement, the author affirms that she began the novel in Bordeaux. That was in 1836, and we suppose that she continued it while living with her stepfather's family in Galicia. Tula reveals in the prologue that she wrote the work in “momentos de ocio y melancolía” (“moments of idleness and melancholy”),4 apparently as a means of passing the time in a period which was a difficult one for her. She also states that she had left it abandoned in a drawer for three years so, that, given the publication date of 1841, she would have finished the work in 1838. In a letter to don Antonio Neira dated February 1843, however, she writes that she began the work in Lisbon in 1838 and finished it in Seville in 1839 (SB [Sab], 15).
She mentions the work in two letters to Cepeda also. In one she notes that she has read ten chapters to a friend and in another she mentions the subscription money collected to underwrite the publication. At any rate, we know for certain that the book was written during the initial years of Tula's life in Spain, while the memories of her native Cuba were still vividly felt. It must have been written in part to soften her homesickness and to compensate for the disappointments encountered on the soil of her long-dead father.
Sab is a romantic novel given the marked importance of love and feeling of its main characters, but it is also part of the tradition of the Indianist novel, being set in the New World. For the European reader it would have appeared exotic, and follows in the traditions of the late eighteenth-century work of Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virginie, which la Avellaneda knew and admired. The terrain and the flora and fauna of Cuba were sufficiently different from those of Spain that Tula frequently explains vocabulary via the use of footnotes in Sab. By the ending of the work, however, the romantic illusions of the principal characters have been destroyed. The only survivor, Carlota, must live in the real world of merchant, money and crass materialism, the world of realism rather than romanticism.
Sab, the protagonist for whom the novel is named, belongs to a long and illustrious line of romantic heroes, marked by destiny for frustration, suffering, and noble sacrifice. The best-known Spanish hero of this type is the duke of Rivas's don Alvaro who has survived down to our time as the protagonist in Verdi's opera La Forza del Destino. Sab is also a part of the family of such star-crossed lovers as Goethe's Werther and Chateaubriand's Chactas or René. All three figures had impressed Tula deeply, but Chateaubriand's influence is particularly noticeable. The story of Atala and Chactas, with its broad vistas and exotic landscapes of a virgin America, its wilderness highly colored and dramatized by what we would now call a “romantic style,” parallel the landscapes of central Cuba in Sab. Chactas's love for the Christian Indian maiden, Atala, is as fatally impossible as is Sab's. Furthermore, the mulatto slave is as melancholy and neurasthenic as René in his barely concealed and—barely controlled—incestuous love for his sister. The burial scenes at the end of the work also clearly recall the scenes of the missionary priest and the grieving Chactas who place the body of Atala into a shallow grave and set above it a crude and rustic wooden cross.
Sab's story is one of frustrated love. He is a mulatto slave whose mother had been born a princess and free, but was brought in slavery from the Congo. Life as a slave was unbearable for her until she fell in love, but she would never reveal who Sab's father was. Nevertheless, Sab did have a protector: it was none other than don Luis de B———, uncle of the Carlota he adores and brother of the present owner of the sugar mill plantation where the family lives. Sab describes himself, saying that he belongs “Pertenezco,—prosiguio con sonrisa amarga—, a aquella raza desventurada sin derechos de hombres. … soy mulato y esclavo.” (“to that wretched race of men without rights. … I am a mulatto and a slave.”), (SB, 46). Consequently he is the first cousin of Carlota, but also her personal slave. He wants to live and die in her service, for he is the slave and captive of his love for her. That love is without any hope of fulfillment on this earth, and Sab is fully aware of this. He asks for no more than to serve Carlota, to see her and to be near her if possible. His contemplation of her is sheer bliss and the rapture of holding a lock of her hair borders on madness. Consequently, his love is an unquenchable thirst which thrives on its own torment, Wordsworth's “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” rather than the “dreary intercourse of daily life.”
Carlota de B– is nonetheless Sab's soul mate. She too is in love's thrall. Her heart has been given to a young blond Englishman, Enrique Otway. Love fills her with joy when all goes well, and with torment when obstacles seem to prevent their marriage. She loves fully, blindly, and spiritually, so much so that even her cold and calculating fiancé is touched by the force and nobility of her feeling. She is also another aspect of la Avellaneda herself, the innocent and beautiful young Cuban girl, untouched and untainted by the flesh or the practical realities of the world, Eve without the apple tree. Indeed, Carlota seems to us today rather like a sentimental schoolgirl, either too shortsighted or too short-witted to see the reality before her eyes. Oblivious to the overpowering passion she has inspired in Sab, she remains equally blind to the cold calculations and mercenary interests of her husband-to-be and his money-grubbing father. She is, by today's standards, insipid, shallow, and, in her emotional myopia, inconsiderate of the needs and feelings of those around her. The adulation which everyone shows her is justifiable only in terms of her symbolic innocence.
Carlota de B–, however, was not created in our day, nor does she respond to our concepts of what constitutes an interesting, admirable, or intriguing young woman. In many ways, Carlota is a compendium of the heroine who briefly held center stage at the height of the Romantic age, and who even then was lampooned and satirized as an improbable simpleton. If we place her within the context that la Avellaneda creates for her, that of a cult of love which totally dominates the whole being and subordinates all else, her acts and her feelings become comprehensible. Tula professed her own ability to love in that way, a propensity which cost her dearly in her relationships with Cepeda and Tassara.
Consequently, Carlota must be seen as one of the innocent young romantic heroines, but she is also one of the many “goddesses” of love that people the pages of all of la Avellaneda's work. Her story does retain some individuality, and it is interesting to compare her to the two women in Leoncia, on which Tula was working at about the same time. She shares certain traits with both the adolescent Elena and the doomed and tortured Leoncia, but they are most alike in their total consecration to love, a fact that makes of them, as it does of Sab, superior beings. Carlota expresses this idea, albeit in moments of melancholy, when she recognizes that her beloved Enrique is not one of the superior beings: “… que hay almas superiores sobre la tierra, privilegiadas para el sentimiento y desconocidas de los almas vulgares; almas ricas de afectos, ricas de emociones … para las cuales están reservadas las pasiones terribles, las grandes virtudes, los inmensos pesares … y que el alma de Enrique no era una de ellas” (“… for there are superior souls on the earth, privileged in matters of sentiment and unknown to vulgar souls; souls rich in affection, rich in emotions … for whom the terrible passions, the highest virtues, and immense sorrows are reserved … and the soul of Enrique is not one of them”), (SB, 74).
In another passage, she speaks of love and suffering, and asks if it is everyone's lot to feel so deeply: “¡Dios mío! ¿Se padece tanto siempre que se ama? ¿Aman y padecen del mismo modo todos los corazones. o has depositado en el mío un germen más fecundo de afectos y dolores? … ¡Ah! si no es general esta terrible facultad de amor y padecer! ¡Cuán cruel privilegio me has concedido! … porque es una desgracia, es una gran desgracia sentir de esta manera” (“Oh heavens! Does one always suffer so when one loves? Do all hearts love and suffer in the same way, or hast Thou placed in mine the most fertile seed of affection and of pain? … Ah, if this terrible faculty of love and suffering is not a general thing, what a cruel privilege Thou hast given me! … for it is an affliction, a great affliction to feel this way”), (SB, 74). This is, of course, Tula herself speaking through Carlota. We know that this concept of grandeur of soul was fundamental to her thinking. Sab expresses the same notion in a slightly different way. He and Enrique Otway leave the plantation just before the outbreak of a terrible storm, with Carlota entrusting her fiancé to the slave. When Otway is hit by a tree limb and knocked to the ground, Sab sees his opportunity to do away with his hated rival. He speaks of “un alma que supiera ser grande y virtuosa y que ahora puede ser criminal” (“a soul that knows how to be great and virtuous and that now could be criminal”), (SB, 76). Sab, of course, decides for virtue and nobility of action, and the dark horror of the storm gives way to splendid scenes of blue sky and celestial light.
Teresa, the poor and dependent cousin, is the third person endowed with this God-given faculty for love and spiritual superiority. She is Carlota's alter ego, the “dark sister” who is simultaneously another aspect of the fictional self-portrait of la Avellaneda in the novel. As she has no money, she has no status in the household, but serves as a sort of companion-servant to Carlota, obviously less than happy with her lot. She is consistently frowning and unsmiling. Sab is sufficiently insightful to recognize that she has deep feelings and even uncovers her mystery: she is in love with Enrique Otway herself. When Carlota, in her total insensitivity to her cousin, tells her that she loves Otway so much that even a word or a look means life or death to her heart, and then says that Teresa of course cannot understand this as she has never been in love, the latter replies quietly but surely: “Serás desgraciada si no moderas esa sensibilidad, pronta siempre a alarmarse” (“You will be very unhappy unless you moderate this sensitivity always so close to the danger point”), (SB, 146). Teresa moderates her own feelings. When Sab offers her the money which he won in the lottery, and which could buy Otway away from Carlota, Teresa realizes that such a maneuver would not really solve anything. She is too much of a realist for any scheme that would distort their own real intentions and feelings. At the end of the novel, Teresa has withdrawn from the world into a convent—a thing Tula repeatedly said she intended to do—and it is to her, until her death, that Carlota goes for consolation and guidance.
There is still another woman character who clings fiercely to her pride, but who, like Teresa, has no hope for the realization of her dreams: Martina. She is some sixty years old, and deeply marked by age and suffering. She too is a slave, and Sab is her adoptive son. Her grandson Luis is a pathetic and grotesquely deformed little boy who clings to Sab. Martina's physical ugliness, however, conceals a noble soul capable of deep devotion. She thinks of herself as a princess of the Indian race that the Spaniards destroyed, and she is portrayed as a wise woman who knows medicine and the lore of the past of her vanished people. As she lives near Cubitas, an area near Puerto Príncipe where Tula grew up, it is possible that she is in fact a portrait of someone whom Gertrudis actually knew. Certainly the descriptions of the outing to her village are based on trips taken there during Tula's childhood and adolescence.
IV ANTISLAVERY SENTIMENT
The theme of slavery is one that is reiterated again and again. Given that fact, it is difficult to understand why some critics have seen the theme of slavery as peripheral or as an unimportant detail. Cotarelo y Mori, whose book on la Avellaneda is by far the most extensive study yet made, makes a very curious statement. Noting that some writers have wanted to see in Sab an abolitionist novel similar to Uncle Tom's Cabin, he remarks: “No hay nada de protesta contra la esclavitud, más que el hecho de admitir en el héroe el impedimento de aspirar a su dicha” (“there is nothing of protest against slavery, except for the fact of admitting in the hero the obstacle to his happiness”).5 He quotes Nicomedes Pastor Díaz to the effect that Sab could have been anyone else, in any other society, and still have had the same problem. Tula did not place the action in another setting or another society, however. She placed it in the Cuba in which she had grown up, in the very town and countryside in which she had grown up, and in which several acute problems in the controversy over slavery had come to a head. She and her family were fully aware of the many aspects, moral and economic, of the slavery question. We can assume from Sab that her family were also slave owners. In 1822, there was unrest, and in 1826, the attempted insurrection of Frasquito came to an end with the execution of the leaders in Puerto Príncipe. An 1827 census of the Island gave the following statistics: 311,051 whites, 286,942 Negro slaves, and 106,494 freed blacks.6 Tula obviously knew exactly what she was doing and saying when she wrote Sab.
There is no doubt that the subject was singularly controversial and even inflammatory. For the daughter of a highly placed military family to have written the unmistakable attack against slavery that she did, must have created much tension within the family. Understandably, she did not include it in the Obras Completas as she designed them before her death. It is commendable that the work was reinstated in the edition of 1914.
Carmen Bravo Villasante, in her recent edition of Sab, gives a much sounder critical opinion on the matter of slavery in the novel (SB, 20-24). She is right when she says that Sab belongs to the series of romantic outcasts from society—the pirate, bandit, and beggar—but at the same time Sab reminds the reader that he is exiled from humanity because of his color as well as his condition of slavery. This makes the contrast to the blond Anglo-Saxon, Enrique Otway, all the more striking and the point of color of the skin all the more significant. La Avellaneda is concerned with racism as well as the institution of slavery, but it is to the inhuman cruelties of the latter that she addresses passage after passage, placed primarily in the mouth of Sab.
The theme appears in the very first pages of the book, in the initial encounter between the unknown arrival—Enrique Otway—and the mysterious “native” of the area, Sab. The stranger, seeking his way to Bellavista, the sugar-mill plantation of don Carlos de B———, encounters Sab, and the two begin to talk. Otway asks about the plantation, and Sab replies that things are not going well. Times are bad; there are only fifty slaves left. Otway's comment is significant: “Vida muy fatigosa deben tener los esclavos en estas fincas, … y no me admira que se disminuya considerablemente su número” (“The slaves on these country estates must have a very harsh life, … and I'm not surprised that their number is greatly reduced”), (SB, 44). Sab's lengthy reply embodies the attitude which Tula reiterates throughout the work:
“Es un vida terrible a la verdad,” respondió el labrador arrojando a su interlocutor una mirada de simpatía: “bajo este cielo de fuego el esclavo casi desnudo trabaja toda la mañana sin descanso, y a la hora terrible de mediodía, jadeando, abrumado bajo el peso de la leña y de la caña que conduce sobre sus espaldas, y abrasado por los rayos del sol que tuesta su cutis, llega el infeliz a gozar todos los placeres que tiene para la vida; dos horas de sueño y una escasa ración …. ¡Ah! sí, es el cruel espectáculo la vista de la humanidad degradada, de hombres convertidos en brutos, que llevan en la frente la marca de la esclavitud y en su alma la desperación del infierno.”
“It is a terrible life indeed,” answered the countryman with a friendly look at his interlocutor: “underneath this sky of flame, the half-naked slave works the day through without rest, and at the hour of the terrible midday, panting, crushed under the weight of the firewood and of the sugar cane that he carries on his shoulders, and burned by the rays of the sun that roasts his skin, the poor soul finally tastes of the only pleasure that he has in all of his life: two hours of sleep and a meager ration. … Ah yes, it is a cruel spectacle, this scene of degraded humanity, of men turned into brutes, who carry on their brows the mark of slavery and in their soul the desperation of hell.”
(SB, 44-45)
At this point Sab reveals to Otway who he is; that he is a part of that unhappy race that have no rights, a slave and a mulatto. Otway changes his tone of address immediately, speaking down to the man whom up till then he had addressed as an equal. Otway's father openly insults Sab, who is but an inferior being after all!
In other passages, Sab is no less vehement in his expression. He has no family, no life. He is a man without a country (“los esclavos no tienen patria”), for a slave is no more than a beast of burden (“los deberes del esclavo son deberes de la bestia de carga”), (SB, 168). Sab's most vehement indictment comes in the letter he writes just before his death to Teresa, asking how she, who is only a weak woman, could show more strength than he, a man. He questions if it is virtue, and then asks of himself, “just what is virtue?” No man has satisfied his quest for a comprehension of it. Even the church supports slavery and the debasement of human beings: “Me acuerdo que cuando mi amo me enviaba a confesar mis culpas a los pies de un sacerdote, yo preguntaba al ministro de Dios qúe haría para alcanzar la virtud, ‘La virtud del esclavo—se respondía, es obedecer y callar, servir con humildad y resignación a sus legítimos dueños, y no juzgarlos nunca’” (“I remember,” he writes, “that when my master sent me to confess my sins at the feet of a priest, I asked the minister of God what I should do to attain virtue. ‘The virtue of the slave,’ he answered, ‘is to obey and keep silent, to serve with humility and resignation his legitimate owners, and never to judge them’”), (SB, 220).
Sab then goes on to examine various facets of life and justice, fundamental matters in all of the work of la Avellaneda in varying degree, as we know. He questions why some have the right to enslave and others the obligation to obey, how God who has written equality on every tombstone could condemn a slave to forget the very dignity that has been given to him through his birth as a human being. Sab has searched in vain for virtue among men: “He visto siempre que el fuerte oprimía al débil, que el sabio enganaba al ignorante, y que el rico despreciaba al pobre. No he podido encontrar entre los hombres la gran armonía que Dios ha establecido en la naturaleza” (“The strong oppress the weak, the wise deceive the ignorant, and the rich scorn the poor. I have been unable to find among men the great harmony that God has established in nature”), (SB, 221). Sab asks if he is to blame if God has given him a soul and a heart, and the ability to love beauty, justice, and greatness. He questions why he must suffer the terrible struggle between his true nature and his bitter destiny. He finally concludes that it is not God, but men who “have formed this destiny,” that it is they who have cut the wings that God gave to his soul. It is not only the slave who suffers. Women also suffer, for they too are the victims of society's laws: “¡Pobres y ciegas víctimas! Como los esclavos, ellas arrastran pacientemente su cadena y bajan la cabeza bajo el yugo de las leyes humanas” (“Poor and blind victims! Like slaves they patiently drag their chain and lower their heads beneath the yoke of human laws. With no other guide but an ignorant and credulous heart, they choose a master for their whole life”), (SB, 227). Woman's slavery is marriage, from which she has no recourse on this earth. The slave can change masters or hope to gather together enough money to buy his liberty, but woman “pero la mujer, cuando levanta sus manos enflaquecidas y su frente ultrajada para pedir libertad, oye el monstruo de voz sepulcral que la grita: ‘En la tumba’” (“when she lifts her emaciated hands and her abused forehead to ask for freedom, hears the monster with the voice from the grave that cries out: ‘In the tomb’”), (SB, 227).
Sab talks of death, as does Teresa. They see it as a release from suffering, and death comes to Martina, to Luis, and to the faithful dog Leal by the end of the book. Carlota has married her beloved Enrique Otway, but soon realizes her error. Her life, to be lived out in the knowledge of the superior love of Sab for her and among the materialistic and heartless people who make up the world of her husband's business associates, is a kind of death. The moment of her marriage and the supposed beginning of her great happiness is also the very moment of Sab's death. “Tales contrastes los vemos cada día en el mundo: ¡Placer y dolor!” (“Such contrasts we see every day in this world: Pleasure and pain!”), (SB, 221), writes la Avellaneda. Five years later, the romantic heroine is a tearful and unhappy middle-class wife, suffocated in a mercantile and speculative atmosphere that has destroyed all of her youthful illusions. She has come to know the source of the comfort and luxury in which she had lived and which she had once taken for granted. She sees her husband for what he is and, Tula tells us, begins to comprehend Life. Her dreams have been dissipated, her love and her happiness have disappeared; romanticism has given way to realism. Tula recognizes that the illusions of romanticism are a deception that cannot withstand the assault of logic or contact with the real world for very long. Carlota and Sab are both romantic figures, but they love and live in the material world from which, ultimately, there is escape only through dreams, through madness, or through death, precisely the solutions that la Avellaneda has recourse to in her dramas and other prose works.
V DOS MUJERES
Just as Sab offers a picture of life and nature in central Cuba during the time la Avellaneda was growing up there, so Dos mujeres (Two Women) portrays the Seville and Madrid of the late 1830s and early 1840s when Tula was living in those two cities. She had gone to Seville in 1838 and taken up residence there with her brother Manuel; later her mother had joined them with her three younger children. There Tula began her literary career and there she met the maleficent Cepeda, refused the hand of Mendez Vigo, and started tongues wagging about her indecorous behavior. In 1840, her hopes of marriage to Cepeda for the time at an end, she moved to Madrid, stepping onto the national, and even international, stage of the artistic world. With the publication of her Poesías and Sab in 1841, she became established professionally and socially. As we know, however, she was not really happy, and her second novel provides a fictional chronicle of Tula's early years in Spain, first in Seville and then in Madrid.
The story which is her vehicle—and which is familiar from the dramas—is a tale of frustrated love. Two women, to a degree the Carlota and Teresa of Sab reworked, love the same young man, Carlos de Silva, a love triangle involving three characters of clearly romantic mold, but living very much in the prosaic society in which Carlota ended her days. The realistic ambience is far removed from the romantic fictions which Scott or Victor Hugo set in exotic places or medieval times, a fact which Tula herself underlines in the prologue written for the novel's publication in 1842. She declares that she is not writing to fit into any set genre, but trying to achieve verisimilitude in this novel (i.e., she is not consciously following any doctrine of realism), but as we shall see, she does write in a manner which less than a decade later will begin to take shape as the realistic novel. The use of specific names, places, dates, and the detailed descriptions of costume and custom, domestic and social life in nineteenth-century Seville and Madrid, are all techniques normally ascribed to the novel of the second half of the century, not to 1842.
The actual time in which Tula sets the work is 1817. There seems to be no specific reason for that particular date, except that this places the action after the end of the Napoleonic wars, but does not require descriptions of the industrial and commercial changes such as those reflected in the final passages of Sab. It also conceivably justified in the author's mind the repressive remarks made by doña Leonor in the opening pages of the work. The reign of Ferdinand VII had been over only three years when la Avellaneda came to Spain, and she was surely aware that only when that tyrannical and bigoted monarch died did romanticism and moderate liberalism finally come to Spain.
In the work, Don Francisco de Silva is a widower with a young and handsome son, Carlos, who has been studying in Paris. His widowed sister, doña Leonor, has a beautiful and demure young daughter, Luisa. Carlos and Luisa, first cousins, were very close in childhood, but have not seen each other in eight years. Doña Leonor, who acted as a foster mother to her nephew, sees in him a good and suitable match for her daughter. She rails at her brother for sending his son to study in Paris, that Ninevah of corruption and heresy, and has a fainting spell when she hears that don Francisco intends to send Carlos temporarily to Madrid when he returns to Spain. The brother yields to his sister's emotional blackmail, agreeing that Carlos should come home to Seville to stay, and, presumably, to wed the bride decided on for him.
The domestic life of doña Leonor's comfortable home is described for us in detail, emphasizing the cramped and stuffy atmosphere of a well-to-do but narrowly provincial family held in tight control by the fastidious and pious mother. If doña Leonor is—as we may reasonably suppose—a portrait of doña Francisca de Arteaga, Tula's own mother (she uses the masculine form of the name, Francisco, for the henpecked brother) it is hardly complimentary. The portrait, in fact, borders on satire. Doña Leonor is wholly inflexible in her living and her thinking. Tula writes of her that she could have been moved back into the seventeenth century, that is to say, long before the period of the Enlightenment, without any change in either her house or her family. Her only company consists of two aging ladies who are as devout and devoted to churchgoing as she, her venerable confessor, and two doddering gentlemen who still talk of the wedding of Charles IV to María Luisa more than half a century earlier. Every Saturday, she goes to confession, and every Sunday she attends mass. Luisa is held in total submission to her mother.
Tula carefully describes Luisa's education, primarily religious, including no music or dance, but a lot about household matters, embroidery and sewing, the rudiments of mathematics and geography, and the forced memorization of some sacred history. She was allowed reading of the lives of the saints and of Fray Luis, had no friends of her own age, and went out only with the aged friends of her mother. What “naughty” reading she did was of novels smuggled to her by her doting uncle, such works as Paul et Virginie (one of Tula's favorites). It is an education that la Avellaneda obviously found very wanting, and through her description of it and her tying it to a mother who lamented the ending of the Holy Inquisition, she clearly means it as criticism of the faulty education of women in her time.
At seventeen, there was nothing about Luisa to lead one to believe that she had “una de aquellas almas de fuego, una de aquellas imaginaciones poderosas y activas que se devoran a sí mismas si carecen de otro alimento” (“one of those souls of fire, one of those powerful and active imaginations that devour themselves if they do not have other sustenance”), (OB [Obras de doña Gertrudis de Avellaneda] V, 15). She is an angelic creature, painted almost like a Murillo madonna: “La inocencia brillaba en cada una de sus facciones como en cada uno de sus pensamientos, y cuando sus ojos azules y serenos se levantaban a lo alto, y un rayo de luz argentaba su blanca frente, diríase que recordaba en la tierra la existencia del Cielo” (“Innocence shone in every one of her features as in every one of her thoughts, and when her blue and untroubled eyes looked upward, and a ray of light lit up her white forehead, you would think that she was recalling here on earth the existence of Heaven”), (OB V, 15). This lovely Eve finds her Adam in her cousin, Carlos, when the two see each other at a carefully arranged get-together at doña Leonor's, surrounded by the usual cronies. Youth speaks to youth, and the cousins quickly recognize their love. Their marriage takes place.
While their personal happiness transcends the dismal domestic atmosphere of doña Leonor's home where they continue to live, their circumstances are presented in terms both of romantic love and realistic daily life. This would, of course, end the story without much drama were la Avellaneda not to introduce some plot reversal. Carlos must go to Madrid to tend to a family inheritance, meeting temptation in the form of the Countess Catalina de S. The peace and monotony to which Carlos had longed so to return is soon gone, never to be recovered. Luisa lives on in her idyll, the absence of her husband making all of life around her seem empty. She trusts completely.
The Madrid that la Avellaneda draws for us is one that she knew intimately, the world of smart society, of dinner parties, brittle and often cynical conversation, gossip and backbiting, all carried out in sumptuous settings of opulence and wealth. It is also the world of the theater boxes where men and women of a glittering but superficial social group exhibit their clothes, jewels, and conquests. Carlos's cousin Elvira, with whom he stays in Madrid, lives on the fringes of this society, but Catalina is at its very center when Carlos first meets her. If Luisa embodies the Tula of years past, Catalina is the self-portrait, in many ways, of the Gertrudis who entered the Madrid literary and social world with such stunning impact in 1840, as becomes apparent in the conversation at the first dinner party to which Carlos goes. The Countess Catalina soon becomes the main topic of conversation, and one of the male guests sings her praises, calling her “distinguished” because of her brilliant talents, her fine education, and her elegance. He finishes his comments by saying that he feels this way in spite of the things said about her by jealous rivals, which produces a spate of protests. How could anyone be envious of such a flirt? Finally, a blond young man, the lover of one of the older women at the table declares: “yo detesto a esas mujeres hombres que de todo hablan, que de todo entienden, que de nadie necesitan …” (“I detest those mannish women who can talk on any subject, understand everything, and have need of no one …”), (OB, V, 51). The identification of this remark with Tula is unmistakable. By this time, the oft-repeated comment that was attributed to Breton de los Herreros, had been made: “Es mucho hombre esta mujer” (“That woman is a lot of man”); and, as Tula was to write in her autobiography of 1850, she was already the target of slander and noxious remarks.
The malicious attacks continue during the dinner party, as one woman questions how the countess could survive without her surrounding cult of adorers. A married woman who lost her husband's affections to the charms of the countess seemingly rises to the latter's defense. The countess, she says, is the finest singer in Madrid, a talented dancer and artist, and a woman who is so well educated that she can talk on their level with the most knowledgeable men on morals, religion, and politics. She concludes by saying there is no other woman in Spain of such liberal opinions. Carlos is sufficiently embarrassed by the reputation of Catalina to deny any family relationship with her. He has no wish to meet the countess, but his cousin Elvira insists that he accompany her to a ball. There was one at her friend's home every week, to which the most brilliant of Madrid's society came. The countess's mansion is beautiful, with everything in excellent taste. The finest of society and the elegant simplicity of the setting are described as worthy of the most distinguished gatherings of Paris. When Elvira presents Carlos to Catalina, there is a moment of confusion. Carlos blushes, and this slight timidity makes him particularly appealing.
The countess, described at length, is thin, with lovely shoulders and neck, graceful in her bearing, but her major charm is in the expressiveness of her face and the brilliance of her look. She is aristocratic and dignified, but comfortably relaxed. Carlos examines her from head to toe, and after his beloved Luisa, finds her strikingly seductive. He avoids, however, the author tells us, the profanation of comparing the lovely and elegant figure before him with the celestial image in his heart.
Not until the second meeting does Carlos begin to see the falsity of the portrait of the countess that had been painted at the dinner party. There is nothing pretentious about her conversation, which, on the contrary, charms him. The mutual attraction has begun, and continues on the third meeting at the theater. Seated in the countess's box, Carlos tells her of his love for Luisa, and Catalina tells him, in the same terms as those of Sab or of Carlota, that only a superior heart could feel such love. She asks if Luisa is worthy of such feeling. It is then that Carlos replies that his wife is an angel, and Catalina, stricken, learns that the man to whom she is attracted has been married for almost a year.
Elvira's illness brings Carlos and Catalina together again, and Carlos' admiration grows. Their conversation—written in excellent dialogue by la Avellaneda—covers many subjects: society, happiness, love, and marriage. Catalina recounts her earlier life with her late husband in the Paris of the First Empire. But she has not been happy, nor has she ever truly loved: “Felices aquellos a quienes cupo el destino de amar y ser amados, y ¡felices también los que no sienten la estéril y devorante necesidad de una ventura que les fue rehusada!” (“Happy are those whose destiny it is to love and be loved, and happy as well those who do not feel the sterile and devouring necessity for a happiness that has been denied them”), (OB, 79). Catalina has filled the void in her soul with activities: “También hay opio para el corazón y para el espírtu; y ese opio es la disipacíon” (“There is an opium for the heart and for the spirit also; and that opium is dissipation”), (OB, 81). Her statements concerning what women look for in a man constitute a compelling image of what Tula herself sought, but did not find: heart, admiration that is not overcoming, domination that does not tyrannize, the ability to love and to appreciate the man who lifts through his own superiority without humiliating. Further on, Catalina declares that a woman will always forgive a lack of intelligence in a man sooner than a lack of feeling. The novelist is obviously criticizing Cepeda in these passages, as some of the same things were said in the love letters to him.
The life of Catalina's youth provides a picture of the Paris that Balzac was immortalizing at the same time Tula was writing Two Women. The husband she describes, the aristocratic roué of the Old Regime, worn out by love and genteel excesses, will reappear in her portrait of Louis XV in The Boatman Artist. Catalina read Rousseau's Julie and Goethe's Werther, and while living in the marriage arranged for her at sixteen by her mother, felt as she read the novels “páginas de fuego que me presentaba su mano fría …” (“pages of fire that held out their cold hand to me …”), (OB, 81). She speaks of her youthful love fantasies and of her idealization of the men she was attracted to. She was also cruelly deceived, at which point she turned to more serious reading, to a study of intelligence and sensitivity in the works of Plato and Rousseau. The problems of social life, with its hypocrisy and temptations, had fascinated her. She comprehends the glory of men's exploits as politicians or soldiers and asks what is left to a woman. the fundamental problem that she presents, however, is one of identity, of the individual in the context of his private life, and in that of his social and public life.
Both Carlos and Catalina struggle in vain against the love that soon overwhelms and possesses them. Even Carlos's “pure” love for Luisa is insufficient to defend him. Nevertheless, the two decide that they must part. Carlos takes a coach to return to Seville to his home and wife, but by this time, he is a changed person. His love for Catalina has brought him a knowledge of the world that he had not conceived of before. The countess has shown him his ignorance. In the coach that Carlos takes, there is a second passenger, so wrapped in her cape that he cannot see her face. At a stop to change horses, the woman awakens. It is Catalina. Destiny that brought them together in the first place has brought them together again, and Carlos returns to Madrid with his loved one. Catalina tells him that although people say that adultery is a crime, there is no adultery for the heart. There is, nonetheless, adultery for Luisa and for Carlos's father who comes to Madrid when the wayward husband does not return. Luisa learns of the love affair and finally goes to the countess's country home and there confronts her. The scene, highly dramatic, is reminiscent of similar confrontations in Tula's stage plays. Catalina, with great nobility of soul, decides to give Carlos up to his legitimate wife, and is shortly thereafter found a suicide by asphyxiation by her friend Elvira, who is unable to resuscitate her.
The final chapter of the novel, the kind of epilogue that also ends Sab, takes place in 1826, seven years after Catalina's death. Carlos has returned from his post in London and goes to the grave of the woman whom he loved and who had died in her twenty-fifth year. Back at his home in Madrid, friends come to call. Two men on leaving the house discuss Carlos's life. He has risen to high diplomatic importance, but he is very seldom at home. There are rumors that he was deeply saddened by the loss of a loved one, and that since her death, he is all ambition. The two men pass a lady on the street. It is Elvira with her two daughters. The elder has dark, burning eyes, and her name is Catalina. Elvira visits Carlos and Luisa, and en route home tells her daughters that Luisa is a very good woman, but a very unhappy one. When the daughters are older, she says, she will relate to them the story of “two women.”
It is the voice of la Avellaneda that speaks in the last paragraphs, pondering whether the truth can make any difference, if the story of Luisa and Catalina can reveal anything of worth to these two young girls—anything more than the fact that woman's lot is unhappiness. The impossibility of dissolving the bonds of matrimony converts them into chains by which women are destroyed. The world is indifferent to them and to their suffering, but is quick to notice any indiscretion and to condemn. The implacable hangman is there whether the individual woman is virtuous or not.
The interest of Two Women goes beyond the work as a novel. It is an insightful and penetrating psychological and social document. Like Sab, it tells the fictional story of star-crossed lovers in the romantic tradition. They live, however, in a real world from which they cannot escape and which dooms the realization of their emotions and aspirations. By the time of writing of this second novel, Tula has mastered the mechanics of plot and dialogue, and when we consider the date of publication of 1842, we more clearly realize the author's incisive social conscience that put her well ahead of her time and contributed to her profound sense of alienation. What makes it all the more impressive is Tula's age: she was twenty-eight years old, and just on the threshold of her career.
VI ESPATOLINO
La Avellaneda's third full-length novel is based on the life story of the Italian bandit, Spatolino, whose name Tula uses in the Hispanized form, Espatolino. The novel was first published in serial format in El Laberinto in Madrid. Publication began on January 1, 1844, and concluded in August of the same year. The work was republished in a single volume two years later in 1858.
The historical figure whose story Tula recounts in Espatolino was shot in Rome in 1807, a notorious bandit chief who had robbed and plundered for a period of eighteen years, stopping coaches, kidnapping passengers, and even murdering them. The area from Rome to Naples was under his power, and it was only by a trick that the French governor—Napoleon had placed Murat on the throne of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies in the period during which the events took place—was able to bring Espatolino to justice. The stratagem was to offer the bandit a pardon on condition that he betray his own men. Espatolino agreed, and he, his wife, and eight of his men were taken prisoner and put on trial.
The trial lasted five months. There were some four hundred witnesses. Espatolino tried to save his wife and four of his men. The other four he considered traitors. Among the police officers assigned to guard Espatolino there was one who had been a part of his band, years before. He was recognized by some of the witnesses and brought to trial for participation in a murder. Espatolino himself displayed a ferocity and courage during the trial that made his legend all the more spectacular. He even lamented those occasions for committing crimes that he had missed. Finally, Espatolino, four companions, and the police officer were condemned to death. Espatolino's wife was sentenced to four years in prison. The bandit chief himself refused to confess and laughed at his companions who did talk with the priest sent to comfort them before their deaths. Before the firing squad, he not only refused to have his eyes covered, but actually gave the order to fire. After his death, several plays and a biography were written about him.7
Apparently there were readers of the first two chapters of Tula's novel who thought that the work was a translation from the Italian. With the publication of the third installment in El Laberinto, the author included a statement telling her readers that the work was an original one and not a translation. She also gave the source for her basic story as an article which had appeared in a foreign newspaper about the imprisonment and trial of Espatolino. The article had been translated and reprinted in Havana, where Tula had read it. She says that the article contained only a brief résumé of the trial, and consequently the rest of her story is one that she invented, as she did not know any other works about the bandit chief. Nevertheless, Tula did know enough of the true history to utilize the real name of the police officer, Angelo Sotoli, who brought about the arrest. She also did sufficient research to give a credible description of the Italian countryside, despite the fact that she had never personally been to Italy.
Tula does indeed write a story of her own invention. Central to it is the love of Espatolino and his wife Anunciata, the niece of an Italian agent of the French police whom Espatolino had seduced and carried off to become his wife. She does not know the identity of her husband, who has taken a false name, Giuliano, and so it is love that gives identity to the person. When Anunciata asks about his position in the world, Espatolino replies: “Mi posición en el mundo! ¿Qué te importa, si es verdad que me amas?” (“My position in the world! What difference does it make to you if it is true that you love me?”), (OB V, 220). Further on he asks: “Si el destino hiciese de tu amante un ser desventurado y aborrecido del mundo, ¿no se mudaría tu corazón?” (“If destiny were to make of your lover an unfortunate being who is hated by the world, wouldn't your heart change?”), (OB V, 203). Anunciata replies with an energetic “Never,” and says that she would demand to be a part of whatever good or bad luck should be her husband's lot.
Anunciata's role is essentially a repetition of that of Carlota in Sab and of Luisa in Two Women. She is the all-believing, all-trusting romantic heroine who is without guile or subterfuge. Her idealism is shattered, however, for it is she who naively persuades Espatolino to accept the pardon of the police official, and consequently, it is she who seals her lover's doom. When she realizes that she has brought about Espatolino's death through her blind and undiscerning trust in the villainous Rotoli, she becomes insane, another of la Avellaneda's angelic females who is destroyed by contact with the real world.
Espatolino is in many ways the romantic hero, but there is also much that belongs to the picaresque tradition in his story. Tula makes of him an Italian Robin Hood, clearly utilizing him to express her own ideas on power and justice. She glorifies him, affirming that one has but to mention his name in Italy to hear his exploits praised by the poets, and that women will recount the stories of “el ingenio y el crimen, la ferocidad y el heroísmo” (“his talent and crime, ferocity and heroism”), (OB V, 258). He is a man with the mission of avenging the weak and oppressed (“poseía la terrible misión del vengador de los débiles y de los oprimidos”), (OB V, 258).
His own life has made him cynical and bitter in all things except his love for Anunciata and his memories of his mother. His tale is one of injured innocence and trust. He had deeply believed in honor, in hard work and honesty. His best friend was Count Carlos, and his youthful beloved was an orphan girl named Luigia. His father's trusted friend, Sarti, betrays the father's confidence, bringing about his bankruptcy. He even seduces and marries Luigia, but Espatolino still has confidence in his friend Carlos. When the latter falls ill with the plague, only Espatolino has the courage to care for him, and subsequently, almost dies of the illness himself. Once both are recovered, Count Carlos seduces Espatolino's sister, gets her pregnant, and then abandons her. When she dies, shamed and shunned by all but her ruined family, the pitiful funeral procession is forced to make way for the baptismal procession of the count's first-born legitimate child. His mother dies of illness and worry and is turned over to a medical group to be dissected for anatomical studies. The father dies in prison. Espatolino himself challenges the count to a duel, and is put into prison. It is then that he becomes a bandit, making war on all of society, and finally has his personal revenge; he captures Sarti and literally makes him eat his own gold; he turns the wife of Count Carlos over to his men to be raped and then returns her to her husband.
Espatolino's declarations on the prison system, on justice, and on power make him the spiritual brother of Sab in his attack on slavery. He sees that prisons are the schools of crime: “Allí crece, en corrompida atmósfera, la contagiosa lepra del crimen, y por eso aunque entran muchos con sentimientos de hombre, ninguno sale sin instintos de fiera” (“It is there that the contagious leprosy, in a corrupted atmosphere, grows, and for that reason, although many enter with the feelings of men, not one comes out without having the instincts of a wild beast”), (OB V, 249). Espatolino cries out that justice is an empty word and a repugnant sarcasm, for only force is justice in this world. Right is on the side of those who triumph. Napoleon, he declares, raised his throne on mountains of dead bodies. Only one law is valid for Espatolino, and it is that of necessity. He justifies his life as a bandit, saying that he makes war on men just as they make war between themselves. There is a difference, however, for Espatolino is consciously and openly dishonest: “ellos matan con las calumnias, con las difamaciones, con las perfidias, y yo con el hierro, que hace menos larga la agonía: ellos roban con disfraces, y yo presento francamente el rostro del bandido” (“men kill with slander, with vilification, with perfidy, and I with steel, which makes the agony shorter; they rob with disguises, and I present my bandit's face openly”), (OB V, 267).
Neither the crown nor the church are spared his attack. Where Sab was told by the priest that full submission was his only lot, Espatolino says that the church condones condemning the criminal to death even though he is repentant. One day, however, the death penalty will be done away with: “no dudemos … de que llegará un día en que ella, la misericordia, ilumine la mente de los legisladores de la tierra, haciendo desaparecer la horrenda venganza social que llaman pena de muerte” (“let us not doubt … that the day will come when compassion will illuminate the minds of the legislators of the earth, causing the horrible social revenge that we call the pain of death to disappear”), (OB V 249). He compares the crown of the monarch and the tiara of the pope to the dagger in his hand, affirming that they are one and the same: “instrumentos de diferentes formas destinados al mismo fin … armas para la lucha en que cada egoísmo se esfuerza para entronizarse” (“instruments of different forms, destined to the same end … arms for the struggle in which each ego strives to enthrone itself”), (OB V, 249).
Espatolino's own end exemplifies his point of view. He is a victim of his trust in his wife, who naively begs him to turn himself over to the authorities. At first he is too noble to do so because of the condition that he also turn in his own companions. Once they betray him, however, he decides to follow Anunciata's fervent pleas, stating that even if his hands are cut off, or he is blinded, so long as he can hear Anunciata's voice he will accept what punishment is meted out to him. He learns too late, however, that both he and Anunciata have been fooled. Anunciata has sold her husband into the hands of the hangman. The horror of this is too much for her to bear: she goes mad, and Espatolino goes to his death.
VII GUATIMOZíN, úLTIMO EMPERADOR DE MéXICO
For her fourth full-length novel, la Avellaneda returned to a subject and a figure that had fascinated her already in her adolescence: Hernando Cortez (Hernán Cortés). She had written a play (now lost) about him and his conquest of Mexico. In the novel she again takes up his story, but gives the novel the title of Montezuma's successor Guatimozín, último emperador de México (Cuauhtemoc, The Last Aztec Emperor). It was published both in serial form—it began in El Heraldo of Madrid on February 20, 1846—and as a single volume, also in 1846. In Mexico there was a second printing in 1853 and a third printing in 1887. In 1898, an English translation appeared, also in Mexico, done by one Helen Edith Blake, who says that la Avellaneda's dramas were “still standard in Spain” (i.e., in 1898). Her prologue states that Tula's novels have fallen into neglect, and that only two copies of Cuauhtemoc could be found in Mexico City as the book “is entirely out of print, although among literary Spanish-Americans it is considered equal, if not superior, to Lew Wallace's ‘Fair God,’ which covers the same epoch and historical events and resembles it in many respects.” Mrs. Blake then speaks of the charge of plagiarism that had been leveled against Wallace: “in fact, it has been freely charged that the ‘Fair God’ is a plagiarism of Cuauhtemoc, but a perusal of both books will show that this charge is unfounded. Both writers drew their inspiration from the same source.”8
As a matter of fact, la Avellaneda drew her information from several sources, including Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Solís, the letters of Cortez himself, Dr. Robertson, whom she highly praised, and Clavijero, whom she consulted on Aztec language and customs. She was quite proud of her scholarly diligence and wrote to Tassara in mid-April 1844 about the novel then being completed. She judges it to be good, and notes it has been admired by Martínez de la Rosa, Juan Nicasio Gallego, and Tassara's friend, Cárdenas. She expresses hope it will be published in a deluxe edition as well as in serial form in a newspaper, going on to talk about the care and effort which she has put into the preparation of the work: “que la autora ha hecho un estudio profundo de la conquista, del estado de la civilización azteca, del carácter de Cortés y compañía, apreciando con imparcialidad y exactitud los hechos y las circunstancias …” (“that the author has made a profound study of the history of the conquest, of the state of Aztec civilization, of the character of Cortez and his men, considering the facts and the circumstances with impartiality and exactitude …”).9 She adds that she polished and repolished her style so that the work would stand with the best historical novels.
At the same time that she proudly proclaims her careful research and authenticity, she speaks of the work as a “una novela semipoema” (“semipoetic novel”), and thus in a sense belies her own assertions. While there is much that is undoubtedly accurate in both events and descriptions, a large portion of the work is fiction invented by la Avellaneda to give the book a narration beyond the facts of history. As in Espatolino, Gertrudis utilizes history to convey her own message and views on life. There is also the tender love affair of the young Spaniard, Velázquez de León, with Tecuixpa, daughter of Montezuma, and the domestic love of the Princess Gualcazinla for her husband Cuauhtemoc.
La Avellaneda's sympathies clearly lie with the doomed but noble Aztecs rather than with the Spanish conquerors. The author glosses over the early life of Cortez and rapidly moves the action to the encounter with Montezuma. She portrays Cortez in a reasonably favorable light, but shows him as a cold, calculating, and pragmatic figure, hardly attractive as a human being. She says of him that “Los medios siempre eran para él cosas accesorias, y persuadíase con facilidad de su justicia siempre que tocase su utilidad. … Aconsejábale su política respetar la vida de Moctezuma; pero dictábale igualmente mantener y aumentar el terror, que podía únicamente allanarle el camino de la conquista” (“The means were always accessory things for him, and he persuaded himself easily of their justification as long as they were of utility. … His political sense counseled him to respect Montezuma's life; but it also dictated to him to maintain and increase the terror as well, which was the only thing that could smooth the road to conquest”), (OB V, 238).
As was the case with Prescott, whose History of the Conquest of Mexico was published in the United States in 1843, la Avellaneda presents Montezuma in a sympathetic and appealing light. More than half of her story is concerned with him. He is portrayed as a man who inspired both respect and fear, who had given proof of his capacities as a ruler and of his bravery as a warrior. Tula writes of him: “Era liberal, magnífico, justiciero: sus parciales le atribuían una sabiduría sobrehumana y virtudes sublimes: sus enemigos le temían porque conocían su rigor y la violencia de sus resentimientos” (“He was liberal, magnificent, righteous; his partisans attributed superhuman wisdom and sublime virtues to him; his enemies feared him because they recognized his rigor and the violence of his resentments”), (OB V, 217). For all his strength, however, Montezuma is predestined for death and destruction. The gods have foreordained the end of the Aztec Empire, and it is the acceptance of this that deeply affects the actions of the emperor in his relations with Cortez and the Spanish invaders. Were these white men the descendants of the god Quetzalcoatl who have returned to claim their heritage? This is the dilemma, and faced by the strangers, the leaders vacillate, are divided, and finally conquered.
Tula's partiality is apparent throughout the novel, but is perhaps best exemplified in the conversations which Cortez has with Guacolando, the oldest and wisest of Montezuma's counselors. Cortez questions the old man about the laws and customs of the Aztecs. Guacolando replies that there are no written laws, as they believe that there should be no absolute laws; a certain flexibility is necessary, as one does not always know all possible cases that may occur. Consequently, the monarch is given the right to alter custom when justice requires it, and he must share this responsibility with his ministers and the nobles, and with tribunals in the capital cities of the provinces. Capital punishment does exist for several crimes: robbery without proven need, rebellion or disrespect toward the emperor, heresy, corruption in ministers or public servants, adultery, murder, and continuous drunkenness. There were also serious penalties for incest, crimes against chastity, and cowardice on the field of battle. Slavery was not hereditary, and all Mexicans were born free. For slaves, there was adequate justice and protection from excesses and mistreatment. Even Montezuma shows consideration for a subject who asks to see him alone to avoid individual embarrassment.
The negative side of the picture is omitted. Tula could not have carefully read her sources without full knowledge of the repression that the Aztecs had carried everywhere that their armies went, or the horribly cruel religious practices that required the constant “feeding” of the gods with the still-beating hearts of their victims. Gertrudis does mention the temple of the war god Huitzilipochtli, but there is no reference to the rites of cutting out the hearts of hundreds and even thousands of prisoners, of the stench of blood or the matted hair and the bloody uniforms of the priests that so repulsed and shocked the Spaniards, and which Bernal Díaz forcefully describes.
The novel ends on a note of madness, death, and of love. Gualcazinla, widow of the murdered Cuauhtemoc, in the madness of her grief, tries to kill Cortez, but doña Marina, the Indian princess who was his interpreter and mistress, historically, saves him. By this time, Cortez has given Marina a Spanish husband, but her love for Cortez transcends the marriage vows of both. Her love is great enough to justify adultery or even the murder of Gualcazinla, and she will lie to hide their guilt. She tells Cortez that he is her god, the center of greatness, wisdom, and heroism. “Yo no soy más que eso: una mujer loca por ti” (“I am no more than this: a woman who is crazy from love for you”), (OB V, 566). Tula concludes the work with a brief quotation from the chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo—who was with Cortez during the conquest—on the basis of which she invented the final scene of the novel. Tula herself had been a woman in love at the time she was writing Cuauhtemoc. The affair with Tassara was a kind of madness, and she had defied convention with tragic results. Was doña Marina's declaration meant for Tassara? Ironically, the affair was over by the time of the book's publication. Tula's gods of love all proved to have feet of clay.
VIII DOLORES, PáGINAS DE UNA CRóNICA DE FAMILIA
La Avellaneda's next full-length novel was entitled Dolores, Páginas de una crónica de familia (Dolores, Pages from a Family Chronicle). First published in the Semanario Pintoresco of Madrid in 1851, it was reissued in Havana in the paper Diario de la Marina in 1860. It was also published in book form in Mexico in 1891. The story is purportedly based on historical facts, but an examination of Tula's supposed sources indicates that the tale is one that Gertrudis invented, utilizing some historical figures to give credence to her claims of authenticity.
As in the case of Munio Alfonso, Tula's choice of subject matter reflects her pride in her paternal ancestry. Dolores is supposedly the story of one of her ancestors in the Middle Ages. The novel opens on January 12, 1425, the day of the baptism of the first-born son of King Juan II of Castille and his wife doña María de Aragón. The use of specific names, including doña Beatriz de Avellaneda, of detailed descriptions, and of the date, give a strong feeling of reality, which was what Gertrudis wished. She succinctly declares that not only Dolores, but all of the characters in the work, are historically real and are taken from a chronicle of the period: “Dolores, mi estimado amigo, existió realmente, como todos los personajes de esta historia, que parece novela, y cuyos principales hechos hallará usted en las crónicas de aquel tiempo.” (“Dolores, my dear friend, really existed, as did all of the characters of this story, which appears to be a novel, and whose principal events you can find in the chronicles of that time.”)10 She wrote to the director of the Semanario Pintoresco that she had invented nothing, and that there had been no need to force her imagination in telling of “la extraña y dolorosa historia de aquella pobre criatura que existió realmente, como todos los personajes que en torno de ella se agrupan en este breve cuadro …” (“the strange and painful story of that poor creature who really existed, as did all of the persons who gather around her in this brief sketch …”).11
Why Gertrudis insisted on the veracity of her story to such an extent is something about which we can only speculate. Cotoreli y Mori states just as categorically that no such person as Dolores exists in the chronicles of the fifteenth century: “En primer lugar la tal Dolores no ha existido nunca, ni semejante nombre se halla en familia alguna del siglo XV. Conócense perfectamente los de todos los hijos e hijas del primer Conde de Castro, y no hay ninguna llamada Dolores” (“In the first place, the supposed Dolores never existed, nor is any such name to be found in any family in the fifteenth century. All of the names of the sons and daughters of the first count of Castro are perfectly well known, and there is no one called Dolores”).12 He concludes that we must consider the work as nothing more than a novel freely invented by the author.
The work revolves around several of Tula's favorite themes: love at first sight thwarted by parental interference, the cruelty of social position and custom that destroys the natural instincts of youth, and the dangers of exaggerated pride and snobbery. The mother figure, doña Beatriz de Avellaneda, is a monstrous woman, ready and willing to go to any lengths to maintain what she considers the honor and position of her family and rank. Dolores, her sixteen-year-old daughter, has fallen in love with don Rodrigo de Luna, the nephew of King Juan II's controversial minister don Alvaro de Luna. Knowing that this is a love match, and intending to satisfy the desires of his favorite don Alvaro as well as the young couple, the king tells Dolores's father, don Diego Gómez de Sandoval, the count of Castro-Xériz, that he has chosen don Rodrigo to take his daughter's hand in marriage. When doña Beatriz learns of the proposed match, she declares that she would rather see her daughter dead than married to a member of the Luna family, whom she considers upstarts. The father, seeing how deeply his child loves the man the king has chosen for her, pleads in vain with his implacable wife.
As a result of the conflict between her parents, Dolores has convulsions and is confined to bed. A Doctor Yáñez is brought in to care for her, and doña Beatriz meets in secret to talk with him. The doctor tells the worried father that there is no possibility of Dolores getting married, as she is far too ill. Shortly thereafter, Dolores worsens and dies; instead of a wedding, there is a burial. Doña Beatriz betrays no sign of loss or grief, but quickly withdraws from society, isolating herself with the old nurse of Dolores and her personal servant in a remote castle in the north that belongs to her husband. Even her husband hears from her only very irregularly.
Finally, after six years, the count visits the castle and there learns from the old nurse, who lives in terror of doña Beatriz, that his daughter is still alive, that she, like Shakespeare's Juliet, had been given a potion that made her appear to be dead. In the interim years, the hateful mother had kept her locked away from the world. Don Rodrigo, her would-be husband, has become a priest, and so the hoped-for union can never be. Dolores asks her father to take her to a convent, where she becomes an exemplary nun. Before leaving the castle, however, she persuades her father to forgive her mother and the sinister Isabel Pérez, who had been the accomplice in carrying out doña Beatriz's inhuman scheme. Rodrigo, who has become the archbishop of Santiago, frequents Dolores's supposed grave and weeps for her.
Given Tula's insistence on the truth of the story, we can wonder to what extent it was a projection of her own rejection of suitors that her family had chosen for her, or of problems with her own mother over her love affairs with Cepeda and Tassara. The portrayal of the mother borders on the grotesque, and the author at several points tries to mitigate her monstrousness through the gentle and forgiving love of the daughter. There is sound reason to identify the Dolores of the novel with reality, though not with that of the fifteenth century. Dolores lived in the nineteenth century: Gertrudis' full baptismal name was María Gertrudis de los Dolores. The name chosen for the protagonist was the author's own.
IX EL ARTISTA BARQUERO O LOS CUATRO CINCO DE JUNIO
The last full-length novel that la Avellaneda wrote was El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de junio (The Artist Boatman or the Fourth Fifths of June). It was written in Cuba and published there in 1861. The author added that the novel was founded on an “anecdote” in the life of a well-known man, thus establishing once more a sense of reality and verisimilitude. Several characters are historical figures: Hubert Robert, the artist of the title who is the protagonist, Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XV. The well-known man of the “anecdote” was Robert de Montesquieu—whom we know la Avellaneda greatly admired—the secret protector of Hubert Robert in his youthful efforts to make his way as an artist. Cotoreli y Mori sees it as the best of Tula's novels, but criticizes it somewhat as being too similar to works by Dumas Père.13
The story takes place in France in 1752, and in three successive years, the young Hubert Robert has to work as a boatman in Marseille to help his destitute mother and sister in the absence of his father. A stranger gives him a purse of gold, which he thinks is a mistake, but is unable to find the owner. He meets and falls in love with a lovely Creole named Josefina, who is from Cuba and lives with her father and a Cuban servant, Niná. They meet on the fifth of June, and their story—or rather that of Hubert—continues for the next three years to give the “four fifths of June” of the title. Josefina and Niná's love of Cuba and their reminiscences of it suggest more than fiction. Josefina is another semiportrait of the author herself in her youth, while the story of Josefina's parents' deep love is a rare instance of marital love whose intensity rivals that of the frustrated figures who people the pages of Tula's other works, whether in novelistic or in play form. A little temple in the garden of the parents' home in Cuba was the symbol of their love and the happiness that was brought to a tragic end with the death of the wife in childbirth at the age of thirty. The father, a Frenchman named Caillard, who has become bitter and materialistic, forbids Josefina to see any more of the impecunious boatman, who he thinks has no future, no name, and no money.
Hubert's father does return, and Hubert goes off to Paris to study at the expense of an unknown benefactor. Tula uses the opportunity to describe the Paris which she herself knew and visited, the Paris of Louis Philippe, comparing it to the eighteenth-century Paris in which the story develops. A sketch of Hubert catches the eye of none other than King Louis XV's mistress, the famous Madame de Pompadour, historically one of the greatest patrons of the arts of all time. Through her, Hubert goes to the Elysée Palace—built as a residence for Madame de Pompadour and now the official residence of the president of France—and to the Chateau of Versailles. Louis XV is a refined and polished version of the Baltasar of Tula's play: the elegant balls, the hunting parties, and the great banquets do little to alleviate his boredom and tedium. Madame de Pompadour also suffers from the artificiality and emptiness of court life. She has, she confides to Hubert, never really loved. Like the Countess Catalina of Two Women, she seems an assured and triumphant citizen of the world, but in essence is a woman in search of love and meaning for her life. She is a public figure who wants private happiness, the cosmopolitan woman with every luxury and comfort, who longs for the simple life with the man she loves! Tula tells us that “En sus horas de felicidad, habría creído poder purificarse por el amor verdadero” (“In her hours of happiness, she would have thought it possible to purify herself by a true love”) (OB IV, 150). When Hubert hears that Josefina is engaged to marry someone else, he is ready to give himself to Madame de Pompadour, but his illness prevents their love from being any more than the unattainable dream of the magnanimous marchioness.
Hubert does win Josefina's hand. He paints the ideal picture of the temple of love that Monsieur Caillard has sought so long as a remembrance of his marriage, the supposed fiancé breaks off the engagement, and the wedding takes place in the presence of the generous Pompadour at the Palace of Versailles on the fourth fifth of June. During the banquet celebrating the wedding, Hubert learns that his benefactor was Montesquieu. The novel ends with the death of Pompadour. Only Hubert Robert truly mourns his noble but unhappy friend as her body is secretly taken away from Versailles on a dark rainy day. The pomp and circumstances that had surrounded her in life meant less than the moments of generosity and affection that her friendship for Hubert had brought her.
Pompadour and Josefina are two sides of a single portrait, just as Countess Catalina and Luisa constitute a fictional self-portrait of the successful but basically unhappy and neurasthenic Tula, in middle-age still nostalgic for the innocent happiness of the past, but fully aware of the fugitive nature of honors and fame. Both Catalina and Pompadour end their lives without real fulfillment, but they are far more interesting and believable than the insipid ingenues who are their rivals and are little more than stereotypes of the romantic heroine that even in la Avellaneda's first novel, Sab, could not stand the test of time and real life.
Notes
-
The edition by Carmen Bravo Villasante (Salamanca: Biblioteca Anaya, 1970), contains an introduction and a brief bibliography as well as the text of the novel.
-
[Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de.] Obras [de doña Gertrudis de Avellaneda, 6 vols. Centennia Edition. (Havana: Imprenta de A. Miranda, 1914)], V, 7.
-
José Fernández Montesinos in his Introducción a una historia de la novela en España en el siglo XIX (Valencia: Editorial Castalia, 1955), devotes over a hundred pages, pp. 154-257, to a bibliography of translations of novels in Spain between 1800 and 1850.
-
All quotations from Sab refer to the edition of Bravo Villasante as it is relatively easy to obtain.
-
Cotareli y Mori, [Emilio. La Avellaneda y sus obras; essay biográfico y crítico. (Madrid: Tipografía de Archivos, 1930),] p. 75.
-
From: Fernando Portuondo del Prado, Historia de Cuba (Havana: Juan Fernández Burgos, 1957).
-
Cotareli y Mori gives this information on p. 109, but says almost nothing about the novel itself.
-
From the preface to Cuauhtemoc, The Last Aztec Emperor, an Historical Novel by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, trans. Mrs. Wilson W. Blake (Mexico City: F. P. Hoeck, 1898). Apparently the novel was a success in Mexico; Cotareli y Mori, p. 128, cites two editions in Spanish published there, one in 1853 and another in 1887.
-
Quoted in Mario Méndez Bejarano, Tassara: Nueva biografía crítica (Madrid: 1928), p. 42.
-
Prologue to the novel in the edition of Obras of 1869, reprinted in the centennial edition of 1914.
-
Reproduced in Cotareli y Mori, p. 201.
-
Ibid., p. 203.
-
Ibid., p. 353.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
The Metamorphosis of Avellaneda's Sonnet to Washington
Gertrude the Great: Avellaneda, Nineteenth-Century Feminist
