[In the following excerpt, Hernandez asserts that Avellaneda wrote didactic and subversive comedies to criticize representations of women in society and the theater.]

The appearance of a successful woman playwright in the Madrid theater of the mid nineteenth century is an odd occurrence since the stage had been dominated by male writers. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda represents a unique case in Spanish as well as in European literary history for the women that had acquired recognition at this time had been mainly novelists and poets. Triumph was not easy for La Avellaneda because she was subjected to severe criticism by her reviewers.¹ Her success is attested, however, by the public reception of her plays, and it is validated by the fact that while she espouses the eclectic tastes of the time, she subverts the structures used by her contemporaries to propose a different vision of women. La Avellaneda had been the victim of men who praised her “beauty” and “poetic feelings” but who, when it came time to incorporate her into their literary club (the National Academy), turned their backs on her and proclaimed “es mucho hombre esta mujer,” or pejoratively referred to her as “Doña Safo.”²

Several of La Avellaneda's critics have discovered that her literary output is a catalyst for real life complaints (Harter, Miller, Bravo Villasante). By examining the female characters in three comedias, I intend to show that it is through scrutiny of contemporary male authors that her theater goes beyond merely reflecting life, or a personal experience, to act upon it. Her comedias, thus, serve two purposes: on the one hand they are a medium through which the author vents her anger at a society that castigated her in life; on the other, they are a commentary on the theatrical treatment of female characters by male authors.

The Spanish stage of the mid nineteenth century is plagued by what is known as eclectic drama. This name is derived from the mixture of romantic elements with neoclassic rules established in the previous century. Most dramatists continued to use and abuse the dynamic structure of the comedia. To combat the exaggerations of Romanticism, the playwrights of the 1840s and '50s proposed to restore the neoclassical ideas of unity in form and didacticism in content. They believed that theater should serve as a promulgator of social conduct, a claim that Leandro Fernández de Moratín had uttered at the turn of the century.³ The treatment of women in this theater is ruled by these moralistic intentions. Women characters serve as examples of what women are expected to be in real life. They are almost caricatures: if they are older, they are defined by moderation and patience; if they are young, they are beautiful, timid and innocent—bordering on simplistic; if they are married, they are preoccupied with household chores (Prades 75). Thus, the women of the eclectic drama are framed in domestic roles. They do not become heroines by expressing their needs, but by abiding by society's wish to keep them in their place (Rubio 99). These stage women were modeled on the eighteenth century neoclassic drama that used its didactic form to propagate a male—oriented idea of female roles. Kathleen Kish concludes that this drama functioned as a “school for wives” since it presented women as dependent on marriage for their happiness (200). The depiction of women on stage aimed primarily at teaching the female audience that dependency was the norm. Eclectic drama, in its obsession with didacticism, carried on this tradition through the nineteenth century.

While La Avellaneda includes in her comedias a moral lesson, her didactic intentions, geared to women, differ from those of her male contemporaries. The language and behavior her characters exhibit on stage are at odds with the traditional vision the neoclassical type of comedy highlighted. Three plays staged between 1852 and 1855 display agreement with the structure of the neoclassical comedy as practiced at the time: Romantic elements appear in form through a didactic intent, and the audience is given a moral lesson with a happy ending. In these plays, we find a conscious subversion of theatrical presence. These comedias deal with the question of marriage, therefore, women are central to them. However, and more important, these women are not passive heroines, but defiant beings who articulate their desires. While the protagonists are modeled after the role preferred by the theater of the time, the traditional image is ruptured by mocking its theatrical roles.

Furthermore, these comedias use metadramatic devices to focus on the roles of the female characters in theater. Drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist theories, Richard Hornby has delineated the “drama/culture complex.” This axiom is based on the nature of theater which he claims to be about reality, “not in the passive sense of merely reflecting it but in the active sense of providing a ‘vocabulary’ for describing it, or a ‘geometry’ for measuring it” (22). In this sense, theater is a phenomenon that provides society with an active model for understanding reality. Plays are, therefore, more than just mimetic: they reflect themselves and are at the same time related to other literary systems and to culture in general. Metadrama is drama about drama; “it occurs whenever the subject of a play turns out to be, in some sense, drama itself” (31). La Avellaneda uses theater as a means of thinking about life—especially women's lives. Theater is a means to examine theater itself; more specifically, it serves as a mode to criticize the fallacy of truth represented by male authors who pretended to practice a true mimetic art.

In La hija de las flores (1852), La Avellaneda parodies the conception of marriage in Moratín's El sí de las niñas as a construct of a male-oriented society. In this comedia a young girl, Paquita, is forced by her mother to marry don Diego, an older and wealthy man. Paquita is in love with his nephew, don Carlos, and because she has been educated to obey, she never expresses her feelings and continues to see the younger man. When don Diego discovers the situation, he realizes his error in courting a woman who doesn't want him, gives up his intentions to marry Paquita, and releases the young woman to the man of her choice, lecturing her, the mother and the audience of the extreme need to educate women to tell the truth.

In La Avellaneda's comedia this plot is turned around and the characters are diametrically opposed. The mismatched couple is comprised of a younger man, Luis, who is forced to marry an older woman by an unwise irresponsible uncle. Inés, the older woman, has been celibate after having been the victim of a rape by Luis's uncle. Her father does not consider her apt to manage the fortune she would inherit and so decides to marry her off. Luis, as an obedient nephew, accepts the marriage without complaints. Yet, when he meets Flora—in reality Inés's daughter—he falls in love with her and is found in the same predicament as Paquita: trapped between unfair parental control and his hope to marry the person of his own choice. Hence, the niña-viejo conflict introduced by Moratín has become the older woman-younger man conflict. By reversing the traditional couple, La Avellaneda not only criticizes the absurd practice of forced marriage but she depicts the unfair position in which male playwrights placed women. In the same way that women were presented as weak in the comedia, in this play men are seen as defenseless, ridiculous and victims. Luis is dominated by those around him and becomes a puppet of a society that ignores his ambitions. He constantly errs when he assumes as correct the lessons he has learned about women. He is taught new lessons that contradict the established male vision. One involves Inés who refuses to behave the way Luis expects when he suggests that she be the one to break their engagement because “a los fueros de dama / todo le está permitido” (II, v).⁴ Inés reminds the audience of the ironic twist the author has given the plot when she refuses to behave as expected and tells Luis that “Mi sexo es muy tímido; / Pero no es justo que a un hombre / Se le trate como a un niño, / Y de su suerte futura / Otro disponga a su arbitrio” (II, vii).

Luis's weakness becomes evident in his relationship with Flora, who is presented outside of social normality—she appears dressed in an extravagant manner and speaking to the flowers, calling them her mother. Luis falls immediately in love with her. Their courtship breaks with all social codes of behavior. The first is that of passivity. Flora, upon seeing Luis, proceeds to tell him that she is in love:

FLORA:
Soy Flora.
LUIS:
(Sorprendido) ¡Flora!
FLORA:
Y te amo.
LUIS:
(Con asombro) ¿Me amas?

(I, v)

In their first encounter, language becomes the tool by which the audience is made aware that the role of love goddess is being mocked. Flora and Luis engage in a discourse in which she ridicules the literary rhetoric with which he tries to impress her by using the same words to define a different love object. Words that traditionally described feminine beauty are now used by a woman to express desire. The empty language of Luis becomes alive when Flora restores to it a meaning that had been lost by the codification of love poetry. As Luis tries to use a language the audience recognizes as the traditional love language, Flora reacts by describing her feelings toward him. When she makes a present of a flower to Luis, she asks if he has kept it. He answers using the codified language of love:

Objeto de ardiente amor,
¿No es igual a la que sella
Tu tez pura, alabastrina?

Flora rejects this description of her beauty: “Con que, tan hermosa soy? / Yo, a la verdad, lo sabía.” By claiming that she is aware of her beauty, Flora parodies the classical patrons of the poetic language used to compare women's faces to flowers. What matters to her is not Luis's poetic garb, but to feel and to enjoy with “alegría” the beauty of the flower:

¿De qué sirviera a la rosa
Su perfume penetrante
Ni su beldad primorosa,
Si nadie la viera hermosa,
Ni la aspirara fragante?

(II, v)

While Luis does not speak with his voice, but with that of tradition, Flora's words are tinted with the sensuality of love. Luis is not willing to accept the new meaning Flora proposes and constantly chooses to ignore an expression of love that goes beyond what women were allowed to reveal in his world. Flora, on the other hand, constructs her happiness by overriding traditional empty words with her own language. As Luis is acting within the prescribed social manner, he never thinks of love away from the conventional modes, be this in marriage or rhetoric:

LUIS:
¡Oh perla de las mujeres!
                    Si yo a tu lado viviera,
                    Soñándote a cada instante
                    Eterno amor, fe constante,
                    ¿A qué monarca pudiera
                    Tener envidia tu amante?

(II, v)

To his wish of “eterno amor,” she answers with a practical invitation: “¿Qué dudas, pues, si es así? / Pues tú quieres y yo quiero, / Sé desde hoy mi compañero” (II, v). Luis refuses this proposal of cohabitation and insists that they should be married: “Preciso fuera primero / Ser tu esposo” (II, v). He adds that since he is already bound by a prearranged promise of marriage, he cannot carry out his wishes. She in turn proposes that they elope, but Luis rejects this on social grounds: “Mas, ¿cómo vivir los dos / Solos, pobres, desvalidos, / Por ese mundo perdidos?” (II, v). At this moment Flora conjures her poetic language to offer a fantastic picture of moment Flora conjures her poetic language to offer a fantastic picture of free love: “Los dos gozaremos / Placeres puros y extremos; / Goces del alma inefables” (II, v). Luis, after seeing such a blatant expression of desires, stops her: “Cesa, Flora; me haces daño / Con cuadro tan lisonjero” (II, v).

This peculiar use of language sets this comedia apart. Rather than follow the models set by the men of her time, La Avellaneda ridicules prosaic language by making the protagonist deliver her desire in a lyrical manner. At the same time, she points out that male authors had represented women in theater as persons who received language, but not as persons who used it to articulate what they wanted. The fact that it is Flora who proposes love and who makes advances to Luis contrasts with the silence other young heroines of the comedia observed in similar situations. It is this female voice that will be the catalyst for the moral lesson so dear to the writers of the time. Instead of having the wise older man rearrange a marriage by the power of his wisdom, it is the woman herself who chooses her partner. What La Avellaneda offers her public with Flora is a voice capable of creating a reality not bounded by the rules of traditional society, and which becomes menacing to the patriarchy as it replaces the authority of the male word.

This play is metadramatic since it makes the audience think of the female roles in the male plays by confronting a young and vital heroine with established models of female domesticity. The author twists the traditional elements of the theater to make fun of comedy itself. What the audience learns is that the previous comedias do not portray women as they are. The audience is aware of the perception errors committed when La Avellaneda introduces a play in which reality and fantasy are constantly set against each other. The play incorporates a theatrical ending when Flora is presented to the audience with a mark of a flower on her arm. The fact that the author does not clarify the significance of the sign suggests that Flora is a fictitious character who wills herself into existence by creating her own language. The final pairing of Inés and the Count, and Flora and Luis, renders the work ironic, since it only solves the mystery of Flora's birth through a game in which those who believe to possess the truth are deceived by appearances. Inés and the Count pretend that they are mending an old love that never existed; their marriage masks a rape. Flora and Luis, on the other hand, represent the young couple of the neoclassical comedy; they pretend that it is Luis who has decided to confront society, as a theatrical hero of the comedia would have done. Of course, the true hero is Flora, who convinces him that the nonsensical language of the flowers is more meaningful than the rhetorical language of love.

In La aventurera (1853), La Avellaneda once again consciously subverts the female theatrical roles by using various metadramatical devices. Role-playing within the role, for example, becomes more prominent. The aim is to allure the audience into identifying with a woman who creates and recreates, accepts and rejects different identities in order to survive in society. The author takes advantage of the vicarious experience the audience and actors go through in the theater event to bring out a new female identity. The intent is to lead the spectator to reflect on the roles women played in the theater and to reject them as false depictions of their experience in the world.

In this play, besides parodying the conflict of the neoclassical comedy, the author focuses on the French theater. The play consists of an adaptation of a drama by Emile Augier titled L'Aventurière (1848), and it includes a parody of the wayward woman in the guise of Margarite in The Lady of the Camellias (1852). La Avellaneda covers foreign ground as well as national terrain when she revives a female version of Don Juan Tenorio of José Zorrilla. As a result, La aventurera forces the audience to contrast its female roles with those of other plays.

Because the play is an adaptation, the audience is faced with the controversy of morality. The Spaniards considered the French theater as licentious, and they went to see it as such (García 26). Owing to the abundance of such adaptations, the public expected a particular theatrical experience; it generally was presented with a theater that followed Sardou and Dumas fils. But the Spanish author surprised the auditors and made them reflect precisely on that theater by contrasting her heroine with the French archetype. Like many adaptations of the time, this play is more than a translation: it is a re-creation that focuses on women's concerns more than on the idealistic codes of behavior male playwrights assigned to them. As Hugh Harter has observed, the adaptation has very little of the original and the author takes wide liberties to re-create the story (108).

The play starts with the same comedia conflict of the Moratín type. Natalia, a woman of twenty-five, is to be married to don Julian, a man well into his sixties. However, Natalia is not the young and innocent woman that Paquita had been. She has led an adventurous life at the hands of her partner who aids her in a plot to deceive don Julian into believing that they are brother and sister of noble blood impoverished by the colonial wars of Mexico. For her projected marriage there are various complications. First, don Julian's daughter opposes it because she is engaged to a cousin whose father is convinced that Natalia is only after money. To try to make his brother come to his senses and to prove to him that Natalia is nothing but a prostitute, he plots with don Julian's son who has been traveling the world as an adventuresome don Juan and who returns home under the guise of a rich friend. This son, Eduardo, believing that she is a “Maquiavelo con faldas” sets out to seduce Natalia with his youth, charm and money. The crux of the play is centered around the battle that ensues between Eduardo, who is set in breaking up the marriage, and Natalia, who falls in love with him and maintains that she is as deserving as he is of social forgiveness. In the process, Natalia becomes disenchanted with the attitude of society toward the victims of “libertinos” like Eduardo, rejects love, and enters a convent.

In true melodramatic style, the repentant woman is presented as a victim, but not as the tool by which society expiates its faults. In contrast to Marguerite Gautier, who is consumed by the prominent bourgeoisie, Natalia rejects the bourgeois conception of marriage and repentance. She opts, not for death, but life away from a society that considered her a sinner. She even gives up her intent to be protected by matrimony because she realizes that society cannot accommodate her. Natalia is not capitulating and entering a convent to expiate her sins, she is doing what other women had done, and that which the author was to do—renouncing a society that framed women into either wives, daughters or prostitutes.

With the parody of the wayward woman, the audience is led to think of the marriage and repentance depicted in the French plays as false theatrical roles based on social conventions that ignored the true nature of women. Natalia acts to obtain what she wants because she knows that to survive in society she has to hide her true self. Going to a convent serves then as a metaphor for the need to escape. Only in an enclosed environment, in a world that eliminated men, were women freed from the roles society forced on them. Ironically, the roles she plays evoke those of the traditional theatrical characters. Each time Natalia accepts a new role that coincides with those of the traditional heroine, she will reject it. The first role she sets out to play, as we have seen, is that of the young girl forced to marry an older man. The work opens with the mismatched couple, but the innocent girl is contrasted with the more experienced courtesan: “Yo he gozado / Cuanto el oro proporciona … / Cuanto anheló mi capricho / Lo tuvo, acaso de sobra” (I, iv). Natalia is at once placed in the role of the young innocent bride-to-be and in that of the experienced and evil courtesan. The audience collaborates with her in the creation of a new identity. It first sees her fabricating the role of the daughter of noble blood and of the sister whose brother is ready to protect her honra. Yet, the spectators justify her deceit because she has been the victim of men such as the Marqués who have taken advantage of her. They sympathize with her in her plea to become decent, and they see her play-acting as necessary for her to be respected. She confirms that it is the same society that protects women such as Luisa, as daughters and wives, that forced her away from this secure life, simply because she did not have the privilege of belonging to a man:

Ah! ¡no, Luisa! … usted no alcanza
lo que en acerba vigilia
A una infeliz sin familia,
Sin sosten, sin esperanza,
Llega a decirle al oído
La miseria inmunda y fea …

(II, vii)

By claiming that women who did not belong to a man were the property of all men, she exposes the roles of the male writers' heroines as false. They did not focus on the true patriarchal domination of women, but rather depicted victims of a social structure that needed to regenerate itself. The protagonist's role-playing is the means by which the author demonstrates to the audience that women's roles were defined by men who only protected them if they remained within established boundaries. Natalia appeals to the sentimentality of the bourgeoisie because she knows that it will take pity on her. Thus, when Natalia decides to stop her comedy and tell don Julian that she has lied about her past, she play-acts again, recreating the careless life that had become popular with The Lady of the Camellias:

Yo sigo el fatal camino
A que me arroja el destino,
De su capricho a merced.
Si me aflige la memoria
La aturdiré con placeres;
Envidiarán las mujeres
De mi hermosura la gloria;
Y las huellas incesantes
Que aquí graben los dolores,
                                        (Señalando su frente.)
Cubriré con gayas flores
Y con perlas y diamantes.

(II, v)

While Natalia does this in order to maneuver don Julian into empathizing with her, she brings forth the inadequacy of society to deal with the likes of her. In this way the vision of the repentant woman as well as of the malignant courtesan are exposed as false representations of the problems women faced.

La Avellaneda weaves into the story of the wayward woman that of the don Juan of José Zorrilla. Her play parodies Zorrilla's and underscores the false solutions proposed by his theater. When Natalia falls in love with Eduardo, she recreates the words used to describe the famous character: “Hallo … un hombre!” (IV, i). La Avellaneda subverts here the classical hero since Eduardo—the hombre—has lived a life of the seducer and is by no means the prescribed husband of the comedy of the time. At the end, Natalia reminds the audience of don Juan's salvation when she tells Eduardo she will wait for him in heaven, “¡En el cielo! … / De su clemencia lo aguardo” (IV, ix). However, the redeeming female image of Inés is deformed here; Natalia, unlike Inés, has spent her life in the world away from a convent but will end it there. It is to be noted that Natalia does not die of love. When she talks of abandoning the world, Eduardo imagines that she is going to follow the route of many a fallen heroine and take her life, but she tells him that this is not the ending of her comedia: “No piense usted que del sepulcro frío / Quiero buscar la paz aterradora …” (IV, viii). She will save don Juan, but not from the other world. Natalia claims that not only women need to regenerate, but men should also take part in the process and forces Eduardo to admit that he does not deserve her: “Si el mundo solo su baldón imprime / En tu sexo infeliz, si no declara / Más vil y bajo al torpe libertino / Que a sus víctimas tristes, ¡yo lo hago!” (IV, ix).

While writers such as Zorrilla concentrated on the presence of the don Juan as a vital force in theater, La Avellaneda focuses on women as victims of these men. This play evinces injustices done to women, and therefore emphasizes that both woman and man are part of a social disorder. Of course, Natalia and Eduardo are products of the cultural forces in which they move, but while the woman has been deemed an aventurera, the man has been elevated to a national idol. In La Avellaneda's play, the don Juan finds its match in the woman of easy virtue. But rather than accepting for women the role of helpless victim or savior, La Avellaneda suggests that this role has been imposed on women by a society that lacks a true place for its feminine half. Instead of forgiving Eduardo for his effrontery to women and allowing him to play the role of the repentant, Natalia encourages him to do charitable work—a type of work associated with women.

In this play La Avellaneda represents the familiar plot of the wayward woman, as well as the alta comedia's concern with social mores. By following the structure her public was accustomed to, she is able to deconstruct the male representations of female characters in a mélange of intertheatrical references, or as Hornby calls it, metatheatrical devices, in which the wayward woman is confronted with the don Juan, the young woman is out of the counsel of the older wise man in her marriage choice and rejects society's injustice in its obsession with immorality. Here Natalia gives up her pretense to become “decent” and abandons the world that would have her happily married to a recovered don Juan. La Avellaneda has no doubt chosen a contrived ending for her comedia, as Hugh Harter has pointed out. Indeed this ending is not typical of the conventional mode of heroines winning the hero. Instead, it makes a clear statement of the incapacity of an intelligent woman to find an acceptable place in marriage, and it denotes a skepticism about the possibility of regeneration with previously found solutions. La Avellaneda exposes the facade that perpetuates societal values. As Natalia points out, there is a double standard in a society that calls women the weaker sex and demands of them a superior behavior:

¿Y es posible en la mujer
Un esfuerzo tan viril,
Y el no alcanzarlo hace vil
Al que llaman frágil ser?
¿Hay razón, hay rectitud
En ese contrasentido?. …
Si al nombrarnos no han mentido,
Que no nos pidan virtud.

(II, ix)

It is not in vain that the audience is reminded of Sor Juana and Santa Teresa, for they serve as examples of women who have gone beyond the limits of their world by fleeing from it. What is clear in the play is that this distancing of the heroine from the world is not a castigation for her sins—as death was meant to be in the male plays. This ending confirmed that society, in using women for its own purposes (prostitution) and then demanding their repentance and death, perpetuated the patriarchal institutions it rested upon. For Natalia to accept the forgiveness of her so-called “sins” and become a “decent” women would in reality be to abdicate. Her conversion becomes revolutionary since by giving up the role of wife that society highly valued, she frees herself to help other women in her condition. La Avellaneda seems to be destroying those literary myths propagated by the works of the time—the Don Juan of Zorrilla being a case in point.

In Oráculos de Talía (1855), once again we are faced with a comedia that is within the parameters of the theater of the time. This play is loosely based on a Calderón comedy La dama duende in which a dueña and her servant come into town in disguise to test the true intentions of the man the former is to marry. In selecting a Calderonian comedy, the author yields to the public taste for the Golden Age drama which the Romantics had introduced after the 1830s (Harter 112). Yet the author goes beyond using a structure to please the public: she again parodies the roles the Romantic writers had assigned to female characters. Rather than the angelical virgin of their plays, La Avellaneda presents a more active woman who through political machinations is able to choose her own life and husband. As the play is set in the seventeenth century, La Avellaneda is able to introduce an active calderonian heroine. The author, however, does this in order to spoof precisely the traditional role of women in the theater. She focuses on the mujer esquiva of calderonian works and confronts her with a different woman. The mujer esquiva, as Malveena McKendrick has described, is a pseudo-heroine who disdains men and leads an innocent, adventurous life. However, she is ultimately forced to accept a husband and correct her error with a superior male who will lead her to the proper path of marriage and family (McKendrick 117).

In Oráculos de Talía, the central character is a woman, who instead of being molded and dominated by men, is herself molding and dominating. The plot centers around Valenzuela, a valido who rose to power during the reign of Carlos II and who was known to be a gossip in court. He was of little historical importance, though he was known in his day. The author fictionalizes this figure and creates a lady-in-waiting who falls in love with him upon reading in secret a comedy he has been writing. Here the historical valido has turned into an unknown playwright; he is not, however, ambitious or well-versed in the art of politics. The lady-in-waiting, Eugenia, is astute and plans to help the queen secure the crown from her enemies by teaching him the game of power. She discovers his true disposition through her role as a duende, spying on him in her servant's quarters located next to his room. Speaking through a statue, she is able to arouse his curiosity as well as the desire to marry a beautiful lady he does not know. Later she makes him understand that she needs a husband who can become successful, acquire ambition and perform well. Above all, she makes it clear that if Valenzuela is to be such a man, he must submit to her desire: “¡Hecho está!—Quiero guiaros; / Quiero alumbrar vuestra senda: / Lucero y brújula en mí / Halla vuestra nave incierta” (II, iv). She proceeds to inform him of how to transform himself from an unknown, politically inexperienced man to an important member of court:

Pues bien, sí; modificaos.
Tenéis un alma muy recta,
Muy generosa, muy noble;
Mas sin dotes perfectas,
Se aprende acaso mejor
Del mundo la social ciencia.

(II, vi)

Valenzuela, whose ambitions are malleable when his vanity is stimulated, acquires fame, helps the queen by becoming an expert in the deceitful game of politics that Eugenia teaches him, and eventually wins the lady.

Eugenia is a true instigator and a veritable answer to the mujer esquiva of Calderonian theater. In contrast to the typical esquiva who was taught a lesson by a worthy suitor, in this play Eugenia is in control of the situation and teaches Valenzuela how to lead his life. She is not led to marriage by a superior man—but in a parody of this role, Eugenia disdains the duke's honor and boastful offer of a better social position. Instead, she hoaxes the duke to obtain the secrets needed to make Valenzuela a worthy hero. So the author in presenting Eugenia as an independent woman astute in the game of politics—as in the game of love, which she plays to her advantage—reveals the heroine of the calderonian theater to be a false one. Eugenia wants to have as much power and ambition as the women of Calderón exhibited; yet, she realizes that she has to do it within theatrical limits. She has to role-play in order to obtain what she wants:

Y ambición mi pecho alberga
Mas ¿hay en el mundo altura
A la que alzarse no pueda
Con sus alas poderosas
La sublime inteligencia?

(II, i)

It is this inteligencia that lets her see the limitations of a woman in the realm of power. In order for her to survive as a politician and help the queen, she needs a man who will act in her place. It is such a man that she chooses for a husband, for although she has all the social standing to obtain an honorable marriage, she prefers a man who is weak so that she can mold him into her designs. Unlike the esquiva who shuns men, Eugenia disregards certain men, those that like the duke think of women as a prize to have: “Pues yo no acepto marido / Que en serlo honrarme presuma” (III, xii).

The motivating forces of the play are the clever theatrical games Eugenia plays with Valenzuela, hiding in his quarters and speaking to him through a statue. The author is poking fun here at the traditional idea of the woman as the inspiration of man—hence the use of Talía—and proposing that the poet's muse is a real woman. The audience is induced to identify with Eugenia's position. Only the public and Eugenia share the secret that Valenzuela is not a brilliant politician. Furthermore, besides partaking of Valenzuela's alien identity, the audience participates in the ridiculing of the duke's pride and the valido's vanity. The comedia becomes a game of role-playing: if Valenzuela plays his role well, he gets the lady and fame, and since it is Eugenia who manipulates the roles, she is in reality the one who is able to obtain what both of them want.

Through various metadramatical techniques (Valenzuela pretends to be on the side of his enemies / Eugenia plays the role of the muse), spoofing of traditional theatrical characterization (mujer esquiva of Calderón) and destruction of strong masculine heroes, La Avellaneda is able to undermine the theatrical tradition of the time. Eugenia as an intelligent, astute and persevering woman becomes the hero of the play. She rejects the idealizing of women along with the literary language of love that Valenzuela tries to use with her: “Dejad símiles o imágenes, / Porque hoy no os quiero poeta” (II, vi).

What makes this play stand out against the background of theater written by men is that Eugenia's chosen hero is not really a hero at all, but a weak man who allows his vanity to get the better of him and who can only become someone when properly led into his role by a woman. This will be one of the downfalls of the play on stage, as we shall see later. While the Romantics had transformed the Calderonian heroine into a mujer caída and had blamed her for this fall, they still used her as the muse. Perhaps the betrayal they felt accounts for the frequent deaths of these heroines. La Avellaneda, on the other hand, focuses on the intelligence of the woman, rather than on her feelings, and demolishes the muse of the Romantics.

These three comedies are in the framework of Hornby's drama/culture complex, because the author focuses on the relationship between drama and society to project a point of view usually ignored by the literature of her time. Examining the female theatrical roles in the plays of her contemporaries, she formulates an answer to representations which aimed to be models for the women in the audience and in society. If male playwrights used their heroines to instruct their audience as to the proper role of women, La Avellaneda outfits didacticism with a different heroine. Thus, the author does not do away with the didactic purpose of the genre, but she instructs male playwrights as to the true representation of women.

That La Avellaneda was consciously parodying her colleagues and that this subversion was effective can be ascertained by the critical reception her plays obtained: negative. She was accused of failing to treat her male characters as strong individuals. Learned male critics complained that her female characters were lacking in verisimilitude, and that the author herself stepped out of the role of responsible artist.

With the unfavorable critical reaction to these comedias, one concludes that whatever success La Avellaneda had on stage was not directly associated with the praise of her equals. In a time when the theater was a male-dominated medium, and women expressed themselves only in fiction and poetry, credit is due La Avellaneda for producing as much as she did. The theater conjuring the public en masse represents at this time an arena in which women exposed themselves. One has only to think of the bad reputation actresses had. Apparently, La Avellaneda's reputation in theater, breaking many a social convention for a woman of her time, bothered the critics who subsequently tried to restrain her from exposing a female consciousness to the audience. When La Avellaneda steals the didactic function of the comedia to give a different lesson, the literary male establishment—in a series of critiques—masked the intolerance for what they believed to be improper behavior pleading with her to leave the stage.

The first attack was that of immorality. In the case of Oráculos one critic, referring to Eugenia's control of Valenzuela, sees the lesson as a lost one when it boasted that a woman was behind male success. He that this reviewer of La España referred to on the 18th of March, 1855, when he claimed that the play “no enseña nada” and the only lesson is inappropriate:

la dama le hará [Valenzuela] palaciego, marqués, ministro, y por último su marido. Moral difícil e impracticable, sobre todo por los poetas casados y de limpias intenciones.

(Cotarelo 280)

This critic is obviously not very receptive to Avellaneda's message and he is maliciously referring to the author's “reputation” as a loose woman. Given such an attitude, it should not surprise us that when faced with, on one hand, a feisty, clever and active female heroine and on the other with a weak hero, he turned to praise the most insignificant character in the play, the Marqués de Astorga, as “mejor trabado y de más bulto de la comedia” (280). La Avellaneda defended the play from such attacks in the prologue to the printed edition. She regards the lessons the critics tried to give her as chaotic. While some insisted that the work “carece de invención, de pensamiento filosófico, de fin moral … en una palabra, de todas las condiciones que la harían digna de la favorable acogida que se la dispensa [her emphasis],” the public had been responsive to it; while some critics considered Valenzuela as a “bobalicón,” others admired “los buenos versos y la corrección de estilo” (Oráculos, prologue 5). Critics seem to resent the belittling of a historical personage, “uno de tantos validos,” by presenting him as a poet who hid behind a woman to perform his duties in politics. While Harter's assumption that the play voices La Avellaneda's reaction to her rejection by La Academia is a very valid one, I am inclined to think that while her exclusion from the prestigious institution sparked her fury, her literary output was more than a venting of her frustration. It was an attempt to depict the female role in the genre. Her play is not merely an exposition or a cry for “the artist … to be judged on merit,” but a conscious effort to subvert an all-male literary establishment (Harter 112).

Similarly La aventurera was praised as an “obra verdaderamente notable por la valentía de sus conceptos, por su versificación robusta … y por su pensamiento filosófico y moral,” yet critics admonished the author for presenting immorality and vice on the stage:

Cualquiera que sea el origen del vicio, la fatalidad o la perversión; cualquiera que sea, por otra parte, la expiación o el castigo que ha de infringírsele, es necesario que en la escena no se le presente jamás en acción; que su cara sea velada con el triple velo del pudor del instinto, del pudor de la conciencia, y del pudor de la cátedra: que en materias de moralidad, cátedra y no otra cosa es la escena …

(Cotarelo 257).

This admonishment for taking over the theater and imparting the wrong lessons epitomizes male reactions to her theatrical work. In fact the only redeeming quality for this reviewer is that the play was poetically and grammatically correct, which led him to conclude that the author should be considered as “un escritor y no, como a una del sexo bello” (Cotarelo 257). Critics frequently focused upon her lack of femininity to discredit her theater. After the staging of Oráculos, she even suffered the tactless humor of offended male colleagues who threw a cat onto the stage during the opening of Tres amores (1858).

The following comments of an eminent man of the time upon seeing La aventurera give us the tenor of esteem women had in literature: “La mujer tiene su papel propio en el arte. Es el ángel que nos presta lágrimas para llorar el infortunio y fe para creer en Dios” (Cotarelo 267). So for Emilio Castelar, as for many “ciertos hombres políticos”—as La Avellaneda so gently put it—women were the tear jerkers of the time. Their place in art was to be that of sufferer and martyr, no doubt reflecting what in society had been the all-accepting wife, the obedient daughter, the romantic bride or the nurturing mother. Castelar in one of those paternalistic bouts admonishes the writer to remain within the idealistic representation and to forget “el materialismo que nos anonada” (Cotarelo 267). In the opinion of the famous politician, she should not delve into the “materialismo” of the times—a subject unfit for women—but accept her “papel propio en el arte” and keep drawing tears rather than mustering realistic male concerns.

As Sandra Gubar and Susan Gilbert have pointed out, every woman inevitably feels certain subversive impulses when she contemplates “deep rooted evils of patriarchy” (77). In the case of La Avellaneda's comedia we have an example in which that subversiveness is expressed in the language of theater by using the structure the patriarchal literary clique of the time had determined to be male, with limited representation of the female.

Notes

1. In many cases it was this condemning that prevented plays from having a second or any subsequent runs on the stage.

2. La Avellaneda's rejection by the Academia Nacional caused her much bitterness, which she often expresses by reminding her male colleagues of their double standard in dealing with her (Harter, Cotarelo, Miller).

3. Peers has been instrumental in setting forth this terminology to describe the drama of this time. Most critics adhere to it, however, there is no tendency to advocate a clear definition of this eclecticism. This term gives the impression that the drama of this time had no identity of its own and that it aimed to be primarily pragmatic. If that were true, then we would have to conclude that pragmatism is one of the vital aspects of the theater, since throughout this century theater is well attended and important to Spanish life. The concerns of most playwrights are with morality; the desire to fuse the “mayor belleza ética con la mayor belleza dramática” is practiced to combat all the disturbing elements that bring chaos to society (Yxart 40).

4. All textual citations of the plays will be indicated by noting the act followed by the corresponding scene. All quotations are taken from the editions included in the bibliography.

Works Cited

Bravo Villasante, Carmen. Una vida romántica. La Avellaneda. Barcelona: E.D.S.A., 1967.

Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio. La Avellaneda y sus obras. Madrid: Tipografía de Archivos, 1930.

García, Salvador. Las ideas literarias en España entre 1840 y 1850. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. La aventurera. Madrid: Imprenta de Rivadeneyra, 1877. Vol. 2 of Obras dramáticas de doña Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. 2 Vols.

———. La hija de las flores o todos están locos. Vol. 2 of Obras dramáticas.

———. Oráculos de Talía o los duendes en palacio. Vol. 2 of Obras dramáticas.

Harter, Hugh A. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Hornby, Richard. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. London: Bucknell UP, 1986.

Kish, Kathleen. “A School for Wives: Women in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Theater.” Miller 184-200.

McKendrick, Malveena. “Women Against Wedlock: The Reluctant Brides of Golden Age Drama.” Miller: 115-46.

Miller, Beth, ed. Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983.

———. “Gertrude the Great: Avellaneda, Nineteenth-Century Feminist.” Miller: 201-14.

Peers, E. Allison. Historia del movimeinto romantico español. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1954. 2 Vols.

Prades, Juan José de. Teoría sobre los personajes de la comedia nueva. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1962.

Rubio Jiménez, Jesús. “Tipología de personajes en la comedia y drama de costumbres contemporáneas.” El teatro en el siglo xix. Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1983. 92-108.

Yxart, José. El arte escénico en España. Vol I. Barcelona: “La Vanguardia,” 1894. 2 Vols. 1894-1896.