[In the following essay, Kirkpatrick claims that the women and slave characters in Sab are alternative depictions of romantic and liberal ideologies. Using this construction Avellaneda critiques the cultural inequities inherent in those ideologies.]

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's novel Sab was the first abolitionist novel to be published in Spanish.¹ Two details—the gender of the author and the date of publication in 1841, a key year for Spanish romanticism—point to another achievement as well: Sab attributes to female characters the new paradigm of subjectivity that emerged with Spain's romantic movement. The novel's condemnation of slavery is intimately related to its representation of women as the subjects of romantic experience, and this connection is made possible by a particular intersection of Spanish romanticism and liberal ideology.

Mariano José de Larra addressed the relation between the new literary movement and the liberal attempt to transform Spanish society in his essay on “Literatura.” Writing in January 1836, when Mendizábal's reforms were no more than promises, Larra expressed the link between art and society only in terms of hope, rather than reality: “Let us hope that soon we will be able to lay the foundations of a new literature, the expression of the new society that we have become, a literature made up of truth just as our society is made of truth.” [“Esperemos que dentro de poco podamos echar los cimientos de una literatura nueva, expresión de la sociedad nueva que componemos, toda de verdad como de verdad es nuestra sociedad.”² Larra squarely identified the renovative force in Spanish society with liberalism: the motto of the age, he tells us, is freedom of commerce, freedom of industry, freedom of conscience. Thus, Larra sets forth the fundamental project of his literary generation: to create a literature appropriate to liberal Spain.

Larra links liberalism and emerging romanticism in his essay, arguing that artistic freedom, freedom from rules, precepts and schools is simply part of the liberal program. But he also points to a much deeper level on which the new literary and political movements join. That “new truth” that he refers to in the passage just cited requires the use of italics to suggest that he is giving the words a special, new meaning. Not surprisingly he combines syllogism and paradox in his attempt to further define “truth”: “In politics man sees only interests and rights, that is, truths. In literature, consequently, he can look for nothing but truths. … Because what is imagination itself, if not a more beautiful truth?” [“En política el hombre no ve más que intereses y derechos, es decir, verdades. En literatura, no puede buscar por consiguiente sino verdades. … Porque la imaginación misma, ¿qué es sino una verdad más hermosa?”] (p. 133). The discrepancy between the various terms that he equates with truth—self-interest, rights, passions, imagination—can be resolved only if one understands that the new reality on which Larra expects to ground society, politics, and literature is the individual subject. In effect, Larra's essay articulates the new model of the subject that both liberalism and romanticism assumed, that both movements elaborated and propagated at different levels of social activity. Subjectivity in the form of self-interest, bearing with it unalienable rights, became the reality that economic and political structures must allow to be expressed; that same reality when represented in art appeared as passions, fantasies, and imagination. In Larra's formulation desire is the crucial form of subjectivity: the project for his generation is to make space for the individual subject to express its desire in economic, political, and artistic practice.

While Larra clarified the basic assumptions of progressive consciousness of his day, it was his friend José de Espronceda who offered the most complete poetic formulation of the new, liberal-romantic paradigm for subjective experience. His evolution as a poet can be read as the working out of an increasingly complex representation of the subject in relation to its world. Starting with “La canción del pirata” [“Pirate's song”] in 1835, Espronceda used the first person in an entirely different way than he had in his neoclassical poetry. In that earlier phase, the poetic voice implied a universal, conventional perspective, with emphasis upon the object of its discourse, often an element of nature, as in “A la noche” [“To night”] and “Al sol” [“To the sun”]. His romantic poetry written after 1835, by contrast, implies a speaker that is fully personalized and located in a particular time and space: it might be a pirate, singing the joys of his free life on the sea; or a poet who, while addressing some other being, describes his personal history, his state of mind, his fantasies and desires. Indeed, the lyrical self becomes the poem's true theme. The poem exists to embody subjectivity, the individual's passions and imagination that according to Larra form the cornerstone of a new social reality for Espronceda's generation.

In 1838 Espronceda published two key lyrical poems, “A una estrella” [“To a star”] and “A Jarifa en una orgía” [“To Jarifa in an orgy”], offering a fully developed paradigm of subjectivity that opposes the creative forces of the inner self to the power of material reality. “A Jarifa en una orgía” shows clearly how the poet articulates the elements of romantic subjectivity. A dialectic between self and world is set in motion by desire, which generates illusion when projected upon external reality.

I want love, I want glory, I want a divine delight like I
imagine in my mind, like nothing that exists on earth. …
[Yo quiero amor, quiero gloria,
Quiero un deleite divino,
Como en mi mente imagino,
Como en el mundo no hay. …](3)

The world's failure to correspond to desire precipitates the mood of bitter frustration with which the poem opens. Since Espronceda conceives subjectivity as a temporal process above all, he shows the dynamics of his malaise by reviewing his spiritual history. In the first stage, the imaginative powers born of desire propel him out into the world to find the objects of his fantasy.

Like a speeding comet, I threw myself on the wings of my
ardent fantasy: my headlong, restless mind thought it
found happiness and triumphs everywhere.
[Yo me arrojé, cual rápido cometa,
En alas de mi ardiente fantasía:
Do quier mi arrebatada mente inquieta
Dichas y triunfos encontrar creía.]

(p. 52)

The subjective powers of imagination and desire produce the values marked as positive throughout the poem, while the real, external world encountered in the search for such values is perceived in negative terms.

Then I sought with eager and delirious love
For virtue and glory on earth,
And stinking dust and crumbling slag
Was all my weary spirit found.
[Luego en la tierra la virtud, la gloria,
Busqué con ansia y delirante amor,
Y hediondo polvo y deleznable escoria
Mi fatigado espíritu encontró.]
And I saw my illusions wither, my desires were
eternal and insatiable. I touched reality and hated
life. I believe only in the peace of the grave.
[Y encontré mi ilusión desvanecido
Y eterno e insaciable mi deseo:
Palpé la realidad y odié la vida.
Sólo en la paz de los sepulcros creo.]

(p. 53)

In Espronceda's paradigm, the gap between subjectively generated positive values and the object world is absolute; as if by definition, reality cannot correspond to desire, illusion leads to disappointment. Subjectivity, then, is both the source of positive value and the repeated experience of frustration and pain. Furthermore, desire is unrelenting; only in death does the poet hope to find peace from its insatiable compulsion. This dilemma generates the poem's point of departure, since the poet goes to the brothel to seek a kind of small death in drink and sex. But because desire can neither be repressed nor satisfied, the poem itself reenacts the ever repeated process of subjectivity: desire, illusion, disappointment, disgust. The brothel, of course, provides an apt metaphor for the experience Espronceda wishes to represent.

For Espronceda, mankind is characterized by an insatiable aspiration toward something that does not exist; the discrepancy causes a fall into despair and rebellion. The presentation of Satan as the voice of man in the introductory canto of El diablo mundo [The devil world] clearly exemplifies this paradigm. Yet, like so many of the mental configurations through which Western culture claims to represent universals, Espronceda's image of the human psyche is identified with masculine consciousness. In “A Jarifa,” he marks subjectivity as male by figuring the relationship between self and world as the erotic connection between a masculine subject and a feminine object. In this poem—and in all the other poems he composed between 1838 and 1841—the beloved or desired woman stands for the object world that fails to correspond to the values imagined and desired by the lyrical, masculine subject. Jarifa represents the “other,” that which is not identical to the poetic self. This difference from the lyrical subject, Jarifa's otherness with respect to his desire, leads the poet to push her away in disgust after he has called her to him. “Leave me, woman: I detest you” [“Huye, mujer: te detesto”] (p. 51), he tells her, and then explains:

Why does my heart, foolishly perhaps, swoon over phantom
women, if later, instead of meadows and flowers, it finds
arid deserts and thorns … ?
[¿Por qué en pos de fantásticas mujeres
Necio tal vez mi corazón delira,
Si luego, en vez de prados y de flores,
Halla desiertos áridos y abrojos … ?]

(p. 52)

The inability to find in the concrete woman, Jarifa, the infinite object projected by his desire prompts the poem's reflections on the inadequacy of reality to imagination. These reflections, in turn, take woman as a primary exhibit of reality's deficiency.

I saw clean, virginal women in white clouds of celestial
light; I touched them, and saw their purity turn to
smoke, to mud and rot.
[Mujeres vi de virginal limpieza
Entre albas nubes de celeste lumbre;
Yo las toqué, y en humo su pureza
Trocarse vi, y en lodo y podredumbre.]

(p. 53)

Woman's status as object, her otherness from the subject that desires her, equates her with materiality and justifies the tension between attraction and disgust that structures the movement of the poem. The germinal figure of the poem—the prostitute in her brothel—becomes a metaphor for the object world through which the subject inevitably fails to realize his infinite desires.

The image of woman as split between a positive male projection and a negative material reality is not unique to “A Jarifa.” It recurs in Espronceda's work, notably in “Canto a Teresa” [“Song to Teresa”]: “But, oh, a woman is either a fallen angel / Or merely a woman and filthy mire” [“Mas, ¡ay! que es la mujer ángel caído / o mujer nada más y lodo inmundo”] (p. 188). In the same stanza the reference to the biblical fall of man implies that woman is the source of human unhappiness.

Yes, for the devil in lost Eden burnt the first woman
with fire from the deep and, alas! that fire has since
been her children's legacy.
[Sí, que el demonio en el Edén perdido
Abrasara con fuego del profundo
La primera mujer, y ¡ay! aquel fuego
La herencia ha sido de sus hijos luego.]

Thus he warns “the burning heart” [“el corazón ardiente”] not to drink at the fountain of love, “for hell has poisoned its stream” [“que su raudal lo envenenó el infierno”] (p. 189). This imagery identifies woman with the impurity of the world that poisons every attempt to slake the thirst of human desire.

Espronceda's new poetic paradigm for subjectivity represents women not as subjects in their own right, but rather as emblems of a vitiated object world. This should come as no surprise, especially when Espronceda's poetic project is viewed in the context of the political and economic thought in his generation. The Spanish liberals who sought freedom for individual rights and the pursuit of self-interest left no place for women in their concept of political expression. Political equality for women simply was not conceived as a possibility in early nineteenth-century Spain. Indeed, Larra, the theorist of the connection between liberal ideology and romantic subjectivity, became quite caustic in his review of Dumas' Anthony about the idea that women should claim rights and freedoms that might undermine the institution of marriage.

In this literary and ideological context, Gómez de Avellaneda's novel has a very particular place. Contemporaneous with Espronceda's lyrical poems (Sab was begun in 1838 and completed the following year), the novel incorporates romantic and liberal values. Indeed, Gómez de Avellaneda's images of the interaction of self and world and of inner, subjective experience closely parallel those of Espronceda. However, Avellaneda reverses the gender positions in this paradigm: women become the subjects rather than the objects of desire. Consequently, her depiction of the external world's hostility to inner feelings and hopes focuses on a very concrete injustice—the impotence and oppression of women and slaves who are excluded from the social structures of power.

The plot of the novel revolves around two interlocking love triangles: Carlota, heiress of a sugar plantation, and Teresa, her orphaned cousin, both love Enrique, the son of an English merchant; Carlota is loved both by Enrique and by Sab, a mulatto slave who is part of her household. This conventional pattern changes, however, as the romantic themes of the novel unfold and the plot traces the impact of a cold, commercial, unjust society on those characters blessed—or cursed—by a superior capacity for feeling. By the end of the novel, Sab, Teresa, and Carlota form a new triad unified not by rivalry for love, but rather, by shared values and common experiences of powerlessness within the social structure.

To illustrate the contrast that differentiates Teresa, Sab, and Carlota from the other characters, let us first consider the case of Enrique Otway. In an interesting reversal of male romantic narratives, his role is that of object—the object of feminine desire; Carlota and Teresa are both in love with him when the novel opens. Although the narrator explores Enrique's feelings and thoughts occasionally, his subjectivity has no impact on the external world of the novel. Instead, his behavior and his emotions are determined from without—by his father's demand that he abandon Carlota or by learning the information that Carlota has won a lottery prize. Furthermore, he is closely associated with the material world, for he concerns himself primarily with business, commerce, and money—values inherently alien to the inner life of the other three main characters. Enrique, then, together with his father, represents the public world of the market, and his feelings obey the laws and norms of that world. For this reason, though ultimately she is devastated by her husband's relentless pursuit of material interests, “Carlota could not, in strict justice, condemn the behavior of her husband, nor complain of her lot.” [“Carlota no podía desaprobar con justicia la conducta de su marido, no debía quejarse de su suerte.”]⁴ Enrique is not presented as an evil man; he is simply the human embodiment of a social structure whose values the novel challenges.

The three other main characters belong to a different category, established early in the novel:

There are on this earth superior souls, privileged with regard to feeling and unrecognized by common souls; souls rich in affections, rich in emotion—for whom are reserved unbridled passions, great virtues, overwhelming sorrows—but … Enrique's soul was not one of them.

[Hay almas superiores sobre la tierra, privilegiadas para el sentimiento y desconocidas de las almas vulgares; almas ricas de afectos, ricas de emociones—para las cuales están reservadas las pasiones terribles, las grandes virtudes, los inmensos pesares—y … el alma de Enrique no era una de ellas.]

(p. 74)

Carlota is quickly identified as belonging to this privileged category because of her sensibility and the passionate blindness of her love for Enrique. Teresa also, though described as outwardly dry and impassive, has a soul that “was not incapable of great passion; was in fact made to feel it” [“no era incapaz de grandes pasiones, mejor diré, era formada para sentirlas”] (p. 55). Sab reveals his spiritual nature in an internal monologue in which he compares himself to his privileged but unemotional rival, reflecting that Enrique has no idea that the slave has the superior soul, “capable of loving, capable of hating” [“capaz de amar, capaz de aborrecer”] (p. 78). This inversion of social and spiritual status is common to the three exceptional souls—they all occupy inferior positions in the social hierarchy. And the correspondence between the social destiny of the black slave and that of the two women becomes the covert message of the novel.

While all three “superior souls” exemplify the basic romantic paradigm of subjectivity found in Espronceda—the fall from the illusions of the passionate imagination to the bitter knowledge of alienating reality—it is Carlota's experience that most fully embodies this trajectory. The most startling feature of this representation of romantic consciousness in a woman is that Carlota's destiny is tragic, even though the external world grants her all that should make a woman happy. As Teresa observes, “adored daughter, beloved mistress, future wife of the man you have chosen, what could make you unhappy, Carlota?” [“Hija adorada, ama querida, esposa futura del amante de tu elección, ¿qué puede afligirte, Carlota?”] (p. 51). Yet Carlota does suffer, for the fatal romantic chasm between illusion and reality yawns inescapably in woman's social destiny. Marriage takes Carlota from the virginal garden presented as an externalization of her personality and places her in her husband's sphere, the world of the marketplace where there is no room for love, beauty, and feeling. Consequently, Carlota languishes after her marriage.

Carlota was a poor poetic soul thrown among a thousand materialist existences. Endowed with a fertile and active imagination, ignorant of life in an age when existence is no more than sensation, she found herself obliged to live according to calculation, reflection and convenience. That mercantile and profit-seeking atmosphere, that incessant concern with material interests dried up the lovely illusions of her young heart.

[Carlota era una pobre alma poética arrojada entre mil existencias positivas. Dotada de una imaginación fértil y activa, ignorante de la vida, en la edad en que la existencia no es más que sensaciones, se veía obligada a vivir de cálculo, de reflexión y de conveniencia. Aquella atmósfera mercantil y especuladora, aquellos cuidados incesantes de los intereses materiales marchitaban las bellas ilusiones de su joven corazón.]

(p. 213)

Carlota's disillusionment teaches her the truth about her place in the world of social facts and power. She discovers that her father-in-law has falsified her own father's will, so that upon his death the inheritance goes to her alone instead of being divided with her sisters. Determined to rectify this injustice, she asks Enrique to give her sisters their fair share. When he refuses, treating her request as childish nonsense, she realizes the full extent of her powerlessness.

Carlota struggled uselessly for several months, afterward she kept silent and seemed to resign herself. For her all had ended. She saw her husband as he was; she began to understand the realities of life. Her dreams dissolved, her love fled with her happiness. Then she touched reality in all its nakedness, in all its pettiness, … and her soul … found itself alone in the company of those two earthbound men.

[Carlota luchó inútilmente por espacio de muchos meses, después guardó silencio y pareció resignarse. Para ella todo había acabado. Vio a su marido tal cual era; comenzó a comprender la vida. Sus sueños se disiparon, su amor huyó con su felicidad. Entonces tocó toda la desnudez, toda la pequeñez de las realidades, … se halló sola en medio de aquellos dos hombres pegados a la tierra.]

(p. 215)

The key to Carlota's disillusionment is found in the words “luchó inútilmente”: the gap between her desire and the world cannot be bridged because women's subordination enforces the radical separation between feminine feeling and male action.

Clearly, Gómez de Avellaneda departs from the conventional women's fiction that her novel at first seems to resemble; instead of demonstrating that women's true happiness is found in their socially assigned role, Sab exposes that belief as an illusion. At the same time, the Cuban-born novelist infuses the romantic paradigm of consciousness with radical new content by attributing it to a female subject. In Espronceda's lyric poetry, the lack of social explanation for the subject's alienation and the frustration of his Promethean desire implies a metaphysical determination;⁵ but Carlota's story, insofar as it reenacts the romantic syndrome of despair in terms of a woman's experience of what society offers as her optimal destiny, attributes alienation to social injustice. Thus, the novel places the romantic model of subjectivity and the socially prescribed model of femininity in a dialectical confrontation from which neither emerges intact.

The subjectivity of those treated by the social hierarchy as objects is further demonstrated in the characters of Teresa and Sab, both of whom occupy a disadvantageous position in society—Teresa was born out of wedlock and Sab was born a slave. The range of the social critique is in this way extended to include slavery and racism, along with marriage and the subjection of women.

Teresa is presented as a soul capable of passion and feeling, but, “humiliated and swallowing her mortification in silence, she had learned to dissimulate, becoming ever more glacial and reserved” [“humillada y devorando en silencio su mortificación, había aprendido a disimular, haciéndose cada vez más fría y reservada”] (p. 55). In a self-protective effort, Teresa has repressed her deeply felt emotions; the unique lucidity stemming from the detachment she imposes on herself permits her to see Sab's secret love in actions that remain opaque to the other characters. When he reveals to her the extent of his passion and suffering, she is able to grasp the true value of his spirit. It is she who formulates the novel's primary code of ethics by deciding to protect Carlota's illusions about Enrique rather than destroy them with the truth—that he intends to break off their engagement because her dowry is too small. She exhorts the world in general:

Oh, you who have seen it all! … Respect these pure brows which have not been stamped with the seal of disillusionment; respect these souls … rich in hope and powerful in their youthfulness; let them keep their delusions, which will do them less harm than that fatal clairvoyance you would give them.

[¡Oh, vosotros, los que ya lo habéis visto todo! … Respetad esas frentes puras, en las que el desengaño no ha estampado su sello; respetad esas almas … ricas de esperanzas y poderosas por su juventud; dejadles sus errores, menos mal les harán que esa fatal previsión que queréis darles.]

(pp. 146-47)

She prevails upon Sab to accept this code of ethics, persuading him to abandon his plan to expose Enrique's materialistic calculations and instead to use his winning lottery ticket to make Carlota rich and thus renew her fiancé's commitment.

Teresa's sublimated passion becomes compassion, which is at the top of the novel's scale of values. Both Sab and Carlota turn to her for sympathy and comfort in their anguish. Sab tells her: “May God bless you! … Were it not for you, I would have gone through life as if through a desert, alone with my love and my misfortune without encountering one look of sympathy or compassionate word!” [“¡Bendígate Dios! … ¡A no ser por vos, yo hubiera pasado por la senda de la vida como por un desierto, solo con mi amor y mi desventura, sin encontrar una mirada de simpatía ni una palabra de compasión!”] (p. 174). Romantic consciousness, according to Gómez de Avellaneda, sees happiness as an illusion, an impossibility in reality. But the novel offers a compensatory value: the sympathy of another feeling soul eases the frustration of desire, confirming the existence of spiritual values despite the exterior world's hostility. Creating a select fellowship of “superior souls” becomes a way of mitigating the isolation of the feeling subject in an alien world.

The value of intersubjective relations as compensation for the failure of the subject-object relation is dramatized in Teresa's final act. As she lies on her deathbed, Teresa gives Carlota the letter in which Sab had revealed his true feelings as he was dying. She offers this testament as a consolation for her friend in the lonely years to come.

Perhaps you will find nothing great or beautiful to solace your tired heart. Then you will have this paper; this paper is a complete soul; it is a life and a death. … When you are reading this paper you will believe as I do in love and virtue.

[Acaso no hallarás nada grande y bello en que descansar tu corazón fatigado. Entonces tendrás ese papel; ese papel es toda un alma; es una vida, una muerte. … Mientras leas ese papel creerás como yo en el amor y la virtud.]

(p. 218)

The lesson that Teresa teaches is that compassion and love, the shared subjectivity of the oppressed, provide the only consolation in a hard, commercial world, the only antidote to solitary despair.

If the sublimation of passion into compassion, the abstraction of a philosophy from pain, are processes of the psyche explored in Teresa, Sab represents the movement of primary emotion. His soul, preserved like a life-giving balm in his letter, has “the fragrance of a heart that died without drying up” [“el aroma de un corazón que moría sin marchitarse”] (p. 218). He believes that his love for Carlota fully justifies his life: “My flame has been pure, immense, inextinguishable! It does not matter that I have suffered, for I have loved Carlota. …” [“¡Mi llama ha sido pura, inmensa, inextinguible! No importa que haya padecido, pues he amado a Carlota. …”] (p. 171). And Teresa agrees: “the heart that can love like this is not a common heart” [“el corazón que sabe amar así, no es un corazón vulgar”] (p. 173). Sab is all heart, all passion. In contrast to Teresa, he cannot sublimate feeling; when he has sacrificed his passion by assuring Carlota's marriage to Enrique, his psychic substance has been spent and he simply dies.

However, there is more to Sab's emotion than passionate love, for he supplies what so far has been lacking in Gómez de Avellaneda's representation of female subjectivity as romantic consciousness—a sense of outrage, the Promethean impulse to revolt. The fifth chapter of the novel links Sab with a rage that, echoed and magnified by nature, escapes the bounds of his character. Accompanying Enrique through the forest as a dangerous thunderstorm approaches, Sab stares somberly at Carlota's fiancé, trying to perceive his innermost thoughts. Suddenly, as if he has seen the truth—that Enrique intends to jilt Carlota because her dowry is insufficient—Sab's face changes, crossed by “a bitter, scornful, inexplicable smile” [“una sonrisa amarga, desdeñosa, inexplicable”] (p. 76). At this moment the storm breaks out in all its fury: “The sky splits open, spewing fire through innumerable mouths; lightning describes a thousand burning angles; its bolts fell even the largest trees and the blazing atmosphere is like a vast bonfire” [“El cielo se abre vomitando fuego por innumerables bocas; el relámpago describe mil ángulos encendidos; el rayo troncha los más corpulentos árboles y la atmósfera encendida semeja una vasta hoguera”] (p. 76). The object of this violence is Enrique, struck from his horse, bloody and unconscious; Sab, standing over him, is identified with the storm: “the gleam emitted at that moment by his jet black pupils was somber and sinister, like the blazing storm …” [“sombrío y siniestro, como los fuegos de la tempestad, era el brillo que despedían en aquel momento sus pupilas de azabache …”] (p. 77). Sab finally subdues the murderous storm in his breast and takes his rival to safety. Still, this episode reveals great anger in Sab's soul, as if the character were the channel for a threatening energy latent in the atmosphere of the island paradise.

Indeed, Sab concretizes the historical threat felt by Cubans during the century following the Haitian revolution insofar as he protests the social order that makes his dream of love an impossible fantasy. In his long conversation with Teresa, he reveals that he harbors fantasies of a slave uprising.

I have thought, too, of arming against our oppressors, turning the chained hands of their victims against them; raising in their midst the terrible cry of liberty and vengeance; bathing myself in the blood of white men; treading their corpses and their laws under my feet, and perishing myself among the ruins.

[He pensado también en armar contra nuestros opresores, los brazos encadenados de sus víctimas; arrojar en medio de ellos el terrible grito de libertad y venganza; bañarme en sangre de blancos; hollar con mis pies sus cadáveres y sus leyes y perecer yo mismo entre sus ruinas.]

(p. 157)

At another point in the novel Sab evokes the image of slave revolt, this time reporting the words of Martina, his surrogate mother, who claims to have descended from the now extinct indigenous population: “the descendents of the oppressors will be oppressed, and the black men will be the terrible avengers of the red men” [“los descendientes de los opresores serán oprimidos, y los hombres negros serán los terribles vengadores de los hombres cobrizos”] (p. 133).

In this vengeful talk, Sab distinguishes himself from the female “superior souls.” Although the cases of Teresa and Carlota imply a social critique, exposing the heartlessness of a society ruled by the marketplace as well as the impotence of women who preserve the human value of love, they do not condemn or denounce social injustice, nor do they register any thought of rebellion. Yet the three characters are so closely associated that the anger suppressed in Carlota and Teresa speaks in Sab's violent fantasies. And in the end, Sab takes on the submission exemplified by the two women. Just as his violent rage during the tempest eventually is subdued, so the thoughts of rebellion are carefully constrained. Sab disavows the desire to rebel, though he fully appreciates the necessity of revolt. “Don't worry,” he tells Teresa, “the slaves are patiently wearing their chains; to break them they need to hear perhaps only one voice crying to them: ‘You are men!’ but that voice will not be mine, you may rest assured” [“Tranquilizaros, los esclavos arrastran pacientemente su cadena; acaso sólo necesitan para romperla, oír una voz que les grite: ‘¡Sois hombres!’ pero esa voz no será la mía, podéis creelo”] (p. 153). At the conclusion of his letter to Teresa, Sab piously asserts that the oppressed must not act, but trust God to raise the throne of justice upon the ruins of the old society.

In contrast to the clarity of his indictment of society, Sab's reasons for not acting upon his political awareness appear vague, revealing a narrative divided against itself as it attempts both to justify and to contain Sab's anger. At the end of the novel in Sab's letter to Teresa, an equation between the destiny of women and that of slaves makes manifest the link between the women characters and Sab's angry protest. Sab's letter to Teresa is passed on to Carlota as a condensation of the secret awareness shared by three souls endowed with superior subjectivity; it also recapitulates Gómez de Avellaneda's identification of the romantic subject with marginalized gender and race. Through the letter, Carlota discovers Sab's inner soul, which harbored a sublime passion that she has come to think impossible. Yet Sab's last words emerge less as a declaration of love than as a powerful attack on the injustice of slavery and a condemnation of society.

Sab begins his letter with a long description of his early reflections on virtue. In his youth he rejected the Church's teaching that “the virtue of the slave … is to obey and be silent, to serve his legitimate owners with humility and resignation, and never to judge them” [“la virtud del esclavo … es obedecer y callar, servir con humildad y resignación a sus legítimos dueños, y no juzgarlos nunca”] (p. 220). Virtue must be the same for all men, he argues, protesting that the God-given harmony of nature has been perverted by human society. Above all, he indicts a social structure that, because he is a slave, prevents him from using his superior talents.

If destiny had opened me any path whatsoever, I would have taken it. … [I] had the aptitude and determination to do anything. I lacked only the power! I was a mulatto and a slave.

How many times have I dreamed like the pariah of great, rich, populous cities, cities of culture, those immense workshops of civilization where the man of genius finds numberless opportunities!

[Si el destino me hubiese abierto una senda cualquiera, me habría lanzado en ella. … [P]ara todo hallaba en mí la aptitud y la voluntad. ¡Sólo me faltaba el poder! Era mulato y esclavo.

¡Cuántas veces, como el paria, he soñado con las grandes ciudades ricas y populosas, con las ciudades cultas, con esos inmensos talleres de civilización en que el hombre de genio encuentra tantos destinos!]

(p. 226)

Sab's letter rings with echoes of liberalism; he adopts the arguments of an aspiring bourgeoisie that accuses a system of inherited privilege of excluding those who possess talent and demonstrate merit: “it is men who have forged this destiny for me, … for they have raised a wall of error and prejudice between themselves and the destiny God designed for me” [“son los hombres los que me han formado este destino, … si ellos han levantado un muro de errores y preocupaciones entre sí y el destino que la providencia me había señalado”] (p. 226).

Significantly, when Sab reaches this culminating point of his denunciation, he becomes aware of the shadow of death pressing in and a vision of Carlota, at the point of consummating her marriage, interrupts the flow of his argument. “It's she, it's Carlota, with her wedding ring and her virgin's crown—but she is followed by a squalid and hateful troop! They are disillusionment, tedium, regret—and behind them comes that monster with the sepulchral voice and the iron head—the irremediable” [“Es ella, es Carlota, con su anillo nupcial y su corona de virgen—¡ Pero la sigue una tropa escuálida y odiosa!—son el desengaño, el tedio, el arrepentimiento—y más atrás ese monstruo de voz sepulcral y cabeza de hierro—lo irremediable”] (p. 227). The words that immediately follow this prophesy of Carlota's fate suggest that Sab's discourse on slavery actually has been about women's destiny:⁶ “Oh, women! Poor, blind victims! Like slaves, they patiently wear their chains and lower their heads under the yoke of human laws” [“¡Oh!, ¡las mujeres! ¡Pobres y ciegas víctimas! Como los esclavos, ellas arrastran pacientemente su cadena y bajan la cabeza bajo el yugo de las leyes humanas”] (p. 227). He deemphasizes the finality of a slave's fate in comparison to a married woman's, arguing that slaves at least can buy their freedom.

[B]ut woman, when she raises her wasted hands and her battered head to ask for freedom, hears the monster with the sepulchral voice shouting: ‘In the tomb.’ Don't you hear a voice, Teresa? It's the voice of the strong who say to the weak: ‘Obedience, humility, resignation—these are virtue’.

[Pero la mujer, cuando levanta sus manos enflaquecidas y su frente ultrajada para pedir libertad, oye al monstruo de voz sepulcral que le grita: ‘En la tumba.’ ¿No oís una voz, Teresa? Es la de los fuertes que dice a los débiles: ‘Obediencia, humildad, resignación—ésta es la virtud’.]

(p. 227)

With this reference to his starting point, Sab includes women in his entire condemnation of society's oppression of slaves.

Indeed, the dominant theme of Sab's letter suggests that the issue of slavery is secondary to that of women. In general, society's blighting of Sab's ambitions and talents is protested more than the oppression of a general class of human beings. While the letter begins with an argument against slavery derived from the assumption of natural human equality, the concrete proof of slavery's iniquity—both in Sab's letter and in the novel as a whole—is found in the denial of an outlet through which Sab's innate superiority might express itself. This focus reveals the true target of the denunciation of oppression. The fictional slave's outrage vents the frustration of the author, a young colonial woman who aspired to pour out her subjectivity in writing and win recognition in the great European centers of civilization and culture, but who was told to be silent and resign herself to those virtues prescribed for women.

Gómez de Avellaneda began to write Sab at her stepfather's family home in Galicia in 1837. An autobiographical document written two years later describes the conflict that immediately ensued between the young woman and Spanish expectations of feminine conduct. In Cuba her mother had more or less indulged her literary aspirations, but her stepfather's people in the very traditional city of La Coruña were appalled by her preference of books to housework.

They said I was an atheist, and the proof they gave was that I read Rousseau. … [T]hey said … that I wasn't good for anything because I didn't know how to iron, or cook, or darn stockings; because I didn't wash windows, or make beds, or sweep my room. … They also ridiculed my fondness for studying and called me the lady scholar.

[Decían que yo era atea, y la prueba que daban era que leía las obras de Rousseau. … [D]ecían … que yo no era buena para nada, porque no sabía planchar, ni cocinar, ni calcetar; porque no lavaba los cristales, ni hacía las camas, ni barría mi cuarto. … Ridiculizaban también mi afición al estudio y me llamaban la Doctora.]⁷

To ease the domestic tension, Gómez de Avellaneda was allowed to travel with her younger brother to her deceased father's birthplace in an Andalusian village. There, too, her relatives' main concern was that she conform to the Spanish ideal of womanhood and marry a local hidalgo (p. 75). Firmly resisting all attempts to domesticate her, Gómez de Avellaneda expressed throughout her autobiography the “horror of marriage” [“horror al matrimonio”] (p. 63) that informs Sab's final outburst. In Sab, she projected her aspirations for self-realization and through his mouth dared to condemn the social institution that would inflict upon women the role of passive resignation to powerlessness that Sab protested. And through Sab she defied the social conventions of gender hierarchy and realized her desire to step into man's world of literary publication: the publication of Sab and her Poesías in 1841 signaled her success.

It was her determination to write, to claim her place in the public world and her right to express her inner passions and fancies, that led Gómez de Avellaneda to assert in Sab that woman, too, can be that liberal and romantic subject characterized in the writing of contemporaries such as Larra and Espronceda. By applying the romantic paradigm of desire and despair to those excluded from the freedom and equality claimed by liberal ideology, she gave that paradigm a social specificity that it lacked in other formulations. This was her achievement in the novel: pointing to concrete inequities that inflicted alienation and anguish on those in her society who were neither male nor white.

However, the limitations of Avellaneda's perspective are also patent in the novel. In a sense she colonized the mulatto slave's subjectivity to suit her own purpose when she characterized him as willing to sacrifice both his freedom and his people for his impossible love of a white woman. That a bourgeois white woman's representation of a mulatto was conditioned by the interests of her class and race is hardly surprising. But the fact that this female author wrote the first Hispanic antislavery novel as a vehicle for an oblique feminist protest reveals something less predictable: Gómez de Avellaneda found it easier to express abolitionist sentiments—which were considered so subversive by the Spanish colonial government in Cuba that it would not permit Sab to be published there—than to broach directly the issues of sexual inequality. This paradox may remind contemporary readers of the power of the cultural taboos that Gómez de Avellaneda faced as she challenged the male monopoly of literature.

Notes

1. In Cuba another abolitionist novel, Francisco. El ingenio o Las delicias del campo, by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, was finished in 1839, the same year in which the manuscript of Sab was completed. Suárez's novel, however, was not published until 1880, while Sab appeared in Spain in 1841. See Alberto Gutiérrez de la Solana, “Sab y Francisco: Paralelo y contraste,” in Homenaje a Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, ed. Gladys Zaldívar and Rosa Martínez de Cabrera (Miami: Editora Universal, 1981), pp. 301-303.

2. Mariano José de Larra, “Literatura,” in Obras de Mariano José de Larra, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 127-30 (Madrid: Editorial Atlas, 1960), 2:133-34. Subsequent page references to this essay will be included in the text.

3. José de Espronceda, El diablo mundo. El estudiante de Salamanca. Poesías, ed. Jaime Gil de Biedma (Madrid: Alianza, 1966), p. 52. Subsequent page references to this edition will be included in the text.

4. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, ed. Carmen Bravo Villasante (Salamanca: Anaya, 1970), p. 213. Subsequent references to the novel will be included in the text.

5. See Thomas E. Lewis, “Contradictory Explanatory Systems in Espronceda's Poetry: The Social Genesis and Structure of El diablo mundo,” Ideologies and Literature 4 (1983): 44.

6. This observation has also been made by Pedro Barreda Tomás in “Abolicionismo y feminismo en la Avellaneda: Los negros como artificio narrativo en Sab,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 342 (1978): 613-26.

7. Autobiografía y cartas de la señorita doña Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, ed. Lorenzo Cruz de Fuentes (Madrid: Imprenta Helénica, 1914), p. 72. Subsequent references to this work will be included in the text.