SOURCE: Ward, Thomas. “Nature and Civilization in Sab and the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Latin America.” Hispanofila 126 (May 1999): 25-40.

[In the following essay, Ward posits connections between the depictions of nature and the characters in Avellaneda'sSab, suggesting that this allows a critique of social Darwinism.]

The relationship between nature and society has long been a theme in Western literature, the pastoral serving as an antidote to the commercial corruption of the city. Horace, Virgil and Ovid, paradigmatic authors, established the notions of beatus ille and locus amoenus as important literary motifs. During the Renaissance, the topos was introduced into Hispanic literature by Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, Jorge de Montemayor and Miguel de Cervantes. It has persisted through the centuries, with each author or movement adding his, her or its own individual slant. We now come to the crux of the matter. What form did the opposition between city and country take in the Latin American novel of the Nineteenth Century? Of course the Romantic noble savage, in spite of its non-understanding of the “other,” was an outgrowth of this Renaissance neoclassical tendency. For Naturalism, conversely, nature could be cruel, and civil society in peril, when controlled by it. As we shall see in this article, for several South-American novels of the Nineteenth Century, it is the notion of soul and its relationship to nature that confronts the corruption of civilization.

During the Nineteenth Century, two broad perspectives developed from which society could be understood. One accepts nature as a governing force in society, the other does not. The first describes society in Darwinian terms, individual conduct being understood as a process of “survival of the fittest.” While morals are not disavowed, primal instincts can and do define behavioral patterns. This then is the realm of study for social Darwinists. The second, elaborated a little later and perhaps a response to the pessimism of the first, is Prince Kropotkin's notion of “mutual aid.” It is civil society, ethical, civilized, and based on “mutual aid,” which inhibits any natural disposition toward survival of the fittest.

Neither tendency is mutually exclusive of the other and both are present in the dynamic of modern civilization, orienting it in a multitude of different directions, making it a difficult task indeed to sort out its constituent elements. As suggested above, every age brings to earlier texts its own new meaning, imbued with its own socio-cultural constructs. Our multifaceted Twentieth Century is no different, casting new light on the nineteenth. Recently, a fresh view on the relationship between nature and civil norms has emerged in the writing of Camille Paglia. In a way, she inverts the classical motif, viewing society, not nature, as a positive element. Paglia's view departs from the premise that “Aggression comes from nature” (Paglia 2). Aggression, a destructive natural force, must be attenuated. Civility is the response. For Paglia, “society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power” (Paglia 1). It is not hard to substantiate such a position. Whether it be an earthquake, a flood, tornados, or fires, we find representative aspects of Western civilization such as the Red Cross, Church groups, Fire and Police departments, even the National Guard, working to protect against nature's wrath. From such a vantage point, Paglia asserts that reciprocal assistance serves as a remedy for the aggression of nature. Yet society sometimes forgets its lofty ideals and reverts back to naturally selective behaviors. Understood from this perspective, “society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check” (Paglia 2). It is the above-mentioned remedy.

One perspective from which to consider the relationship between civilization and nature, is to probe the male-female dynamic. In suggesting this, I do not mean to imply that the association between men and women can comprehensively define the larger relationship of society and nature. While the latter is of a constant character, the former mutates incessantly in a never ending shifting of relations due to gender, class, ethnicity and nature. As Carlos J. Alonso cautions, the social dynamic of a diverse society is “a complex dialogic negotiation among parties in a multi-layered relationship of constant and mutual reaccommodation” (Alonso 229). Given the intricacy of society, gender correlation reflects only one, albeit important, element of the macrocosm created when society interacts with nature. However, male-female interaction, arguably, is the one element, which interacts with all others, from race, class, and social structure, to nature. It is to this factor we now turn our attention.

Generalizations can lead to oversimplifications. However two clarifying tendencies, not mutually exclusive, can be perceived when comparing men and women. The former can be associated with society and the later with nature. Both Susan Griffin in her Women and Nature and Paglia in her Sexual Personae have identified this relationship. Women are different from men because they are connected to the cycles of the moon in ways that men cannot imagine. Both menstrual cycles and pregnancy are experiences that are beyond the realm of masculinity. Not surprisingly, then, Paglia reminds us that “The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory” (Paglia 7). On the other hand, “Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature” (Paglia 9). What Paglia does not say is that if men “invented” civilization, they also did so to check their own primitive urges, especially in matters of love and sex. Marriage is a good example of this aspect of society. Yet when men and women come together it is always closer to nature, detached, in greater or lesser degree, from legal and social structures. This bipolar dynamic, society-nature, man-woman, creates an evolving basis for interpersonal relationships. It is a tale of creation and appropriation. Again we turn to Paglia:

Hence the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman, at first content to accept man's projections but not inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man's systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them.

(Paglia 9)

Of course women had not gone very far in their embrace of male culture during the Nineteenth Century. Few could imagine women on the military front lines or even in politics. The century that saw the abolition of slavery very clearly associated women and nature, differentiated from that aspect of Western civilization defined by men and wealth.

How can this phenomenon be studied? The role of men and women in society is mirrored in literature. This theory is not new; it derives from Plato. By means of mimesis, we can read what one author has seen or perceived as seen. For example, contemporary novelist Isabel Allende reveals that most of what she writes in her novels has a basis in reality (Alvarez-Rubio 1064). If we embrace such a proposition, we can expect that several Latin-American novels of the Nineteenth Century would reflect the maleness of that civilization. They do. Three such novels are Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab (1841), Jorge Isaacs' Maria (1867), and Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido (1889). In the Cuban novel, the monetary aspects of Western civilization are embodied in the men of the Otway family. As the Colombian love story unfolds, we find that Efraín's medical career is more important to his parents than his love for María. The Peruvian narrative, for its part, presents the women as a front, more unified than the men, against the civilized economic system of the mita and the reparto. Juxtaposed against male culture, the women in all three works find themselves much closer to nature.

Avellaneda's Sab, the primary focus of our study, departs from the Classical pastoral model, which was aristocratic. It speaks to what Raymond Williams has termed the “neo-pastoral,” removed from the court and set “in its new location, the country house and its estate” (Williams 21-22). The neo-pastoral reflects a new social reality, “that of a developing agrarian capitalism” (Williams 22). Of course, Williams is referring to the English Renaissance. Yet the relationship between Great Britain, Cuba and colonialism is not so far fetched. In Sab, we observe nineteenth-century Cuba, the neo-pastoral milieu that the English Otways come to dominate. As they acquire land, the father and son come to symbolize British neocolonialism, which provides a model for “development” on the world stage. Conversely, as we read the novel, we see that three characters do not fit into the Western notion of development, necessarily understood as an attempt to exploit nature in order to achieve monetary gain. Two of these three characters are women; the third is a mulatto bondsman.

One of the women, Carlota, shares the role of protagonist with the slave Sab. There is a palpable relationship between her and nature. The narrator, referring to her, informs us that, in effect, there is “cierta armonía entre aquella naturaleza y aquella mujer, ambas tan jóvenes y tan hermosas” (199). The second woman, Teresa, will take a drastic step toward the end of the novel to separate herself finally from male culture. The apparent relationship between women and nature also surfaces with the minor character of Martina, the medicine woman. She narrates stories of Vampires and Apparitions (202), and seems to be in direct contact with the soul of Camagüey, the fallen Cuban chief (202).

Women in Sab are not so different from female characters in Isaac's María. In her important work, Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer finds that “María lacked ‘manly’ dignity and self control,” two elements of civilized behavior. Sommer goes on to theorize that María's feminine behavioral traits “slip dangerously on a closer reading into the ‘barbarity’ of uncontrolled femaleness” (Sommer 199). What Sommer is referring to here is María and her constant weeping, her going barefoot, her flirting and her unbridled passion (Sommer 199). All of this links María to nature. Another commentator, Sharon Magnarelli, also notes that the narrator, Efraín, a male character created by a male author, describes María “in terms of both nature and motherhood.” However, Magnarelli distances herself from a mimetic theory of literature, viewing Efraín as artificially imposing María on nature. Yet, she views María's “Christianization” as a civilizing process (Magnarelli 20, 35) that could, in fact, be termed a Paglian appropriation of culture. Further on, looking at two naturalist novels, Doña Bárbara and La vorágine, Magnarelli sees the depiction of women and nature as malevolent and connected. These two twentieth-century determinist novels, however, do not reflect a nature which allows for a soul, as in the literature of Romanticism. If I differ with Magnarelli on how María came closer to nature, i.e., biological and cultural tendencies vs. male manipulation, we both agree that, in fact, in the novel, she is identified with nature. Of course the passive María (created by a male author) and Sab's active Carlota (developed by a female author) are two very different creatures. What matters is that both of them share a certain proximity to nature, making Isaacs' representation of “woman” socially contextual.

The same association of women and nature also presents itself in Clorinda Matto's Aves sin nido, an early naturalist novel, not completely liberated from a romantic notion of life. In this work, “… la mujer, por regla general, es un diamante en bruto, y al hombre y la educación les toca convertirlo en brillante …” (Matto 36). This idea is not a mere nineteenth-century construct. The Peruvian novelist anticipates Rosario Castellanos, who one hundred years later, would also use the diamond as a symbol on at least two occasions. Both would appear in book form posthumously. One occurs in her El uso de la palabra (1974) which contains one of her essays on Mexican feminism, “La liberación del amor.” Castellanos writes of a fourteen-year-old girl, a “diamante en bruto,” who becomes, upon polishing, an “objeto de lujo” (El uso 63). The symbol also appears in a short poem, “Valium 10,” from her Poesía no eres tú (1972). Here the Mexican poet longs for the polished and cut diamond which represents beauty and order, absent from the chaos of her Supermom world in which the male is nonexistent. It takes education and male presence to polish the diamond, tame nature, and bring women closer to men. This is the same theme represented in Aves sin nido, where the nature-society dynamic defines male-female relations. Paglia herself could have expressed this idea, developed by a female author who was close enough to a nature-based culture to address Cáceres' troops in Quechua (Berg 81). Later, in exile in Argentina, she would translate the Gospels into the language of Tahuantinsuyo.

In Aves sin nido, it was these “raw diamonds,” close to the equality of nature, who compelled liberal men to emancipate the indígenas from the hierarchical mita and reparto, appropriated and defined as a part of Western culture in Peru. Yet the plot of the novel does not just reflect the association of women and nature. This tendency in the novel is somewhat at odds with another, one that also shows a tension between the city and the country. This other thread derives from Sarmiento and his doctrine of civilization and barbarism. Here not only are men and women set apart, but—as Cornejo Polar points out—the urban Marín couple is differentiated from the barbarity of the rural sierra (Cornejo Polar 131). While both ideological aspects of the novel's fabric are important to its understanding, it is the former which concerns us here. For the nineteenth-century beatus ille mind, being close to nature was a positive attribute, providing an elevated basis to guide life. This was the case with both María and Aves sin nido. The first idealizes love, the second justice, yet both from a pro-nature perspective. Both novels, reflecting two different literary movements, written in two very different cultures, by a Jewish man and a Quechua-literate woman, provide two very different points of comparison for Sab, reflecting a very different nineteenth-century society, defined by black slavery.

In Avellaneda's novel, any black and white analysis would limit our understanding of the text. Even a superficial reading of the romance reveals that women are not the only characters linked to nature. Men, for their part, can be closer or further from nature. Like the women, the slave Sab also feels the connection. This relationship is clearly established, as Susan Kirkpatrick has observed, during the storm scene in which Enrique falls off his horse (Kirkpatrick 153). Sab himself is aware of his relationship with nature, which becomes problematic. For him, God has willed a conflict between his nature and his social destiny as a bondsman:

Y si ha sido su voluntad que yo sufriese esta terrible lucha entre mi naturaleza y mi destino …

(314)

Clearly his “nature” must be equated with his soul, the conduit through which love must pass. This is not so strange; again we can find a parallel in Isaacs' María:

Las grandes bellezas de la creación no pueden a un tiempo ser vistas y cantadas; es necesario que vuelvan al alma, empalidecidas por la memoria infiel.

(Isaacs 6)

In this informative passage, we see that nature, to be appreciated, must return to the soul, its point of comprehension, its partner in harmonious lusciousness. In similar fashion, a notion of nature is elaborated in Sab which allows for a spiritual link between two souls:

Hay en los afectos de las almas ardientes y apasionadas como una fuerza magnética, que conmueve y domina cuanto se les acerca. Así una alma vulgar se siente a veces elevada sobre sí misma, a la altura de aquella con quien está en contacto, por decirlo así, y sólo cuando vuelve a caer, cuando se halla sola y en su propio lugar, puede conocer que era extraño el impulso que la movía y prestaba la fuerza que la animaba

(191).

The idea of the soul as a “magnetic force” is not unusual during this period. In José Mármol's Amalia (1851), another romantic novel, the narrator speaks of a certain “influencia magnética y voluptuosa que postra el alma bajo el imperio de un encantamiento indefinible y misterioso …” (Mármol 102a). The Argentine author's mysterious enchainment echoes Avellaneda, where burning and impassioned souls are like a magnetic force, capable of creating a subaltern natural notion of society. Although a soul could still be affected by such ordinary tendencies such as jealousy (269), it is ennobled when inflamed with love, allowing for an elevated sense of right and wrong. Sab becomes the paradigm. When he is accompanying Enrique to town during the above-mentioned storm, the merchant is knocked to the ground and left in a dazed state. At this point Sab contemplates killing his competitor:

Una voluntad le reduciría a la nada, y esa voluntad es la mía … (la mía, pobre esclavo de quien él no sospecha que tenga un alma superior a la suya … capaz de amar, capaz de aborrecer … un alma que supiera ser grande y virtuosa y que ahora puede ser criminal! ¡He aquí tendido a ese hombre que no debe levantarse más!

(168)

Yet Sab cannot kill Enrique. On the contrary, because of his special soul, he ends up nursing Enrique back to health.

Enrique, conversely, has a weak soul. He himself admits it to Carlota: “Mi alma acaso no es bastante grande para encerrar el amor que te debo” (191). Since Enrique and Sab both love Carlota, it makes perfect sense to compare both men's souls, especially regarding matters of love. Carlota, perhaps blinded by love, is not able to distinguish between higher and lower souls in Enrique and Sab. In a conversation with Enrique, she compares both souls: “su alma era tan noble, tan elevada como la tuya, como todas las almas nobles y elevadas” (294). Upon hearing this, Enrique feels uncomfortable and, he vacillates “un tanto … como si su conciencia le hiciese penosa una comparación que sabía bien no era merecida” (294). We are confronted with the question, then, as to why Enrique would have a less substantial soul than Sab, a fact understood by both men. The answer lies in the relationship between “nature” and civil standing in the characters.

Significantly, Sab is not the only figure in the novel who can boast an exalted soul. Carlota's is so elevated that Enrique fears she can sense his thoughts from afar: “¿esa alma tan apasionada sentirá un presentimiento que la anuncie que en este momento su Enrique piensa en el modo de abandonarla … ?” (270). A soul with this level of power is immanent in nature. In fact, it could be God [her]self that Enrique fears in this instant. For a Carlota that could feel his vacillations between reason and nature, wealth and love, is a very powerful woman indeed. This fact does not go unnoticed by her cousin Teresa who explicitly links Carlota's soul with God:

Tú has poseído sin conocerla una de esas almas grandes, ardientes, nacidas para los sublimes sacrificios, una de aquellas almas excepcionales que pasan como exhalaciones de Dios sobre la tierra.

(305)

Additionally, it is not just the white female and the black male souls that can achieve higher spiritual contact. Not surprisingly, Native Americans also have this characteristic. As a point of comparison, we can turn again to Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido. Even the Spanish term the Cuzqueña author employs to describe them, los naturales, suggests a closer link to nature. This term has been part of Latin American literary language since Cortés wrote his Cartas de relación (87b, 88b). Over the centuries, the meaning has been preserved. In Matto's novel, such usage distances them, absolutely, from the class-conscious civilization represented by the notables. This reading of Aves provides a context for Sab, where the soul of the assassinated Cuban Indian chief Camagüey falls into the same category as Matto's naturales. Like pre-Hispanic cultures in the Andes, the original inhabitants of Cuba held beliefs which were very closely associated with nature. Camagüey's spirit is so omnipotent that it takes the form of visible energy:

el alma del desventurado cacique viene todas las noches a la loma fatal, en forma de una luz, a anunciar a los descendientes de sus bárbaros asesinos la venganza del cielo que tarde o temprano caerá sobre ellos.

(202)

It is this powerful soul, in the form of twinkling lights, which the Bellavista delegation sees on their trip to Cubitas.

We see here that the culture embodied in both the nonwhite races and women produced souls more lofty than those generally held by men of European stock. Consequently, it should not surprise us that Carlota, being a woman, and closer to nature in a Paglian sense, would dream of being with her Enrique not as a white, but a copper couple. Thus, Enrique would build her a Palm hut, where they could enjoy a life of love, innocence and liberty (205-206). This theme of a simpler rural existence in nature was common during the period. It also appears in Isaacs' María when Efraín detours his narration to tell the love story of the Africans Nay and Sinar (92-101). This mise en abîme, a tale within a tale, parallels the exterior narrative of María and Efraín who also experience a true-without-bounds love, possible only outside the norms of “civilization” as defined by his family. The same reality defines relationships in Sab. Carlota not only praises the Romantic “noble savage,” she desires to be one, so that she can love. As an inverse parallel, Sab's adoration of Carlota is prohibited within the framework of nineteenth-century Cuban “civil” society.

It is possible that Gómez de Avellaneda created both Carlota and Sab in her own image. Being a woman and seeing her subordinate condition even as an adult female, she could sympathize with the subservient condition of blacks and indigenous peoples. Solidarity with the former is codified in Sab, and with the latter, in her fourth novel, Guatimozín, el último emperador de México. Yet it is a nineteenth-century solidarity that she represents. For Sab, it is important to remember we are reading a piece of Romantic literature. Being a white woman, the author cannot possibly understand the subtleties of being a black man. Consequently, she defines the mulatto Sab through an upper class conceptualization of the “other,” a process that leads her to call black culture “savage” on more than one occasion. Not unexpectedly, Gómez de Avellaneda does not differ from other writers of her time. Many used the term “savage” to describe people from the African continent. Jorge Isaacs does the same in his María. Once, Efraín describes Nay's “ira salvaje” (103a). The term was not only used to describe those of African heritage, it could also refer to white people. En José Mármol's Amalia, for example, the label has a political usage. Juan Manuel de Rosas is described as having “furor salvaje” (60b). One of his soldiers demonstrates “alegría salvaje” (69b). Of course this was all Unitarian political posturing, calling the other political camp, the Federalists, savage. We find the same on the Federalist side. From most of the literature of the period, we remember their slogan describing the opposition as “salvajes unitarios” (for ex. 69a). Finally, being a “savage” defined an individual as proximate to nature, which in Amalia was also described as “salvaje” (45a).

In general, attitudes toward different cultures in the Nineteenth Century resulted from notions of civilization that were developing. The study of these ideas became generally known as sociology by the end of that century. Our Postmodern sociological understanding of race and gender and its implications for Avellaneda's work have also been evolving. During the sixties, Helena Percas Ponseti proclaimed that the novel: “empezó siendo novela contra la esclavitud, terminó siendo una novela psicológica de tono romántico” (Percas Ponseti, 352). Twenty years later, Lucía Guerra argues convincingly that the abolitionist element of the novel is only a strategic paradigm which nurtures a feminist value system which, given the values of the age, could not be elaborated explicitly (Guerra, 708-709). Beth Miller concurs when she asserts that Avellaneda followed “a natural progression from the idea of racial to that of sexual equality” (Miller 209). In spite of evolving critical perspectives, very clearly there is a parallel in the novel between the two forms of oppression. In Sab's own words,

¡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.

(316)

The two central women of the novel share a very special condition with Sab and the slave class. As Kirkpatrick points out, “By the end of the novel, Sab, Teresa, and Carlota form a grouping unified not by rivalry for a love object, as in the conventional triangle, but rather by shared values and a common experience of powerlessness within the social structure” (Kirkpatrick 147). Of course this social structure is none other than that designed by white men as a buffer between them and nature. Such a mediator becomes an all-powerful method of subordination that defines the black man, and the two women. Let's turn now to look at the white male.

According to Paglia's theory on society and nature, men have created society, and hence are removed from nature. In Sab, commerce is that which defines society. It is at this juncture that we come to the literary theme mentioned in our first paragraph. Remember that Horace's notion of beatus ille, inserted into the Hispanic canon by Fray Luis, comes from Beatus ille qui procul negotiis (Horace 165), meaning “lucky the one who is far from business.” When we look at Enrique, a white male, we find him representing capitalist civilization, a framework defined by his being “educado según las reglas de la codicia y especulación …” (162). His father Jorge is so connected to Western civilization that he lends money for his business dealings. When such arrangements fail, he has enough connection to the system to then borrow money (150). The English Otways would have done well to heed Horace's poem on Beatus ille. But the ever-conniving father and son do not seem to have time to read Horace. Business for Enrique is a rational, not a literary enterprise. Before Sab informs him that Carlota has “won” the lottery, he feels impotent because his love for Carlota (nature) weakens his resolve to follow the paternal will of his father (hierarchical civilization) [268]. It is this conflict that defines the younger Otway's character. Enrique's motivation does not come from within as with Sab, Teresa or Carlota. As Kirkpatrick advises, Enrique's “behavior and indeed his emotions are determined from outside—by his father's demand that he abandon Carlota or by the information that Carlota has won a lottery” (148). The exteriorization of will in Enrique's character associates European culture with greed, while distancing, both women and black men from selfish impulses toward monetary gain. While such a unidimensional model is naive, i.e., both white woman and black men can also be greedy when they appropriate monetary culture, it does present a generalized framework helpful for understanding the Antillean society into which Avellaneda was born. Of course she understood this, creating the kind don Carlos as an antidote to the romantic cult of oversimplification. Yet most characters in the work tend to monolithically represent “good” or “evil,” nature or Western civilization. In order to make a socio-political statement, her emotional look at Cuba reduces to outline form the society that is her referent. This is, of course, why Enrique appears to be so superficial.

Being close to Western civilization, existing in a state removed from nature, Enrique cannot have a superior soul. So how can his essence be characterized?

… 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.

(164)

Why is Enrique's soul inferior? Given that there is an Erasmist “equidad de la madre común” (243), we can only assume that equality has been violated by “la sociedad” (243). This view has been common since the Renaissance, when bondage, for example, came to be seen as a social phenomenon by thinkers as diverse as Sir Thomas More and Bartolomé de las Casas (See my “Toward …”). As Sab himself writes to Teresa:

He visto siempre que el fuerte oprimía al débil, que el sabio engañaba 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

(310).

Consequently, he suffers from his terrible struggle between nature and his social destiny (314). It is precisely under “survival of the fittest” norms that society developed the injustice of slavery. Such social relations do not respect the equality of nature, which Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly (1510), postulated during the Renaissance (Erasmus 35). In fact, when the Erasmist precept that Nature equalizes everything is not appreciated, an unequal aberration is created between the souls of Enrique and Sab. The irony here is that Sab, whose body is limited by bondage, has a venerable soul, while Enrique, whose body is that of a free man, has a vital force worthy only of pity. The only plausible explanation here is that Enrique's spirit has been corrupted by commerce, reducing his connection to nature. This argument is strengthened when we look at Carlota's father, don Carlos, where the inverse is true. Although a white aristocrat, he has not been corrupted by business. Consequently, his lands do not provide such profit as they once did. Not being tainted by business, we see Carlota's father being characterized as benevolent, and even egalitarian (when Sab sits at his table), although we are not provided insight into his inner spirit.

If voracity putrefies Enrique's soul, Sab's retains a direct link with nature. As a matter of fact, this connection is so cogent, that at the exact moment when Enrique and Carlota exchange wedding vows, which is to say, at the precise instant that their union becomes sanctioned by Western civilization, Sab's agonizing struggle against death fails and he perishes (287, 288). As Percas Ponseti theorizes, Sab's perfection is so superhuman, that to achieve it, he has to die (Percas Ponseti 354). When Enrique and Carlota modify their “Civil” state, and become part of “Civilization,” Sab's rejected immaterial essence abandons his body and returns to nature where it belongs. After the Englishman and the Criolla woman integrate themselves into the structure of Western capitalism, Carlota discovers herself living a very material existence, devoid of any spirituality. In the end, her animating force, powered by enthusiasm and illusions, finds itself alone between Jorge and his son Enrique, two men stuck to the earth, not in a natural sense, but for profit (304). Carlota, because her love is so great, cannot see until too late. She is forcibly detached from her neo-pastoral locus amoenus and obliged to confront what Raymond Williams has described as part of the capitalization process, “the utilitarian reduction of all social relationships to a crude moneyed order” (Williams 35). Carlota, then, represents the passage from a simple rural condition defined by a warm-hearted family to an agrarian capitalism in which morals are reduced to the accumulation of wealth. Her elevated soul cannot understand a utilitarian reality such as her husband's. She is not allowed to turn the tide on society, injecting heart and soul into an impersonal civil structure. Teresa understands Carlota's situation. With empathy, she informs her cousin about how she feels: she detests the world and men (305). This view is not so unique. In Aves sin nido, for example, in spite of such positive male models as Juan Yupanqui and Fernando Marín, the three women who open the novel, Marcela Yupanqui, Lucía Marín and Petronila Hinojosa, find they must challenge the Western colonial model for civilization, represented by the cleric and the governor, in favor of a more human proto-Christian model (14-37).¹ Their lofty actions against society challenge the framework for the naturalist novel, evoking earlier works of romanticism. Yet their ultimate failure is in keeping with European prescriptions for the genre. These active figures in the Peruvian setting differ from Teresa, who chooses to retreat away from the battle.

Teresa, painted as quite coldhearted until her secret meeting with Sab at the riverside, finds spiritual happiness within the confines of the “female” convent. It is here that her virtue becomes stronger through stoic resignation of her fate (301). The resolution of her destiny varies from Carlota's predicament at the end of the novel. Carlota is trapped by a “male” civilization in which Jorge and Enrique Otway manage the Bellavista Cane Farm, usurping the third and fifth parts of her father's estate. They do not allow her to participate in financial matters.² When Carlota rebels against this injustice committed against her younger sisters, Enrique sees her as infantile (303). The male speculative investors cannot understand her, a natural entity with a compassionate soul.

Both Carlota and Teresa would have both been happier had they been able to live in a luscious nature, on virgin soil, under a magnificent sky, surrounded by all the great works of God, learning to know God and to love God (306). Teresa's spiritual path, which puts her closer to nature and to female culture, is a model for Sab. In his letter to her, Sab thanks her for her generosity, her selflessness and her heroism. He tells her that she is a sublime woman and that he wants to imitate her (308). From the slave's perspective, one that parallels closely a woman's, Sab can see a way out. Yet he is not strong enough to leave the island.

Of course Sab and Teresa are both linked to nature in another way. They are both bastard children. In Spanish this can be expressed as hijos naturales. As natural offspring, they are cut out of the patriarchal system and left closer to nature. This linguistic usage anticipates Matto's naturales who work the land. Both Sab and Teresa are able to find solutions (his ultimate death, her religious vocation), an area in which Carlota fails. Therefore, Sab's adoption by the Earth Mother Martina is especially poignant. As Sommer theorizes, this space that he establishes with Martina “allows him to construct a different ‘artificial’ order that can recognize his natural legitimacy” (Sommer 119). Yet it cannot protect him from the pain of unrequited love.

The social message of the novel becomes clear as we realize that the more superior the soul, the closer the communion with nature, yet the lower on the social ladder the individual becomes (See Kirkpatrick 149). As the soul becomes developed (a process we can observe in Teresa), there is an inverse movement down the social ladder. It is the superior soul that causes the women and the black man to be exiled to what Garfield calls an “uncivilized space” (Poder 62). Yet the novel is not proposing a binary opposition here. There is also a white man with a superior soul, don Carlos, Carlota's father. Although we do not come to know him as well as we do Sab, Carlota, and even Teresa, he is upheld as an ideal figure. His death, when nature claims him from civilization, prohibits his positive force from protecting his daughters. However, without his death, subsequent events would not unravel.

Again it must be cautioned that Sab's “uncivilized space” described by Garfield is a romantic oversimplification. In history, there is always some form of resistance. Recent research has indicated that there was much feminist resistance during Avellaneda's century (see Meyer, et al.). The same can be affirmed for naturales and slaves. Resistence is a process of adapting and surviving, even if some cultural baggage is lost. However, in the novel, resistance is attenuated by love, a process not so shocking, given the narration's connection to the romantic movement. Sab, Teresa and Carlota do not make any Paglian attempt to annex Western money civilization to their world view. Unquestionably, resistance during the time of Sab was much more clandestine than today during the Postmodern era. In Sab it is so covert that it becomes submerged, allowing the novelist to create total victims, necessary for her social criticism. It is the reader's empathy with these victims that creates a sense of outrage that could, in turn, inspire future resistance. This brings us back to the social theories expressed in the work.

The reverse relationship between soul and social station in the novel explains the corruption that surrounds the Otway family and the institution of racial slavery. This is because civil society in Sab's novelistic space is based on the pseudo-Darwinistic acquisition of wealth, not on “mutual aid.” Such a survival-of-the-fittest economic system, a throwback to pre-animated nature, rejects morality, and orients society toward a non-sentient, mechanized process (from whence it came). Social organization based on social contract is negated. Therefore, the vision of civilization that Avellaneda evokes opposes the one that Paglia offers, where “society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check” (Paglia 2). This textual tension is not resolved because if Jorge and Enrique Otway represent “moral crime,” a transgression eschewed by “civilization,” the precepts of mutual-aid would require that they be punished. Yet if this were the case, the reader would not be so outraged and the novel would not hold meaning. We must see the two foreigners as they are, so that we may despise them. The father and son get away with impunity, in a manner not unlike the patrón, himself historically originating as a newcomer to a strange land. We conclude, therefore, that Avellaneda, a product of nineteenth-century, pre-suffrage, slave society, arrived at a conclusion much more pessimistic than the one at which Paglia would latter reach. Yet this gloomy view does leave an opening, as we do not come to know with certainty the final fate of our heroine, Carlota. While the parameters at the end of the novel would suggest that she remains trapped, not finding a solution, this conclusion is not explicit. It also behooves us to remember that Sab and Teresa did succeed in finding noble ways out of the cybernetic machine created by Avellaneda's money-man civilization.

The theme of love, common in the neo-pastoral (Williams 20-26) is central to the narrative. Sadly, Enrique is never able to free his soul from a monetary mentality. Furthermore, both Carlota and Sab suffer the pain of unrequited love, a heartache which, for Garfield, reinserts both women and slaves into Hispanic discourse (“La historia” 75). This theme of forbidden love also organizes Aves sin nido's narrative material. In Matto's novel, Manuel and Margarita cannot marry because, in a perverse anagnorisis, they find out that they share a father in common. Social norms prohibit incest and they cannot be together. Yet, like Avellaneda's novel, the prohibited love in Aves represents a criticism of an unjust society. If in Sab it foregrounds monetary greed, in Aves it shows priestly lasciviousness, not completely unrelated to the theme of avarice in upper-class society.

Finally, it must be argued, that the “nobleness” of Sab, which causes him to die, and the “sadness” of Carlota who cannot love in such a wicked environment, represent a positive model for nation building, the thesis of Sommer's book (Sommer 31-32). Of course both Sab and Carlota fail in their idealist quests, Sab in his death, and Carlota in her inability to free herself from financial culture. Yet both represent a beginning. The spark of interracial love is a very moving and positive milestone. The idea of an elevated soul provides a basis for tolerance, a necessary attribute for a society that would later be called multicultural. We see the same ideas in both Isaacs and Matto de Turner. The romantic notion of nature is a pure one, one that characterizes feminine love in María, and the love of innocence in Aves sin nido, which also, not coincidentally, is interracial. The romantic notion of nature also drives the feminine push for social justice in Aves, which in this sense can only strive (unsuccessfully) to pertain to the naturalist school of literature.

In Sab, the natural soul, then, is a necessary trait that, paradoxically, moves those characters away from their naturally selective roots, and closer to a social structure based on mutual aid. Carlota, Teresa and Sab all help each other. It could be argued, therefore, that Avellaneda's book is not so much a general criticism of white male culture, but a rejection of unethical capitalist practices, a praise of beatus ille nature, and of mutual aid. Of course the solutions that Sab offered were so radical that the novel was banned. Later in 1869, Avellaneda omitted it from her Complete Works, not for quality control—as Anthony Castagnaro has suggested (163)—but because she knew it was too controversial. Yet, in spite of the novel's infrequent publication (it is not in print in Spanish in 1996),³ the work continues to hypothesize an intriguing difference between nature and civilization.

Notes

1. The proto-Christianity which Matto de Turner presents here may have been derived from her association with Manuel González Prada. For the later's concept of proto-Christianity, see my La anarquía inmanentista de Manuel González Prada 9-83.

2. This theme continues to repeat itself in literature, appearing in our time in the work of Isabel Allende. In Casa de los espíritus (1982), we see Blanca's father work out a business arrangement with her husband (in an arranged marriage) in which “ella no tenía nada que decir” (Allende, 262). Blanca's husband, a count, explains that the family finances are “responsabilidades propiamente masculinas y que ella no tenía necesidad de llenar su cabecita de gorrión con problemas que no estaba en capacidad de comprender” (Allende, 268). In reality the theme of nature and civilization, men and women, is fundamental to Casa de los espíritus. The campesino Pedro García can talk to ants (non-Western) and when businessman Esteban Trueba (Blanca's father) passes by, “huían los animales domésticos y las plantas se ponían mustias” (Allende 283). Perhaps this relationship in Allende can be studied more thoroughly at another opportunity.

3. Recently the University of Texas Press has published Nina Scott's English translation of both Sab and the Autobiography, demonstrating the relevance of both works to United States' culture.

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