[In the following essay, Mandrell explains Bécquer's use of women as a theme in his Rimas.]

The dictum ‘Poesía … eres tú’ [Poetry … is you] (59; 549)—found both in the last line of the twenty-first rima (LG 21) and in the first of the Cartas literarias a una mujer—sums up what has long been considered one of the more pressing questions with respect to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and his poetry and prose.¹ This question is nothing less than the nature of woman, as well as the identity of the woman, in Bécquer's work, and it has had serious implications for the study of Bécquer. With few exceptions, discussions of the poetry included in the volume known as the Rimas [Poems; literally, rhymes] and of the texts in prose linked to the poetry—specifically the ‘Introducción sinfónica’ [“Symphonic Introduction”], ‘La mujer de piedra’ [“The Woman of Stone”], and the Cartas literarias a una mujer [Literary Letters to a Woman]—tend toward an explicit or even implicit consideration of the identity of the woman or various women to have inspired or to be addressed in these works. If speculation oscillates between the real and the ideal, between Bécquer's biography and the literary texts themselves, the biographical impulse predominates.

To be sure, many of Bécquer's biographers, critics, and exegetes are following the lead of the poet himself. In the Rimas, Bécquer seems to speak to a specific or ‘real’ woman (the ‘hermosa’, or beautiful woman, of the first rima (LG 11) or the woman with whom the poet reads Dante's Inferno in the twenty-ninth (LG 53)), yet also to desire a woman who is intangible or ‘ideal’ (the ‘vano fantasma de niebla y luz’ [vain phantasm of mist and light] (81/573) of the eleventh poem (LG 51)). It therefore comes as no surprise that Francisco López Estrada suggests in his study of the Cartas literarias that there is most likely a particular woman to whom the letters were addressed, perhaps Julia Espín or Bécquer's future wife Casta Esteban, but that, given the nature of the publication of these works, Bécquer is directing himself to all women, the ideal woman who would read the Cartas:

me parece que Bécquer (independientemente de cuanto hubiese en las Cartas de realidad vivida u observada) no quiso referirse en concreto a una mujer determinada, aunque todas las que tuvieron su amor puedan estar en ella, y esta mujer única de las Cartas se transfigure en la realidad cuantas veces sea necesario.

it seems to me that Bécquer (independently of however much lived or observed reality there might be in the Cartas) refused to refer directly to a specific woman, even though all of those that he loved might be found in her. This unique woman of the Cartas is transfigured in reality as often as necessary.

(70)

From Bécquer's poetry and prose to more recent discussions of Bécquer and his œuvre, then, the topic of woman has remained central and speculation endless on the identity or nature of the woman in Bécquer's poetry because we know so little for certain about the personal life of the poet that would illuminate his verse. As José Carlos de Torres remarks in the introduction to his edition of the poems—an edition that incorporates, not co-incidentally, the ‘Introducción sinfónica’, the ‘Mujer de piedra’, and the Cartas literarias as well as Ramón Rodríguez Correa's biographical introduction to the posthumous first and second editions of Bécquer's Obras completas [Complete Works]:

Respecto a su biografía, después de la lanzada por la leyenda romántica (incluso en nuestro siglo) podemos llegar a la conclusión de que algo muy profundo de sus sentimientos, que escribió en cartas, fatalmente se ha perdido para la crítica (literaria y psicológica, aunque ya no lo sabremos nunca), al quemarlas personalmente en vísperas del fin para no comprometer su honor … se destruyeron cartas que podían haber revelado datos claves sobre sus sentimientos y quién(es) era(n) las(s) mujer(es) inspiradora(s) de su amor. Lo que resta, puede sacarse de los mismos testimonios del poeta; las noticias que se encuentran en la prensa, ya que su profesión periodística ayuda a ello; los recuerdos de los amigos y, sobre todo, las aportaciones de una crítica objetiva interesada en la obra bacqueriana por la importancia que ha supuesto para la poesía posterior española.

With respect to his biography, after the launching of the romantic legend (including in our own century), we can arrive at the conclusion that some very profound trace of his sentiments, which he included in his letters, was fatally lost to criticism (literary and psychological, even though we will never know) when he personally burned his papers on the eve of his death so as not to compromise his honour … letters were destroyed that might have revealed key information as to his sentiments and the identity of the woman (women) who inspired his love. All we are left with is the poet's own testimony; information found in periodicals, especially since Bécquer was a journalist; the recollections of his friends and, above all, the contributions of an objective criticism interested in Bécquer's œuvre because of its importance to later Spanish poetry.

(11-12)

The constant return to the topic of woman indicates that there is something more of interest in the figure if not the identity of the woman in Bécquer's poetry and prose. If there can be no definitive answer to the question that is woman in Bécquer's Rimas, if we cannot know to whom the Cartas literarias were originally addressed, why are we still bothered by this issue? What itch are we trying to scratch when we once again try to read the sign of Bécquer's woman, to fit the signifier with a particular, as yet unknown, signified?

My own hunch is that interest in the woman in Bécquer's poetry and prose has less to do with the Rimas as poetic texts, or with the ‘Introducción sinfónica’, ‘La mujer de piedra’, and the Cartas literarias a una mujer as expressive poetics, than with the creation of a literary text and the patriarchal ideology often embodied in certain types of literature, particularly lyric poetry. In other words, scholars and critics have asked the wrong questions of Bécquer and his poetry, and have quite literally sought to determine the identity of the ‘tú’ of ‘Poesía … eres tú’ without carefully considering the various implications of the texts they are discussing. This is the case for two reasons, the first that, as Heidi Hartmann suggests, patriarchy can be defined as the ‘set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women’ (14). In this guise, the itch that is scratched when discussing women in Bécquer's poetry and prose is that pertaining to furthering the hegemony of patriarchal ideologies. The furthering of this ideology brings us to the second point. As Teresa L. Ebert explains in her Lacanian treatment of patriarchy and postmodern feminist theory, patriarchal culture tends toward concealing the ideological nature of its discourse:

ideology is the dynamic operator that organizes signifying practices and attempts to fix and to limit the representations, meaning, and subjectivities they produce according to the requirements of the symbolic order. … Ideology is thus misrepresentation, not in that it is a false version of some originary ‘real’ or that it stands in opposition to the ‘truth’ or an ‘objective’ science outside ideology (as in Althusser's theory), but in that it represents itself and its signifying practices as ‘natural’, unified—even global—totalities free of contradictions. It conceals not only its own inconsistencies but also its own construction through signification.

(26-7)

Bécquer's poetry and the pertinent texts in prose are intimately implicated in patriarchal ideologies, as are most discussions of the poet and his work. And the literary texts and their explications, to say nothing of the explanations of Bécquer's life, become part and parcel of the creation of and enabling ‘interdependence and solidarity among men’ as well as the concealment of its ‘own construction through signification’.

It is my contention, then, that discussions of Bécquer and the question of woman respond not necessarily to the poems in and of themselves, but to the thematic grouping of the poems as found in the volume entitled Rimas, and to the narrative given the poems by Rodríguez Correa in his biographical introduction to the posthumous Obras completas. Moreover, I would suggest that Bécquer's biography, especially as found in some of the more sensational and sentimental versions, furnishes an interpretative key that proves almost impossibly seductive to scholars and critics alike, whether or not these more apparently ‘objective’ readers realize it. Finally, the view of woman that emerges from the Rimas, biographies of Bécquer, and critical approaches to the question of woman in Bécquer's poetry and prose has less to do with Bécquer and much more to do with nineteenth-century attitudes toward women and artistic creation, and to the ways in which these attitudes are carried into and fostered in the twentieth century. Because any attempt to address the consequences of the question of woman in Bécquer's poetry and prose must confront prior considerations of the topic, my own argument will be elaborate, even Byzantine, since at least initially I will not be discussing the woman question in Bécquer's poetry per se, but the conditions that allow for this topic to appear to be so pressing and of such import. This is not intended as a slight to the topic of woman in Bécquer's poetry so much as an acknowledgment that woman as a topic is embedded in a more general literary and cultural discourse regarding Bécquer and his milieu. The question of woman remains the subtext, if not the more obvious focus, for my remarks.²

I also hasten to add that the topic of the text and order of the Rimas, and the problem of biographical interpretations, are not new to Bécquer criticism. Juan M. Díez Taboada comments in an important 1967 article that ‘nos interesa penetrar ahora en el origen de esta ordenación’ [it is of interest now to inquire into the origin of this ordering] (284); and he sketches out three critical paths to a consideration of the question. There is, first, biographical criticism, which deals with the literature in terms of events either real or imagined from Bécquer's life; second, the search to reproduce the chronology of the composition of the poems, which Díez Taboada deems ‘very common’; and third, the search for an internal logic that would give us an idea of the ‘psychological-amorous evolution that the book presents’ (289). Yet these three paths—which Díez Taboada would most likely admit are not the only ones available—do not address the assumptions that such an interest in order in general and in the present order in particular supposes. In other words, the textual question has less to do with what order than with why this order.

In fact, the literary texts we are discussing are, for the most part, somewhat artificial or inauthentic, in the sense that their grouping together constitutes a critical act or act of homage, and not a creative act attributable to the author. Bécquer's Obras completas were first published posthumously in two volumes in 1871, following the poet's death on 22 December 1870; a second, more complete edition came out in 1877. The poetic text known as the Rimas is a reordering of poems found in Bécquer's 600-page manuscript volume entitled ‘Libro de los gorriones: colección de proyectos, argumentos, ideas y planes de cosas diferentes que se concluirán o no según sople el viento’ [Book of Sparrows: Collection of Projects, Plots, Ideas, and Plans for Different Things that Might or Might not Be Finished in Accordance with how the Wind Blows]. This bound book of blank pages and manuscript texts contains the ‘Introducción sinfónica’ on pages 5 to 7; the ‘Mujer de piedra’ on pages 9 to 19; blank sheets from page 20 to page 528; and the poems, with an index, on pages 529 to 600. The Obras completas, in which the Rimas are to be found, is therefore not Bécquer's work but the creation of a group of Bécquer's friends, principally Rodríguez Correa with the help of José Casado del Alisal, Julio Nombela, Narciso Campillo, and Augusto Ferrán. Only sixteen of the seventy-nine poems in the Libro de los gorriones appeared in Spanish journals during Bécquer's lifetime; of the seventy-nine poems in the Libro de los gorriones, only seventy-six were published in the first Obras completas. Neither the ‘Introducción sinfónica’ nor the ‘Mujer de piedra’ were published previous to the posthumous Obras. As for the Cartas literarias a una mujer, they are not part of the Libro de los gorriones. Rather, they were published anonymously in the pages of the newspaper El Contemporáneo on 20 December 1860, 8 January 1861, and 4 and 23 April 1861 prior to their inclusion in the second—but not the first—edition of the Obras completas. The Bécquer we now read is, then, the narrative constructed by his friends from his various published and unpublished works.

If the Rimas are not presented either in the Obras completas or in most subsequent editions of the poetry, including modern editions, in the order in which they appear in the Libro de los gorriones, and if the ordering of the Rimas poses a problem to which textual critics return time and again, it is nevertheless an issue for the most part easily set aside, since the individual poems now possess two numbers by which they are designated: there is a roman numeral that situates them in a posthumously created body of poetry and that usually serves to suffice as a defining mark; and an arabic number, probably overlooked by most readers, that locates the poems in the Libro de los gorriones. In his study of Bécquer's poetry (now in its fourth edition), José Pedro Díaz writes of the discrepancy in the order of the poems:

Desde que las rimas fueron publicadas por primera vez, varios escritores señalaron en este orden un sentido y, algunos, la existencia de diversos grupos o series sucesivas. Rodríguez Correa ya insinuaba, en 1871, y otros afirmaron después concretamente, que ese ordenamiento parece descubrir las alternativas de una historia de amor que, partiendo de una primera etapa feliz y esperanzada, celebra luego francamente el amor, llora después su desengaño y canta, por último, la más angustiada soledad.

Since the poems were first published, various writers have detected in this order a sense and—in some cases—the existence of distinct groupings or successive series. As early as 1871, Rodríguez Correa insinuated—and others later explictly affirmed—that this order seemed to reveal the twists and turns of a love story that, beginning with an initial happy and hopeful phase, goes on to celebrate love openly before lamenting its disillusionment and finally singing of the anguish of solitude.

(370-2)

Díaz goes on to propose what is now accepted as the traditional division of the Rimas into four groupings. The first grouping comprises the first eleven poems and has to do with the nature of poetry itself. The second set—poems “XII” to “XXIX”—treats the topic of love in an ‘affirmative and luminous tone’ (374). The third series begins with poem “XXX” and ends with “LI,” and deals with disillusionment. The fourth and final group—poems “LII” to “LXXIX”—is considered the most disparate, the defining characteristic being less a topic or theme than a pervasive air of ‘unfathomable pain, desperate and solitary anguish’ (378). The quibbles other critics and scholars may have with Díaz's divisions and terminology, and their minor modifications to his sequence, are generally left to one side, in deference not only to Díaz but also to the overriding narrative provided by Rodríguez Correa.

By offering what is in essence a typically Romantic account of the vicissitudes of love, Rodríguez Correa pre-empts and shapes subsequent discussion. His version portrays Bécquer as a hero worthy of comparison to Goethe's Werther or many other Romantic figures, which means that the man that Rodríguez Correa identifies as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer is not so comprehensible to us as a human of flesh and bone but as a fictional form of the tragic artist. In the end, as we shall show, Rodríguez Correa's Bécquer is not so different from Clarín's Saturnino Bermúdez of La Regenta (1884-5) or Benito Pérez Galdós's Horacio of Tristana (1892).

Rodríguez Correa's representation of the poetry also reveals Bécquer's singularity:

personalmente siente y manifiesta sus particulares sensaciones, resultando, y así debe ser, que aquéllas son comprensibles para todos, porque las experimenta ni más ni menos que como cualquier otro, si bien revela la manera de percibirlas bajo una forma poética, a fin de despertar esos mismos sentimientos en los demás. Sus pasiones, sus alegrías, sus aspiraciones, sus dolores, sus esperanzas, sus desengaños, son espontáneos e ingenuos, y semejantes a los que lleva en sí todo corazón, por insensible que sea.

he personally feels and expresses his particular sensations, so that they are comprehensible to everyone, as they should be, because his emotions are those of every man, even if he shows the ability to describe them in a poetic form so as to awaken those same feelings in the rest of us. His passions, his joys, his aspirations, his pains, his hopes, his disillusionments are spontaneous and ingenuous, and similar to those held in every heart, however insensitive.

(211)

Note the way in which in this presentation Bécquer becomes the omniscient narrator of our own experiences and desires, the one who can speak of our secret lives. In generalizing from the poems that make up the Rimas not only the details of Bécquer's own life but also the elements of the lives of those who read the poetry, Rodríguez Correa turns Bécquer and the experiences articulated in the poetry into a master or key narrative of individual existence, a narrative that emphasizes the quintessentially Romantic character of amorous encounters as well as the quintessentially Romantic nature of the genius who speaks of them. The power of this account rests in the broad diffusion of these and similar terms for describing the surprisingly repetitive nature of love. In particular it assumes, first, the Romantic and tragic character of that love and, second, depends on a specific view of woman, both conditions that, as Susan Kirkpatrick notes, are intimately connected to the type of poetic subjectivity characteristic of Spanish Romanticism. According to Kirkpatrick, the ‘self represented by the Romantic text … is inevitably the writing subject in the process of constructing itself’ (11), as in Bécquer's poetry and as elucidated by Rodríguez Correa; but these very same texts ‘tacitly acknowledge the undeniably gendered character of Romantic paradigms of selfhood by identifying them almost exclusively with male figures and coding as feminine those entities that did not represent full, conscious, independent subjects—the beloved, nature, or the poetic creation’ (23).

As for the trajectory of the Rimas, Rodríguez Correa asserts a similarly familiar and coherent narrative, one that makes clear the nature of woman:

Todas las Rimas de Gustavo forman, como el Intermezzo de Heine, un poema, más ancho y completo que aquél, en que se encierra la vida de un poeta. Son, primero, las aspiraciones de un corazón ardiente, que busca en el arte la realización de sus deseos, dudando de su destino. … Siéntese poeta. …

No encontrando realizada su ilusión en la gloria, vuélvese espontáneamente hacia el amor, realismo del arte, y se entrega a él, y goza un momento, y sufre y llora, y desespera largos días, porque es condición humana, indiscutible, como un hecho consumado, el goce menor se paga aquí con los sufrimientos más atroces. Anúnciase esta nueva fase en la vida del poeta con la magnífica composición que, no sé por qué, me recuerda la atrevida manera de decir del Dante. … Sigue luego desenvolviéndose el [Illegible Text] de una pasión profunda, tan sentida como espontánea.

Una mujer hermosa, tan naturalmente hermosa, que … conmueve y fija el corazón del poeta, que se abre al amor, olvidándose de cuanto le rodea. La pasión es desde su principio inmensa, avasalladora, y con razón, puesto que se ve correspondida, o, al menos, parece satisfecha del objeto que la inspira: una mujer hermosa, aunque sin otra buena cualidad, porque es ingrata y estúpida. ¡Tarde lo conoce, cuando ya se siente engañado y descubre dentro de un pecho tan fino y suave, un corazón nido de sierpes, en el cual no hay una fibra que al amor responda! Aquí, en medio de sus dolores, llega el poeta a la desesperación; pero, cuando ésta le lleva ya al punto en que se pierde toda esperanza, él se detiene espontáneamente, medita en silencio, y aceptando por último su parte de dolor en el dolor común, prosigue su camino, triste.

All of Gustavo's Rimas form, like Heine's Intermezzo, one poem, fuller and more complete than the other, encapsulating the life of a poet. First, there are the aspirations of an ardent heart, that seeks in art the realization of its desires, doubting its own destiny. … He feels himself to be a poet. …

Failing to find his illusion realized in glory, he spontaneously turns to love, the realism of art, and he surrenders himself to it and enjoys a momentary happiness, and he suffers and cries, despairing for long days at a stretch, because it is indisputably the human condition, a consummated fact that the smallest pleasure is thus paid for with the most atrocious suffering. This new phase in the life of the poet announces itself with the magnificent composition that—for some reason—reminds me of Dante's daring manner of speaking. … Then the topic of a profound passion continues to unfold, as heartfelt as spontaneous.

A beautiful woman, so naturally beautiful … touches and fixes on the heart of the poet, who opens himself to love, forgetting everything around him. From the very beginning, the passion is immense, overwhelming, and with reason, since it is requited, or at least appears to satisfy the object inspiring it: a beautiful woman, without any other good quality, since she is ungrateful and stupid. He recognizes this all too late, feeling himself to be deceived and discovering in a breast so delicate and soft a heart like a nest of serpents, in which not a single fibre responds to love! Now in the midst of his pain, the poet plunges into despair; but when despair carries him to the point of losing all hope, he spontaneously pauses, meditates in silence, and, finally accepting his share of common pain, continues on his way, sad.

(217-19)

According to Rodríguez Correa, our reading of the Rimas ought to uncover the tragic love story in which the personal details of Bécquer's unfortunate experience become expressive of general human truths. More to the point is the fact that it is a particular woman to whom Bécquer's downfall may be attributed, a woman who is ‘naturally beautiful’ but ‘stupid’, a woman who is associated with the eternal sin of women (since her heart is a ‘nest of serpents’), the Romantic type recognized as ‘la belle dame sans merci’. Bécquer's personal history as a lyric poet victimized by tragedies of love and an early death not only situates itself in the readily comprehensible narrative tradition of the tragic artist but also accuses woman as the culprit in this sad story.

What we end up with, then, is a portrait of Bécquer that is so easily understood in literary terms and in terms of the cultural discourse of the mid-nineteenth century that the prose becomes as if transparent. For those who would remark on such things, the prose is anything but neutral. But for those for whom such points of view are not only natural but givens, the description of Bécquer provided by Rodríguez Correa and perpetuated by others who spoke about Bécquer seems all too normal. As for the portrait of woman that emerges, all of the negative attributes associated with women in the nineteenth century come to mind: she is vulgar, arrogant, stupid and foolish, hopelessly earthbound in her desires and aspirations, and fully capable of plunging any man in love with her into despair, or, worse, dragging him to his death.³ These naturalizing tendencies are, of course, similar to the ways in which Roland Barthes discusses myth in the modern world. In Barthes's Saussurian reading of myth, he shows how myth both bears and universalizes or, better, naturalizes certain parts of the world so as to make them immediately comprehensible in terms of bourgeois ideology, since, when ‘practised on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become’ (140). Thus, the temporal aspects of the world, of ‘reality’, are linked to the timeless discourse of myth to make things appear one way or another because that is the way they have always been and should be:

What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. And just as bourgeois ideology is defined by the abandonment of the name ‘bourgeois’, myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory they once were made.

(142)

Rodríguez Correa's presentation of Bécquer qualifies as an example of this type of mythical discourse. When Rodríguez Correa assumes that Bécquer's ‘pasiones, sus alegrías, sus aspiraciones, sus dolores, sus esperanzas, sus desengaños, son espontáneos e ingenuos, y semejantes a los que lleva en sí todo corazón, por insensible que sea’ [passions, his joys, his aspirations, his pains, his hopes, his disillusionments are spontaneous and ingenuous, and similar to those held in every heart, however insensitive], he presumes that we as readers understand those emotions as universal, that ‘spontaneity’ is desired and to be envied in ‘every heart, however insensitive’. This is likewise the case in the discussion of the trajectory of the Rimas, the recurring recourse to ‘spontaneity’, ‘the realism [and therefore naturalized comprehensibility of] art’, the ‘beautiful woman, so naturally beautiful’, the italics emphasizing the ‘heart like a nest of serpents’, which harks back to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. In playing on the cultural myths of love and of women, Rodríguez Correa provokes sympathy for Bécquer by creating of him the nineteenth-century Spanish version of Barthes's ‘Eternal Man’; and these myths masked as cultural truths, although made, readily conceal the processes by which they have been elaborated.

We could corroborate the view that the presentation of Bécquer is all too natural in a number of different ways, including references to nineteenth-century treatises and conduct manuals, but the easiest might be to demonstrate the literary qualities of these narratives by turning to nineteenth-century novelistic texts. As points of comparison, then, consider briefly the cases of Clarín's Saturnino Bermúdez of La Regenta and Galdós's Horacio of Tristana and their relations with women, the first as a kind of parodic counterpart to the tragic poet, the second as a more sanguine version of the inspired artist. Saturnino Bermúdez is, of course, the local historian in Clarín's Vetusta, a man misunderstood by those around him, especially the single and married women to whom he devotes himself. He ends up remarking after yet another rebuff by Obdulia, a local woman of easy virtue, ‘¡Así eran las mujeres! ¡así era singularmente aquella mujer! ¿Para qué amarlas? ¿Para qué perseguir el ideal del amor? O mejor dicho, ¿para qué amar a las mujeres vivas, de carne y hueso? Mejor era soñar, seguir soñando’ [Such was Woman! Such, in particular, was this woman! Wherefore love women? Wherefore pursue the ideal of love? Or rather, wherefore love real women, women of flesh and blood? Better far to dream—to continue dreaming] (i. 503; Eng. trans. 298). We find in Saturnino Bermúdez the pathetic reincarnation of the tragic individual who gives up on love for the inspiration afforded by the putative feminine ideal. Bermúdez becomes a virtual parody of the real yet fictionalized Bécquer, who, though supposedly not fulfilled in the same way, would never have experienced the despair attributed to him had he not opened himself up to disillusionment in love as found at the hands of heartless—and stupid—women.

In contrast, Galdós's painter Horacio is not tragic, although his affair with Tristana draws to a tragic conclusion when one of her legs is amputated. Indeed, Horacio is of interest precisely because he is not overcome and subsequently disabled by unrequited love, and because the denouement of his relationship takes place over the course of a lengthy correspondence in which the many literary references to other lovers idealize love and destroy it, much as Bécquer's affections wane in the Cartas literarias a una mujer as the relationship between the poet and woman recedes into the past tenses of the preterite and imperfect. In the case of Galdós's Horacio, the love that Tristana and he share is shaded ironically by the narrative presentation such that it becomes the woman who would be an artist, and not the artist himself, who bears the burden of the tragedy. When Tristana and Horacio allow their relationship to progress to include sexual congress—a development that the narrator slyly alludes to by referring to Dante's Paolo and Francesca of the Inferno with his mention that the two lovers rarely walked outdoors, ‘Y desde aquel día ya no pasearon más’ [And from that day on they walked no more] (1562)—Tristana, her ambition, and her intelligence begin to assume almost monstrous proportions and to affect Horacio in dire ways as he loses interest in painting:

Estos alientos de artista, estos arranques de mujer superior, encantaban al buen Díaz, el cual, a poco de aquellos íntimos tratos, empezó a notar que la enamorada joven se iba creciendo a los ojos de él y le empequeñecía. … había soñado en Tristana la mujer subordinada al hombre en inteligencia y en voluntad, la esposa que vive de la savia moral e intelectual del esposo y que con los ojos y con el corazón de él ve y siente.

Her artistic spirit, her flights of feminine intelligence, delighted young Díaz. Not long after the beginning of their intimacy he noticed that she was growing before his eyes—and diminishing him. … in Tristana he had dreamed of the woman subordinated to man in intellect and will, the wife who lives on the husband's moral and intellectual sap and sees and feels with his eyes and his heart.

(1563)

Although Horacio laughingly allows that he will ‘wear the skirts’ (1566), Tristana's independence, which at times she stridently asserts, allows them to drift apart. In the end, Horacio suggests to Tristana: ‘no te aferres tanto a esa aspiración, que podría resultar impracticable. Entrégate a mí sin reserva. ¡Ser mi compañera de toda la vida; ayudarme y sostenerme con tu cariño! … ¿Te parece que hay un oficio mejor ni arte más hermosos? Hacer feliz a un hombre que te hará feliz, ¿qué más?’ [don't cling too tightly to your aspiration; it might turn out to be impractical. Give yourself to me completely, without reserve. Be my lifelong companion; help me and support me with your love! … Do you think there's a higher work or a more beautiful art? Make a man happy who will make you happy, what more?] (1569-70). Once Horacio escapes from Tristana, he rediscovers his pleasure in art and nature; and when one of Tristana's legs is amputated, he is free of her forever.

Tristana's personal ambition, which for Horacio represents something unnatural, finds its counterpart in Clarín's Ana Ozores, la Regenta of the novel of the same title. When Ana is caught writing poetry in a notebook, the world around her reacts as one. The priest Ripamilán is perhaps the most charitable when he explains, ‘las mujeres deben ocuparse en más dulces tareas; las musas no escriben, inspiran’ [women should occupy themselves in gentler tasks; the Muses don't write, they inspire] (i. 232; 112), but the bottom line is that ‘En una mujer hermosa es imperdonable el vicio de escribir’ [In a beautiful woman, writing is an unpardonable vice] (i. 234; 113). Woman becomes and is encouraged to embody in these texts the problematic yet living muse of men, and, as such, her function as an inspiration is to exist as the necessary yet secondary element in an equation involving three terms: to exist between two men (much as Ana Ozores does between Fermín de Pas and Alvaro Mesía or Tristana exists between Don Lope and Horacio), between two families (as in exchange theories), or between an author and the literary text (as women become for Saturnino Bermúdez).

The narrative created by Rodríguez Correa in his biographical introduction to the Rimas, as exemplified by reading the poetry as a collection of autobiographical texts, re-creates as real the standard nineteenth-century text regarding women by invoking many of the time-honoured feminine stereotypes. As Lou Charnon-Deutsch comments apropos of novelists: ‘Nineteenth-century male authors, eager to explore the dilemma of individuality in their male characters, very often take short cuts and rely for their female characters on the time-worn roles women play in Western literature: wicked stepmother, femme fatale, siren, keeper of cults, virgin, goddess, fisherman's wife, and Cinderella’ (17). Clearly, Rodríguez Correa would have us believe that, in the case of Bécquer, the poet deserved and in fact sought a keeper of cults, a virginal—yet sexually desirable and available—goddess, a Cinderella, but ended up time and again with some version or even combination of the wicked stepmother, femme fatale, siren, or fisherman's wife.

In terms of these accounts, Bécquer ought to have dealt with his desire for the all-too-real and imperfect woman by sublimating that desire in deference to the all-too-ideal yet fortunately remote woman-as-muse, as he suggests in the eleventh poem (LG 51). If the ‘vain phantasm of mist and light’ is the ideal for Bécquer and for those who have written sentimentally of his life, then reality—in the form of the hopelessly prosaic and real women he loved or his wife Casta—was terribly disappointing, and that disappointment finds expression in laments for Bécquer's unrequited loves and early death. If, on the other hand, we read the eleventh poem as exemplary of a form of discourse on women—and Rodríguez Correa's introduction as integral to that tradition—we can begin to see how the construction of Bécquer as a tragic victim of life and love both draws from and reinforces traditional views of women.

As an indication of how pervasive that tradition is as well as how eternal some would see it, we need only turn to the twenty-ninth rima (LG 53), which harks back to Dante, both in the epigraph to the poem and in the body of the poem itself. This poem is particularly resonant at this moment in our discussion, expressing the notion of the timeless quality of the experience of love—from Lancelot and Guinevere, to Paolo and Francesca, and from there to Bécquer and the nameless woman—and possibly clarifying Rodríguez Correa's remark about ‘la atrevida manera de decir del Dante’ [Dante's daring manner of speaking]; it also anticipates Galdós's qualified reference to the initiation of a sexual relationship between Tristana and Horacio. But the real point has to do with the fact that the view of woman found in the Rimas and in Rodríguez Correa's commentary presumes a remarkable constancy, at least in cultural terms, from the mythical times of Adam and Eve and the Arthurian legends into the nineteenth century.

It would be optimistic to suggest that this nineteenth-century view of woman is no longer common currency in the twentieth. Bécquer's twentieth-century exegetes, editors, and biographers almost all confirm the view of women dominant in the nineteenth century that allowed for the propagation and diffusion of the romantic legend surrounding Bécquer.

Consider two examples. The first is from Eduardo L. del Palacio's Pasión y gloria de Gustavo Adolfo [The Passion and Glory of Gustavo Adolfo] (1947), in which woman is seen as the divine muse. The second moves back slightly in time to Pedro Marroquín y Aguirre's Bécquer: el poeta del amor y del dolor [Bécquer: Poet of Love and of Pain] (2nd edition, 1938). The part played by Eduardo L. del Palacio's commentary in the trajectory being traced seems almost too easy to discern. His approach obviously develops out of Rodríguez Correa's biographical presentation of Bécquer and his poetry and pertains to traditional views of women:

Poeta … es quien hace, quien crea lo inmaterial, lo espiritual. … Por eso, los más y los mejores de los poetas cantan a Dios, que es un poco cantarse a sí mismos, o a la mujer, que es cantar a la Poesía. … Las mujeres son nuestras razones de ser, el eje de nuestra vida, la médula de nuestros ideales. … La mujer es, pues, poesía, Así la vemos …, o la debemos ver los varones.

The poet … is one who makes, who creates that which is without matter, that which is spiritual. … For this reason, most poets—and the best of them—sing to God, which is a bit like singing to themselves, or they sing to woman, which is to sing to Poetry. … Women are our raison d'être, the core of our lives, the marrow of our ideals. … Woman is, thus, poetry. And that's how we men see her …, or how we ought to see her.

(34-5)

Woman is here seen as a kind of muse or even domestic angel, two more common types of women discussed in nineteenth-century Spain. It is but one small step from this view of woman as poetry to an invocation of the ‘ideal woman’ in Bécquer's poetry, the woman who is, according to del Palacio, always ‘inasequible o porque en efecto no se la alcanza, o porque no se la quiere alcanzar no sea que se mancille con las impurezas de la realidad’ [inaccessible either because, in effect, he cannot reach her, or because he does not wish to reach her so as not to sully her with the impurities of reality] (47-8).⁴

If the view that emerges from this discussion of Bécquer is relatively constant with respect to other considerations of the poet, we can hazard the assertion that it is absolutely consistent with respect to treatments of the woman in Bécquer's poetry in particular and of women in general. In other words, the views expressed represent nothing less than the ongoing force and reiteration of the values of patriarchal Spain. But there is an overtly political valence to the use of Bécquer and his texts that bears consideration, too. To return to Marroquín y Aguirre's thirty-eight-page appreciation of the poet, we need only look at the double dedications to observe the political cast given to texts conceived of as hospitable to traditional values.

The first dedication to Marroquín y Aguirre's essay reads:

En testimonio sencillísimo y humilde de amor a España, y como homenaje de fervorosa admiración por el bizarro Ejército de España, que por honrarla, defenderla y salvar la [sic], lucha con bravura ejemplar, y vitoreándola, vence y muere en los frentes, destina el autor de este librillo los productors de su venta en favor del Tabaco del Soldado, colaborando modestísimamente en la obra patriótica que realiza el Centro de Cultura Femenina, de San Sebastián, taller elegante y coquetón, en el que manos bonitas de mujer española trabajan asidua y alegremente, poniendo en su labor cariño, entusiasmo y devoción española, porque es en pro de los bravos soldados nacionales, y para enviarles a los parapetos, a las trincheras, a los hospitales y sanatorios, el consuelo, el quita pesares [sic] que constituye el inocente recreo de convertir en nubes azuladas que se pierden allá arriba, el polvillo envuelto en leves papelitos blancos.

In the most simple and humble testimony of love for Spain, and as an homage of fervent admiration for the gallant Spanish Army which, as a means of honouring Spain, defending it, and saving it, fights with exemplary valour and, saluting Spain, conquers and dies at the fronts, the author of this little book destines the profits from its sale to the Soldier's Tobacco, thus collaborating modestly in the patriotic work realized by the Women's Cultural Centre at San Sebastián, an elegant and charming workshop in which the lovely hands of Spanish women work assiduously and happily, putting Spanish tenderness, enthusiasm, and devotion into their labours, which are undertaken on behalf of the brave Nationalist soldiers so as to send to them, in the parapets, trenches, hospitals, and sanatoriums, the consolation and distractions that constitute the innocent recreation of converting those fine strands wrapped in slim white papers into blue-tinged clouds that lose themselves up on high.

The second runs:

A S.E. el Generalísimo don Francisco Franco

Mi General:

¿A quién, mejor que al Jefe Supremo de los ejércitos de aire, tierra y mar, que es, en estos trágicos, pero heroicos tiempos que alcanzamos, el más glorioso representante del soldado de España, a la vez la encarnación más genuina del honor militar español, he de dedicar, obedeciendo a grato deber y a fervorosa voluntad, un librillo que tiene por finalidad llevar una agradable y hasta necesaria distracción, en sus horas de descanso, al soldado abnegado y patriota, en cuya bravura confía V.E. para realizar la excelsa tarea de reconstruir la patria?

Por esto me atrevo a rogar a V.E. que tenga a bien aceptar la humilde ofrenda, sin atender al escaso valer de tan modestas páginas, ni a la insignificancia y oscuridad de quien, doliéndole hondamente España, las escribió, fijos el pensamiento y el corazón en esta tierra inmortal que adora rendidamente; y le ruego asimismo que tan sólo vea en ella mi anhelo de servir a la causa nacional, siquiera con el pobre fruto de mi menguado ingenio, ya que el cielo no me ha concedido la ventura envidiable de dar, en fervoroso holocausto, mi vida por España.

To His Excellency Generalísimo Francisco Franco

My General:

To whom could I, obeying a welcome duty and ardent wish, better dedicate a little book that has as its end that of being an agreeable and even necessary distraction for the selfless and patriotic soldier—on whose valour Your Excellency relies for the realization of the lofty task of reconstructing the fatherland—in his hours of rest than to the Supreme Chief of the Air Force, Army, and Navy, the man who, in these tragic yet heroic times in which we find ourselves, is the most glorious representative of the Spanish soldier as well as the most genuine incarnation of Spanish military honour?

For these reasons, I venture to beg Your Excellency to be so kind as to accept this humble offering without taking note of the slight value of such modest pages or of the insignificance and obscurity of the person who, deeply afflicted by Spain, wrote them, his thoughts and heart fixed on this immortal land that he adores devotedly. And I likewise beg you only to see in them my longing to serve the National cause, even if with the poor fruits of my paltry creativity, since the heavens have not granted me the enviable fortune of offering up my life for Spain in an ardent holocaust.

To dismiss the dedications to a small, critically insignificant book on Bécquer as irrelevant to Bécquer as an author and to studies of his work would be to fail to take into account our previous discussion and the broader ideological work of which literature and its study are a part. The fact that a book on Bécquer was dedicated to Franco on the eve of his victory over the Republican forces, and, moreover, carried an additional tribute to the women working on behalf of the Nationalist forces in the Centro de Cultura Femenina at San Sebastián, implies that there is something inherent in the topic of Bécquer and woman that lends itself to such appropriation.

Such dedications help us answer the question asked earlier: ‘What itch are we trying to scratch when we once again try to read the sign of Bécquer's woman?’ The itch is the continuing hegemony of patriarchy; the scratch, the apparent need to reinforce its authority. The construction of Bécquer, and its relation to the sign of woman in Bécquer's works as well as in biographies and critical treatments of his poetry and prose, obeys the dynamics of patriarchal ideology and signification in the assumption of the immediate comprehensibility, essentiality, and universality of the representation of the second of the two primary players: ‘woman’. As Rubén Benítez points out, Bécquer was and is a ‘símbolo del alma española de su época … [que] sufrió intensamente la nostalgia del pasado, la inseguridad del presente, el temor al futuro’ [symbol of the Spanish soul of his epoch … [who] suffered intensely from nostalgia for the past, insecurity in the present, and fear of the future] (49). Nostalgia for the past and past values is implicit in the dictum ‘Poesía eres … tú’. As the foundation on which Bécquer's poetry and interpretations of that poetry have been erected, these words relegate women to the role of muse and helpmeet, and become virtually a command, possibly a warning. The woman who is not a muse is vulgar, stupid, pathologically sexual, and therefore liable to punishment, be it in the form of dismemberment or disfigurement, as with Galdós's Tristana, or social isolation, as with Clarín's Ana Ozores.

José Carlos de Torres's ‘objective criticism’ aside, we must begin to read Bécquer in a much more complex manner, not only as the author of the divinely spiritual Rimas, but as someone whose life and work have become part of a hegemonic cultural discourse that reformulates and restates its aims in almost every new discussion. A more complex reading of Bécquer would take into account his involvement in the creation of the satirical/pornographic water-colours signed by the pseudonym ‘SEM’, as well as his writings about and visual representations of women.⁵ This reconsideration of Bécquer would also have to avoid the trap of received opinion and seductive biography. In this way, we would see that the dictum ‘Poesía … eres tú’ has as much to say about us and our appropriation of Becquer as it does about Bécquer, his poetry and prose, and his cultural moment. Although such a rereading of Bécquer would represent an enormous undertaking, it would lead to a reconsideration of the nature and role of the male author in nineteenth-century Spain alongside the role relegated to women. With such a rereading, as initiated here, we may begin to understand the peculiar effect and force of the traditional lyric link between poetry and women, the peculiar effect of Bécquer's Rimas and the force of the many accounts of his poetry and life. In this new reading the words ‘Poesía … eres tú’ not only bear the mark of the construction of Bécquer and the sign of woman. The words and the ellipses that both separate and join them speak of the continuing effect and force of such classic formulations, to say nothing of the possibility of their undoing.

Notes

1. On the few occasions necessary, I have chosen to cite the poetry from the facsimile edition, using modern orthography and accentuation but preserving the original punctuation. Page references will be given in parentheses first to the transcription in the facsimile edition and then to the original manuscript page in the Libro de los gorriones. I will, however, refer to the individual poems by the roman numerals associated with the Rimas and include parenthetical reference to the numbering in the Libro de los gorriones (LG).

2. For the most part, my argument is non-theoretical in nature, although there are a number of critical and theoretical texts and traditions that furnish the implicit framework. In addition to the essays by Ebert and Hartmann, works by the following are behind many of my ideas: in general, Nancy Armstrong, Teresa de Lauretis, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Haunani-Kay Trask; with respect to Spain, see Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Susan Kirkpatrick, and Geraldine M. Scanlon.

3. For a personal turn to the discussion of woman in Bécquer, see the contemporary account of Eusebio Blasco. Blasco's assessment of Casta is cited by most of Bécquer's biographers, and is usually seconded by them. José Andrés Vázquez is perhaps more vitriolic than many, but he captures the prevailing sentiment if not the tone. Rica Brown (150-61) is more balanced than Vázquez while Gabriel Celaya attempts to restore to Bécquer's wife some measure of respectability, with mixed results (66-9).

4. Probably the most obvious expression of the role played by this ‘ideal’ woman in Bécquer's poetry is Díez Taboada 1965.

5. The collection of water-colours is included in Bécquer and Becquer. See also the introductory essays by Robert Pageard, Lee Fontanella, and María Dolores Cabra Loredo.

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