SOURCE: Wilcox, John C. “Rosalía de Castro.” In Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990: Toward a Gynocentric Vision, pp. 44-83. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Unlike her sisters, Rosalía de Castro has established a secure reputation in Peninsular literature, but such was not the case during her lifetime (1837-85), when she fluctuated between being a “Nobody” (Emily Dickinson's word) and a “santiña” (dear little saint).¹ Few have noted her “monstrous” qualities, to use Gilbert and Gubar's metaphor for a committed woman artist whose subconscious mind is intent on self-determination; but it is the “monstrous” as opposed to “angelic” persona that interests today's students of poetry. Rosalía's “monster” persona can be glimpsed if her poems are read as texts that were generated by a writing subject who was also female. By foregrounding the monster within Rosalía, I believe that more of her poetic originality and influence on poets of this century can be appreciated.

With one or two notable exceptions, the major criticism of Rosalía's work focuses not on female or feminist impulses but on those characteristics her poems share with all poetry: themes, style, symbols, regionalism, personal angst, religious doubt.² These studies are empathetic and exhaustive in their careful treatment of the important characteristics of Rosalía's poems, but they focus on features that could be found in any Modern poet, most of whom are males—those very males who established the canonical standards by which poetry by women is traditionally judged. The fact that Rosalía was a woman, though not ignored,³ is not foregrounded, a perspective that was altered in the early 1980s when Matilde Albert Robatto carefully studied the condition of woman during Rosalía's time as well as the view the poet presents in her prose and poetry of the Galician woman's predicament.⁴ Then in 1986, several critics began to focus on Rosalía's female and feminist characteristics⁵ and to unearth a feminized infrastructure to her poetry; that is, such studies began to allow postmodern readers to see that on one level Rosalía's work is a covert exploration of experiences that were central to her as a woman. A reader today can therefore make a legitimate attempt to find that on one level Rosalía's poetry was dealing “with central female experiences from a specifically female perspective.”⁶ Or, to follow Ostriker (Stealing 7) but to adapt her words: postmodern readers of Rosalía's poetry should begin to argue that an increasing proportion of her work is explicitly female in the sense that Rosalía chose to explore experiences central to her sex and to find a form and a style appropriate to the exploration of such experiences.

Rosalía de Castro published three principal books of poetry over a period of twenty years:⁷Cantares gallegos (Galician songs) appeared in 1863, in Galician; Follas novas (New leaves) in 1880, also in Galician; and En las orillas del Sar (On the banks of the Sar) in 1884, in Castilian.⁸ In general, her first book is known for its regionalistic joie de vivre, while her second and third books are singled out for their resignation, sadness, and homesickness (saudade). Although I agree in general with this poetic trajectory,⁹ I think it diminishes her work by making us see it through andromyopic eyes.¹⁰ Hence, in the following remarks I shall focus on Rosalía's marginalization (i.e., “Nobody” status) and foreground her “monstrous”—as opposed to “angelic”—qualities. I study her anger and her negative vision of womanhood, as well as the gynocentric style and vision she selects to undermine patriarchal norms.

Rosalía's marginalization was threefold: political, social, and esthetic. Catherine Davies, the first to research Rosalía's marginalization, has demonstrated that Rosalía and her husband, Manuel de Murguía, as Galician regionalists, identified themselves with liberal and progressive policies which provoked the hostility of the conservative Castilian centralists. The latter's antiregionalist campaign of prolonged hostility, Davies says, “discouraged Rosalía during her lifetime and belittled the reputation of her work after her death in July 1885” (“Rosalía” 610). Davies documents the intense anti-Rosalía campaign initiated by the prestigious novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán.¹¹ In her fascinating study, Davies concludes: “it was by means of their savage attack on a pluralist society and an autonomous Galicia that Rosalía's enemies, the Church, the oligarchy, and their cultural cliques, managed to keep her out of the main current of Spanish literature for so long” (“Rosalía” 619).¹² This politically based marginalization lasted until around 1912, when, as Davies notes, both Unamuno and Azorín “wrote warmly of Rosalía” (618).¹³ Much later, in 1953, Juan Ramón Jiménez acknowledged Rosalía's originality in his lectures on Modernism.¹⁴

In addition to political marginalization, Rosalía, like all women artists of the nineteenth century, had to deal with pressures of a social—and psychological—nature that dissuaded her from being a writer. Some women writers of the time dealt with this by using their initials rather than their full names; others opted to publish under a male pseudonym.¹⁵ Rosalía de Castro contemplated the latter, as a brief excursus on the extrinsic history of the Cantares (1863) will testify.

It was Manuel Murguía, if we are to believe him, who pressured his wife into completing the Cantares as well as into writing additional poems and a prologue required for their publication. For a while, Rosalía refused to oblige; she even went to the extreme of telling her husband that it would be better if the poems appeared under his own name.¹⁶ It is quite possible to gloss over these rapports de fait as indications of Rosalía's modest nature. However, recent feminist criticism (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 554-58) has clearly demonstrated that patriarchal culture conditioned the nineteenth-century woman artist to believe that she possessed neither the talent nor even the humanity to be a creative artist. The woman poet learned quickly that she was “Nobody” as far as “Poetry” with a capital “P” was concerned, and she acted accordingly.

Such an attitude is apparent in Rosalía's concluding poem to the Cantares,¹⁷ where she apologizes for what she perceives as her lack of poetic finesse:

1 Yo cantar, cantar, canté,
          aunque mi gracia era poca,
          que nunca (y de ello me pesa)
          fui yo una niña graciosa.
5 Canté como mal sabía,
          con mil vueltas enredosas,
          como hacen los que no saben
          directamente una cosa.
          Pero después, con cuidado,
10 y un poco más alto ahora,
          fui soltando mis cantigas
          como a quien nada le importan.
          Mas en verdad bien quisiera,
          que fuesen más melodiosas.
15 Yo bien quisiera que en ellas
          bailasen sol y palomas,
          con la luz las blandas aguas,
          mansos aires con las rosas.
          Que en ellas claras se viesen
20 espumas de verdes ondas,
          del cielo blancas estrellas,
          de tierra plantas hermosas,
          nieblas de color sombrío
          que las montañas arropan,
25 los gritos del triste búho,
          y aún las campanas que doblan,
          la primavera que ríe,
          y las aves voladoras.
          Canta que te canta, mientras
30 el corazón triste llora.
          Esto y aún más, bien quisiera
          decir con lengua graciosa:
          mas donde gracia me falta
          el sentimiento me sobra:
35 aunque éste tampoco basta
          para explicar ciertas cosas;
          por fuera a veces se canta,
          mientras por dentro se llora.
          No me expliqué cual quisiera
40 que soy de palabras corta;
          si gracia al cantar no tengo,
          el amor patrio me ahoga.
          Yo cantar, cantar, canté,
          aunque mi gracia era poca.
45 ¡Mas qué he de hacer, desdichada,
          si no nací más graciosa!

(Cantares, trans. Barja, 298, 300)¹⁸

(As for me, I sing and sing, I sang, / even though I had little grace, / for I never was a graceful girl / (which distresses me). / I sang, poor singer that I am, / but with hundreds of intricate trills, / like those who've never known / a thing by heart. / But later, with care, / and now a little higher, / I chirped out my songs, / as if it were all the same to me. / But in truth, I wished / they'd been more melodious. / I really wanted the sun / to dance in them with the doves, / the light with the smooth waters, / the gentle breezes with the roses. / I wanted in their clarity to manifest / the green waves' spray / the sky's white stars, / the earth's lovely plants, / the somber mists / that cover the mountains, / the sad owl's cries, / and even the bells that toll, / the Spring that laughs, / and the birds that fly. / You go on singing, while / your sad heart weeps. / All this and more I really wanted / to express in gracious speech: / but what I lack in grace, / I make up for in feeling: / but nor is that enough / to explain certain things; / from the outside at times it seems that one's singing, / when inside one's weeping. / I couldn't say what I wanted to / because I'm poor with words; / if I'm graceless when I sing, / it's because I choke on love for my native land. / As for me, I sing and sing, / I sang, even though I had little grace. / But, woe is me, what more could I do / if I wasn't born more graceful.)

This is a romance (“ballad”) but unlike a traditional romance that presents a coherent vision of an aspect of reality, this poem's vision is bifurcated:¹⁹ there is an imaginative response to the wonders of nature (ll. 15-30) which is framed by the speaker's protestations of her inferior talent (ll. 1-14, 31-46). Because of this dichotomy, the poem becomes an intriguing text: is it its frame (lack of talent), or that which it frames (nature)?

The text's frame is certainly an exercise in self-deprecation and, in retrospect, a clear manifestation of the inferiority complex from which Rosalía suffered at the beginning of her poetic career. Despite the fact that she has just given her readers thirty-four original poems, the Cantares gallegos, in her concluding piece Rosalía chooses to apologize for the lack of “gracia” (charm and wit [ll. 2, 33, 41, 44]) she perceives in all those songs; she even attributes this to the fact that she herself has never been a “graciosa” (charming woman [ll. 4, 32, 46]).²⁰ The words “gracia” and “graciosa” signify “grace” or “charm,” but also something or someone “amusing,” “witty,” “entertaining.”

Is Rosalía begging for her readers' indulgence? Is she saying: this poem is written by a woman, therefore you should not expect linguistic grace and mental wit (e.g., ll. 5, 6, 14, 40), and to compensate for my gauche talents, I offer you my own honest and straightforward feelings (l. 34)—which, of course, tradition allows women poets to display—and my deep-felt love for the region of the country where I was born (l. 42)?

It may well be that Rosalía is playing the modestry game. However, she may also be protesting too much, thereby subconsciously offering a critique of the lack of grace and wit to be found in poetry written by males at that time. Poullain notes that Murguía claimed that Rosalía published the Cantares in Galician because she was so disgusted by the poor use of the Galician language she found in the 1861 Album de la caridad (Charity album) (Rosalía Castro 51 and n. 67).²¹ We can therefore assume that in part Rosalía was conscious of the superiority of her own talents.²² Indeed, today's readers who carefully consider the four stanzas that constitute the body of “Yo cantar, cantar” (“As for me, I sing and sing” [ll. 15-30]) must disagree with the speaker of the poem and conclude that the poet displays both grace and intelligence in the way she represents that ideal world of natural beauty (which she also describes in similar terms but in prose in her prologue [Obras 1:67-71]). Rosalía's metaphors (ll. 16, 24) are audacious, her use of bird imagery (ll. 16, 25, 28) apposite, as is her exploitation of chiaroscuro (ll. 17, 21, 23), sound symbolism (ll. 25-26), synaesthesia (ll. 17-18), and the elements (earth, air, water). She writes what we are accustomed to think of as a “modern” poem.

Hence, for today's readers this poem (and all the Cantares) is more than just a paean to Galicia from one who was overwhelmed by an intense love for her native region (“amor patrio” [l. 42]). Its double vision can be read on another level as a schizophrenic response to an androcentric culture. It is a text that manifests a psychological split between a voice that claims that it has little talent and a poet who demonstrates no few poetic gifts. This double-voiced text is Rosalía's response to the patriarchal culture of her time, her way of coping with the restrictions placed on women poets in the nineteenth century, when women were conditioned to believe that it was unnatural for them to be poets. What better way of demonstrating real talent than by framing a nature poem with a reflection on one's limitations as a woman poet, by turning one's reputed physical and linguistic drawbacks into an intriguing verbal artifact?

I have been arguing that Rosalía was marginalized as a poet by both the political and social prejudices that prevailed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There is also a third factor in Rosalía de Castro's marginalization: an esthetic self-marginalization, which derived from the fact that as a fledgling poet she tried to imitate a male model to whom she compared her own talents unfavorably.

In her prologue to the Cantares, Rosalía affirms that the inspiration for her poems came from El libro de los cantares (The Book of Songs) by the Galician writer don Antonio de Trueba y de la Quintana (1819-89). Trueba's was a very popular collection of fifty-four poems (romances [ballads] and coplas [folksongs]) which first appeared in 1851. As Kulp-Hill observes in her remarks on Rosalía's debt to and striking difference from Trueba, El libro de los cantares “had eight editions in twenty years” (Manner and Mood 34-35) In addition, Poullain (Rosalía Castro 56) reminds us that, in his prologue to Ferrán's La soledad (Solitude), Bécquer himself praised Trueba highly as a model for “intimist” poetry. However, Varela (Poesía 152) sums up the reaction of today's readers to El libro de los cantares when he asserts that in comparison to Rosalía, Trueba's verse appears “pale, insipid, trite” (“pálido, soso, simplón”). More recently, Feal Deibe (“Sobre el feminismo” 313 and n. 13) found little human value in Trueba's poems. Indeed, today these fifty-four poems will strike a reader as commonplace, sentimental, jingoistic. They now read as a well-versified collection of facile tales, ridden with clichés and superficial thoughts. Let me justify these assertions and, by implication, suggest the originality and talent of Rosalía de Castro.

Trueba is both traditional and conservative in his religious views and his political outlook. He presents the perfect mother as one who indoctrinates her children in the religion of the country (no. 10). He praises the queen (Isabel II) not only because she is good but also because she is a woman and a mother (no. 1); he lauds the birth of the princess (no. 32); he glorifies the history of the motherland (no. 27), and he intones the greatness of Spain's newly formed Civil Guard:

1 Un grito de regocijo
          resonó en mi dulce patria
          y á la voz de Isabel, fué
          la Guardia civil creada,
5 y al verla el pueblo español
          cantó lleno de esperanza:
          —¡Viva la Guardia civil
          porque es la gloria de España!

(Libro 226)

(A cry of joy / rang out in my dear homeland / for the Civil Guard, created / by [Queen] Isabel's voice, / and when they beheld it, the Spanish people / sang out with hope: / Long live the Civil Guard / for it's the glory of Spain!)

Likewise, Trueba's vision of womankind is conservative and traditional: a blend of simplistic stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes. In his prologue he refers to “blue-eyed virgins who hold pride of place in my nugatory portraits” (“las vírgenes de ojos azules que ocupan el primer término en mis desaliñados cuadros” [x]), and then asks: “but where is there more purity and feeling than in children and mothers?” (“pero ¿dónde hay mas [sic] pureza y sentimiento que en los niños y las madres?” [xii]). In his cantares, we find such descriptions as these: “To my eyes, woman / is a weak plant / threatened / by eternal hurricanes, / and hence I endeavour / to be her valiant aide / in this world” (“La mujer á mis ojos / es débil planta / de eternos huracanes / amenazada, / y así procuro / su generoso apoyo / ser en el mundo” [no. 10, 38]); or, “girls are flowers / whom even the wind can depetal” (“las niñas son flores / que hasta las deshoja el viento” [no. 16, 51)]. A later poem, “The Glories of Womanhood” (“Glorias de la mujer” [no. 41]), has a refrain—“I say that you have neither the soul / nor the heart of a woman” (“digo que no tienes alma / ni corazón de mujer”)—which may well have impressed Rosalía.²³ “Glorias de la mujer” represents the state of motherhood as one of sublime delight and one to which every girl should aspire.²⁴ In addition to a patriarchal attitude toward the woman, Trueba's poems pretend that a woman's fulfillment consists in finding a loving man (no. 35), and they consistently present women from the male point of view as objects for sensual pleasure (nos. 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 46):

1 ¡Salada, qué hermosa eres!
          ¡Salada, por ti me muero!
          Tienes una cinturita
          que se abarca con dos dedos,
5 tu mano y tu pié parecen
          de una niña en lo pequeños.

(Libro 151)

(Darling, how cute you are! / Darling, I die for you! / Your waist's so slender / it's just a few inches wide; / so tiny are your hands and feet, / they look like a child's.)

And finally, if women speak in these poems, it is because they have been seduced (no. 2) or because they are mad (no. 28).

As Trueba expresses so many platitudinous views, it is difficult today to understand why Rosalía thought him so fine a poet.²⁵ Nevertheless, in the prologue she wrote for the Cantares, she lauds the sophistication of “don Antonio,” “Antón, el de los Cantares,” while introducing herself as “a person of poor talent” (“un pobre ingenio” [trans. Barja 14]), “with little ability, and schooled in no other place than our poor villages” (“débil de fuerzas, y no habiendo aprendido en otra escuela que la de nuestros pobres aldeanos” [trans. Barja 16]):

Mis fuerzas en verdad quedaron muy por debajo de lo que alcanzaran mis deseos, y por eso, comprendiendo cuánto podría hacer en esto un gran poeta, aún más me dolió mi propia insuficiencia. El libro de los cantares, de D. Antonio Trueba, que me inspirara y me diera aliento para llevar a cabo este trabajo, pasa por mi mente como un remordimiento, y casi asoman las lágrimas a mis ojos al pensar cómo se levantaría Galicia hasta el lugar que le corresponde si un poeta como Antón el de los “Cantares” fuese el destinado a dar a conocer sus bellezas y sus costumbres. Mas mi patria infeliz, tan desventurada en esto como en lo demás, tiene que contentarse con unas páginas frías e insulsas, que apenas serían dignas de acercarse de lejos a las puertas del Parnaso si no fuera por el noble sentimiento que las creó. ¡Que esto mismo me sirva de disculpa ante quienes justamente critiquen mis faltas, pues pienso que el que se esfuerza por desvanecer los errores que manchan y ofenden injustamente a su patria es acreedor de alguna indulgencia!²⁶

(My talent was not up to my desire, and hence, realizing just how much a great poet could achieve, I was all the more pained by my own inadequacy. The Book of Songs, of don Antonio Trueba, which had inspired me and given me the courage to carry out this work, passes through my mind like a regret, and tears almost come to my eyes when I think how Galicia would be elevated to its due place if a poet like Antón, he of the Songs, had been the one destined to make known her beauties and her customs. But my unfortunate native land, as luckless in this as in all else, must be satisfied with a few dull, cold pages that would be most unworthy of approaching the gates of Parnassus from afar, if it were not for the noble feeling that created them. May this itself excuse me before those who justly criticize my faults, for I think that he who struggles to dispel the fallacies that unjustly stain and offend his native land is entitled to some indulgence!)

In her first book of poems, Rosalía sees herself as singing of the beauty and the customs of Galicia, and she feels inferior to the task. Why, when in comparison her poetry is far superior to Trueba's? I suggest that one of the reasons Rosalía fixates on the alleged paucity of her own talent is that she sets out to imitate a model for poetry supplied to her by a man; she sees herself as trying to do what a man has already done (i.e., versify the beauty and customs of a particular region). Rosalía even claims that she made every effort to “make known how some of our poetic customs still retain some primitive and patriarchal freshness” (“dar a conocer cómo algunas de nuestras poéticas costumbres todavía conservan cierta frescura patriarcal y primitiva” [Cantares, trans. Barja 16, italics mine]).

In imitating a male model, Rosalía is trying to succeed at doing what males do, which is to “tell male stories about a male world” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 67). Rosalía is suffering from an “anxiety of authority,” which means that she is attempting to imitate a patriarchal literary model, one invented and historically developed by men; the more she employs that model, the more anxious she feels about her lack of talent, the more “diseased and infected by the sentences of patriarchy” she becomes (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 71).

Rosalía de Castro's marginalization is therefore a complex web of social, political, and esthetic factors. Some of these—the social and political—she would have been conscious of, while others (psychological and esthetic) she could combat only subconsciously given her time and place.²⁷ This subconscious combat constitutes her “monstrous” side and gives her work its feminist infrastructure.

I turn now to the poems themselves, to argue that in many texts Rosalía struggles with the “monster” within, with a woman's experiences from a feminist and female perspective—something traditional criticism has ignored. In her Cantares, Rosalía is subconsciously subverting the patriarchal order and covertly undermining the androcentric worldview. This struggle is manifested in the fact that she foregrounds numerous and diverse female personae, and that she herself is engaged in a search for her own matrilineal roots. In doing this, she finds her own voice, one that can express her experience—an experience conditioned by the fact that she is a woman.

Is it not monstrous—beyond the bounds of expectation of that time—that the speaker of most of Rosalía's Cantares is a woman, and that the dominant experience treated in this book is female, not male? Just how remarkable this is becomes apparent when one notes that fifty-two of the fifty-five poems in Trueba's El libro de los cantares are spoken by males and deal with a man's experience from a male perspective.²⁸ In most of Rosalía's poems, by contrast, the speaker is a woman and most of her Cantares do not just deal with a woman's experience but also treat it from a woman's perspective.²⁹ Stevens, the first to investigate this feature of Rosalía's poetry,³⁰ concludes her study with the following assertion: “If I were to name one source with which Castro had the most intimate contact and the least ambivalence, it would be the women of rural Galicia whose lives and voices came closer than any others to expressing Castro's own predicament. Although Castro undoubtedly learned about women's emancipation from literate Spanish and European sources, the peasant women of Galicia provided her with the invaluable proof of women's artistic and spiritual achievement against all odds” (Rosalía 122).

In the Cantares there are women who sing (nos. 1, 32) and women who sin (nos. 3, 12); there are independent women (no. 4), rebellious women (no. 7), unfaithful (no. 10) and faithful women (nos. 26, 30); there are old women who dialogue with young women (nos. 3, 5); simple peasant women (no. 31) and mountain women (no. 18); there are ethereal women (no. 14),³¹ seductive women (no. 24), and seduced women (nos. 2, 13, 30); there are love-struck and confused women (nos. 9, 27) and lovelorn and angry women (nos. 13, 28); there are religious women (nos. 11, 33, 37) and superstitious women (no. 16); there are snooty (Castilian) women (no. 23); silly, loquacious women (nos. 13, 27, 29); there are women who suffer from infertility (no. 20) and those who suffer from a profound longing for their native region (“saudade,” nos. 17, 18, 19). All of these poems present an image of woman that is diverse, complex, and fascinating—especially in contrast with Trueba's.

But the Cantares do not just “present” an image of woman, female personae present themselves by articulating their desires, disappointments, and predicaments; they exchange advice and reveal the untextualized community women have always had; they criticize hypocritical women (no. 21) and the male world. For example, the female speaker of “Un arrogante gaitero” (“An Arrogant Bagpiper” [no. 8]) takes a critical look at the arrogant bagpiper and at the stupid girls he seduces in every village:

1 Ellas loquinas, bailaban,
          y a donde estaba corrían,
          ciegas …, ciegas, no veían
          las zarzas que las cercaban;
5 cual mariposas, buscaban
          a luz para irse a quemar,

(trans. Barja 86, Obras 1:109)

(Silly girls, they'd dance, / and run to where he was, / blind …, blind, and not see / the brambles that encircled them; / like moths, they'd search out / the light to burn themselves up.)

In this poem, a woman finds fault with women. In others, a woman displays her strength of character, as for example in the poem that begins:

—Cantan los gallos al día,
yérguete, mi bien, y parte.
—¿Cómo partir, queridiña,
como partir y dejarte?

(trans. Barja 48, Obras 1:88)

(—The cocks are crowing in the day, / rise up, my darling, and take your leave. / —How can I take my leave, beloved, / how can I depart and leave you?)

This poem—like the alboradas (“dawn songs”)—is a dialogue between young lovers who have spent the night together and must part at daybreak. This is a frequent topos in all types of literature, but with Rosalía there is a twist. Carballo Calero notes: “Unlike what happens in the famous scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Rosalía, like the song she glosses, presents the man as loathe to leave” (“A diferencia de lo que ocurre en la famosa escena de Romeo y Julieta, de Shakespeare, Rosalía, como el cantar que glosa, hace al hombre representante de la actitud de resistencia a la separación” [Castro, Cantares, ed. Carballo Calero 56 n. 2]). Unlike Carballo Calero, who focuses his comment on the male's resistance in this poem, I would say that, consciously or not, Rosalía presents a girl who takes the initiative, who pushes the boy out of bed and makes him leave. Rosalía subconsciously undermines—or fails to subscribe to—the androcentric worldview of traditional literature, in which the boy (male) is resolute, decisive, quick to leave after taking his pleasure, while the girl (female) is weak, resists his leaving, and clings desperately to the boy.

Traditional criticism has not foregrounded the predominance of female speakers and of a woman's experience as distinctive features of the Cantares. It has not done so, I suggest, because (following Rosalía herself) it sees the book as a depiction of Galician life. However, it is evident that, while imitating poems about men, Rosalía in fact writes poems about women. In subconsciously working through her “anxiety of authority,” Rosalía finds her own voice, and this leads her to deal “with central female experiences from a specifically female perspective” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 72).

Cantares also reveals that the poet is involved in a quest for her matrilineal heritage. Gilbert and Gubar interpret nineteenth-century women's interest in idyllic settings as a “pained yearning for a lost, visionary continent,” which in turn signifies “their yearnings for motherly or sisterly precursors” (Madwoman 100). As the poem “Yo cantar, cantar” (“As for me, I sing and sing”) frames an idyllic, natural setting with expressions of female inadequacy, I want to pursue this line of investigation in another (but earlier) poem from Cantares, “Cómo llovía, suaviño” (How gently it rained) is an unusually long discursive poem in which Rosalía's struggle to find a style and an original voice is manifested. The poem begins:

Cómo llovía, suaviño,
cómo, suaviño, llovía;
cómo llovía, suaviño
día y noche por Laíño,
por Lestrove, noche y día.

(trans. Barja 270, Obras 1:215)³²

(How it rained, so gently, / how, ever so gently, it rained; / how it rained, so gently, / day and night on Laíño, / on Lestrove, night and day.)

In this poem, Rosalía musically descends into the depths of her own mind where she follows her thoughts poetically:³³ she muses on the regenerative effects of the rain on the earth, meditates on her recently deceased mother (d. 1862), and reflects on the decaying condition of the mansion and estate (“Casa grande”) where she and her mother grew up.³⁴ This extremely long poem ostensibly deals with Galicia: how the fine rain refreshes the countryside, the sailboats hearten the rivers, and how the old estates lie fallow (because these days there are no decent men [“venerable cabaleiro”] to care for them and for the poor who depended on them for survival).

However, and more importantly, Rosalía's thoughts lead her back in every instance to her mother—to what Sandra Gilbert called “the powerful womb of the matriarchal muse” (“Literary Paternity” 494)—so that the poem evolves into a meditative communion with a kindred female spirit who has been lost and whom the speaker tries to recuperate. The poem's first nine stanzas describe the rain from its first appearance until it dissolves into vapor, and the tenth stanza shifts gears thus:

1 Así imagino a la triste
          sombra de mi madre, errando
          en la esfera donde existe;
          que a ir al cielo se resiste,
5 por los que quiso aguardando.

(trans. Barja 272, Obras 1:216)

(That's how I imagine / my mother's sad shade, as she wanders / in the sphere where she exists, / reluctant to go to heaven, / while she waits for those she loved.)

As she thinks of her mother's spirit, Rosalía is led to recall their shared experiences of tender and affectionate memories—“ternuras,” “memorias cariñosas”—one of which are the songs “cantigas” her mother sang—those very “cantares” she alluded to in the apologetic concluding poem of her Cantares.³⁵ Later she recalls the ringing of the bells and writes:

Aquéllas, sí, que animadas
me llamaban mansamente
en las mañanas doradas,
con las cantigas amadas
de mi madre, juntamente.

(trans. Barja 278, Obras 1:219)

(Yes, those merry bells, / they softly called me / together with my mother's dear songs, / on golden morns.)

In this free association of childhood memories, Rosalía subconsciously connects the “cantares” she is now writing with her mother's “cantigas”—a step she did not take in the final poem of her Cantares.³⁶ She is dreaming “of an archaic language that predates the patronymics of culture … gaining strength through fantasies of either an original or an originary linguistic matrilineage, a ‘grandmatology’ that [is] implicitly set against the patrilineal linguistics of the grammatology that has historically subordinated [women] and their ancestresses” (Gilbert and Gubar, “Ceremonies” 25).

Moreover, as she searches through the past to give meaning to the present, the woman poet in Rosalía settles on a strong precursor, her mother (who loved the “cantigas” she learned as a child). The poem then moves on to meditate on the huge, abandoned house (“casa grande”) where her mother was born. However, the text evolves in such an ambiguous way as to imply that the abandoned house is also her mother (“amazona malherida” [badly wounded amazon]),³⁷ abandoned by Rosalía's father, and maybe even the speaker herself, “abandoned” by her mother who had just died. Hence, although this poem ostensibly treats the parlous state of Galicia, on a very different level it constitutes—as Adrienne Rich might say—a dive into the wreck of the self, from which the woman poet emerges clinging to central bits and pieces of submerged and lost experience.

Ostriker describes such a process when she offers a version of the Demeter/Kore myth as a model for the way women poets cease to be “Nobody” and become “Somebody”—they “retrieve and revive” their mutilated mother. She writes: “Rather than Oedipus and Laius at the crossroads, the model among women writers, critics as well as poets, is Demeter and Kore: except that it is the daughter who descends to Hades, step by step, to retrieve and revive a mother who has been raped, or perhaps seduced, by a powerful male god. For as the mother returns to earth, the daughter expects to blossom” (Stealing 16). Ostriker's focus on identity through recuperation and connectedness illuminates what Rosalía achieved in her Cantares: her own mother had been seduced by a powerful male (a priest) and had been ostracized by society because of the shame. By incorporating her mother's memory into literature, by textualizing a small piece of the untextualized culture women have always had (e.g., “cantigas”), Rosalía the daughter “blossoms”: she retrieves and revives the mother, returns her to earth, and she makes society subsequently see her worth.

Also, Ostriker's focus on identity through recuperation and connectedness suggests that Rosalía subconsciously connected submerged pieces of her female experience, bits and pieces that are dispersed, that have hardly yet found their way into the written culture of (male) hegemonic texts. In this poem, Rosalía enters the “cave of the mind”; she begins to connect the scattered fragments—“revitalize the darkness, retrieve what has been lost, regenerate, reconceive, give birth” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 99), as demonstrated in “Yo cantar, cantar, canté” and “Cómo llovía suaviño.”

Despite my rhetorical claims, Cantares is not the work of an acknowledged feminist but of a woman who sees herself as conforming to—if constrained by—cultural norms. However, the contradictions in its poetic vision manifest the writer's unconscious thoughts and hint at a feminist infrastructure that underlies the entire work. This feminist vision constitutes one of the woofs or warps of the Cantares—one of the subtexts or codes that constitute its total discourse. If such a subtext is read today with the benefit of the novel insights of gynopoetics, Rosalía's latent feminism can be glimpsed.

Cantares, I argue, manifests a split vision: a poet who thinks negatively of her talent writes original poems that reconnect her with her matrilineal roots. A comparable polarity between negative vision and positive achievement characterizes Rosalía's subsequent work, Follas novas (1880) and En las orillas del Sar (1884), which offer a host of material for a feminist rereading of her work. In these books of poetry, Rosalía is criticizing the condition of nineteenth-century womanhood by presenting us—at times angrily—with negative views on womanhood, marriage, motherhood, and on the condition of the female poet. However, she also rebels creatively against these conditions by initiating an inscription of a strong female self; by selecting gynocentric imagery and metaphors to develop a female vision and subvert androcratic norms.

The poems of Follas and Orillas del Sar reveal how women are abused by a patriarchal culture.³⁸ The poet foregrounds negative perspectives on the roles phallocracy assigns a woman. Such negative imagery is inspired by a frustrated and suppressed feminist impulse; for today's readers it manifests the latent feminist infrastructure of these texts. Hence, Rosalía's mature work displays a subconscious desire to demystify the ángel del hogar condition which nineteenth-century culture represented as a woman's predilection.

One of the dominant metaphors for the condition of woman in Follas is abandonment. Women are abandoned by their husbands and their sons—through betrayal, drowning, emigration, disappearance, death. As Rosalía puts it, women are “viudas de vivos y muertos / que nadie consolará” (widows of living men / widows of dead men whom no one will console [trans. Barja 278]).³⁹ Traditional criticism would silence the feminist voice of these poems by shifting the focus of interpretation to the effects of emigration on Galicia. However, both the sociopolitical and the feminist voices should be heard.

A particularly poignant description of this abandonment is given by a woman whose husband has been lost:

1 Sola he tejido mi tela
          sola sembré mi nabal,
          sola voy por leña al monte,
          sola la quemo en el lar.
5 Ni en la fuente ni en el prado,
          aunque me mate el afán,
          él no vendrá a levantarme,
          él ya no me tumbará.

(trans. Barja 292, Obras 1:488)

(Alone I've woven my cloth, / alone I'll plant my swede patch, / alone I fetch firewood from the mount, / alone I burn it in the hearth. / Neither at the fount nor in the meadow, / though I die of desire, / will he come to raise me up, / no more will he come to lay me down.)

The emotional and physical yearning expressed by the female speaker in the last lines above (ll. 5-8) give the poem an underlying feminist perspective, for the simple reason that society—especially of the last century and in Spain—traditionally forbids the widow from ever fulfilling such deep desires for human closeness. (“Tumbar” is a colloquialism for “to copulate.”)

The speaker of the above poem has been abandoned only in so far as her husband has died. However, there are several poems in which women curse the frustrated lives they are forced to lead because the men to whom they sacrificed themselves disappeared and left them for others. Rosalía refers to the abuse women take for remaining faithful to men who have long abandoned them for others.⁴⁰ She refers to women who remain enthralled by men who have long since lost interest in them.⁴¹ Moreover, one female speaker implies that her deceitful treatment was comparable to the sale of a piece of meat in the market (“¡Como venden la carne en el mercado / a ti su falsedad!” [trans. Barja 296, Obras 1:491])—which leads her to blame herself: “—¡Malhaya tu constancia, pobre loca, / malhaya tu lealtad!” (damn your loyalty, poor madwoman, / and damn your fidelity too [trans. Barja 296]). It should come as no surprise that as a result of such abandonment and betrayal, women in Follas think frequently about suicide and attempt it, especially by drowning.⁴²

However, as she develops as a poet, Rosalía's style becomes more and more allusive and suggestive, less dramatic and politically direct, and hence the negative perspective on womankind is figuratively inscribed—rather than overtly foregrounded—by means of subtly understated symbols.⁴³ For example, “marchitas hojas” (withered leaves) come to symbolize a woman's loss of innocence, her victimization by the floodwaters of life, “el río desbordóse / arrastrando en sus aguas a las víctimas” (the river burst its banks / and dragged its victims in its floodwaters [Obras 1:582]). In “Los tristes, IV” (“The sad ones”), rape is implied meiotically:

Cuando en la planta con afán cuidada
la fresca yema de un capullo asoma,
lentamente arrastrándose entre el césped,
la asalta el caracol y la devora.

(Obras 1:589)⁴⁴

(When the fresh shoot from a bud appears / on the fervently cared-for plant, / the snail, dragging itself through the grass, / attacks and devours it.)

The delicacy and innocence of “la fresca yema de un capullo” (l. 2) is comparable to the “Cerrado capullo de pálidas tintas” (closed bud of pale hues [Obras 1:623]), a poem that concludes by symbolizing a girl's loss of her virginity. In addition, the Blakean “Viéndome perseguido por la alondra” (Seeing myself pursued by the lark), in which a small insect with golden wings (“diminuto insecto de alas de oro”) takes refuge inside the calyx of a rose (“refugio hallé en el cáliz de una rosa”) only to be caught in a gale, concludes:

Y rodamos los dos en fango envueltos,
para ya nunca levantarse ella,
y yo para llorar eternamente
mi amor primero y mi ilusión postrera.

(Obras 1:691)

(And both of us rolled around covered in mud, / she never to rise again, / and I to weep eternally / for my first love and my last dream.)

The rose that never rose again (l. 2) signifies a woman's loss of self to that “diminutive insect” that is male—a palimpsestic subversion of phallic drive. Moreover, women and children are symbolized as “tórtolas” (turtledoves) and “palomas” (doves), whereas men and mankind are predatory foxes, kites, eagles—“zorro, milano, águila”—or unsociable tawny owls or frogs (“cárabo, rana”).⁴⁵

Another feature of Follas and Orillas del Sar is that they present a negative perspective on marriage. Love, romance, marriage, all end under the shadow of disillusionment and deceit, “la sombra de aquel negro / desengaño sin cura” in the following poem:

          Llévame a aquella fuente cristalina
          donde juntos bebiéramos
las purísimas aguas que apagaban
la sed de amor, la llama del deseo.
Llévame de la mano como antaño …
          Mas no, que tengo miedo
          de ver en sus cristales
          la sombra de aquel negro
desengaño sin cura, inconsolable,
          que entre ambos puso el tiempo.

(trans. Barja 78, Obras 1:329)

(Take me to that limpid spring / where together we could drink / the purest waters, those that slaked / love's thirst, desire's flame. / Take me by the hand as of old … / But no, for I'm afraid / to find reflected there / the shadow of that / inconsolable and incurable, black disillusion, / which time cast between the two of us.)

Clearly, the female speaker is lamenting the utter frustration of her life, a life she cannot change because, as another poem states, “matrimonio dogal es” (marriage is a halter [trans. Barja 198; Obras 1:423]); by implication, the woman who succumbs to it must be an ass. In addition, a female speaker condemns marriage utterly: after dying, she chooses to wander the earth as a haunted spirit rather than run the risk of settling where her dead husband might be (in Heaven or Hell).⁴⁶

A third feature of Follas and Orillas del Sar is that they present motherhood in an unflattering light. It keeps a woman chained to her house,⁴⁷ and it keeps a mother in bondage to her young and to a life of travail, as the following subtle poem implies in the symbol of the “paloma”:

“SIN NIDO”

1 Por montes y campiñas,
          caminos y esplanadas,
          va una paloma sola,
          sola de rama en rama.
5 Aún las crías la siguen,
          sedientas y cansadas,
          sin que encuentre alimento
          para darles, ¡cuitada!
          Trae manchadas las plumas,
10 que un tiempo fueron blancas,
          marchitas y rastreras
          y abatidas las alas.
          ¡Pobre paloma, antaño
          tan querida y tan blanca!
15 ¿Dónde se fue tu brillo?
          Tu amor, ¿por dónde anda?

(trans. Barja 136, Obras 1:379)

(“Without a Nest”: Through woodland and open fields, / along roads and esplanades, / a [female] dove alone, / hops alone from branch to branch. / Her tired and thirsty young / still follow her, / even though she finds no food / to give them, poor wretch! / Her feathers, / which once were white, / are stained; / faded and trailing / and fallen, her wings. / Poor dove, / so beloved and white of yore! / What happened to your brilliant glow? / And your love, where's he strutting now?)

The harried state of the “paloma” (ll. 5-8) is indicative of motherhood. Those once white feathers, now bloodied and beaten (ll. 9-12, 14-15), are a metaphor for the woman's condition; the violence of the image indicates Rosalía's feminist impulse. If the gory detail and the violence of the imagery are not taken into account, this poem might well be taken as a cameo for a pathetic and fortuitous event in nature.

The “faded and trailing and fallen wings” of the above poem (l. 12) might allude to the damaging effect of marriage and motherhood on a woman poet's inspiration. Whether this is so or not, in her mature work Rosalía presents the condition of the woman artist as inferior and besieged. In several poems of Follas, the speaker presents herself as hunted and marginalized, and even implies that any woman who attempts self-realization is doomed to failure.⁴⁸ The woman artist is withdrawn from the world, she views life from her hiding hole (“yo en mi escondrijo”), or from the inside of a deep wood.⁴⁹ In Gilbert and Gubar's terms, Rosalía is seated at her attic window watching the world in which she cannot participate:

Desde aquí veo un camino
que no sé dónde va;
.....quisiera poderte andar.
.....Mas tú vas yendo, vas yendo,
.....yo sigo clavada en donde
arraigo tiene mi mal.

(trans. Barja 310, Obras 1:506)

(From here I see a road / that goes I know not where / … / I would like to walk you / … / But you keep going, keep going, / … / Me, I am stuck to where / my disease has taken hold.)

Related to the “attic window” metaphor is Rosalía's intermittent assertion that she dwells in the depths and prefers the shadows. She exclaims:

¡Aire!, que el aire me falta.
¿Qué ves en el pozo oscuro?

(trans. Barja 40, Obras 1:289)

(Air! I need air. / What do you see in the dark well?)

Falling to where there is a lack of light and air is a recurrent metaphor: “Tan bajo caí, tan bajo / que luz no me llega ya” and “ya que aquí no encuentre / aire, luz, tierra ni sol” (So far down I fell, so far / that light could not reach me; given that here I may not find / air, light, earth or sun).⁵⁰ Rosalía's preference throughout is “to wander and drift in the shadows” (“quiero errante vagar en las tinieblas” [Obras 1:581]); or to remain “en el dintel oscuro de mi pobre morada” (at the dark lintel of my poor dwelling [Obras 1:718]). As Rosalía matures as a poet, she is drawn more and more to the “aesthetics of renunciation” (whereas a late twentieth-century poet might well reconceive such a space as the darkness of the womb from which she can emerge anew).

In Follas, the speaker characterizes her ideas as “locas” (“mad”); later, they are mad because no one knows what will become of them in the future. However, they continue to be the poet's most intimate companions.⁵¹ Madness, after Gilbert and Gubar, is a metaphor and must be read as a sign of the deep anxiety felt by a woman poet in the nineteenth century. Rosalía develops this metaphor in her oft-anthologized poem—discussed later—“Dicen que no hablan las plantas” (It's said plants don't speak) from Orillas del Sar.

The woman poet in Orillas del Sar is hounded by detractors and, hurt by praise that has turned to scorn, she shrinks further and further inside her “cárcel estrecha y sombría” (dark and narrow prison), inside her “asilo” and “antro” (shelter and cavern), or into a corner where she hides.⁵² In “Cenicientas las aguas” (Ashen the waters), she begins to observe all from her (attic) window or “desde mis ventanas” (Obras 1:563):

          Yo, desde mi ventana
que azotan los airados elementos,
regocijada y pensativa escucho
          el discorde concierto
          simpático a mi alma …

(Obras 1:616)⁵³

(From my window / lashed by the wild elements, / I listen cheerfully and pensively / to the discordant concert / so congenial to my soul)

The poet senses that her tastes are not of the mainstream (“Blanca senda; camino olvidado” [White path; forgotten road (Obras 1:621)]), that her poems are simple daisies (“En mi pequeño huerto / brilla la sonrosada margarita” [In my little orchard / the rosy daisy glows (Obras 1:650)]),⁵⁴ and that her talent is “Como la peña oculta por el musgo de algún arroyo” (like the rock that's hidden by the moss of a stream [Obras 1:727]). The following poem in an unpretentious gesture pulls together much of this symbolism and meaning:

          Cuido una planta bella
          que ama y busca la sombra,
          como la busca el alma
huérfana, triste, enamorada y sola,
y allí donde jamás la luz del día
llega sino a través de las umbrosas
ramas de un mirto y los cristales turbios
          de una ventana angosta,
ella vive tan fresca y perfumada,
y se torna más bella y más frondosa,
y languidece y se marchita y muere
cuando un rayo de sol besa sus hojas.

(Obras 1:657)

(I look after a beautiful plant / that loves and searches out the shade, / as does the orphaned, / sad, lovesick and lonely soul, / and there where daylight only shines / through a shady myrtle's boughs and a wide window's / misted panes, / it lives as fresh and fragrant as can be, / and becomes more leafy and more beautiful, / and languishes and withers and dies / when a sun's ray kisses its leaves.)

Such images of shrinking, drying up, entrapment, isolation, and confinement may well reflect—as traditional criticism would argue—the spiritual and psychological disposition of the poet or the illness that was wasting her. However, if we follow Gilbert and Gubar, they also indicate the increasing discomfort Rosalía felt the more she tried to combine her schizophrenic roles of “angel-mother-wife” and “monster-woman-poet.” In a famous poem Rosalía characterized herself as “la loca” (the madwoman):

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, ni las fuentes, ni los pájaros,
ni el onda con sus rumores, ni con su brillo los astros.
Lo dicen; pero no es cierto, pues siempre, cuando yo paso,
de mí murmuran y exclaman:
                                                                                                    Ahí va la loca, soñando
con la eterna primavera de la vida y de los campos

(Obras 1:668)

(It's said that neither plants, nor founts, nor birds can speak, / nor with their mumble the waves of light, nor with their splendour the stars. / So it's said; but it's not true, for always when I pass by, / they gossip about me and shout out: There goes that mad woman again, dreaming / about the eternal spring in life and fields.)

Certainly, this “loca” is a poet-dreamer preoccupied with her own imminent death, but she is also a harried mother, a marginalized woman, a vilified artist, and a poet who is driven mad by listening to her own inner poetic voices. The “loca” in the above poem is the woman artist in the nineteenth century who is driven “mad”—divided from herself—by the pressure she senses from the androcentric values of a patriarchal culture.

The hiding hole, the cavern, the shelter, the window, the shadowy depths—attic and sanctuary—do give us a more complete metaphorical picture of the condition of the woman artist who struggled to compete and was repulsed. Traditional criticism would react by claiming that such poems indicate Rosalía's inherent spiritual and psychological disposition. However, they also indicate Rosalía's belief that all is hopeless for the woman poet. In one poem she suddenly exclaims that “Ya se acabó la edad de las Corinas” (The age of the Corinnas is over and done with [Follas, trans. Barja 182, Obras 1:411]). (Corinna was the woman poet who instructed Pindar and gained a victory over him at the public games at Thebes.) That women poets have no comparable influence in the nineteenth century is what Rosalía de Castro implies in her own subtle, intellectual, and inoffensive manner.

A further negative perspective on the condition of the woman poet is indicated by the speaker's loss of confidence and self-worth. Cantares ends with an apology from the poet for her inferior poems, and Follas begins where Cantares left off. In the first poem, Rosalía apologizes for not writing traditional women's verse:

          De aquellas que cantan palomas y flores
          se dice que tienen alma de mujer.
Yo que no las canto, ¡ay, Virgen Santísima!,
          ¿de qué la tendré?

(trans. Barja 28, Obras 1:277)

(About those who sing of doves and flowers, / it's said they have a woman's soul. / Oh, Most Holy Virgin, and I who do not sing about either / what can I have?)

Such a self-questioning response is no doubt a reaction to the criticism Rosalía's work provoked. Indeed, the speaker of a later poem is a critic of Rosalía's poetry who expresses contempt for the distasteful type of verse Rosalía writes (“hechos … para leerse a soplamocos” [written … to be read under duress] in “Haces versos … ?” [Do you write verse? (trans. Barja 204, Obras 1:430)]). Clearly, the woman poet is reacting to the negative response her verse has received: she has not produced what is expected of women poets and is therefore receiving public opprobrium.

A final negative perspective on the condition of the woman poet is her anxiety of authority. In the second poem of Follas, Rosalía recognizes an anxiety of authority (in the sense that the precursors to whom she turns instigate mimicry rather than inspire originality from her). She confesses that she writes things others have already thought: “Bien sé que nunca hay nada / nuevo bajo este cielo” (I know full well that there's never / anything new under the sun [trans. Barja 28, Obras 1:278]). Rosalía was reacting in part to the fact that her readers heard only Bécquer or Trueba in her poems, while failing to see what was truly Rosalía.⁵⁵

However, with “¡Silencio!”—“Con torpe mano y palpitante el seno” (Quiet!—With clumsy hand and throbbing heart [trans. Barja 46, Obras 1:297), the manner in which she presents the Promethean battle she engages in with her muse to create her poems leaves her readers in no doubt of her originality and conviction.⁵⁶ She describes herself, while in the actual process of writing, as insecure about what she is doing, but notice, in the following lines, that no eagle or vulture eats out her bowels; it is as though she is giving birth to her own poems:

mojo en mi propia sangre dura pluma,
rompo mi vena hinchada,
y escribo …, escribo …, ¿para qué?

(trans. Barja 46, Obras 1:297)

(I dip a stiff pen in my own blood, / I lance my swollen vein, / and I write …, I write …, for what?)

The woman poet fertilizes herself by stabbing the “dura pluma” into her own flesh, slashing her swollen vein, and making the verse flow.⁵⁷ The woman poet must give birth to herself because, especially in the nineteenth century, there were few female precursors who could mother or sister her along. When she questions the past, she finds male figures (e.g., Mephistopheles [see Obras 654 and 686]) who are a hindrance rather than a stimulus to her inspiration.

There is implicit in the criticism leveled against Rosalía an assumption that women should not write profound, metaphysical poems; they should not be inquiring into the nature of existence but should merely paint scenes in nature. For this reason, perhaps, in “A la sombra te sientas de las desnudas rocas” (You sit in the shade of the bare rocks), Rosalía later advises a “niña” (“young girl”) that

encierra el alma humana tan profundos misterios,
que cuando a nuestros ojos un velo los oculta,
es temeraria empresa descorrer este velo:
no pienses, pues, bien mío, no pienses en qué pienso.

(Obras 1:655-56)

(the human soul keeps such profound mysteries cooped up, / that when a veil hides them from our eyes, / it's a risky business to draw this veil back: / so don't think, my dear, don't think about what I think.)

But the “niña” does just that, and she dies from the anguish (“la pena”) it brings her. The implication is that women who are Promethean enough to write profound poetry of inner struggle will suffer torment and will die for their art.

Another aspect of Rosalía's protofeminism is that she expresses intense anger about the condition of her culture and society. Kirkpatrick has also shown how anger becomes Avellaneda's antidote to ambient pressures (Románticas 200), but anger is still not recognized as a characteristic of nineteenth-century women's poetry. However, it is a distinctive feature of the poetry of the latter half of this century, as Ostriker has shown. She writes that “Anger is psychic necessity, both emotionally and intellectually. To be conscious as a woman, is to be conscious of hurt and to demand reparation” (Stealing 161). Anger is an attack on culture's systemic phallocentrism, which a woman might have to explore despite the rejection it entails. Such observations as these can disinter Rosalía's latent feminism.

In the eponym of Follas, “¡Hojas nuevas! risa siento” (“New leaves! I feel like laughing” [trans. Barja 32, Obras 1:281]), Rosalía makes it clear that there is much grief, bitterness, and anger in this ironically titled book of “new leaves”—which were born in the “páramo” (desert/wasteland) of her life. These so-called new leaves of poetry are “fieras, como mi dolor” (wild beasts, like my grief [trans. Barja 32, Obras 1:281]); they are not demure, feminine sighs but the screams of a fiend or virago—figurative meanings for “fiera.” As “¿Qué tiene?” (“What's the matter with her?”) asserts—all women can do today is “rabiar”: “hoy el sufrir tan sólo / es rabiar día y noche” (to suffer today is only / to be raging all day and night [trans. Barja 182, Obras 1:410]).⁵⁸

Perhaps Rosalía's angriest poem is “La justicia por la mano” (Taking justice into one's own hands [trans. Barja 83, Obras 1:332]) in which an aggrieved woman takes a scythe and murders the family that has dishonored her. This poem is surely a covert manifestation of the poet's anger that justice is blind to women, in particular to their honor: it implies that women will need to take justice into their own hands in order to achieve what is their due. Elsewhere, Rosalía is angry that there is no justice to be found; she is angry that there are so many starving beggars at her door in winter; and she is furious that Castilian invaders have felled Galicia's oak trees and leveled her forests.⁵⁹ The speaker ends the last poem, “Jamás lo olvidare!” (“I'll never forget it”), by recognizing that most will think her mad because the loss of trees is nothing when compared to the loss of a tower or the sacking of an estate. In the following lines, the voice of patriarchy ridicules Rosalía's concerns and asks, behind the poet's back:

¿O en mis haciendas penetrando acaso
osado criminal, ha puesto fuego
a las extensas eras? ¿Por qué gime
          así importuna esa mujer?

(Obras 1:609)

(Or has a brazen criminal, / sneaking perchance onto my estates, set fire / to the extensive pastures? Why does that woman persist / in stubbornly whining?)

Further indication of Rosalía's fury may be found in “Cayendo van los bravos combatientes” (“The brave combatants keep on falling”), a fragment appended to Orillas del Sar, in which she writes:

          ¡Vendrán! … Mas presto del vampiro odioso
          destruid las guaridas,
si no queréis que los guerreros vuelvan
tristes y oscuros a morir sin gloria
antes de ver la patria redimida.

(Obras 1:728)

(Sure they'll come back! … But you should destroy at once / the lairs of the odious vampire, / if you do not want the warriors to return / in a sad and somber state and die ingloriously / before they see the redemption of their homeland.)

It is certainly legitimate to argue, as traditional criticism has done, that Rosalía is furious because of her illegitimate birth, because of her husband's infidelities, or because of the injustice she sees in Galicia. However, her fury and anger also stem from her treatment as a woman and the marginalization she suffers as a woman poet. Given the importance attributed to the expression of anger by women poets of the twentieth century, anger should now be recognized as a distinctive feature of the work of late nineteenth-century women's discourse. Space needs to be made in Rosalía criticism for interpreting her anger as a major subtext, otherwise the complexity of such an apparently simple poem as “Sin nido” (Without a nest) [discussed above]) will never be appreciated. The hidden text of “Sin nido” is a palimpsest representing the abuse a woman experiences as an abandoned mother.

Given the abundance of anger coupled with the negative vision of womanhood and the woman poet, it is surprising to find that Rosalía is known as a “santiña”—a sort of dear little saint—not only by her readers but also by those who knew her. Even her daughter claimed her mother was sweet and charming and not angry at all about Castile. Obviously, a myth surrounds Rosalía like a halo. In today's critical terminology, that myth wants to keep Rosalía de Castro imprisoned in the pigeonhole marked “angel”—“ángel del hogar.” But in Gilbert and Gubar's terminology, critics studying Rosalía need to see that their poet was both a “monster” and an “angel.” I have no desire to deny Rosalía a place with the Saints on High, but I do want her postmodern readers to recognize that there is much “monstrous” anger in Follas and Orillas del Sar. To ignore it, because it is not “feminine,” is to fail to comprehend the modernity of Rosalía de Castro as a poet.

Despite its overwhelming sense of the negative condition of womanhood, Rosalía's poetry also offers a positive gynocentric vision: she inscribes strong females within her poems, and she initiates the development of a positive female self and vision by her selection and deployment of gynocentric images and metaphors. We have already discussed the numerous strong women in Cantares, as well as the woman who takes justice into her own hands and murders those who have dishonored her; another commits adultery; others flout convention by running off with the men they love.⁶⁰ In addition, there are those women who always make ends meet despite terrible hardships.⁶¹ The tone of these poems—vibrant, approbatory—is what makes one realize that Rosalía endorses these women. To the emblems of such positive women must be added “la señora de las meigas” (she of the supernatural wise women); the woman who curses men; and the cunning and guileful old woman who always gets what she wants.⁶² These poems stand out as eulogies to “monster-women”—women intent on emancipation and self-determination—and they stand in opposition to the myriad negative images of frustrated and embittered “angel-women” who conform or are forced to conform by the patriarchal culture of the time.

Another feature of Rosalía's positive gynocentric vision is that she saw her poems as illuminating some small and intimate circle of reality. She characterizes her poems as clarifying intermittently a small, local, and peculiar emotion:

Pensaréis de estos versos, y es lo justo,
que son de extraña, insólita armonía,
que en ellos las ideas brillan, pálidas,
          como erráticas chispas
          que de repente estallan,
          que luego se retiran
semejándose a la bruma incierta
que en lo hondo de los huertos se desliza
y al susurro insistente de los pinos
          junto a la mar bravía.

(trans. Barja 30, Obras 1:280)

(You'll be right if you think these lines / are of a strange, unwonted harmony, / for in them ideas wanly shine, / like erratic sparks / that suddenly explode, / then drift away / resembling the uncertain mist / that sneaks about the orchards' depths, / around the pines' insistent rustle / along the savage sea.)

A poem such as this can be fully appreciated only if we contrast its goals to those of a typical male poet. There is an element of non-transcendentalism in Rosalía's vision. She wishes to illuminate some small patch (ll. 3-6), whereas the male poet would probably claim to his readers that he was enlightening the whole of mankind or the entire world.⁶³

To articulate and develop her positive gynocentric vision, Rosalía de Castro also selects images and metaphors that center around the concerns of a woman. For example “Los robles” (“Oaks”),in which the devastation of the Galician oak trees is condemned,⁶⁴ selects a scene of three generations of women around a fire as an image for how life should be lived:

De la hoguera sentados en torno,
en sus brazos la madre arrullaba
          al infante robusto;
daba vuelta, afanosa, la anciana,
en sus dedos nudosos, al huso,
y al alegre fulgor de la llama,
ya la joven la harina cernía,
          o ya desgranaba,
con su mano callosa y pequeña,
del maíz las mazorcas doradas.

(Obras 1:593)

(Seated around the fire, / the mother would rock to sleep in her arms / the robust infant; / the old woman would vigorously turn / the spindle in her gnarled hands; / the young girl, by the flames' bright glow, / would be sieving flour by now, / or with her tiny calloused hand, / she'd be on to shelling / the corncobs' golden kernels.)

This is a loving re-creation of the past, in which women (anciana, madre, joven) had their own community.⁶⁵ At the end of the poem, the speaker apostrophizes the oak and begs it to return to restore Galicia to its greatness; and the female poetic voice compares the oak's beauty to a virgin's:

y en las suaves graciosas pendientes
donde umbrosas se extienden tus ramas,
como en rostro de pálida virgen
cabellera ondulante y dorada,
          que en lluvia de rizos
acaricia la frente de nácar.

(Obras 1:597)

(on smooth and graceful slopes / where your boughs spread out in shade, / like the undulating golden hair / that rains in ringlets / on a pale virgin's face / and strokes her pearly brow.)

It is unlikely that a male poet would have described a pale virgin in such sexless terms.⁶⁶ The smoothness Rosalía foregrounds is indicative of a different attitude toward women.

Moreover, Rosalía's descriptions of children and mothers are distinct from the way male poets treat them. As her own child is dying, she evokes his calm and focuses on her turbulence (“Era apacible el Día” [It was a calm day (Obras 1:571)]). She also foregrounds the maternal protection she feels for her own children but concludes her reflection on what might await them once they are grown up with this condemnation: “Del hombre, enemigo del hombre, no puede / libraros, mis ángeles, la égida materna” (My little angels, maternal protection cannot save you / from man, who is man's own worst enemy [Obras 1:613]).⁶⁷ As the role of the mother is foregrounded in feminist criticism, this aspect of Rosalía's poetry merits attention. Furthermore, other discursive codes are maternalized by Rosalía. For instance, her poems are akin to those songs and fervent prayers (“canciones,” “fervientes oraciones”) which once learned in childhood are remembered forever. The River Sar is a child, and the inspiration the poet finds in her region is compared to breast feeding: “como el sediento niño el dulce jugo extrae / del pecho blanco y lleno” (just as the thirsty child extracts that sweet juice / from the full, white breast).⁶⁸

The sea, which for women poets in the twentieth century will frequently symbolize regeneration, is associated with death for Rosalía.⁶⁹ However, it is a liquid womb—“la serena / y tersa superficie” (the serene / and smooth surface [Obras 1:588-89])—in which the speaker may slake her thirst once and for all: “a apagar vuestra sed inextinguible” (slake your inextinguishable thirst [Obras 1:587]). Death by drowning is a return to the maternal womb—recall the French homophony of “mère/mer”—from which the overburdened speaker first issued.

The opposite of liquidity is hardness (and dryness), and Rosalía selected several of what Ostriker later identifies as “exoskeletal” forms to arm and defend herself against sentiment and the world, as well as to manifest her split condition of “angel/monster.” Ostriker found that women poets of the 1960s cultivated a hard and rational style of expression, which she called “exoskeletal.” She adds: “The artist's stance in many of these poems seems to identify aggressive-defensiveness with the art of writing, and this stance is clearly ungracious, ungentle, unladylike. From the point of view of poetic reputation, so much the better. The woman poet who adopts an impermeable tone is less in danger of being dismissed as sentimental or overemotional by critics” (Stealing 88).⁷⁰ Ostriker adds that the selection of a hard object (stone, metal) signifies the woman poet's fragmented being which is unable to unify itself. Rosalía's symbols corroborate Ostriker's insights.

In “Yo no he nacido para odiar” (“I was not born to hate”), Rosalía writes of being a rock:

Como la peña oculta por el musgo
de algún arroyo solitario al pie,
inmóvil y olvidada, yo quisiera
ya vivir sin amar ni aborrecer.

(Obras 1:727)

(Like the rock hidden by moss / at the bottom of a solitary stream, / immovable and forgotten, I'd now like / to live neither loving nor loathing.)

In addition, Rosalía describes herself as having an “alma yerta” (rigid soul) and adds that “secáronse tus flores de virginal fragancia” (your flowers of virgin fragrance have dried up [Obras 1:567]). She describes her condition thus: “mi sien por la corona del mártir agobiada, / y para siempre frío y agotado mi seno” (my brow heavy from the martyr's oppressive crown, / my bosom drained and forever cold [Obras 1:568]). Dry springs and fountains and dry leaves occur throughout her mature work as emblems of her condition.⁷¹

Such symbols certainly indicate Rosalía de Castro's “saudade,” her spiritual disposition, and the illness that was in fact devouring her. But in addition, and on a completely different level, they indicate her struggle with the self-division she feels. They can surely be read today as Rosalía's reaction to the shrinking horizons that beset her in a totally androcentric culture.

A further characteristic of Rosalía's feminist vision is that she begins criticizing—even subverting—some of the sacrosanct (i.e., male) beliefs of Western culture. Subversion may be too strong a term for this tendency, insofar as Rosalía de Castro never consciously undermines the epoch's intellectual beliefs. However, she does demystify them in numerous poems.

Orillas del Sar presents an unfavorable image of the male world.⁷² The hegemonic (i.e., male) world is one of light,⁷³ science, and glory.⁷⁴ By contrast, the woman's world is one of shadows (“el dintel oscuro de mi pobre morada” [the dark lintel of my poor dwelling (Obras 1:718)]). Patriarchal religion—that is, the male God—is found to be hollow.⁷⁵

In place of these man-made beliefs, the poet offers with conviction the world of the spirits: with its old women who are in touch with the supernatural (“meigas” [Obras 1:122-24]), its local spirits (“los genios propicios” [Obras 1:600]), and “genios misteriosos / que os llaman tan sentidos y amorosos” (its mysterious spirits / that keenly call you with such deep love [Obras 1:620]). Consciously or not, Rosalía shows more faith in the matriarchal religions, as may be glimpsed in the strange, quasi-traditional religious poem which begins “Si medito en tu eterna grandeza, buen Dios, a quien nunca veo” (If I meditate on your eternal grandeur, good God, whom I never see [Obras 1:672]), but which ends with the speaker running to church, throwing herself at the feet of Christ on the cross, and experiencing relief thus:

que cual niño que reposa
en el regazo materno,
después de llorar, tranquila
tras la expiación, espero
que allá donde Dios habita
he de proseguir viviendo.

(Obras 1:672)

(Like the child reposing / in the maternal lap, / after a crying fit, calm / after atonement, I have hope / to go on living / there where God has made his dwelling.)

It is to be emphasized that Rosalía derives her religious consolation, such as it is, by identifying not with the dying God figure himself but with the feeling a child has in its mother's arms; with the feeling she herself might have imparted to her own son as he lay dying. What she does is mother herself back to normalcy. A male god cannot “mother” a woman back to health, for “mothering” is a woman's job and therefore women must “mother” themselves—which is what Rosalía, the prefeminist, does. Cixous implies this when she writes: “There always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other—in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix, cradler; herself giver as her mother and child; she is her own sister-daughter” (“Laugh” 252]). And Rabuzzi, in her reflections on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, concludes that “the return to the mother … suggests … the maturation rather than the regression of the daughter, a condition which renders her indistinguishable from her mother. When, or if, a woman achieves this stage, she has achieved the capability of being mother to or caretaker of herself, a very significant step for any human” (Sacred 135).

Finally, in Orillas del Sar the most trenchant symbol for the subversion of male values occurs in “Desde los cuatro puntos cardinales” (“From the four points of the compass”), where Rosalía revises the classical (i.e., male) myth of the voyages of Ulysses, but tells it from Penelope's point of view: Penelope shrugs her shoulders at the male world of science and progress and at the modern world's blind faith in hard work:

          ¡Esperad y creed!: “crea” el que cree,
y ama con doble ardor aquel que espera.
          Pero yo en el rincón más escondido
y también más hermoso de la Tierra,
                    sin esperar a Ulises
(que el nuestro ha naufragado en la tormenta)
                    semejante a Penélope,
tejo y destejo sin cesar mi tela,
          pensando que esta es del destino humano
                    la incesante tarea;
y que ahora subiendo, ahora bajando,
unas veces con luz, otras a ciegas,
cumplimos nuestros días y llegamos
más tarde o más temprano a la ribera.

(Obras 1:713-14)

(Wait and believe!: he who believes, “creates,” / and those who wait, love with twofold zeal. / Whereas I, in the most sequestered / but most beautiful corner of the Earth, / like Penelope, / but not waiting for Ulysses / (for ours was shipwrecked in the storm), / ceaselessly weave and unweave my cloth, / thinking that human destiny is / this never-ending task; / that by climbing up and heading down, / sometimes with a light, sometimes blindly groping, / we serve out our allotted time and reach / sooner or later the other shore.)

Rosalía clearly identifies with Penelope as she rewrites the Ulysses myth.⁷⁶ The revision of patriarchal myth is a distinctive feature of women's poetry, and in Rosalía's case it is another indication of her covert feminist impulse, a further sign of her clandestine struggle to deal “from a specifically female perspective” with her “female experience” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 72).

That Rosalía de Castro displays several distinctive features of a gynocentric vision, and that she initiates a subversion of the ideals and myths of the phallocratic Occident, and that she at times selects gynocentric images and metaphors to articulate that vision indicate why women poets in twentieth-century Spain continue to revere her and provide additional evidence of her genius as a Modern Spanish poet.

Notes

1. Mayoral comments on true and false images of Rosalía in her conclusion (Poesía 567-68). She writes of “una dulce y morriñosa mujer gallega que llora y se lamenta continuamente en no menos dulces y suaves versos” (“a sweet and homesick Galician woman who weeps and moans in verses that are just as sweet and smooth”), as opposed to “aquella mujer de espíritu fuerte, tantas veces áspera … que [habla] en un tono feroz” (“that strong-spirited woman, often harsh … who speaks in ferocious tones”).

2. For instance, Carballo Calero's edition of the Cantares and studies by Alonso Montero, Kulp-Hill, Mayoral, and Poullain, and the recent three-volume Actas do Congreso internacional de estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro e o seu tempo.

3. For example, both Mayoral and Kulp-Hill study Rosalía's “Electra” complex—her desire to compete against her mother for her father's affections.

4. Albert Robatto's Rosalía de Castro y la condición femenina, in my estimation, focuses on Rosalía's presentation of the “angel” woman. She writes: “Sintetizaremos esta parte de nuestro estudio reafirmando una vez más que la capacidad de entrega, la ternura y la disposición al trabajo son tres cualidades de la mujer gallega, recurrentemente expresadas en la obra de Rosalía, que nos han ayudado a precisar ese particular feminismo rosaliano” (We would sum up this part of our study reasserting once more that her capacity for giving, her tenderness and her aptitude for work are three qualities of the Galician woman, repeatedly expressed in Rosalía's work, that have helped us specify that particular aspect of Rosalía's feminism [112]).

5. See especially Stevens, Rosalía de Castro (who on pp. 118 and 121 makes the same point I am making here). And in the three-volume Actas, see Blanco García (“A problemática”), Briesemeister (“Rosalía de Castro”), Ciplijauskaité (“Cárcel estrecha”), Feal Deibe (“Sobre el feminismo”), March (“Rosalía de Castro”), M. Miller (“Rosalía de Castro”), Noia Campos “Elementos literarios”), Sánchez Mora (“Rosalía de Castro”), and Stevens (“Apología feminista”).

6. Gilbert and Gubar (Madwoman 72) discuss how nineteenth-century women writers grew beyond the permitted bounds of female “modesty” and male mimicry.

7. I omit La Flor and A mi madre.

8. All future references to these books will be abbreviated to Cantares, Follas, and Orillas del Sar respectively and will be given in Spanish.

9. However, I do agree with Poullain that a bipartite trajectory does not do justice to Rosalía's complexity. Moreover, an argument could be made that attention needs to be paid to the idea that her “saudade” would have been intensified and aggravated by the fact of her being a woman writer in the nineteenth century.

10. For example, all poets toward the end of the last century were mournful and somewhat effete (decadent), and hence Rosalía's mournfulness (“saudade”) is overemphasized in all criticism of her work. As early as 1890 Pardo Bazán was implying that Rosalía's poetry was decadent: “repite quejas [de] la enferma poesía lírica” (“repeats the complaints of sick, lyric poetry” [see Davies, “Rosalía” 612; and Stevens, Rosalía de Castro 34]).

11. For example, Davies notes that in 1885 Pardo Bazán “insisted on relegating Rosalía to the role of a minor provincial poet,” and in 1891, in “La mujer española” (The Spanish woman), she “praises Avellaneda, Carolina Coronado, and Concepción Arenal” (“Rosalía” 612) but ignores Rosalía. This campaign was sustained by such figures as Núñez de Arce, Juan Valera, Tamayo y Baus, Menéndez Pelayo, and Emilio Castelar: “all [of whom] contributed to the formation of a solid block of intellectuals bound to officialdom which ostracized Rosalía de Castro” (612, 617).

12. Rosalía's vilification by her nineteenth-century peers is also treated by Cardwell (“Rosalía de Castro” 440-41), who, recognizing his own debt to Davies, notes that Rosalía's early work, which attacks the status quo, helped inspire the self-serving campaign conducted against her after 1874 and continued after her death by Pardo Bazán, Valera, Menéndez Pelayo and others. Criticism of Rosalía and Murguía, Cardwell argues, was directed against the decentralization of Spain and the autonomy of Galicia. Such political emancipation was fiercely attacked by the supporters of the monarchy, restored in 1875, who also marginalized Rosalía's work by arguing that it reflected a decadent culture.

13. Unamuno in an article collected in Andanzas y visiones españolas; Azorín in Clásicos y modernos (1912), El paisaje de España visto por los españoles (1917), and Leyendo a los poetas (1929).

14. Jiménez told his students that in 1896 Rosalía was one of his favorite poets and that he was reading her at that time in Galician (El modernismo 54). Jiménez did translate a few poems from Follas novas. Aguirre writes that he translated “Sombra negra que me asombras” and “A [sic] la Habana (“Influencia” 46-47). Sánchez Romeralo says that he translated “Cuando creo que te has ido” and “Esta parte y aquella parte,” which is the fifth section of “Hacia la Habana.” He also notes that only the former has appeared in print, in Jiménez, El modernismo 302 (“Rosalía” 214 and 219).

15. See for example, Gilbert and Gubar's “Ceremonies” (esp. 26-27).

16. Alonso Montero (Rosalía 49) cites a letter of Murguía's, published in the Boletín de la Real Academia Gallega (Dec. 1950, 102-3), in which he claims that unbeknown to Rosalía he took the poems to a publisher friend in Vigo and demanded a prologue from her while they were being printed. For a month Rosalía refused, insisting “en que era mejor saliese el libro con mi nombre” (“that it were best that the book appear under my name,” i.e., her husband's). In Los precursores (145), Murguía adds that Rosalía was obliged to write the rest of the book once the first printing was complete.

17. The collection originally ended with this poem. However, the Obras completas (hereafter cited as Obras with the volume number)—which contain thirty-eight Cantares—have a different order. For further analysis of this poem, see Stevens (Rosalía de Castro 58-60).

18. For the Galician original, see Obras 1:232-33. I give the Spanish because I assume that few of my readers will follow Galician sufficiently well to grasp poetic nuances.

19. For a discussion of the traditional “romance,” see note 22 to my introduction above. A romance has lines of eight syllables, with assonance in alternate lines. In this romance the assonance is in o-a.

20. Critics (e.g., Mayoral) have noted that Rosalía was not physically attractive.

21. This collection of poetry in Galician, together with the Juegos Florales de la Coruña, marked the beginning of the Galician Renaissance. (Nothing had been written in Galician since the sixteenth century.)

22. The issue of Rosalía's command of Galician is more complex than this; see Stevens (Rosalía de Castro 36-48, and esp. 39).

23. She described her own heart as unfeminine in the opening poem of Follas (Obras 1:277).

24. The poem reads: “Bajo ese vínculo santo, / ¿tus ojos, niña, no ven / á la madre cariñosa / que besa con embriaguez / la rosada faz del ángel / desprendido de su ser? / ¿no ves al feliz esposo / sellar con su labio fiel / la mejilla de la esposa / lleno de amor y placer? / ¿no piensas que en estos goces / hay tal encanto y tal bien / que solamente en el cielo / mayores los puede haber? / Pues si nada de esto piensas, / pues si nada de esto ves, / digo que no tienes alma / ni corazón de mujer” (In this sacred bond, / do your eyes, girl, not see / the caring mother / who kisses madly / the rosy face of the angel / that sprung from her being? / Don't you see the contented husband / filled with love and pleasure / seal with his faithful lip / his wife's cheek? Don't you think that in such joy / there's such enchantment and good / that only in heaven / can there be anything better? / Well, if you think nothing like this, / if you see none of this, / I say that you have neither the heart / nor the soul of a woman [Trueba, Libro 169]).

25. However, let me note the following parallels—all from Follas—as they probably demonstrate her debt to him. “Todo clavo se saca / con otro clavo” (Trueba, Libro 78), and “Unha vez tiven un cravo” (Obras 1:286). Poem no. 24, “Oros sin triunfo” (Trueba, Libro 88) should be compared to “No hai peor meiga que unha gran pena” (Obras 1:355), as they concern counts and country girls. Poem no. 44 (Trueba, Libro 177) has a woman who kills the man who seduced her; Rosalía in “A xusticia pola man” (Obras 1:332) has a woman who kills a family with a scythe.

26. Trans. Barja 16; for the text in Galician, see Obras 1:68.

27. Additional factors of a psychological nature which would have contributed to Rosalía's marginalization are her illegitimacy and rumored marital infidelities.

28. Only poems nos. 2, 18, and 21 deal with women and/or a woman's experience.

29. To be precise, seven of the thirty-eight poems have male speakers and/or focus predominantly on a male predicament (nos. 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 35, 38). “A gaita gallega,” “Castellanos de Castilla,” and “Alborada” each have a female speaker but are not really about a woman's experience.

30. For Stevens's analysis of Cantares in particular see Rosalía 36-71.

31. This ethereal woman, it should be noted, does not lead her man to perdition. Compare Bécquer, Rimas, Rima 11 “soy incorpórea” etc., and “Los ojos verdes.”

32. This is the first stanza of a very long poem of 225 lines. It consists of fifty-five “quintillas” in abaab.

33. As will Machado in “Poema de un día—Meditaciones rurales” [128] of Campos de Castilla (for which see Wilcox, “Self-Referentiality”). The resonance of Rosalía in Machado and Jiménez is astounding (and, apart from meriting a detailed study, is another testimony to her greatness).

34. Rosalía's early years are complicated. Her father, a priest, abandoned her mother. Rosalía was initially brought up by distant relatives, but joined her mother when she was about eight years old.

35. For “cantigas,” see note 22 to my introduction, above.

36. Possibly written under pressure from Murguía and therefore less meditated.

37. This is an allusion to the medieval “cantiga de amigo,” “Malferida iba la garza” (cited in my introduction, n. 22 above).

38. On this topic, see Stevens, Rosalía de Castro 96-117.

39. The fifth and final section of Follas is called “Viudas de vivos, viudas de muertos.” For a totally different interpretation of this sequence of poems than mine, an objective one, see Poullain, Rosalía Castro 123-28.

40. However, in this respect, it is as well to recall Gardiner's shrewd observation, in her remarks on “seduced and abandoned women,” that “lamenting a man after he has gone may be easier than conforming to his wishes when he is present” (“Mind Mother” 137).

41. See “Vivir para ver” (Follas, trans. Barja 302, Obras 1:498) and “Nadie se muere” (trans. Barja 304, Obras 1:500); “Cuando era tiempo de invierno” (trans. Barja 44, Obras 1:293) and “Allí, entre las flores, canta” (trans. Barja 126, Obras 1:371). In Orillas del Sar negative images of women are presented via women who are lovelorn (“Alma que vas huyendo de ti misma” [Obras 1:598]), those who are foolish enough to expect their husbands to return (“Era la última noche” [Obras 1:617-18]), and those who have been seduced and abandoned (“Sed de amores” [Obras 1:708]). There is even a young girl who married an old man; after his death, she remains so imprisoned by his memory that she is unable to love another (“Quisiera, hermosa mía” [Obras 1:644-49]). On this issue, see Stevens, Rosalía de Castro 102-6 and ff.).

42. “Con su sordo murmullo” (Follas, trans. Barja 44, Obras 1:295), “Corred, serenas ondas cristalinas” (trans. Barja 58, Obras 1:308), “Deja que en esa copa” (trans. Barja 62, Obras 1:312), “Sola” (trans. Barja 102, Obras 1:351), “Torres del oeste” (trans. Barja 324, Obras 1:519), and “Con las penas a cuestas” (trans. Barja 338, Obras 1:530). There are more allusions to sea and suicide in Orillas del Sar. See Stevens (Rosalía de Castro 108-16) for suicide and the sea.

43. See also “Sin nido” from Follas, discussed below.

44. The feminist impulse in this metaphor is easily overlooked because the second stanza of this two-stanza poem focuses the argument exclusively on loss of faith and the onset of doubt.

45. See “Los tristes” (Orillas, Obras 1:588), “Era la última noche-II” (Obras 1:618), and “Unos con la calumnia le mancharon-II” (Obras 1:611)

46. See “Tanto e tanto nos odiamos” (Follas, trans. Barja 254-60, Obras 1:462). See also “Tú para mí, yo para ti, bien mío” (Orillas, Obras 1:719-20), where marriage is lambasted. The state of marriage is in effect subverted in “Margarita,” in which the title character is a strong and independent woman wrestling with the moral, spiritual, and practical problems of caring for her father all day and evening, while trying to keep her own romantic relationship alive. Her solution is to abandon her father at night while he is in bed, and sneak out to the house of her lover so that she may spend the night with him (Obras 1:584-86). Azorín was most impressed by this poem and in 1912—the start of the reassessment of Rosalía—commented on it.

47. See “Quien casa tiene, tiene media vida” (Follas, trans. Barja 284, Obras 1:482-83).

48. See, respectively, “Ladraban contra mí” (Follas, trans. Barja 68, Obras 1:319), “La extranjera en su patria” (trans. Barja 92, Obras 1:342); “La losa encantada” (trans. Barja 240-54, Obras 1:454).

49. “E ben” (Follas, trans. Barja 136, Obras 1:378); “Olvidemos los muertos” (trans. Barja 278-82, Obras 479).

50. Follas, trans. Barja 62, Obras 1:311; trans. Barja 92, Obras 1:340-41; “Tengo un nido de locos pensamientos / junto al lar escondidos” (trans. Barja 320-22, Obras 1:515)

51. Follas, trans. Barja 30, Obras 1:279; “Mis pensamientos” (trans. Barja 300, Obras 1:497).

52. See, respectively, “Aturde la confusa gritería” (Orillas, Obras 1:641); “Los que a través de sus lágrimas” (Obras 1:673-77); “Orillas del Sar-II” (Obras 1:564); “La canción que oyó en sueños el viejo” (Obras 1:634); and “A la sombra te sientas de las desnudas rocas” (Obras 1:655-56).

53. And see “Una cuerda tirante guarda mi seno” (Orillas, Obras 1:710).

54. M. Miller implies this in “Rosalía de Castro” 66.

55. For Bécquer, see Poullain (Rosalía Castro) and Ciplijauskaité (“Cárcel estrecha”). For Trueba, see Kulp, Manner and Mood, and n. 25 above.

56. Kirkpatrick has shown how women in the nineteenth century withdrew from their attempts at Promethean (male) desires (Románticas).

57. A Freudian interpretation would go much further than this. For example, the pen would represent the appropriation of phallic discourse; the woman would fertilize herself and give birth (“blood”) to her own poems.

58. Rosalía's fury is evident in the content of these poems, not in her expression. For ways Rosalía deals with anger see Stevens, Rosalía de Castro 89.

59. See, respectively, “¡Justicia de los hombres! Yo te busco” (Obras 1:707); “Cuando sopla el Norte duro” (Obras 1:642); “¡Jamás lo olvidaré!” (Obras 1:605-9), all from Orillas.

60. See, respectively, “La justicia por la mano” (Follas, trans. Barja 82, Obras 1:332); “Yo por vos, y vos por otro” (trans. Barja 136-42, Obras 1:380); “¡Valor!” (trans. Barja 142, Obras 1:383); and “De horror un abismo veo” (trans. Barja 144, Obras 1:385).

61. See, for example, “Casiña mía, mi hogar” (Follas, trans. Barja 210-14, Obras 1:437) and “¿Por qué?” (trans. Barja 330-32, Obras 1:524).

62. See, respectively, “Gigantescos olmos” (Follas, trans. Barja 122-24, Obras 1:368); “Permita Dios que te veas” (trans. Barja 198-200, Obras 1:425); “¡La pobrecita está sorda … !” (trans. Barja 218-36, Obras 1:442).

63. See Stevens (Rosalía de Castro 87-93) for the nineteenth-century belief that women should avoid poems of a transcendent theme (i.e., of a political, social, or philosophical nature), and Rosalía's repudiation of it. Stevens (33) cites Ortner's work in support of the view that women are excluded from the “transcendent processes of culture.”

64. And the male drives are symbolized by the axe (“el hacha”).

65. One that probably inspired Machado in “Campos de Soria. CXIII-V.”

66. In the 1880s, Rubén Darío begins one of his Abrojos (Thistles) with “aquella frente de virgen” (that brow of a virgin) and within ten lines has converted her into “¡la número 10!” (a 10!) (Poesías completas 134-35). And in the 1890s, Juan Ramón Jiménez, having described the bodies of naked women in a voluptuous manner in “La canción de la carne” (Song of the flesh), has “la pura virgen” (the pure virgin) dance with lecherous delight (“una dicha lujuriosa”) (Primeros libros 1484-86).

67. Also in “¡Volved!” (Orillas, Obras 1:619), the speaker identifies with “mother” Galicia who is pained by the emigration of so many of her “Children.” And in “Santa escolástica,” she suddenly exclaims: “¡Majestad de los templos!, mi alma femenina / te siente como siente las maternas dulzuras, / las inquietudes vagas, las ternuras secretas / y el temor a lo oculto, tras la inmensa altura” (Orillas, Obras 1:665). (“The majesty of temples! in your immense height / my feminine soul / feels for you as it feels maternal gentleness, / vague stirrings, secret tenderness, / and fear of the unknown.”)

68. See “Aunque no alcancen gloria” (Obras 1:561); “Del antiguo camino a lo largo” (Obras 1:600); and “Orillas del Sar-v” (Obras 1:567), all from Orillas.

69. “Los tristes” ends with this line: “las negras corrientes del hondo Leteo” (deep Lethe's black currents [Obras 592]); and see “¡Ea!, ¡aprisa subamos de la vida!” (Obras 1:725), both from Orillas.

70. For more on the topic of sentimentality, see also Stevens, Rosalía de Castro 79ff.

71. See, for example, “Ya no mana la fuente se agotó el manantial” (The fount no longer flows, the spring dried up [Obras 1:614]); “Si en ti secó la fuente del consuelo, / secas todas las fuentes has de hallar” (If the fount of consolation has dried up in you, you'll find all founts dry [Obras 1:598]); “y ya secas las hojas en las ramas desnudas” (and now the leaves on the naked branches are dry [Obras 1:622]); all from Orillas.

72. There are also negative perspectives on men and the male vision of reality. Rosalía presents negative images of the male betrayer in “Vivir para ver” (Follas, trans. Barja 304, Obras 1:498) and in “Nadie se muere” (Follas, trans. Barja 306, Obras 1:500); of man's ambition in “Aprisa” (Follas, trans. Barja 196, Obras 1:422); of male pride in “Soberbia” (Follas, trans. Barja 214, Obras 1:440); and of drunkeness in “Vamos bebiendo” (Follas, trans. Barja 116, Obras 1:362). The personification of Castile, for which she feels disgust, is also masculine—but this is much clearer in the Cantares and Orillas del Sar. In the latter, she calls the Castilians “los fieros hijos del jardín de España” (cruel sons from the garden of Spain [Orillas, Obras 1:608]).

73. “Las ondas / de luz que el espacio llenan” (“the waves / of light that fill space” [Orillas, Obras 1:564]); see also in Follas “luz y progreso” / “light and progress” (“¿Quién no gime?” [trans. Barja 66, Obras 1:317]); and “Para unos negro” (trans. Barja 160-64, Obras 1:397-98), where the male and female visions of life are dramatically opposed: a dying man tells his son to be astute and give offense; the dying mother tells her son to be frank and loyal, to pardon, do good, and be hospitable.

74. “Una luciérnaga entre el musgo brilla” (Orillas, Obras 1:574); “¡Oh gloria! … jamás te rendí culto” (Orillas, Obras 1:718). Rosalía's disgust with fame is also found in Orillas, Obras 1:581, 699, 717.

75. See “Una luciérnaga entre el musgo brilla” (Orillas, Obras 1:574-76) and “Creyó que era eterno tu reino en el alma” (Orillas, Obras 1:602).

76. Francisca Aguirre will develop this insight, as we shall see in chap. 6.

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