[In the following excerpt, Wilcox examines Castro as a marginalized woman poet whose collection Cantares gallegos—ostensibly a poetic celebration of her native Galicia—offers an ambivalent feminist vision.]

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 (Beside the River 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 Cantares¹⁷ where she apologizes for what she perceives as her lack of poetic finesse:

Yo cantar, cantar, canté,
aunque mi gracia era poca,
que nunca (y de ello me pesa)
fui yo una niña graciosa.

Canté como mal sabía,
con mil vueltas enredosas,

como hacen los que no saben
directamente una cosa.
Pero después, con cuidado,
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.
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
espumas de verdes ondas,
del cielo blancas estrellas,
de tierra plantas hermosas,
nieblas de color sombrío
que las montañas arropan,
los gritos del triste búho,
y aún las campanas que doblan,
la primavera que ríe,
y las aves voladoras.
Canta que te canta, mientras
el corazón triste llora.
Esto y aún más, bien quisiera
decir con lengua graciosa:
mas donde gracia me falta
el sentimiento me sobra:
aunque éste tampoco basta
para explicar ciertas cosas;
por fuera a veces se canta,
mientras por dentro se llora.
No me expliqué cual quisiera
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.
¡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. I 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 modesty 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:

Un grito de regocijo
resonó en mi dulce patria
y á la voz de Isabel, fué
la Guardia civil creada,
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):

¡Salada, qué hermosa eres!
¡Salada, por ti me muero!
Tienes una cinturita
que se abarca con dos dedos,
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 straggles 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:

Ellas loquinas, bailaban,
y a donde estaba corrían,
ciegas …, ciegas, no veían
las zarzas que las cercaban;
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 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 Laiño,/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:

Así imagino a la triste
sombra de mi madre, errando
en la esfera donde existe;
que a ir al cielo se resiste,
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 Adrierme 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, Rosalia 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…

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 Montera, Kulp-Hill, Mayoral, and Poullain, and the recent three-volume Actas do Congreso internacional de estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro e 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"), Féal 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 Rosalia's moumfulness ("saudade") is overemphasized in all criticism of her work. As early as 1890 Pardo Bazán wasimplying 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, Rosalia 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 Boletin 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 complétas (hereafter cited as 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 [in Rosalía de Castro]… 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. In 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 [in Rosalía de Castro]…

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…).