Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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had in this debate. As Blanco has noted, the added material included a loaded reference to certain novels about Galicia published after she had finished the first draft. Choosing not to mention the authors’ names to avoid granting them greater fame (Herrera Garrido, 1921: 12), Herrera nevertheless elaborates on the content of their novels, a content that she sees as morally deleterious for the public image of Galician women, both outside and within the borders of Galicia. Emphatically, she claimed, ‘a nosa muller non é, nin nunca foi, nin será xamáis, a que retratan alguns libros qu’houbera que queimar o seu autor, dinantes de qu’eles traspuxeran as lindes do terruiro própeo’ (our women are not, never have been and never will be, like the women depicted in those books, which their authors should have burnt before they entered the boundaries of our homeland) (12). Probably with Wenceslao Fernández Flórez in mind (a Galician, as opposed to Rafael López de Haro), Herrera wrote that such demeaning descriptions were all the more condemnable if the author was of Galician origins; thereby she reinforced the deep dialectic nature of Galician nationalist discourse in its early phases, when it was reacting to a, by then, widespread colonial narrative about Galician women. Such is my interpretation of one of the questions she poses in her article, where she establishes that any attempt to disparage Galician women on moral grounds cannot possibly originate from a nationally aware Galician man, who would be, by dint of doing that, condemning the whole nation as if he were condemning his own mother (1921: 11–12). With this configuration Herrera was laying bare the dialectical structure of one of the central metaphors of Galician nationalism, that of Galicia as the revered terra nai (Mother Land), a symbol of a femininely connoted hearth, home and landscape, which stood historically in opposition to the masculine spaces of migration, high-sea fishing and forced displacement from the land of one’s birth. The myth of the terra nai, so integral to Galician cultural history from Otero Pedrayo to Juan Rof Carballo, Alfonso R. Castelao and Manuel Rivas, has lent itself to feminist appraisals of images of the nation in Galician nationalist discourse (Rios Bergantinhos, 2001: 159–61; Blanco, 2006: 205–11). However, I would argue that the history of this trope, its origins and staggering durability in Galicia, cannot be disassociated from turn-of-the-century colonial representations of Galician rural women as indecent and immoral. The force with which the trope of Galician women as pious and self-abnegating, and of Galicia itself as a saintly mother in need of care and protection, erupted in the early programmatic texts of Galician nationalism, and subsequently as a recurrent metaphor of cultural nationalism throughout the twentieth century, is a testament to the perceived magnitude of the attacks, and also, as we shall see in the course of this book, to the extent to which the codes of sexual morality have informed nationalist discourses on women in Galicia.5
The critical reception of Rosalía de Castro is paradigmatic of the above friction between national construction and sexual politics in Galicia. As this book’s five chapters show, the national exegesis of Rosalía de Castro has been so intricately linked with the discourse of Galician sentimentality that any suggestion that she may have been anything less than its absolute embodiment has been met with hostility and uproar until quite recently. As a result, traditional Rosalian scholarship in Galicia has tended to avoid the question of just what it was that made this author the object of such extraordinary levels of discursive control. Large gaps in biographical and documentary data remain either irremediable or inadequately confronted, while some aspects of de Castro’s life and writings, including the fact that she was the daughter of an unmarried woman and a priest, the anti-clerical meanings of her texts and the trace of adulterous desire in her poems, were treated with formulaic, pious evasion for most of the twentieth century. We do know, however, that the uneasy conflation between gender and national politics was a problem for her authorial position and a central concern of her literary project, as a female nationalist writer in both Galician and Castilian who addressed gender and national politics in her texts.6 One of this book’s aims is to offer an explanation for why the study of this aspect of Rosalía de Castro’s legacy has been delayed by a critical establishment more preoccupied with the construction and maintenance of a worthy national symbol, one that would prove resilient against the specific attacks of Spanish centralism but which, paradoxically, ended up having a disabling effect for political nationalism in Galicia. Rosalía de Castro has been, for this reason, an overloaded code in Galician cultural history. Casting her, and keeping custody of her image, as a devoted mother, a loving wife and, above all, as the icon of Galicia has been a central aim of the principal loci of Galician cultural history, from the seminal texts of nationalist literary history to essays on cultural anthropology and the House-Museum of Rosalía de Castro, open to the public since 1971.
Galicia, a Sentimental Nation aims to chart the various stages of this colonial dialectic between Spanish and Galician discourses of the Galician nation, as well as its implications for Galician cultural history and the history of its own nationalist movement. I have come to this study from a disciplinary position midway between literary criticism and cultural history, and this will become evident in the range of historical, literary and extra-literary sources I will draw on for the construction of my argument. Amongst the plethora of textual – and occasionally visual – material to which I will be referring, one type stands out, and that is the texts of Galician literary historiography, in both Spanish and Galician. The reason for this goes beyond the consensus among critics of colonialist discourses that the mechanisms of Orientalism have provided an ‘enunciative capacity’ to travellers, writers and anthropologists, but crucially also to historians (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 23). For the Galician context, close analyses of literary histories as a narrative corpus have been seldom attempted, mainly because literary history has enjoyed a protected high-status position in the nation-building process. Yet it is precisely because of their overloaded status, as both monuments and inventories of a national literary genius that is to be projected against historically specific paradigms of value and authority, that Galician literary historiography provides us with a rich textual corpus for the study of how those paradigms have remained static or have shifted. A central argument of this book is that such paradigms for national definitions in Galicia have been forged in close relation to colonizing and self-colonizing discourses about the region, developing both outside and within its borders. I have structured my arguments in each chapter to foreground the textual sites of these cultural and political negotiations, as can be traced in the texts of Galician literary history and the network of cultural artefacts with which they interact, including literary dictionaries, institutional speeches, cultural criticism, literary writing and audiovisual material. In the first chapter, which examines the inaugural texts of Galician literary history written by the Galician conservative politician Augusto González Besada (1885, 1887) and his acceptance address at the Real Academia Española in 1916, I look at how feminizing metaphors of Galicia, Galician and Galicians lie at the core of the discourse of ‘regionalismo instrumental’ (instrumental regionalism) emerging in the late nineteenth century (Vallejo Pousada, 2005), a discourse for which the image of a self-abnegating Galician woman embodied in the figure of Rosalía de Castro was of paramount importance. In the second chapter, which analyses the literary histories written by the regionalist polymath Eugenio Carré Aldao (1911, 1915), his bio-bibliography of Rosalía de Castro (1926–7) and the narrative texts he wrote between 1919 and 1925, the focus is on how a nascent Galician cultural nationalism reacts to two debilitating tropes emerging out of colonial reappropriations of the myth of Celtic origins, namely those of the emasculated, sentimental Galician man and of the sexually avid Galician woman. In the third chapter, I reread the political turn in Galician nationalism after 1916 as a narrative of masculinization aimed at counteracting the feminizing metaphors operative in Galician apolitical regionalism and Spanish centralism, and I propose that a chief function of texts such as Antonio Couceiro Freijomil’s Diccionario bio-bibliográfico de escritores (Bio-bibliographic Dictionary of Writers) (1951–3) was to restore pre-war colonial discourses about Galicia during the fascist dictatorship. The fourth chapter turns to the work and figure of the man conventionally considered the founding father of nationalist Galician literary history, Ricardo Carvalho Calero, and examines his histories of Galician literature, criticism and narrative, as an influential example of how national and sexual politics have marked Galician cultural nationalism, specifically where questions of masculine potency and feminine morality are concerned.7 In the fifth chapter, which takes up a series of contemporary texts of literary history, criticism and writing, I look at how more recent discourses of the nation such as