Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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the purposes of this study is the role that the Galician poet and novelist Rosalía de Castro was made to play in this discursive transaction. By 1889, Rosalía de Castro had been dead for four years, and the signification of her literary and intellectual legacy was now available for appropriation in the market of competing discourses on the nation developing in Galicia and Spain. In the years following her death and for the length of the twentieth century, the equation between Rosalía de Castro and Galician sentimentality acted as a highly serviceable ruse geared towards the feminization of Galicia and, thus, its political demobilization. Against Murguía’s description of de Castro’s Cantares gallegos as a veritable ‘grito de guerra’ (war cry) (1889: 18), a reactive discursive structure was also emerging which sought to redefine her legacy in more pacifying terms. Rosalía de Castro thus turned into the transmogrified voice of a sentimentalized Galician people, a turn made possible by her literary status in Galicia mainly as a writer of popular poetry and, of course, her womanhood. The Galician national psyche, ‘tan paciente y sufrid[a] en las cuitas como tenaz en sus afecciones y ensueños’ (as patient as abnegated in its sorrows, as it is steady in its affections and yearnings) (Figueroa, 1889: 43), found not only its vehicle but its archetype in the figure and poetry of de Castro, and this turn was also instrumental for the further categorization of Galician as a soft and mellifluous language, apt for the expression not of hard political realities, but of private, delicate emotions:
Para esto de decir ternezas y mimos, frases de amor y caricias, tienen singularísimo valor los diminutivos gallegos, principalmente en los labios de las hijas del país, que parece hacen rítmica con la frase la melodía de su acento. Las mujeres son, según nos enseña el P. Sarmiento, las que inventan la letra y la música de los cantares gallegos: en ellas hay, pues, que buscar la filiación literaria de Rosalía Castro.
Y no se entienda que rebajo el mérito á Rosalía y sus cantares, que tienen por principal excelencia la intensidad de sentimiento, la frescura y precisión de los del pueblo… Es la naturaleza femenina de Rosalía Castro, admirable para la percepción de las bellezas gallegas: sus afinadas facultades sorprenden con los secretos del lenguaje los del alma, de que arranca sentidos lamentos al pulsar la cuerda de la sensibilidad. (1889: 62–3)
(When it comes to expressing tenderness and sweet nothings, words of love and fondness, Galician diminutives are most perfectly suited, principally on the lips of the daughters of this country, whose melodic accent seems to render their speech more rhythmic. As Father Sarmiento taught us, women are the creators of both the melody and the lyrics of the Galician popular songs: and it is in them that we must search for Rosalía de Castro’s literary lineage.
And let it be understood that I am not demeaning Rosalía’s merits or those of her songs, whose principal excellence lies in the intensity of feeling, the freshness and precision of the feeling of the people … That is Rosalía de Castro’s feminine nature, so admirably sensitive to Galician beauty: her finely tuned faculties reveal both the secrets of language and the secrets of the soul, from which they extract the deepest of laments by playing the chords of sensitivity.)
A year before the Marqués de Figueroa’s address in Madrid, the figure and legacy of Rosalía de Castro had already provided an occasion for the consolidation of the above tropes in another key voice of centralist anti-galeguismo, that of the Galician novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. The speech she delivered in 1885 at A Coruña’s Liceo de Artesanos (Artisans’ Lyceum), which was subsequently published in slightly revised form in her book De mi tierra (About my Homeland) (1888), offers a crystallization of how references to Galician identity, sentimentality and femininity appeared in easy tandem, and how literary commentary on Rosalía de Castro was already offering a convenient vehicle for this arrangement. In Pardo Bazán’s view, Rosalía de Castro had selected the Galician ‘dialect’ as the best vehicle for her popular poetry, because it ‘posee un dejo grato y fresquísimo, que impensadamente se nos sube á los labios cuando necesitamos balbucir una frase amante, arrullar á una criatura, lanzar un festivo epigrama, exhalar un ¡ay! de pena’ (has a fresh and pleasant cadence, which springs inadvertently to our lips when we need to whisper a sweet nothing, lull a baby to sleep, give forth a festive epigram, breathe a cry of sorrow) (Pardo Bazán, 1984: 16–17). It is not difficult to perceive how the images of a sentimentalized Galician language, popular poetry and Rosalía de Castro are fastened together through the gendered trope of infantile lack of development and femininity. The author remarks that, in Galicia, popular lore and traditions cannot possibly be transmitted through men, ‘mientras las mujeres … los comunican con singular exactitud’ (while women do so with unique dexterity) (1984: 32), and this is primarily because:
el alma de la mujer, acaso por su contacto con la niñez, está más cerca del alma ingenua del pueblo; que es más capaz de comprenderle, de entrar en su orden de ideas, de interesarse por las pequeñeces que le preocupan. Ese es el principal encanto de Rosalía: haber expresado como poeta lo que entendió como mujer … (32)
(a woman’s soul (perhaps owing to its contact with childhood) is closer to the simple soul of the populace and is therefore more capable of understanding them, of entering their thought structures and of caring for the trifles that concern them. And that is Rosalía’s most outstanding charm: that she expressed as a poet what she was able to grasp as a woman …)
In the endnotes to the published edition of her speech, Pardo Bazán elaborated on the theory of Galician as an undeveloped dialect in the pseudo-scientific language that would become characteristic of Spanish naturalism. Her gendered differentiation between a feminized Galician and a Castilian that is ‘rudo y musculoso’ (rough and muscular) lends itself to a colonialist reading, particularly in her clarification that Castilian ‘necesitó mucho más tiempo para formarse, quizás por la misma causa que influye en que la pubertad sea más pronta en las hembras que en los varones, y más rápido el desarrollo de su osatura’ (took much longer to be formed, perhaps for the same reason that makes women reach puberty before men, and makes their bone structure develop earlier) (1984: 44). A further interesting element emerges in her text which seals the colonial power logic informing the sentimentalization of Galician identity: its description as a collective pathology. The rhetorical use of a pseudo-medical language serves as a figurative medium with which to weaken the national function of the myth of Celtic origins, turning it ultimately into a colonial form of representation that explains Galicia’s subaltern condition as both inferior and dominated:
Cuando un país tiene contra sí la fortuna y, como Galicia, se ve primero relegado á puesto secundario, casi anulado después, al paso que aumenta su desdicha, suele crecer también en apasionada intensidad, hasta rayar en el fanatismo, el amor que á sus hijos infunde … Este sentimiento de exaltado cariño hacia el suelo natal, – complicado con la enfermedad afectiva que se conoce por nostalgia, privación de aire que acaba por asfixiarnos cuando no respiramos la atmósfera de los lugares donde vive nuestro corazón – es más profundo en los pueblos de raza céltica, esa rama del nobilísimo tronco ariano, cuya condición parece tan sedentaria, como son inmóviles y permanentes sus colosales dólmenes de piedra. En los celtas de origen, el natural apego al país presenta caracteres morbosos, es un mal físico del cual se muere … (1984: 37–8)
(When a land is opposed by fortune and, like Galicia, finds itself first relegated to a secondary position and then almost annihilated, what usually happens is that, as its misfortune increases, the love that it inspires in its people also grows in passionate intensity, until it verges on fanaticism. This sentiment of impassioned love for the native land – complicated by the affective disease known as nostalgia, a deprivation of air that ends up suffocating us when we do not breathe the atmosphere of the places where our hearts live – is certainly profoundest in peoples of the Celtic race, that branch of the most noble Aryan stock, whose condition seems as sedentary as their colossal stone dolmens are motionless and permanent. In those of Celtic breed, natural fondness for the native land presents morbid characteristics: it is a physical illness from which people die …)
The above stands for one of the most enduring and politically convenient justifications of Galician national identity as a narrative of deficits and drawbacks. For this narrative to gather force, the gendered reversal of the myth of Celtic origins from worthy edifice in the process of nation building to convenient