Notes Introduction 1. In Spain: A Unique History (2011), Stanley Payne points out that “between 1833 and 1923 Spain lived for more years under parliamentary government than did one of its great ‘modernizing mentors,’ France. In 1812, 1820, and even during the 1830s, Spain was serving as an inspiration to many other countries in Latin America and Europe. No other country more thoroughly experienced the entire gamut of European political and social practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— all the European trends were present in Spain, sometimes in exaggerated or extreme form and often locked in mortal conflict” (92). 2. Habermas further defines the phenomenon of modern subjectivity: “In moder- nity, therefore, religious life, state, and society as well as science, morality, and art are transformed into just so many embodiments of the principle of subjectivity” (18). He also cites Hegel’s assertion of the key role of subjectivity in modernity: “The right of the subjects’ particularity [. .] is the pivot and center of the differ- ence between antiquity and modern times” (quoted in Habermas 388n44). 3. Mónica Bolufer Peruga’s research has revealed that there were only between 170 and 180 women writers during the eighteenth century in Spain (22). See Bolufer Peruga, “Women of Letters in Eighteenth- Century Spain: Between Tradition and Modernity” 17– 32. According to Joseba Gabilondo, between 1832 and 1868 only 120 Spanish women wrote and published literature. This number increased to 1,080 between 1868 and 1900. She also notes that 81 percent of women (versus 62.7 percent of men) were not able to read in 1877. See Gabi- londo 73– 95. Kirsty Hooper finds that only just over 1 percent of approximately 80,000 books incorporated into the Biblioteca Nacional between 1890 and 1920 are by women, yet she identifies 400 Spanish women who published at least one work during the period from 1890 to 1920 (205, 200). 4. I define canonical women writers as those who are cited as exceptions and who represent the accepted voice of women among the intellectual elite of mod- ernizing Spain. In her article “Críticos, críticas y criticadas: El discurso crítico ante la mujer de letras,” Begoña Sáez Martínez presents the examples of Fernán Caballero— deemed as an exceptional literata (woman of letters) by A. de San Martín in La mujer: apuntes para un libro (1861, 34)—and Emilia Pardo Bazán and Blanca de los Ríos as writers that “bien pueden parangonarse con los literatos” (45; can definitely compare themselves with male writers). In “Gender and Lan- guage: The Womanly Woman and Manly Writing,” Maryellen Bieder describes how Carmen de Burgos recalls “the significance of this move out of gendered 182 O Notes writing into gender- neutral writing— from literata (woman of letters) to escritora (woman writer)” (104). In “On Spanish Literary History and the Politics of Gen- der,” Constance A. Sullivan asserts that “at the end of the [nineteenth century] and for almost all of [the twentieth century . .] the many successful nineteenth- and early twentieth- century women writers of novels, plays, poetry, and essays [. .] were reduced to Emilia Pardo Bazán, followed not too closely by the less important Fernán Caballero and [. .] Rosalía de Castro” (31). These are five of the seven canonical women writers whose literary texts are explored in the pres- ent study. The other two writers, Josefa Amar y Borbón and María Lorenza de los Ríos, were firmly entrenched in the elite group of women granted membership in the Junta de Damas (Women’s Assembly), established in 1787, whose social utility was supposed to contribute to Enlightenment Reform through mother- hood and education. See Theresa Ann Smith’s The Emerging Female Citizen: Gen- der and Enlightenment in Spain. 5. I consider Fernán Caballero to be a woman writer of the general canon even though Sánchez Llama cites her as a prime example of a conservative woman writer of the canon isabelino (canonical literature under Queen Isabella II). Caballero still retains her canonicity after Galdós’s criticism of female writers of the canon isabelino who write serial novels and folletines (serial melodramas). Sim- ilarly, writers such as Eugenio de Ochoa, El Duque de Rivas, Ramón de Cam- poamor, and Ramón Nocedal criticized the social novelists but exalted Fernán Caballero as Spain’s exemplary novelist. See Goldman, “Toward a Sociology of the Modern Spanish Novel: The Early Years” 192. 6. I include two chapters on Emilia Pardo Bazán as “la única [mujer] que logra franquear la separación de los sexos en el campo literario y ser designada escritora” (the only woman who manages to overcome the literary separation of the sexes and be designated a woman writer) according to Maryellen Bieder. See Bieder, “Emilia Pardo Bazán y la emergencia del discurso feminista” 75– 110. I dedicate two chapters to works by Benito Pérez Galdós to complement this emphasis on Emilia Pardo Bazán. 7. Alda Blanco contends that Fernán Caballero is allowed to enter the canon because of the “Spanishness” of her patriotic costumbrismo (literature of manners) and that Emilia Pardo Bazán attains canonical status because of her cultivation of the realist novel (133–34). See Blanco, “Gender and National Identity: The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literary History” 120– 36. 8. Nerea Aresti describes this transformation from an explanation of women’s infe- riority based on religion to one based on science in her Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas: Los ideales de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX: “Durante los años del principio del siglo veinte, los científicos no hicieron sino reproducir en términos seculares y modernos las concepciones más sexistas de la ideología tradicional [. .] Querían convertir a la mujer de una figura idealizada a una figura de escrutinio científico que probaría la inferioridad femenina” (45; Dur- ing the first part of the twentieth century, scientists only reproduced the most sexist concepts of traditional ideology in secular and modern terms [. .] They wanted to convert the woman as an idealized figure into a figure of scientific scrutiny which would prove the inferiority of women). Notes O 183 9. Adrian Shubert gives evidence of this “dechristianization of Spain” during the late nineteenth century with startling statistics such as the attendance at Easter Mass falling below 70 percent in the province and city of Logroño in the 1870s and the dioceses of Cuenca, Toledo, and Ciudad Real having only a 5 percent attendance rate for Easter Mass in the late nineteenth century (161). Accord- ing to Shubert, religion lost support in the South and the big cities because the Church neglected these areas and also because the lower classes associated the Church with the social order that oppressed them (162). See Shubert 145– 68. 10. Solange Hibbs traces the Church’s defense against rationalism and modernity at the end of the nineteenth century but explains that the Church’s focused attack on rationalism had been going on since the late eighteenth-century threat of the influence of the French Revolution’s liberal values on Spanish society. 11. See Bordo 439– 56. 12. Christopher Britt Arredondo’s Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire (2005) analyzes the “regenerating elitism that Quixotists recommended for modern Spain” in their quest for Spain to return to the “premodern ascetic self- abnegation of Spanish mystics such as St. Theresa of Avila and St. Ignatius of Loyola and the premodern crusading self- sacrifice of Christian conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés and Vasco Nuñez de Balboa” (19). This nostalgia for premodern Spain accompanied the other reaction of paralyzing disillusion and critique of modernity typically exhibited by canonical Spanish male writers and explored in the present study. 13. Arintero made this statement in 1853, and Solange Hibbs cites its source in Púlpito e ideología en la España del siglo XIX 64. 14. Nerlich makes this assertion in his chapter “The Crisis of a Literary Institution Seen from Within (On a Parallel Reception of Voltaire and Chateaubriand in Spain)” in The Crisis of Institutionalized Literature in Spain 35– 66. 15. Immanuel Kant believed that women had a beautiful understanding of the world, while men had a deep understanding of the world linked to the sublime. See C. Christopher Soufas, “The Sublime, Beautiful, and the Imagination in Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio” 302– 19. 16. Burke and Kant represent a sort of “pesimismo ilustrado” (enlightened pessimism) that Fernando Savater has identified in eighteenth- century Spanish literature. See Savater 253– 71. 17. Antonio Ramos- Gascón points out that the concept of literature as we know it today had not been invented until the late eighteenth century and that the term literature was still in an inchoate state even in the late nineteenth century. He explains that when Menéndez Pelayo underwent the examination for the post of Chair of Critical History of Spanish Literature, he had to begin his presenta- tion with a discussion of the definition of literature (175). See Ramos- Gascón 167– 94. 18. Russell P. Sebold even goes as far as declaring José Cadalso the first European romantic of Spain in his book Cadalso: el primer romántico “europeo” de España (1974). 19. Susan Kirkpatrick has studied the sense of female agency and disillusion expressed by female romantic poets in her groundbreaking book Escritoras y Subjetividad: 184 O Notes Las Románticas 1835– 1850 (1991). In a later article, Kirkpatrick sums up the mid-nineteenth- century Spanish woman poet’s subjectivity and discontent, which contrasts greatly with the domestic novel writers of the same time period such as María del Pilar Sinués: “[T]he poet’s desire thrusts against the restrictions imposed by society, producing expressions of protest, complaint, and frustration— the very feelings that Sinués’s protagonist must banish in order to become a properly adjusted female subject.” See Susan Kirkpatrick “Women as Cultural Agents in Spanish Modernity” 234.