View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations EARLY MODERN IBERIAN LANDSCAPES: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY By Jonathan William Wade Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish August, 2009 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Edward H. Friedman Professor Earl E. Fitz Professor Carlos A. Jáuregui Professor Marshall C. Eakin Copyright © Jonathan William Wade All Rights Reserved To my late father, Robert Wade, who showed me the way and To my beautiful wife, Emily, who never stopped believing in me iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Celestial hands have carried me past the doubts, discouragement, and distractions that held me back during graduate school. I thank Them for everything I have and am. I cannot begin to imagine these years without my dear wife, Emily. With all the ups and downs, she never doubted. I have reached these heights, and will yet achieve others, because we fly together. I know that she will always be by my side, and I by hers. Although he passed away almost fourteen years ago, dad continues to inspire me to excellence. I am happy to carry his example into the next generation. Mom remains the constant force for good that she has always been. I am grateful for her tireless love and kindness. I also want to recognize my brother, Rob, who has always been one of my biggest fans. I thank him for always caring. To the rest of my large family of Wades, Redds, and the like, thank you for your love, friendship, and support. Few graduate students ever get to work with anyone as brilliant and kind as Edward Friedman. I consider myself privileged to be called one of his students, and feel honored to call him my mentor. I also recognize Dale, Valerie, Kit, and Earl, whose past and present mentoring have made all of this possible. Not to be forgotten is Dave, my academic big brother, and Ted, who started me on this journey years ago. I conclude by expressing gratitude to Vanderbilt University, which has been very good to me. I thank the College of Arts and Science, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and, especially, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities for their generous support and encouragement. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION....................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................1 Chapter I. PORTUGALIDADE, SAUDADE, AND THE NATION: LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF PORTUGUESE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS......................19 II. VICENTE, FERREIRA, AND CAMÕES: TRACING THE ROOTS OF PORTUGUESE ANNEXATION LITERATURE.......................................................53 III. PORTUGUESE NATIONALISM IN A SPANISH COSTUME: THE CASE OF MANUEL DE FARIA E SOUSA...................................................85 IV. STAGING THE NATION: CORDEIRO, AZEVEDO, AND THE PORTUGUESE COMEDIA.....................................................................................158 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................204 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................223 v INTRODUCTION IN SPANISH, ABOUT PORTUGAL: RETHINKING PORTUGUESE LITERATURE OF THE ANNEXATION António de Sousa de Macedo’s treatise, Flores de España, Excelencias de Portugal (1631), closes with a question borrowed from Luís de Camões’s national epic Os Lusíadas (1572). He asks the reader whether it is better to be king of the entire world without Portugal, or Portugal alone. This inquiry appears in the final chapter of one of the most radical works of Portuguese nationalism ever written. Although the author follows with an answer, his position on the matter is made abundantly clear during the course of the work. What, as twenty-first century readers, are we to take from such an ostentatious proposition? Moreover, under what social, political, and historical conditions was such a question put forward in the first place? While Sousa de Macedo’s answer is interesting, it is not nearly as consequential as the assertion inherent in his appeal to Camões. In a time before nations and nationalism––at least by modern standards––what are we supposed to make of the author’s overt exaltation of his native Portugal? During Spain’s annexation of Portugal from 1580 to 1640, many Portuguese authors voiced something similar to what we find in Flores de España. Making sense of that voice, however, is not as easy as it might seem. The writers I am considering, for one, made their affection for Portugal known almost exclusively in the language of the empire. What does the free use of Spanish and Portuguese tell us about these writers and the time in which they lived? Furthermore, annexation authors invoke a rhetoric of nation 1 and nationalism well before the rise of the modern nation-state. They do this with a degree of consciousness that is difficult to define because it is attuned to a collectivity that transcends any one writer individually. Is this national consciousness? If so, what could that possibly mean in the context of early modernity? I believe that Portuguese annexation literature offers a response to these issues by challenging readers to make sense of the wheres, whens, whys, and hows of its production. The fascinating intersection of identity, language, history, and politics found within these texts leads to further questions about this often misunderstood period of Portuguese letters. Pilar Vázquez Cuesta, like many others over the centuries, chooses to see the annexation in terms of loss, so far as Portuguese literature is concerned: No debe de sorprendernos el bajón que da la Cultura portuguesa durante los sesenta años de monarquía dual y los primeros tiempos de la Restauración si pensamos que mucha de la savia que en otras circunstancias habría servido para revitalizarla se emplea en enriquecer a la Cultura española, en donde no faltan los nombres de emigrantes o hijos de emigrantes portugueses. (628; my emphasis) Did Portuguese culture really drop off as much as Vázquez Cuesta suggests in this passage? The answer to this question, of course, is a matter of perspective. If the category “Portuguese culture,” as we currently understand it, only makes room for literature written in the Portuguese language, then the annexation indeed represents a severe drop off from the literary glories of the century previous. If, however, works written by the Portuguese in the Spanish language, or vice versa, are incorporated into what we might better describe as a Peninsular heritage (rather than any specific national culture), we would see the annexation not as a time of artistic scarcity but as a period of plenty. That is not to say that the seventeenth century produced a legitimate rival to either Gil Vicente or 2 Luís de Camões––each of whom, lest we forget, wrote a significant amount in Spanish as well––but that does not mean that the period was as decadent as some have suggested. Notwithstanding the various ways in which we might praise annexation literature, both the Spanish and Portuguese literary traditions have been reluctant to allow these authors into their respective canons. Edward Glaser explains the marginalization of these works from the Portuguese perspective: “Students of Portuguese culture tend to leave aside an author who willfully neglected to cultivate the national language at a moment when its very existence as a tool of artistic expression was at stake” (Preface 5). This view of annexation literature, however is anachronistic, as it defines the relationship between language and literature much more rigidly than it was understood at the time (although such ways of thinking about literature, as I will describe in chapter one, were not unheard of on the Iberian Peninsula). Some scholars, in fact, consider Portuguese annexation authors writing in Spanish revolutionary nationalists. Hernani Cidade, for example, claims that there was never a time of greater national pride (27), which is precisely why Glaser thinks the Spanish have generally shown little interest in Portuguese-biased texts (Preface 5). No matter how one values Portugal’s literary output during the annexation, the Portuguese Nation was one of the most widespread topics of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese literature; a reality augmented, not stifled, by Spain’s sixty-year occupation. In truth, Portugal––as a place, a past, and a people–– pervades early modern Peninsular literature from beginning to end. Although Portugal ceded its independence to Philip II and the Spanish Empire, its literary celebrity was only enhanced by the annexation, which served as a stimulus for artistic expression (Cidade 3 50). This is due, in part, to the outpouring of texts––of every genre––dedicated to the glories of Portugal. My approach to this body of works falls into a category of critical analysis I call comparative Iberian studies. Ricardo Jorge offers the term hispanologia as a way of describing the same thing (a binational, interdisciplinary approach to Iberian literature) (46). Building on Jorge’s thinking,