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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado provide the first cultural history of modern literatures in Spain. With contributors Helena Buffery, Kirsty Hooper, and Mari Jose Olaziregi, they showcase the country's cultural richness and complexity by working across its four major literary cultures - Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque - from the eighteenth century to the present. Engaging critically with the concept of the "national", Modern Literatures in Spain traces the uneven institutionalization of Spain's diverse literatures in a context of Castilian literary hegemony, as well as examining diasporic and exile writing . The thematically organized chapters explore literary constructions of subjectivity, gender, and sexuality; urban and rural imaginaries; intersections between high and popular culture; and the formation of a public sphere. Throughout, readings are attentive to the multiple ways in which literature serves as a barometer of cultural responses to historical change. An introduction to major cultural debates as well as an original analysis of key texts, this book is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in the literatures and cultures of Spain.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
1 Modernity and the Singular Nation (1700–1840s)
Reactive Modernity
Reasons of State
Public Spaces and the Location of Power
Cultural Identity and the Enlightenment Reform Project
Gender and the Productive Nation
The Myth of Two Spains
2 From Sensibility to Desire: The Construction of the Modern Subject (1730s–1880s)
Sensibility and Bourgeois Morality
The Romantic Self and the Emergence of the Woman Writer
The Consolidation of Sexual Difference
The Sexualization of Desire
3 The Rise of the Public Sphere and the Professionalization of the Writer (1730s–1890s)
The Enlightenment Man of Letters and Spaces of Sociability
The Regulation of Theater
Book Publishing and the Rise of an Independent Press
The Original Author and the Creation of a Literary Market
Journalism and the Expansion of the Literary Reading Public
The Diversification of the Public Sphere
4 Countering Castilian: From Retrenchment to the Renaissance of Peripheral National Literatures (1710s–1890s)
Between Literary “Reconstruction” and Language Shift: Catalan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and Beyond
After the “Dark Centuries”: Re-emergence of the Galician Language
The First Modern Basque Period: Linguistic Revival
The Catalan Renaixença: From Provincial Revivalism to the Beginnings of Political Catalanism
A Nation Finds Its Voice: The Galician Rexurdimento
Euskal Pizkundea: The Basque Renaissance
5 The Uses of the Past: Writing the Nation (1760s–1890s)
Neoclassical Tragedy: The Past as National Allegory
The Romantic Interest in the Multicultural Past
From the Romantic Historical Novel to the Folletín
Catalan Historical Literature and Scholarship: Conflicting Nationalist Projects
Galician Historiography and Fiction: Constructing a Pre-Modern Past
Basque Literature: Myths of Origin
Narrating the Nineteenth Century: From Patriotism to Entertainment
6 Popular Culture: Exclusion and Appropriation (1760s–1930s)
The Construction of a Spanish Literary Canon
Popular Theater in the Eighteenth Century
Folk Culture
The Serialized Novel
The Commercialization of Theatrical Culture
Performing and Containing Catalan Popular Culture: Theater and the Satirical Press
Basque Popular Culture: Oral Literature and Theater
Popular Culture in Galicia: The Dilemmas of Diglossia
Kiosk Literature, Politics, and “Sicalipsis”
The Modernist Cooption of Popular and Mass Culture
7 Urban Modernity and the Provincial: Changing Concepts of Time and Space (1830s–1930s)
Constructing the Capital
The Madrid Avant-Garde: The Metropolis as the Shock of the New
Barcelona: Modernity and Cosmopolitanism
A Provincial Nation
The Critique of Rural Spain
Symbolist Poetics and the Catalan Landscape
8 The Nation Called into Question (1890s–1920s)
Turn-of-the-century Crisis
The Problem of Castile
An Idiosyncratic Critique of the Nation: The Case of Valle-Inclán
Ortega y Gasset and the Revista de Occidente
Galicia: Between Languages and Continents, a Nation Takes Shape
Euskal Herria: The Homeland of the Basques
In Search of a Cosmopolitan Nation: Catalan Nationalism and European Modernity
9 Writers and Political Commitment (1930s–1960s)
Feminist Intellectuals
Taking Sides
The Cultural Program of the Second Republic
Falangist Intellectuals: From Victory to Disillusionment
The Emergence of a Literary Opposition
Catalan Writers and the Struggle for Cultural Survival
From Galeguismo to Galaxia: The Freezing and Thawing of Galician Literary Culture
Basque Culture: Resistance and the Fight for Modernity
10 Spain beyond Spain: Exile and Diaspora (1939–1980s)
The Aporetic Place of Exile
Haciendo Justicia (Doing Justice): Remembering and Recovering Exile through Spanish Republican Exile Historiography
Basque Diaspora and Exile: The Eighth Province
Galicia: Displacement and Deterritorialization
Catalan Literature in Exile/Exile Literature in Catalan
The Places and Temporalities of Exile
11 Catalan, Galician, and Basque Literatures: Recovery and Institutionalization (1960s–1990s)
Imagining a Future for Catalan Culture: From Resistance to Normalization and Beyond
Literature in Galician: Politics, Peripheries, and Postmodernism
The Consolidation of the Basque Literary System
12 Rewriting Gender and Sexuality (1970s–2020)
Belated Recognition
Coming Out
Camping up the Transition
Cartographies of Desire: Rewriting Gender and Sexuality in Catalan
Girl (and Boy) Interrupted: The Fragmented Story of Galician Writing on Gender and Sexuality
Feminist and Gay Writing in Basque
Female Bodies in Transition: The Personal and the Political
Feminism Comes into View
Unseemly Bodies: Illness, Aging, Disability
13 Memory and Forgetting (1970s–2020)
Recovering Silenced Memories of the Francoist Repression
Remembering World War II and the Holocaust
Exposing the Underside of the “Development Years” and Transition to Democracy
Rewriting the Distant Past
Catalan Literature “in the Skin of the Other”: Other Histories, Other Voices, Other Bodies
Galician Memories: Local Histories, Global Stories
Basque Memories: A Double Violence
14 Normalization, Crisis, and the Search for New Paradigms (1975–2021)
The Transition as Interpretative Matrix
The State of Culture
Intellectuals and the Renewal of the Essay
The Literature of Consensus: Private Conflicts and the Occlusion of the Social
The Shifting Scapes of Contemporary Catalan Writing
Change of Skin: The Basque Literature of Afterwards
Crisis and Its Counterpoints: Galician Analog and Digital Culture since 2008
Questioning Normalcy, Imagining Otherwise
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustration
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Europa Regina. Reproduced from the 1598 German edition of Sebastian Münster’s Co…
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Cultural History of Literature
Christopher Cannon, Middle English Literature
Sandra Clark, Renaissance Drama
Glenda Dicker/sun, African American Theater
Alison Finch, French Literature
Ann Hallamore Caesar and Michael Caesar, Modern Italian Literature
Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado, Modern Literatures in Spain
Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction
Michael Minden, Modern German Literature
Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama
Lynne Pearce, Romance Writing
Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction
Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature
Charlotte Sussman, Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Mary Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre
Andrew Baruch Wachtel and Ilya Vinitsky, Russian Literature
Andrew J. Webber, The European Avant-Garde
Tim Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature
Modern Literatures in Spain
JO LABANYI AND LUISA ELENA DELGADO
with Helena Buffery, Kirsty Hooper, and Mari Jose Olaziregi
polity
Copyright © Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado 2023
The right of Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4583-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932840
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Introduction
The title of our volume, Modern Literatures in Spain, recognizes Spain’s particularity as a country that has developed literary markets in four languages: Castilian (whose rise to dominance as the language of state from the late fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries led to its becoming synonymous with Spanish), Catalan, Galician, and Basque (euskara in the Basque language). Our aim has been to offer a cultural history that is attentive to the way that “Spanish literature” has been constructed historically and came to refer solely to literature in Castilian. We have made a point of analyzing these four literatures relationally, avoiding the frequent tendency to treat them in separate chapters.
Throughout, we call into question geographic and linguistic definitions of the nation. Exile literature is explored in order to question the boundaries of the Spanish nation and its literary production; we consider exile writing in all four of Spain’s literary languages. The discussion of literature in Basque covers the French as well as Spanish Basque country, since literary processes in the two territories have functioned as a continuum. The coverage of Catalan literature includes the Balearic Islands, Valencia, and the Catalan-speaking parts of Aragon. The sections on Galician literature in particular consider the fraught issue of authors from Spain’s historic nationalities who write entirely or partly in Castilian. Foreign-born authors resident in Spain are mentioned at certain points, since the question of who counts as a Spanish (or Catalan or Galician or Basque) writer need not align with place of birth – or with mother tongue, for that matter.
The volume’s timeline moves from the eighteenth century, in the course of which Castilian was imposed as the sole language of administration and education, to the present, with a solid publishing industry and literary output now established in Catalan, Galician, and Basque. While the minority languages still compete on an uneven playing field with Castilian, globalization has opened up opportunities for Spain’s “minor” literatures. In the course of writing this book, we became increasingly aware that the timelines of the four literatures studied do not always coincide; for that reason, in certain chapters the temporal framing of the sections devoted to the various literatures differs. A major aim has been to rethink literary periodization: our chapters have a thematic focus, overlapping in their temporal coverage but gradually moving forward through time – in this way avoiding the impression that at a certain date one period ends and another starts. This has allowed us to take account of the multi-temporality of historical processes, with the coexistence at any one moment of what Raymond Williams identified as residual, dominant, and emergent tendencies (2009 [1977], 121–7). We have consequently been sensitive to the tensions and contradictions that give literary texts their dynamism and cultural relevance. The thematic focus of our chapters is organized in terms of forces of cultural change that leave their mark on, and are facilitated by, changes in literary form: we take seriously Williams’s claim (2009 [1977], 128–35) that literary form does not simply mirror cultural processes but is a motor of change through its imaginative capacity to give expression to still inchoate social concerns.
There are several ways in which this cultural history of modern literatures in Spain differs from existing Spanish literary histories, in addition to its relational treatment of the country’s four literatures. First, its discussion of literary movements emerges out of the exploration of literature’s ability to act as a barometer of cultural change, rather than being a primary organizing principle; this avoids a view of literary history as a closed system of intertextual literary influences. Second, we have questioned the principles that underlie histories of national literature by working against the notion of a literary canon comprised by texts that are deemed worthy to represent the national – a notion that has excluded authors from certain social categories, as well as privileging certain kinds of subject matter and style. The forging of Catalan, Galician, and Basque literary canons that has been necessary to give status to minority literatures has not been exempt from such exclusions. The conception of the canon as a corpus of works deemed worthy to represent the national has meant that literary histories have often included texts that were little read or performed. We have tried in our cultural history to give a sense of what the Spanish public actually read or viewed on stage; consequently, our volume approximates to a history of literary tastes. We thus pay considerable attention to popular literary forms, many of which – especially those associated with urban culture – have been dismissed as vulgar. We have also worked against a tendency to construct “Spanish literature” (seen in the singular) in a uniformly serious register, on the supposition that the serious is better suited to represent the national. This tendency has led to the exclusion from the canon of a great deal of literary works that are huge fun – and were enjoyed by a broad public for that reason.
In this respect, we have been mindful of Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of taste as a means of constructing class distinctions, and of the process whereby, in the course of the nineteenth century, literature established itself as a (supposedly) autonomous field by defining literary merit as the inverse of commercial gain (1996a [1979], 1996b [1992]). In tracing the emergence in modern Spain of a public sphere, we have stressed the importance of journalism, not only for creating several modern literary genres but also for enabling the professionalization of the writer. We have sought to show how the literary field evolved in the course of the twentieth century with the requirement from the 1930s to the 1950s – on both sides of the Spanish Civil War – that writers commit to specific political options, and the impact since the return to democracy in 1975 of the consensus politics favored by the Spanish state and the increasing pressures of the neoliberal market, both challenged in recent years.
As should be clear from the above, we hope to have shown that, while the social and political attitudes taken by writers are hugely varied, literature is never truly autonomous; declarations of literary autonomy are themselves ideological statements. This is, therefore, a political as well as cultural history of literature, inasmuch as it situates literature in relation to political responses to, and proposals for, historical change, as well as in relation to changing social formations and experiences. In those social experiences we include the creation of new forms of subjectivity, where literature has played a vital role. A major factor here, considered throughout the volume, is the role played by literature in the construction – and critique – of gender roles. That involves much more than broadening the canon beyond the usual (heterosexual/homosocial) male suspects – though that is something we have also tried to do.
The book has been written by the two co-authors Jo Labanyi and Luisa Elena Delgado working together as a team with the three contributors: Helena Buffery for literature in Catalan, Kirsty Hooper for literature in Galician, and Mari Jose Olaziregi for literature in Basque. In some chapters, one of us has served as lead author, with one or more co-writers contributing particular sections; in others, the division of labor has been more even. Most chapters cover more than one of Spain’s four literatures, in various combinations as appropriate to the topic. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 discuss literature in Castilian only. Chapters 4 and 11 deal solely with literatures in Catalan, Galician, and Basque. Buffery was responsible for all the sections on literature in Catalan, as well as for writing the frame narrative for chapter 11; she additionally wrote the sections on Spanish-language literature in chapter 10, for which she was lead author, and played a major role through her attention to the relational dimension of issues discussed in different sections of the text. Hooper wrote all the sections on literature in Galician, as well as the frame narrative for chapter 4. Olaziregi wrote all the sections on literature in Basque. The sections on literature in Castilian were shared by Delgado and Labanyi, co-writing chapters 7 and 12, and with Delgado being lead author for chapters 1 and 14, and Labanyi being lead author for chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 13. Although we have each taken responsibility for writing specific sections, the planning and rewriting of the book as a whole has been done by all of us working together, in order to produce what we hope is a coherent narrative.
We have provided English translations of quotations from Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque, and of titles and organizations (where not self-evident) on first mention in each chapter. Dates of works are given on first mention in each chapter. The book’s thematic organization means that many authors are discussed in more than one chapter; readers are encouraged to use the index to locate multiple mentions of particular authors. We have assumed that not all of our readers will have prior knowledge of the literatures of Spain or of Spanish history. Each chapter has a number of subheadings so as to focus discussion and allow flexibility in the positioning of the sections on the four literatures concerned.
We are keenly aware of how much has had to be excluded from our narrative for reasons of space. We have tried to make the condensed overview critical rather than descriptive. In addition, for each chapter, we have singled out a number of texts – covering the various literatures discussed in that chapter – for more detailed textual analysis, offering readings that go beyond existing criticism. We thus hope that the volume will add to scholarly understanding of the four literatures of modern Spain not just through the range of material covered, but also by offering fresh interpretations of individual texts and writers.
This book has been long in the making. We thank our editors at Polity Books – Andrea Drugan at the start and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Stephanie Homer, and Mary Savigar at the end – for their patience. We also thank the Production Department at Polity Books for their inspired suggestion of a mosaic for the cover picture, not only because of its evocation of Gaudí’s modernist reworking of the mosaic art form, but also because the concept of a mosaic – including the gaps between the pieces – perfectly represents our attempt in this volume to produce a narrative that foregrounds cultural heterogeneity. The five authors have learned much from each other in the course of writing this book, which could not have been written by any of us on our own. The collaborative conception of the volume has been essential to the relational approach to Spain’s four literatures that characterizes its structure and scope. We hope that this collaborative conception of scholarship may serve as a step towards further discussion of the diverse cultures of Spain that is based on dialogue and cooperation, allowing a rich understanding of the complexities of the country’s cultural plurality.
1Modernity and the Singular Nation (1700–1840s)
This first chapter covers the beginnings of debates around modernity in Spain in the early eighteenth century through to the Romantic period. Around 1580, German cartographer and cosmographer Sebastian Münster included in his popular work Cosmographia universalis a map created by Johannes Bucius in 1537 (see figure 1). Known as Europa Regina, it represented a queen carrying the iconology of Europe, with different parts of the body corresponding to specific territories (Dainotto 2007, 30–3). The head of Europa Regina was Hispania, Germany represented the heart, and France the upper chest. Italy was Europe’s right arm with Sicily the orb in its hand. England, Spain’s political enemy, occupied a marginal position, symbolized by a flag firmly in the grasp of the monarch’s left hand. The Habsburg Emperor Carlos V (Carlos I of Spain) must have been pleased with this visual commentary on his imperial affairs.
A hundred years later, a similar anthropomorphic map would have illustrated a very different political body, as the European territories under the control of the Spanish empire began to shrink and France started to consolidate its political and cultural hegemony. The gravity of the nation’s predicament had been recognized by Spanish observers even before the Peace of Westphalia (1648) in which Spain lost northern Flanders. From the first half of the seventeenth century, reformers known as arbitristas (from arbitrio, project) circulated countless proposals to improve the nation’s economic situation, political cohesion, and moral character. The weaknesses threatening the stability of the vast Spanish empire’s heterogeneous territories (encompassing the Americas, southern Italy and Milan, Flanders, the Philippines, and other smaller domains) were evident: a constantly bankrupt state that could not collect taxes or pay its army; conflicting internal trading policies; an unwieldy bureaucracy; unproductive lands controlled by the Church and an idle aristocracy; depopulation; massive inflation. The arbitristas offered a number of concrete solutions (protection of agriculture and industry; bringing water to arid areas; re-population of territories depopulated by wars; curbing of state spending; overhaul of the tax system) that were mostly ignored. The eighteenth-century proyectistas (reformers) recognized some of these arbitrios as valuable precedents to their own reformist ideas (Álvarez de Miranda 1985; Dubet and García Guerra 2009).
Figure 1:Europa Regina. Reproduced from the 1598 German edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia universalis.
Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
The perception of national decadence intensified with the outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), considered the first world war of modern times. The Habsburg Carlos II’s death in 1700 without a direct heir produced a conflict between the French Bourbons’ support for the future Felipe V, grandson of Louis XIV of France, and support for Archduke Charles of Austria by England, Holland, Prussia, and Austria, alarmed at the threat to the continental balance of power posed by possible union of the French and Spanish crowns. The war’s conclusion marked a major re-drawing of the political boundaries of the Spanish empire. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) allowed Felipe V to keep Spain’s American possessions but forced him to renounce his rights to southern Flanders, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Menorca, and Gibraltar, most of which passed to the new emerging powers, England and Austria (Naples and Sicily would revert to Bourbon control in 1738). The war also marked a radical reconceptualization of the Spanish state, with the centralizing “Nueva Planta” (New Design) decrees of 1707–16, discussed below.
Reactive Modernity
The political and cultural implications of such losses by a previously hegemonic power were remarked upon by European thinkers in a discourse that displaced Spain’s political and cultural location towards Africa, away from rationality and modernity. Montesquieu wrote a scathing attack on Spanish culture in his Persian Letters, asserting that the nation should be under its European peers’ political supervision, thus assigning a colonial position to a nation that was (still) a colonial power (Dainotto 2007, 88). In response, eighteenth-century Spanish writers of different ideological tendencies like Father Benito Feijoo, José Cadalso, and Juan Pablo Forner wrote defensively about Spain’s cultural worth, negating its symbolic “africanization” or, conversely, questioning the value of phenomena associated with modernity such as empiricism, scientific advances, secularism, and rationalism (Donato and López 2015). This kind of slanging match would become endemic to modern Spanish culture: the discussion of “Spanishness” in reactive mode, always in response to a northern European gaze (Torrecilla 1996, 11–54). The reactive mode would become increasingly emotional, whether belligerent or anguished, throughout the nineteenth century (Mariano José de Larra, Ricardo Macías Picavea, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Rafael Altamira). It would peak with the thinkers writing around the time of the loss of Spain’s last major colonies in 1898 (see chapter 8), captured in Miguel de Unamuno’s famous statement “me duele España” (Spain hurts me), reprised and mocked by Francoist chauvinism (Franco 2005).
In practice, Spain was not the only country to be re-positioned as Europe’s exotic Other. As Roberto Dainotto (2007) has shown, in the eighteenth century the European south in general became Europe’s internal Other, with Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece (not to mention outlying nations like Russia and Turkey) seen as “deficiencies of Europeanness,” located within its past. Conversely, France and other northern European countries came to incarnate the present and future, modernity and progress in all their teleological certainty. Spain’s ambivalent status as both an imperial and a declining power at this moment of modern European expansion presented its thinkers and public figures with an ineluctable choice: between progress achieved through a modernity viewed as foreign, and authenticity derived from intolerant, archaic traditions. The choice was an impossible one, resulting in the “split consciousness” of so many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish thinkers: torn between the promise of progress and cultural prestige tied to modernity’s Eurocentric master narrative and the realization that such a narrative assigned them, as members of a second-rank nation marked by its Semitic (particularly Arab) heritage, to the margins of history. This double-bind has been used to construct a tragic narrative of Spanishness, premised on the nation’s supposed “autophagous” tendencies (Ilie 1984) – a predicament shared with all those peripheries excluded from the modern European utopia which had to eliminate the elements in their respective cultures that constituted deviations from the modern cultural paradigm. The irony is that, in so doing, they were often accused of imitation and lack of originality (Torrecilla 1996; L.E. Delgado, Mendelson, and Vázquez 2007).
What was specific about Spain’s situation was its simultaneous position as an imperial power and a colonized country (Dussel 1995, 67; Mignolo 2012). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Spain would be subject to the cultural, military, and economic imperialism of hegemonic Europe (in particular France, Holland, and England). At the same time, it was immersed in its own imperialist designs: not just in America, but also, still at this time, in South-East Asia (the Philippines) and the Pacific (Caroline Islands, Mariana Islands including Guam), all lost in 1898 (in the case of the Carolinas and the Marianas excepting Guam, sold to Germany), and in Europe (Naples and Sicily would remain under the control of a branch of the Spanish Bourbons until 1860). Spain’s complex position is well illustrated by a famous quote from the novator (literally, innovator) Juan de Cabriada. The novatores were scientists and thinkers who, between 1675 and 1725, challenged traditional Spanish scholastic thinking and created networks of knowledge and sociability – often meeting in private tertulias (salons) and learned academies – in support of empiricism, secularism, and the free circulation of modern European philosophical and scientific thought (Pérez Magallón 2002). In his Carta filosófica médicoquímica (Medical-Chemical Philosophical Letter, 1687), Cabriada lamented: “Que es lastimoso y aun vergonzosa cosa que, como si fuéramos indios, hayamos de ser los últimos en recibir las noticias y luces públicas que ya están esparcidas por Europa” (“It is pitiful, even shameful, that we should be the last to receive news and public enlightenment already disseminated throughout Europe, as if we were Amerindians”) (Sánchez Ron 2016). A mid-eighteenth-century list of Catalan grievances presented to the Spanish Crown denounced priests who only spoke Castilian with a similar argument: “¿Y van a ser los labradores catalanes y valencianos de peor condición que los indios?” (“And are Catalan and Valencian laborers to be seen as inferior to Amerindians?”) (Memorial de Greuges 1760), the point being that Spanish missionaries often learned Amerindian languages to facilitate the conversion process, but Catalan and Valencian laborers were expected to communicate in Castilian, a language they often did not know. These two examples show the coexistence of a defense of European minority languages with an unquestioned assumption of imperialist hierarchies, thus illustrating the intersection of modernity and coloniality.
The shift in the perception of Spanishness that took place in the eighteenth century and Romantic period can be summed up by the question: Against whom is Spanishness defined? The answer foregrounds opposition to the foreign; specifically, the French. In the eighteenth century, throughout Europe, refinement and high culture were equated with French “civilization.” For Spain, which had maintained its political hegemony by fighting against France for two centuries, the change of dynasty from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons had far-reaching consequences for the country’s cultural self-perception. The identification of modernity, high culture, and scientific innovation with France explains why it was at this time that reactionary sectors started to monopolize the meaning of “lo español” (Spanishness). The desire to draw the boundaries of a distinct Spanish identity also led, during the second part of the eighteenth century, to the specifically Spanish cultural phenomenon of majismo. A majo/a was a well-dressed, outspoken man or woman of the working classes, particularly of Madrid (a similar term was manolo/a). Majismo refers to the appropriation by the aristocracy (particularly by women, with important ramifications for the intersection of gender and national character) of popular customs seen as manifestations of an essential national spirit (Haidt 2011; Zanardi 2016). That appropriation included dress, dance, and even linguistic usage and body language. Majos/as and manolos/as are represented in Goya’s early paintings and tapestry cartoons and in the most popular plays of the century, Ramón de la Cruz’s sainetes (one-act farces with song and dance; see chapter 6).
The literary battles fought in the eighteenth century are a consequence of Spanish reactions to French cultural hegemony. The positions in the dispute range from full acceptance of this hegemony to a defensive rejection of any tendency perceived as foreign. Around 1735, new customs imposed by the government and public officials, many of them French and Italian, came to be seen as incompatible with an essential Spanishness expressed by the term castizo. In Spain, castizo meant of good lineage; that is, unadulterated by foreign (including Jewish or Muslim) elements. The term also underpinned attempts to classify degrees of racial mixture in Spanish America and the Philippines (Carrera 2003). By extension, the term referred to what was typical of a certain region or of the nation. What was castizo was incompatible not only with the foreign but also with the country’s non-Castilian speaking regions, unless they were assimilated into a national melting-pot, the capital Madrid being the indispensable instrument of this process. Regional specificities were viewed as local expressions of a larger whole to which they should be subordinated. From the eighteenth century on, the castizo came to be assigned in the Spanish national imaginary to Castile and/or Andalusia. The debate over which elements of Spanish culture were or were not castizo would continue through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the term mobilized by Spanish conservative nationalism.
Reasons of State
Domestically, the end of the War of the Spanish Succession marked the beginning of a new political era, characterized by strongly centralized government and the aspiration to create an equally centralized national culture: a process that would continue throughout the nineteenth century. With the proclamation of the Nueva Planta decrees (Valencia, 1707; Majorca and Ibiza 1715; Catalonia 1716), the new Bourbon king Felipe V revoked the traditional institutions and charters (fueros) of the Catalan-speaking territories that had opposed him, ending Spain’s division into the separate Crowns of Aragon and Castile. Navarre and the Basque provinces, which had supported him, kept their charters. Contrary to the fragmented character of Habsburg rule, the Nueva Planta state required the unity of all its parts, subject to a single administration. All the king’s subjects would therefore be bound by Castilian law and customs; internal borders were erased, which meant, among other things, the end of the Cadiz monopoly on trade with America and beginning of Catalonia’s economic expansion into colonial markets, with long-term social and economic consequences. The new political order was sustained by the creation of Spain’s first permanent army and a new administrative organization that reduced or suppressed the multiple existing territorial consejos (councils) – of Aragón, Navarre, Italy, the Indies – while the power of the Council of Castile was increased. The territories in the Americas were subjected to parallel measures of centralization and control, which remained largely theoretical since local authorities often determined what could or could not be enforced (Guimerá Ravina 2007; Paquette 2008). Recent consideration of the Spanish and Spanish-American Enlightenment from an Atlantic perspective has challenged the premise of the movement’s European uniqueness, focusing on autochthonous processes that facilitated cultural interaction and the co-production of ideas and knowledge (Cañízares-Esguerra 2001; Conrad 2012; Hill 2018; Lewis, Bolufer Peruga, and Jaffe 2020; Stolley 2020).
Felipe V’s punitive centralizing measures against supporters of his Habsburg rival in the War of the Spanish Succession also extended to cultural matters, as the new king determined to make Castilian the official language of his newly designed state. Use of the Catalan language was first restricted in public areas and later eliminated from primary and secondary education, a decision that would have long-lasting consequences for Catalan culture as well as for the relationship between the Catalan territories and the state. Already in 1715, a prosecutor in the Council of Castile called for restraint in the application of the new language laws, warning that they would make Catalans of all political tendencies feel resentful (Anguera 2003, 78). The Bourbon monarchy’s interest in the Castilian language was ironic, since the language of the court during the first half of the century was French and, in the second half, Italian. Ignacio de Luzán, whose Poética (1737; most-cited edition 1789) is considered the best Spanish expression of neoclassical aesthetics, wrote in both Italian and Spanish. The emphasis on a monolingual state, perceived as crucial for a unified citizenship, was consistent with the Enlightenment’s belief in fixed universal cultural hierarchies and consequent disregard for (and fear of) difference. The new type of subject envisioned by the Bourbon dynasty was to be positioned in relation to a center from which “reasons of state” were articulated, imposed, and internalized (Medina 2009, 2013). In both politics and cultural matters, Bourbon Spain was characterized by the attempt to erase internal differences, particularly those that did not fit the imagined community of Enlightened subjects, including the poor, beggars, and vagrants. The Roma community (particularly those with a nomadic lifestyle) was subjected to increasingly repressive legislation, culminating in the 1749 order for the detention of all its members, rescinded in 1765. A 1783 royal decree granted citizenship to the Roma with the aim of achieving their full cultural assimilation, forbidding their language and traditions (Pym 2007).
Thus, it was in the eighteenth century that a particular political and cultural narrative was born: a narrative of Spanish identity whose starting point was the identification between nation and state, and the consideration of that state as politically and culturally homogeneous and centered in Castile (Albareda i Salvadó 2002). The top-down, coordinated effort to define Spanishness constituted an identity project whose far-reaching implications would surpass the economic and social projects undertaken in the century’s course. The shadow that this identity project would cast on the construction of the Spanish literary canon would be very long indeed: not until the late twentieth century (1995) would a writer be awarded the Premio Nacional de las Letras (National Literature Prize) for a work in a language other than Castilian: the novel Dins el darrer blau (Into the Last Blue), written in Catalan by the Majorcan writer Carme Riera. Only in 2019 would the Premio Cervantes be awarded to a writer with a significant body of work in a language other than Castilian (the poet Joan Margarit, who switched to writing in Catalan in 1981, after early work in Castilian).
Public Spaces and the Location of Power
Part and parcel of that new narrative of unified Spanishness was the creation of physical and symbolic public national spaces. “National” meant “royal,” given the absolutist equation of nation-state and crown. It was at this time that the various royal academies were founded under crown patronage (see chapter 3). Among the first collections of the Royal Library, created in 1712, were books seized from aristocrats who had supported the Habsburg side in the War of the Spanish Succession. The institution would officially become a “national library” (rather than crown property) in 1836. Academies of Letters were founded in Barcelona (1751) and Seville (1752). The Archives of the Council of the Indies (now Archivo General de Indias) were established, also in Seville, in 1785. The new dynasty additionally embarked on a process of urban modernization, particularly in Madrid, in consonance with Enlightenment ideals of the common good, social order, and sociability. This project included well-lit streets, gardens, and coffee houses (Outram 2019, 10–25). It also included new roads and infrastructure to facilitate the exchange of people and goods between the nation’s symbolic center (Madrid) and the provinces, as well as between peninsular Spain and the rest of its territories. Emblematic of the new Bourbon state model is the number of royal residences, tripling those of the Habsburgs: a building boom that culminated in the construction of the vast Royal Palace in Madrid, built on the ruins of the old Alcázar after a fire destroyed it in 1734. The new Versailles-inspired building, designed mostly by Italian architects and decorated by the best artists in Europe, became a symbol of the new Bourbon dynasty and the new state (Medina 2009, 39–46). However, Felipe V would never inhabit it; the French-born monarch responsible for Spain’s centralization and official monolingualism never fully adapted to life in the capital and never spoke Spanish fluently.
Despite its efforts, the Spanish state – unlike the French – was not able to shape “citizens” loyal to a common national cause in the eighteenth century or later. One reason is that in Spain, unlike France, a bourgeois public sphere independent of government and its institutions did not exist (García Díaz 2019; Kitts 2019). For the most part Spanish elites, including the aristocracy and the Church, would oppose progressive ideas as antithetical to a true national essence.
For all the state efforts to impose Madrid as cultural center of the newly designed state, the reality was that new economic, political, and cultural ideas often came from the provinces and the colonies, even if official recognition had to come from the political center. The first of the many economic societies created to promote Spain’s development was the Real Sociedad Vascongada de Amigos del País (Basque Royal Society of Friends of the Nation), founded in 1765; Madrid’s equivalent would be created ten years later, followed by many others in the Peninsula and other territories of the Spanish Crown. Indeed, the very notion of a Republic of Letters, a universal and timeless intellectual community from whose center (hegemonic Europe and in particular France) knowledge would circulate to the world, was challenged from the peripheries (Álvarez Barrientos 2003). Father Juan Andrés y Morell, a Valencian Jesuit who settled in Mantua (Italy) after the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1767, composed in Italian what is considered the first history of world and comparative literature (On the Origins, Progress and Present State of All Literatures, 1782–99). Andrés’s work challenged the existence of universal good taste and insisted on the importance of historicizing local phenomena. His monumental work developed a comparatist approach that theorized a different Europe and a different modernity: a Europe seen from the south whose origins are found in Sicily and Al-Andalus; that is to say, in the Orient (Dainotto 2007, 105–33). The tensions between state and “regional” identities were seen as a danger to the unified nation even by “liberal” Enlightenment writers like Feijoo, whose essay “Amor de la patria y pasión nacional” (Love of the Fatherland and National Passion, 1729) would warn against the perils of split loyalties or national allegiances considered incompatible with true patriotism, by now firmly identified with a state that was to be the sole guarantor of its citizens’ interests and happiness (Valero 2002).
Cultural Identity and the Enlightenment Reform Project
In the Enlightenment, literature (meaning “letters” in the broad sense) was understood as a tool of communication and education in service of the common good; hence the predominance of didactic genres and advocacy of stylistic clarity. This was the century when the word ensayo started to take on its present-day sense of “essay,” even if those today considered the period’s best essayists (Feijoo, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Francisco Cabarrús) did not use the term (Álvarez de Miranda 1992, 285–327). Communication and exchange meant vigorous discussion, and the century is marked by innumerable public polemics. These included the bitter confrontations between the Valencian Gregorio Mayans, whose defense of a Spanish tradition which he located in the sixteenth century privileged a discursive style supported by science and erudition, and the Galician Padre Feijoo, who linked his own role as “divulgador” (disseminator) with use of the vernacular (Castilian instead of Latin) and an accessible, “natural” style. The dichotomies underscoring most of the public debates of eighteenth-century Spain – scholasticism versus innovation, tradition versus modernity, casticismo versus afrancesamiento (Frenchified customs and thought) – have carried over into critical evaluations of the period. Until recently, it was common to read that the cultural products of the Spanish Enlightenment were derivative and not on a par with their French, English, or German counterparts. Those sympathetic to the Enlightenment have justified its limited scope in Spain – what Eduardo Subirats (1981) has called its “insufficiency” – by noting that the spirit of reform could not flourish in a country with an all-powerful Church and still active Inquisition; that the creation of a true public sphere was impossible in a nation with a feudal, parasitic aristocracy; and that economic progress could not be achieved in a nation that disdained manual work and commerce and lacked an efficient communications network. Opponents of the Enlightenment have related the lack of originality of its Spanish version to what they saw as a loss of identity attributed to the secularizing reforms of the first Bourbon monarchs.
The best representative of this position is renowned philologist and historian Menéndez Pelayo, who in his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles(History of Spanish Heterodoxies, 1880–2) consistently metaphorized the period as a deadly virus spread by foreigners. Menéndez Pelayo’s strategy is clear. On the one hand, he argues that empiricism, pragmatism, and above all secularism are heterodox manifestations in the overall context of a true Spanish culture marked by a profound religiosity. On the other, he identifies what he considers the best cultural products of the time with the residues of an essential Spanish orthodoxy that has resisted foreign contagion. That logic is based on a model of cultural uniqueness, diffusion, and derivation that has been widely questioned. To engage adequately with the eighteenth century requires a major shift of focus – one that considers the Enlightenment not as a homogeneous European intellectual movement, but rather as a process of transnational and global entanglements, including the co-production, circulation, and translation of knowledge. Works like Jovellanos’s Informe sobre la Ley Agraria (Report on Agrarian Legislation, 1794), Feijoo’s Teatro Crítico Universal. Discursos varios en todo género de materias para desengaño de errores comunes (Universal Critical Theater: Various Discourses on All Kinds of Matters to Correct Common Errors, 1726–40), or Diego de Torres Villarroel’s satirical Sueños morales, visiones y visitas de Torres con D. Francisco de Quevedo por Madrid (Torres’ Moral Dreams, Visions, and Excursions around Madrid with Don Francisco de Quevedo, 1727–51) must be understood in relation to the major topics of debate at the time: censorship and free speech; women’s rights, intellectual capacities, and the role of motherhood; the boundaries between emotion and reason; the social value of manual labor; the need for an equitable tax system and agrarian reform; and the definition of good citizenship and patriotism.
One of the persistent myths found in discussions of Spanish modernity, largely the result of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative readings, is the idea that Enlightenment reforms were abruptly introduced by the French Bourbon dynasty. The change in mentality that would lead to those reforms, continuing through to the 1812 Constitution, was in fact already visible in seventeenth-century Spanish society, especially in the peripheries. We have already referred to the novatores, the group of doctors and scientists who from 1675 undertook a critique of scholasticism and encouraged scientific principles and empiricism. Contemptuously called “innovators” by their opponents, figures such as Juan Caramuel, Isaac Cardoso, and Cabriada questioned the reliance on authorities and the dominant role of theology in Spanish universities. The movement developed in various parts of the country: Valencia, Seville, Cadiz, Zaragoza, as well as Madrid. The novatores’ emphasis on pragmatism and social improvement, as well as their interest in opening Spanish debates up to French and English ideas, connects them with later Enlightenment writers such as Feijoo, Pablo de Olavide, and Jovellanos. Despite their attempts to link reform to Spanish humanism, the novatores were accused of being enemies of the “true spirit of the nation”; the link between Spanish tradition, militant Catholicism, and the rejection of “foreign” influences was already established in their time (Pérez Magallón 2002).
When Carlos III acceded to the throne in 1759, his enthusiastic continuation of the reforms introduced by his Bourbon predecessors was received by some sectors as drastic, revolutionary, and – again – anti-Spanish. The 1766 Motín de Esquilache (Esquilache Riot) has been used to prove the existence of an intrinsic Spanish resistance to foreign influences. The revolt was triggered by a decree issued by the Neapolitan minister Leopoldo de Gregorio, Marquis o Esquilache, banning the traditional long Spanish cape and broad-brimmed hat, but the people’s anger related to several issues, not least price rises for bread and coal. The popular agitation was stirred up by the aristocracy and the Church (in particular, the Jesuits), unhappy with the Bourbon dynasty’s reforms which challenged their considerable privileges. The crowd’s insistence on a face-to-face confrontation with the King contested the absolutist state’s control over its subjects. The traditional long Spanish cape and broad-brimmed hat had allowed citizens to conceal their identity, evading the government’s increasingly controlling gaze; the new measure was perceived by the people as subjecting their bodies to intrusive surveillance (Medina 2009, 137–72). The riot’s ambivalent conclusion shows that a negotiation process was necessary to resolve the tensions: Esquilache was dismissed, the short cape was eventually adopted. More broadly, the riot exemplifies the importance of collective, popular acts of protest in the (long) eighteenth century (Fuentes and Malin 2021). The Jesuits were expelled in 1767 and Carlos III continued his reform program, which included a drastic reduction in popular public celebrations and suppression of freedom of assembly. The episode, like the 1808 popular uprising against the Napoleonic occupation, would be instrumentalized for the benefit of a conservative narrative of Spanishness in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Gender and the Productive Nation
The notion of national decadence and crisis that entered the collective imaginary towards the end of the seventeenth century became embedded in it during the eighteenth, comprising an enduring structure of feeling that would reach its high point at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the notion of decadence can be considered a founding myth of modern Spanish history, in the sense that it captures a very specific perception of reality linked to political agendas across the ideological spectrum. During the Enlightenment, with its belief in the potential for progress, Spain’s “anomalous” position was usually interpreted as serious but solvable through practical measures. As the nineteenth century progressed, the tone became more pessimistic, metaphysical, and essentialist. Not surprisingly, given modernity’s emphasis on the (re)production of normative bodies and minds as essential to society’s well-being, debates around the country’s decline and desired regeneration were framed through bodily metaphors (Haidt 1998; Outram 2022). From the eighteenth century on, conservatives and liberals, Spaniards and foreigners alike would figure the nation’s failure to enter European modernity (that is, normalcy) as a bodily ailment or deviation (Sosa-Velasco 2010; Tsuchiya 2011). Identification of the precise locus of infection became a key concern. Whatever the source of the problem, its rhetorical presentation was always gendered: the nadir of the Spanish monarchy was often symbolized by the disabled, impotent body of the last Hapsburg king, Carlos II. If the empire’s expansionist phase could be symbolized by a spectacular royal femininity (Europa Regina), its declining phase was consistently figured as a deficient, infertile, or queer masculinity (Penrose 2014). In the nineteenth century, nationalist discourse figured the nation in terms of motherhood, as a mater dolorosa or a wayward mother who ignored her obligations to her children, as was alleged of the much-maligned Queen Isabel II (Álvarez Junco 2001).
During the Enlightenment the male body signified the possibilities of reason, knowledge, and pleasure but also the limits to desire and instinct, seen as in need of control. Bodies and sexuality are key to understanding the dual nature of the period’s ethos, in its normative and liberatory dimensions, discernible in the tension between a refined (elite) homosociality (which included enjoyment of erotica and pornography) and undisciplined passions or effeminacy (Harvey 2004). Spanish writers of the period construct the body as a vehicle for rational, scientific knowledge (Feijoo, Torres Villarroel) and as the site of bodily pleasure (the anacreontic poetry of Juan Meléndez Valdés and José Cadalso). Félix de Samaniego could write moralistic fables as well as racy tales to be shared with male friends; Nicolás Fernández de Moratín exalted feminine virtue in his drama Lucrecia (1763) and the joys of casual sex for sale in El arte de las putas (The Art of Whores, 1770); Meléndez Valdés could go from depicting idyllic scenes of pastoral life to graphic descriptions of lovemaking in Los besos de amor (Kisses of Love, 1783) (Haidt 1998, 63–102; Gies 1999, 2008; Penrose 2014, 33–110). Needless to say, erotic and pornographic materials did not circulate widely, if at all. The Inquisition was not abolished till 1834; Moratín’s El arte de las putas, with its explicit descriptions of prostitution, was included in the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1790 and not published until 1898.
While Enlightenment thought emphasized universal values, the period has also been considered a watershed in European attempts to define differences between the sexes and the role of each in relation to citizenship and public life (Smith 2006; Bolufer Peruga 2016, 2018). In Spain, as in the rest of Europe, the nature of women, their role in a civilized society, and the specificities of their contribution to the public good were the subject of heated public debates and important literary works, such as Feijoo’s Defensa de las mujeres (Defense of Women, 1726); Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s plays El viejo y la niña (The Old Man and the Young Girl, 1790) and El sí de las niñas (The Maidens’ Consent, 1805); and Josefa Amar y Borbón’s remarkable Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres y de su aptitud para el gobierno y otros cargos en que se emplean los hombres (Discourse in Defense of Women’s Talent and their Suitability for Government and Other Positions Held by Men, 1786). Mixed sociability was considered an important element of public life; hence the crucial role that many (aristocratic) women played in the period’s cultural life as hosts of and participants in tertulias where politics, philosophy, and cultural matters were discussed. These salons were, nevertheless, private spaces. The presence of women, even aristocratic women, in cultural and educational institutions at a time when the boundary between public and private space was becoming increasingly demarcated was a different matter, exemplified in the intense 1775–87 debates over women’s admission to Madrid’s Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País. Despite all the restrictions on their intellectual and political contribution to the res publica, educated women found ways to create public platforms for their ideas. They were notable, for example, as translators, an activity that gave them intellectual legitimacy and room for creativity, since translations were often seen as textual transformations: Inés Joyes y Blake’s Apología de las mujeres (Apology for Women, 1798) was written as a letter accompanying her translation of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, and works by Racine and Voltaire were translated by Margarita Hickey (Bolufer Peruga 1998, 331–9; Smith 2003).
The equation of the ideal nation with a vigorous yet restrained masculinity pervades eighteenth-century Spanish literature, as it would that of the nineteenth. The link between proper gentlemanly behavior, masculinity, and national identity converged in two crucial cultural constructs of the time that exemplify the dichotomous articulation of national identity: the petimetre and the hombre de bien. The petimetre (fop, from the French “petit-maître”) represented a failed masculinity that exceeded the proper limits of its opposite, hombría de bien, by pursuing excessive pleasures and superficial appearance while lacking the civic virtues needed to build a strong nation: industriousness, self-discipline, and good judgment. As the term makes clear, the petimetre’s excess was intrinsically linked to the foreign and thus opposed to the castizo. The masculinity represented by the hombre de bien is a crucial theme in most of the century’s best-known works: Moratín junior’s El sí de las niñas; Jovellanos’s El delincuente honrado (The Honorable Delinquent, 1773); and, most importantly, Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters, published posthumously 1789), which frame an explicit critique of the nation.
Structured in epistolary form, the 90 letters that form the Cartas marruecas develop an exchange between Gazel, a Moroccan diplomat who arrives in Spain, his Spanish host Nuño Núñez, and Gazel’s adoptive father and advisor Ben-Beley back in Morocco. Although the Cartas’s configuration and subject matter bear a clear resemblance to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters – against one of which Cadalso had written a Defense of the Spanish Nation (1768–71) – Cadalso’s “Introduction” establishes a national literary filiation for his work, appealing to Cervantes as his predecessor. The Cervantine connection is reinforced by the fictional editor’s claim to be publishing a manuscript on which he has stumbled. The editor acknowledges that his goal is to criticize the Spanish national character from a balanced position or “justo medio” (happy mean). This “happy mean” is mentioned repeatedly as the only position from which to aspire to the hombría de bien that undergirds the utilitarian morality of productive citizenship, equally opposed to petimetres and majos. The work’s use of three narrators (two Moroccan Muslims and one Spanish Catholic) seems to sustain the cultural equanimity that the editor of the letters claims as his goal, and the work’s linking of Spanish and Moroccan customs complicates the relation between Enlightenment and Europeanness.
In practice, however, the foreign interlocutors’ opinions are always mediated and (in)validated by the Spaniard’s voice. The text’s discussion of the many ailments afflicting the weak Spanish national body is based on a notion of patriotism that regards defense of the nation’s singularity as a duty. In response to the modern European emphasis on universal values and taste, the Moroccan Ben Beley states that there is nothing worse than a nation “sin carácter propio” (without its own character) (Letter XX). Nuño claims that the true Spain can still be found in the provinces (Letter XXI) but the emphasis throughout is on what Spain is not. The often-humorous account given in Letter XXVI of the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual differences between the different provinces includes recognition that, though an obstacle to “perfect union” in peacetime, the resulting rivalries can be an advantage against a common (foreign) enemy. Language – Castilian, purged of Gallicisms – is presented as a key factor in the preservation of an authentic Spanish identity.
The Cartas marruecas make it clear that a strong national identity rests on the concerted efforts of a community of men linked by bonds of friendship and sensibility, understood as civic virtues. The good citizen’s leisure has to be carefully regulated. Letter XL criticizes an idle, ill-educated aristocracy’s proclivity for hobnobbing with marginal (especially gypsy) elements of the populace for entertainment purposes: that is, for its majismo. By contrast, the hombre de bien is industrious and his productivity of public benefit.
Women (and minority ethnic groups) lack a place in the transnational society of good men that the Cartas marruecas celebrate. The former are discussed as reflections of their husband’s merits (Letter XIX) or as examples of moral corruption and excessive consumption. The female equivalent of the petimetre – the petimetra (the century’s ubiquitous symbol of unproductive femininity) – is not specifically addressed. Yet, the nation’s decadence is metaphorized as effeminacy resulting from excessive luxury and idleness (blamed on wealth from the Americas) and moral laxity (blamed on new French customs). The petimetra would take center stage in eighteenth-century Spanish theater, in its neoclassical variants – Moratín senior’s La petimetra (1762) – and in many of the popular sainetes of Ramón de la Cruz – such as La oposición a cortejo (Against Male Admirers, 1773) (Haidt 1999, 2003a; 2011).
Cadalso’s fictional editor anticipates the reactions to his work in terms of the dichotomies that by then defined Spanishness: traditionalists will label him a bad Spaniard; afrancesados
