Writing Nineteenth-Century Spain: Rosario de Acuña and the Liberal Nation
Christine Arkinstall
The University of Auckland
In nineteenth-century Spain, the process of forging a liberal national identity is inseparable from the creation of a national culture and literature. Although women writers and intellectuals were engaged in this enterprise, it is principally their male counterparts who have been acknowledged for their cultural contributions. Symptomatic of such exclusion is the figure of Rosario de Acuña (Madrid 1851-Gijón 1923), playwright, poet, essayist and freethinker. Although Acuña was almost an exact contemporary of the canonically inscribed Emilia Pardo Bazán, her considerable literary oeuvre has not yet received the recognition it deserves, on account of the controversy provoked by both the writer and her works. In contrast with Pardo Bazán's Catholicism and alignment with a bourgeois class and reading public, Acuña was fiercely anticlerical and embraced workers' causes. Not only did she work in a literary genre considered off-limits to women (the theater, where she addressed contentious political issues of the day), she was also prominent in freemasonry and an active advocate of women's rights and education. Indeed, her outspokenness on the latter led to her going into exile in Portugal from 1911 to 1914, on account of the political scandal that erupted from the publication of a letter of hers to Luis Bonafoux in El Internacional in Paris and El Progreso in Barcelona1.
There exist few literary studies on Acuña's works2. In spite of being hailed as «la pionera de la literatura femenina del librepensamiento español» (Simón Palmer 7), Acuña has tended to receive most attention from historians interested in the association of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism with freethinking and freemasonry3. Yet, closer examination of her literary production reveals a writer deeply immersed in contemporary currents of thought. In particular, Acuña's dramatic corpus participates in fashioning a specific construct of the nation in late nineteenth-century Spain, in accordance with that strand of liberalism known as «progressive». In contrast to the more conservative liberalism propounded by the «moderates», who sought a limited bourgeois revolution in the interests of an elite, the «progressive» national ideal was founded on industry and commerce, the advancement of the working classes and a secular society4.
During the nineteenth century national histories in Spain aimed to project an image of a united, permanent community, defended by its founding fathers, heroes and martyrs (Álvarez Junco 196). Important to this notion of permanence was the demonstration of the continuity of an essential national character across the centuries. In Acuña's theater this model can be perceived in her protagonists, who are all defenders of causes of the people, while continuity is visible in the range of periods in which the plays are set: from fourteenth-century Rome and sixteenth-century Valencia and Játiva, in Rienzi el Tribuno and Tribunales de venganza respectively, to early -and late- nineteenth-century Spain, in Amar a la Patria, El padre Juan and La voz de la Patria. This article proposes to focus on the second and third of Acuña's five plays, Amor a la Patria (1877) and Tribunales de venganza (1878), which, unlike the better-known Rienzi el Tribuno (1876) and El padre Juan5 (1891), have not been republished. However, they deal with two of the founding myths of liberal Spanish nationalism: the so-called War of Independence fought against the French in 1808 and the uprising of the Valencian Germanía or Brotherhood in 1519.
Contemporary Spanish nationalism, José Álvarez Junco has argued, is born with the popular uprising against the Napoleonic forces in 1808. This date marks the beginning of what comes to be mythified as the «War of Independence»: the conflict during which the Spanish people successfully rebel against the imperial, foreign invader6. Whether it was later represented as the people's affirmation of national sovereignty, as declared by the liberals, or as proof of the people's loyalty to inherited tradition, as stated by the conservatives, these renditions of the «War of Independence» constitute inventions that belie its complexity. This conflict was both an international one fought by France, England and Portugal, and also a civil war in which foreign powers were supported by different sectors of the Spanish population. With allegiances divided among the elite groups, most of the general Spanish population aligned themselves with England and Portugal: a position more marked by xenophobia against the French than by any sense of national consciousness. Conversely, support for the French by Enlightenment reformers can be construed as patriotic in that the administrative and cultural models of France were perceived as crucial to strengthening the Spanish monarchy and restoring lost international prestige (Álvarez Junco 144, 120-22).
In Amor a la Patria, a one-act play in verse subtitled a «drama trágico», Acuña's retrospective vision of events in 1808 conforms to the national myth of a «War of Independence» that by 1877, its date of publication, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish psyche. Thus the protagonist Inés exclaims:
«¡¡Por la patria mía,
[...]
por verla libre de extranjero yugo,
por conquistar su libertad bendita [!!]».
(Amor 8)
while her daughter María affirms: «[D]espués de conquistar la independencia, / yo les diré a los hijos de mis hijos, / lo que á los pueblos sus derechos cuestan» (17). Furthermore, in her Dedication to her grandmother, whose first-hand accounts are acknowledged as having inspired her own version, Acuña refers to the conflict as «la heroica guerra de la Independencia», «la epopeya más grandiosa de nuestro siglo» and «el periodo más glorioso de nuestra historia» (5). While the reference to her forbear as witness to the events functions to endow her rendition with historical veracity and authority, the adjectival phrases «heroica», «más grandiosa» and «más glorioso» present the nineteenth century as the culmination of a master narrative of history, founded on the tradition of the medieval epic and directed to marking out a liberal national space and history connoted by «nuestro siglo» and «nuestra historia».
Acuña, however, does not base her play solely on her grandmother's tales. As indicated by her «Advertencia», she also draws on the description given by the Spanish nineteenth-century liberal historian, Modesto Lafuente, in his monumental Historia de España7. Just as Lafuente's intellectual enterprise is geared towards the confirmation of Spain as nation, so too is Acuña's theater, which promotes a vision of Spanish nationhood rooted in popular elements. Preserved in literature, the memory of the people's resistance against the French should serve to bolster Spanish identity in the face of future foreign invasion; as María states:
«Y de siglos en siglos repetidas
memorias tan gloriosas como acerbas,
servirán de bandera en nuestra patria
cuando se acerquen huestes extranjeras».
(17)
Set in Zaragoza on July 2, 1808, Amor a la Patria depicts the attempt by the town's inhabitants to defend it against the French. With the «pueblo» cast as embodying «true» Spanish nationalism, the play aligns itself with the kind of anti-French stance taken by the Enlightenment thinker Antonio de Capmany, who considered that Spain's essence was to be found in the unchanging instinctual strength, physical and moral, of a common people uncorrupted by modern civilization8. Such a notion, typical of early Romantic thought in its privileging of a Volkgeist, accords with the neo-Romantic strain of Acuña's dramatic works. It is also consistent with a liberal sociopolitical perspective, in which, as Inman Fox notes, «el pueblo llega a ser sujeto político activo»9 (36).
In Acuña's play, Zaragoza marks both a regional and national space, pointing to blurred definitions of a patriotism in transition. At the time, the «War of Independence» was fed by a patriotism that was ethnic rather than national. The reality was not that of a nation united -the goal of the liberals- but of a state formed of competing «patrias», each with its own interests. The recasting of the war as a national conflict only carne later with the liberal establishment in 1812 of the Cortes of Cádiz and the Liberal Constitution, intent on legitimating a new nation built on collective sovereignty and consensus rather than on royal privilege (Álvarez Junco 125-31). Ethnic patriotism is suggested in Acuña's play by María's exclamation: «¡como si sangre tuya no tuviera / y no fuese Aragón la patria mía!» (Amor 9), as well as by repeated references to the heroine of the defence of Zaragoza, Agustina of Zaragoza; indeed, Inés sees María as yet another Agustina:
«¡No en valde a la Agustina Zaragoza
has visto combatir; la patria mía
no ha de rendirse nunca al extranjero
mientras albergue tantas Agustinas!».
(12)
Yet, on other occasions, Zaragoza and Aragón are equated with Spain, as in Inés's following admonition to her son, Pedro:
This slippage between the ethnic and national not only reveals how notions of Spanish nationhood are forged, it also reflects the fact that, within the context of the war, Aragón and Spain were not opposed terms; rather, as Álvarez Junco notes, «la afirmación de lo aragonés era, en 1808-1814, una de las maneras de proclamarse español» (86).
Competing definitions of patriotism are explored by Acuña in the diverging perspectives of Napoleon afforded by different characters. For Inés, he is not the epitome of liberal revolution and freedom from antiquated sociopolitical structures, but the «verdugo de la tierra» (Amor 13), who desires to enslave her: «¡[...] la Francia quiere que tu patria / en repugnante feudo esclava viva!» (10). At the same time, however, this portrayal of Napoleon is undercut through Pedro, Inés' son, who nine years ago abandoned the family home to seek opportunities not present in Spain and is now a captain in the army besieging Zaragoza. For Pedro, Napoleon embodies the progressive spirit of the French Revolution, offering democracy to a Spain under a despotic monarchy:
«¡Napoleon, al fragor de sus canones
y en los sangrientos campos de batalla,
enseña al pueblo a conquistar derechos
que un bárbaro egoismo le negaba!».
(24)
These shifting parameters of patriotism are underscored by an important dialogue between Inés and Pedro. While Pedro is uncertain as to what constitutes his «patria» -«¿Dónde la patria está, que no la veo?» (29)- Inés retorts that «patria» is inseparable from the place where one is born, grows up and dies:
«¡Está donde nacieron tus sonrisas,
[...]
donde meces la cuna de tus hijos
y guardas las cenizas de tus deudos».
(29)
For Pedro, «patria» is a changeable concept, defining that place where ambitions can best be realized. For Inés, it is an immutable entity that forms one's very identity, thus resembling the original meaning of «nation», explained by Timothy Brennan as «both the modern nation-state and... something more ancient and nebulous -the natio- a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging» (45). That this relationship, however, is not a natural given but a cultural construct, is elucidated by Brennan when he turns to Raymond Williams' following distinction: «'Nation' as a term is radically connected with 'native'. We are born into relationships which are typically settled in a place. This form of primary and 'placeable' bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial»11.
Where the metaphors of kinship which inform the construct of the nation are most powerfully encapsulated is in the equation of nation with mother12. In Acuña's play, «mother» and «patria» are synonymous concepts, as intimated by María: «Madre y patria: guardando estos dos nombres / el alma siempre vivirá tranquila» (Amor 10). Through her motherhood, Inés conforms to the traditional destiny and role for women. At the same time, she is also a widow and hence possesses an independence that would have been legally impossible should she have still been married. These seemingly contradictory states make her the ideal symbol for the emerging view of the liberal Spanish nation, as both mother of all its people and also autonomous and self-governing. Although Inés may appear to conform to conservative norms of femininity that present Woman as eternal and unchanging, these same attributes also stand as guarantor of the inviolability and continuity of the nation against man's aggression and betrayal, represented by Napoleon and Pedro, respectively.
The opposition created between Inés and María, on the one hand, and Pedro on the other, refraets national sentiment with gender. Contrary to conventional representations, here women are repeatedly seen as the embodiment of true patriotism, premised on the concept of sacrifice. Not only are they prepared to blow up their own home (strategically placed at the entrance to the town, in order to prevent it being captured by the French and used as a fortification against their cause), they are also willing to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their «patria», with Inés exclaiming:
«¡¡Por la patria mia,
[...] por conquistar su libertad bendita
y mirarla temible y poderosa,
la vida, es poco, el alma perdería!!».
(8)
Indeed, Inés' patriotism is taken to an extreme when she places love of country before love of her son, repudiating Pedro for his support of Napoleon: «¡tú no has nacido, no, de mis entrañas!»13 (26). These manifestations of patriotism concur with the more general purpose of sacrifice, that of shaping and confirming national sovereignty, as noted by Jean Bethke Elshtain: «Only a preparedness to forfeit one's own life rounds out, or instantiates in all its fullness, devotion to the political community...» (146-47). More specifically, they also reveal how during the «War of Independence», as Álvarez Junco explains, patriotism became identified with those who «luchaban contra los franceses; lo que significaba también, sacrificarse por la colectividad y luchar por la libertad» (134).
Furthermore, both Inés and María serve as models for patriotic emulation. Just as Inés constitutes, María affirms, her ideal -«aprendiendo de ti con entusiasmo / á ser noble y á ser buena patricia» (Amor 10)- María in turn inspires courage in her beloved, who declares:
«Y yo con el recuerdo idolatrado
de mujer tan amante como fiera,
si ántes con entusiasmo peleaba,
como un leon me lanzaré en la guerra!».
(17)
Women are thus not only heroes in their own right but also the physical and figurative mothers of heroes of both sexes, ensuring the transmission and continuity of national virtues: «¡[...] de tan bravas hijas / héroes no más, es justo que nacieran!...» (17).
That by 1877 the liberal concept of the nation is firmly equated with national sovereignty rather than with entrenched class privileges is again visible in Acuña's representation of Inés. Her identification with the common people is patent in her having embraced their lot by choice. Originally of noble birth, Inés, María tells us, loses her reputation, class and family when she falls in love with and marries an
«tú, la heróica mujer, buena entre todas,
de estirpe noble, poderosa y rica,
que por unir tu suerte á un artesano
perdiste nombre, posición, familia;
tú, la madre del alma idolatrada,
que entre el humilde pueblo confundida
diste siempre el ejemplo de virtudes».
(9)
Inés, therefore, represente the progressive liberal ideal of an upper-middle class prepared to renounce its privileges out of love for the common people and the future good of Spain.
Such a foregrounding of an artisan or lower-middle class as an effective force for countering traditional hierarchies of power reemerges in Acuña's following drama, Tribunales de venganza, first performed in Zaragoza in 1878 and published two years later in 1880. As with Amor a la Patria, Acuña again relies on Lafuente for her account of the attempted revolution by the Germanía of Valencia in 1519 and 1522 against a despotic and corrupt aristocracy. Although she now addresses a more remote period in Spanish history, the theme of revolution by the common people continues to bear witness to the liberal desire for more democratic forms of government. It is important that the historical events of which the Germanía is protagonist evoke the practically contemporaneous uprising of the Comuneros, the leaders of those Castilian communities who rebelled against Charles V's perceived abuse of Castilian law (Fox 39). The significance of the Comuneros for nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism and its push for decentralization is stressed by Rafael Altamira in his Historia de España y de la civilización española (1899-1906), where he describes the Comuneros' political program, which granted relative autonomy to its city communities, as groundbreaking for its time14. By 1876, just what the Comuneros represent for liberals in Spain is encapsulated by Gumersindo de Azcárate in Minuta de testamenta«Los comuneros de Castilla eran los héroes paradigmáticos de una España que pudo ser y que fue ahogada por el despotismo austríaco» (Qtd. Fox 53)15.
The uprising of the Germanía of Valencia is, as J. H. Elliott indicates, an event that occurs separately from the rebellion of the Castilian Comuneros. This latter movement, which lasted barely a year from May 1520 to April 1521, was essentially defensive. On the one hand, it was motivated by the desire of a group of urban nobles to preserve the independence of the Cortes, and with it, the traditional powers of the Castilian towns. On the other hand, it was fuelled by the people's xenophobia towards the rule of Charles V, seen as a foreign king who was subjecting Spain to excessive taxation to finance his European interests. As the conflict dragged on, it began to assume the vestiges of a civil war which challenged the power of the aristocracy, now increasingly alienated (see Elliott 151-55). Among those few nobles who continued to support the cause was Rosario's ancestor, Antonio de Acuña, bishop of Zamora16.
It is into this familial tradition of opposition to established power that Acuña inserts herself when she chooses for her drama the theme of the uprising by the Valencian Germanía. Although this «brother-hood» sees the Comuneros as linked to their own struggle, its causes are different. Whereas the revolt of the Comuneros was primarily due to political reasons, that of the Germanía was social in origin, revolving around two main factors: firstly, the arming of the guilds in 1519 against feared raids on the Valencian coast by Turkish galleys; and secondly, an outbreak in Valencia of the plague, attributed to immorality, from which the nobility, perceived as the most sinful, fled. The result was the formation of the Germanía, an urban movement made up of armed artisans, whose initial intention was to make Valencia a republic. Like the rebellion of the Comuneros, that of the Germanía was unsuccessful, being put down some months later in October 1521. Its leader, Vicenc Peris, who could well constitute the model for the unfortunate Sorolla from Acuña's drama, was executed in March 1522 (see Elliott 156-59).
Acuña thus privileges a movement that, due to its more radical nature, can better reflect the agitated sociopolitical context of late nineteenth-century Spain: it must be remembered that the decade just prior to the staging of Tribunales de venganza had seen the anti-Borbonic Revolution of 1868, the abdication of Isabel II and her successor, Amadeo of Savoy, the short-lived First Republic (1873-74), and the restoration of the monarchy. Acuña's setting of Valencia is equally crucial to her message: from a nineteenth-century liberal perspective, Valencia, the land of the Cid, stands for a Spain built on tradicional regional rights and the coexistence of different cultures (Álvarez Junco 424). In the play, this vision of a pluralistic, decentralized nation has been shattered by the absolutist rule of Charles V, who favors imperial policy in Europe over the need to resolve injustices in Spain:
«Son tantos los desmanes que sufrimos,
es tanta la justicia que queremos,
que ese rey ambicioso de victorias
tuviera que olvidarlas mucho tiempo:
[...]
Valencia, esta Valencia de los Cides
gime oprimida por feroces dueños...».
(Tribunales 9)
Thus the monarchy is represented as no longer responding to the needs of the Spanish people and as increasingly disassociated from the interests of the nation17.
Nevertheless, Valencia's problems are not attributed as much to the king as to the nobles: «Un pueblo entero sus lamentos lanza / pidiendo al trono hispano los derechos / que una nobleza estúpida le arranca» (18). What this shift in focus achieves is to displace the pivotal opposition by some nobles to the monarchy in the rebellion of the Comuneros and afford greater protagonism to the issues of class conflict manifest in the uprising of the Germanía. Through Acuña's sociopolitical lens, therefore, the corrupt nobles symbolize the contemporary decadence of the Spanish upper classes, while the king can refer to any one of a series of ineffectual monarchs from Isabel II to Amadeo of Savoy, through to the lackluster Restoration monarchy.
Similar to Amor a la Patria, and El padre Juan, the political events in Tribunales de venganza are played out within a family. As with Ramón in El padre Juan, it is the unknown family origins of the protagonist, Guillen Sorolla, a member of the Valencian Germanía, that serve as the catalyst for his death. The drama opens in Valencia in 1519 when Sorolla's unidentified adoptive brother, Asail, betrays him by allowing the abduction of Sorolla's wife, Andrea, by the noble, Luis Cabanillas, in the hope of information that might identify his own mother's murderer. In turn, Cabanillas aims to satisfy his lust for Andrea and use her to convince Sorolla to abandon the Germanía and thus stifle the rebellion. Although Andrea remains steadfast in her loyalty to Sorolla and refuses Cabanillas, Sorolla is captured and eventually executed in Játiva two years later.
Placed both within and without the family unit, as Sorolla's unknown half-brother, Asail occupies a similar position in terms of the larger family or nation as a converted Moor or Arab18. Nevertheless, Asail declares that he is Christian not by choice but «por mandato expreso / del rey de vuestra raza» (24). It is the resentment produced by his forced conversion that overrides any feelings of loyalty towards Andrea and Sorolla, who have taken him into their home and given him work. Such a breakdown of sociocultural relations on a microcosmic level also mirrors the wider context of the kingdom of Valencia, progressively paralyzed by the Moorish problem, which brought about the forced conversion of the Moors to Christianity between 1520 and 1525 (Fox 45). Thus, to the context of civil discord, Acuña adds the elements of religion and «race»19, to argue indirectly for freedom of worship and respect for other cultures within the national context.
Of noble Moorish descent, Asail's account of his early years casts the Arabs as independent and peace-loving:
«En los fértiles llanos de Valencia
de árabe raza y sin feudales dueños
una pequeña aldea se veía
blanca paloma entre frondoso huerto».
(Tribunales 21)
In contrast to this picture of civilization, the pole of barbarity is assigned to the «condales señores» who pillage his village and rape and murder his mother: «De condales señores vil cuadrilla, / seguida de jayanes y escuderos, / como feroces tigres de la Nubia» (22). It is during the course of these atrocities that the twelve-year-old Asail is separated from his adopted brother of two years, whom he presumes dead also. It is his memories of these events that fuel his promise to his dying mother to avenge her dishonor: «¡Borrar esas memorias! ¡Más valdría / que pidiérais al sol matar su fuego[!]» (24). Whereas memory is represented as a powerful natural force that can never disappear, the markings of nobility on the murderer's dagger in Asail's possession are already fading with time, indicating how history is challenging the aristocracy's power. Thus, when Asail shows Andrea the dagger, she remarks: «Borrosa cifra», with Asail replying:
«Vago contorno de blazon añejo,
un lema, más borroso todavía,
y una doble corona...
Esas, que apenas son visibles armas».
(24)
Through Asail's narrative, Acuña undercuts dichotomized historical renditions derived from that other founding myth of Spanish nationhood, the Catholic «Reconquest», which present the Arabs as aggressive barbarie hordes and the nobility as paragons of Christian virtue. As Sorolla's adoptive brother, Asail reminds Acuña's contemporary audience that the Moors, cast out of the Spanish nation, should be acknowledged as a legitimate part of Spain's tradition and heritage. As a victim seeking revenge for his mother's murder at the hands of Cabanillas, he revindicates the claims of all wronged others. However, as his brother's betrayer, albeit unwitting, Asail also exhibits negative attributes that mirror liberal nineteenth-century Spain's desire to shake off its representation by Northern European countries as the exotic, barbarie other to their civilizations. The negative facets of Asail's portrayal, therefore, can be seen as partially revelatory of liberal aspirations to bring the country out of its perceived inferiority and decadence.
The ambiguity that surrounds the character of Asail may also be a consequence of the intersecting values that, by the second half of the nineteenth century, are inherent in the term «raza». As Álvarez Junco signals, it is then that «raza» enters political vocabulary to refer not merely to physical differences among peoples but also to psychological and moral ones (247-48). Acuña loads the word with greater political significance by introducing connotations of class; Andrea tells Cabanillas that the «señores», whom he represents, are a «raza envilecida», in contrast to the «pueblo» or common people with whom she identifies:
«Crimen sin nombre, bárbaro, inhumano
levantó de mi pueblo los clamores,
y hoy su poder inmenso y soberano
hace temblar de espanto á los señores.
Viértase nuestra sangre por tu mano;
provoca nuevamente sus furores,
y se hundirá tu raza envilecida
de Dios y de los hombres maldecida».
(Tribunales 39-40)
A similar notion is echoed by Sorolla when he states that Cabanillas and his kind are a «raza vil cuyos andrajos / jamás esconden del honor la llama» (45). In both instances, «raza» serves to demarcate sociopolitical bodies that Acuña considers have no place in a liberal nation, from others whose right to belong must be recognized; the aristocracy are «¡Verdugos de las razas desvalidas, / de la razón, del pueblo y de las vidas[!]» (44).
Such a paradigm problematizes facile characterizations of Arab and Christian to establish another model, which insists on class as an integral and overlapping component of historical conflict in Spain. Indeed, Acuña uses Asail to draw a parallel between him and the Spanish people, whom Asail likens to a caged African lion, which escapes to regain temporarily the lost freedom of its homeland:
«Ruge el leon de Nubia prisionero
con rudo esfuerzo de su hercúlea garra;
logra por fin reconquistar un dia
la hermosa libertad que ambicionaba;
[...]
y aspira el aire cálido que enciende
en su pecho recuerdos de la patria».
(42)
Through this fable Asail reminds Cabanillas that passing uprisings by the populace can be used to ensure the latter's continued subjection:
«La imbécil muchedumbre que te espanta
compárala con el leon de Nubia:
fiera brava que ruge y despedaza:
hartándola de sangre un solo dia,
lo ménos por un siglo vive esclava».
(42-43)
With the lion the traditional symbol of Leon, and hence of a strong, centralized Castile and Spain under monarchic rule, Acuña's description is subversive in that it equates the ideal nation with sovereignty by the people. For those in power, the populace's latent strength must be contained, like the imprisoned lion, lest it fragment the centralized state: «fiera brava que ruge y despedaza». What makes Spain akin to Africa, Acuña insists, is not its repudiated Moorish heritage but the continued denial of basic rights to its weaker subjeets by the afore-mentioned «feroces tigres de la Nubia» (22), repeatedly associated with Cabanillas' class20.
Just as Asail functions to mark an intermediate position that disturbs paradigms of nationhood based on exclusionary premises of «race» and religion, so too does Sorolla stand for a third class with the potential to shift the old power hierarchies in a nation founded on the supremacy of the nobility and monarchy. The inequity of the socioeconomic order that leads to the uprising of the Germanía is highlighted by the fact that, as an artisan, Sorolla is a «pechero» or taxpayer; conversely, as a member of the nobility and an «hidalgo», Cabanillas is exempt from taxes21. This economic system, which places, as Elliott observes, «the burden of taxation on the shoulders of those least able to bear it» (204), makes Sorolla partially representative of a similarly abused Spanish people.
Nevertheless, it is also as an artisan that he symbolizes a self-made class, which has acquired what it has through work and not birth, with reputation founded on an untarnished name:
«pobre artesano soy, sin más riquezas
que las escasas que al trabajo debo,
ni la fama se ocupa de mi vida
ni más blasones que mi nombre tengo».
(8)
This lack of stress on rights through birth is also evident in his unknown origins and his adoption by Asail's father, a rich merchant from Játiva, who bequeathed him an inheritance as recognition for his humility, loyalty and hard work. Having invested half this money in studies (16), Sorolla stands for a new kind of nobility premised on a cultivation of intelligence and not solely on inherited wealth. Thus, when he asks Vicente, a fellow «brother», how he can contribute to the Germanía without fame and an inherited title, the latter responds: «[...] Guillen, tú puedes mucho, / tu vasta ilustración, tu gran talento» (8). Within Acuña's context, Sorolla reflects the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis, rooted in the Enlightenment and manifest in Krausism and socialism, on education as key in the advancement of the people.
In contrast, the nobility are portrayed as motivated purely by wealth or «honra», sacrificing their honor for material gain. The result, Sorolla informs Cabanillas, is a nation of bastards and monsters:
«Sin amor vuestras mujeres
se venden como esposas por el oro
[...]
halagadas de bárbaros poderes
les venden su virtud por su tesoro
dando ser á unos hijos sin conciencia,
[...]
monstruos de monstruos viles engendrados».
(46)
Through such a representation, Acuña may be seen to take umbrage with the mercantilism of a bourgeois society22, which resulted in rampant corruption within the administration associated with Isabel II and the more conservative liberalism of the Moderates. With public office synonymous with immorality, the rallying cry for the 1868 Revolution was «¡Viva España con honra!» (Aranguren 108). The hope for Spain's regeneration, Acuña suggests, lies with a hard-working, educated lower-middle class, as embodied by Sorolla.
As in Amor a la Patria, Tribunales de venganza continues to exploit the metaphor of the nation as family. Just as with Pedro, Acuña again implies through Asail and Sorolla that their being raised in the same place does not ensure common sociopolitical views. What Tribunales suggests is that the survival and unity of the nation will not only depend on the positive recognition of brother by brother, in order to avoid internal discord. More importantly, as intimated by Sorolla's surname, a nation must be constructed according to a genealogy of common ideas governed by reason, in what Andrea describes as «el pacto fraternal que nos impuso / la ley de la razón» (Tribunales 20). Here what Acuña privileges is a concept of nation that rests on culture, not nature; rather than national affiliation being predetermined through birth, the nation should be a voluntary coming together of subjects in the name of common ideals, in the sense of Benedict Anderson's imagined community.
Such a brotherhood of like-minded individuals is symbolized in the «gran Germanía valenciana» (7). Depicted by Sorolla as «esa noble hermandad» (8), it continues the «guerra sagrada» (10) of the Comuneros, in that it is an «empresa [...] muy santa» (11). These religious overtones are placed, however, by Sorolla in a more individual context when he refers to the «íntimo altar de la conciencia» (15). This phrase echoes a text practically contemporaneous with Acuña's, Estudios sobre el engrandecimiento y la decadencia de España, published in 1878 by Manuel Pedregal y Cañedo. A historian and teacher in the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Pedregal y Cañedo maintains that Spain's regeneration must be founded on freedom of conscience and independent thought (Fox 42-43). It is this autonomous choice or secular free -will that brings similar- thinking individuals together in larger communities or associations to form the essence of the liberal concept of the nation as a «macroasociación» (Cayuela Fernández 46).
The importance of associationism for the development of alternative sociopolitical formations that might challenge and change existing power structures cannot be underestimated in the formation of concepts of the liberal nation and in Acuña's own life trajectory23. It is the nineteenth century that provides Spain with the sociohistorical conditions that permit the rise of associationism, premised on the return of the emigrant liberals after the death of Fernando VII, the consolidation of the middle and lower-middle classes, and the growth and industrialization of the cities. In particular, it is the city that facilitates the exchange of information and knowledge, and the creation and institutionalization of sociocultural spaces for this purpose (see Guereña 25-26). That associationism is perceived as fundamental for the construction of a civilized nation is underscored by Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, when he refers in 1838 to the «espíritu de asociación que estimula y preside en el día a la mayor parte de los trabajos de los hombres en los pueblos civilizados»24.
It is clear that Acuña envisages literature as also performing an associative function, bringing together a community of people -spectators and readers- within the dramatic space. Amor a la Patria and Tribunales de venganza constitute retrospective accounts designed to confirm and consolidate subsequent liberal renditions of history, ensuring the continuance of their values. Furthermore, it is important for those who criticize the liberals for allegedly not valuing all that is Spanish that these paradigms of nationhood take their bearings from a homegrown tradition rather than from foreign models from northern Europe25.
Acuña's rewriting of founding myths of Spanish liberalism is faithful to the latter's aim of recovering the history of the common people. The purpose of writing such a history is, as Sorolla points out, to provide models for emulation so that the downtrodden might eventually defeat a cyclical history of tyrannical oppression:
National sovereignty is presented by Acuña as the consequence of a natural, unstoppable process that serves to unite all subjugated nations, in which the winter of dynastic monarchies will be replaced by the dawn of a new civilization, with each responsible for his or her historical destiny:
«Brillante luz de un sol que sobre el cielo
han de mirar los siglos del mañana,
tal es la aurora que rompiendo el hielo
alumbra ya nuestra conciencia humana:
[...]
Justicia y libertad los pueblos gritan,
[...]
y al paso de los siglos se adelantan,
coronándose reyes en la historia
con el lauro inmortal de la victoria».
(54)
Nevertheless, reconciling such models of past greatness with Spain's contemporary reality is not easy. The failure of this attempt is borne out by the broken families, fratricides and other murders that inevitably recur in Acuña's dramatic production, pointing to a nation divided by mutual suspicion and hatred. Her particular vision of Spain, with her inclusive definitions of gender, «race», and class, cannot prosper in the sociopolitical climate of the late nineteenth century. As suggested by the often unsatisfactory and inconclusive endings of her plays, the solution still lies beyond the boundaries of the drama of the nation, in an imagined space and time yet to be realized.
Works cited
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——. Influencia de la vida del campo en la familia. Madrid: Montegrifo, 1882.
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