Category: Think Piece

By Elena Barattini

It was the 19^th of April 1840. The Villanueva, a packet boat flying the Spanish flag, dropped anchor in the flocked harbor of Havana. Fifteen passengers disembarked and stepped foot on Spanish territory. Among them, there was an Italian traveler, getting acquainted with the bureaucratic procedures of the colonial government and the two routine British inspections of the vessel. In fact, as all male passengers were requested to present a papeleta (document) to reach the mainland, two groups of British officers had already fathomed the craft, looking for dreadful proofs of “dealers in coal”: slavers with human cargo.

Never object of a systematic study, quoted, and read just by a few scholars, Carlo Barinetti’s Voyage to Mexico and Havana provides in-depth, although extremely biased, descriptions of the everyday management of economic activities in Tampico, Mexico City, Veracruz, Puebla, Havana, and New Orleans. Carlo Barinetti’s work might be described as a detailed first-hand traveler account of the political landscapes of some of the main trading posts in the Americas in the first half of the 19^th century. Skillfully mixing his critique of the present situation of pre-unitary Italy, and his juvenile aversion to the Austrian control of his homeland, the Lombard-Venetian Barinetti defined himself as a convinced liberal. A young enthusiast for the cause of a united and self-governed Italy, he then moved to the pre-Civil war United States, where he taught modern languages, and eventually obtained citizenship.

From there, he sat sail south. Ending up in Havana in the 1840s, his travel accounts are a powerful harbinger of positions which legitimized the Escalera repression, a mass-punishment of free people of color that followed a summary trial that raised alarm of a suspected plan to end slavery and Spanish rule in Cuba in 1843. Quintessentially political in the observations of what in his opinion did and did not work in the territories he visited, his text represents a key and underrated source for the study of ideas, political forms, and their circulation in the first half of the 19^th century Atlantic world. Still intimately linked to the history of power, his literary production reflects his take on that crucible of happenings capable of keeping a privileged, educated, white man awake all night: the Haitian Revolution. As he provided details on the extremely severe measures implemented to police non-white subjects on the island, his words are deeply informative on the broader, generalized, sense of panic surrounding the long wake of happenings that linked La Escalera to the 1791 revolutionary experience.

Walking around Havana, “a place so well known to the Americans”, Barinetti took notes on the “kind of prosperity which shows itself at every step, which render that city highly agreeable and interesting”. The prosperity in question was all bloodstained, made by enslaved people’s hands and sweat. The tons of sugar once produced in French Saint-Domingue were now put on the market by Cuban ingenios (sugar mills) owners. Thousands of enslaved people, who would have once been principally deported a few maritime miles south, were now directed to Cuba, amid what has been defined as  “second slavery”.   

In the intertwined histories of the Haitian Revolution – the largest slave uprising the world has ever seen and the only one that led to the formation of an independent state in 1804 – and the sugar revolution in Cuba, concern and optimism influenced the behaviors of enslavers, travelers, and property owners. On the one hand, in the era of the Saint-Domingue uprisings, there was a “common wind” among the men and women of the African diaspora, characterized by the diffusion of empowering concepts, such as freedom and the abolition of slavery. On the other hand, the recurring metaphor of the fear of contagion, and a constant terror of retaliation meandered through the cities and the plantations of the Caribbean. This constant state of panic went hand in hand with the increase of the enslaved population, especially as the wealth that could be destroyed during such uprisings grew.

Haiti was thus instrumentally invoked to ideologically reinforce slavery in Cuba, emphasizing a “dangerousness” intrinsic to the individuals deprived of their freedom. This was reflected in the strict regulation and the increased surveillance imposed on the free and enslaved population of color on the island. Four years before the Escalera repression, the clase de color (people of color) of Cuba after a given hour had to “be at home, while no assembly of colored people is allowed after sunset; not even two can walk together or stand in the streets” as Barinetti attentively wrote down in his notebooks. The Haitian specter hovered around the island of Cuba, and the constant worry of a mass gory riot of the enslaved affected the very act and portrait of traveling as depicted by the Italian. A “sudden rising” was expected at every corner of the island. Travelers wandered armed, counting on a steady intervention on the part of “a couple of Spaniards or Creoles on horseback” who could “attack and subdue a band of fifty or more slaves, though the latter are generally armed with machetes, or long knives, which they use to cut the sugarcane”.

Not surprisingly, the liberal Barinetti spent several pages on the virtues of the free States in the North of the Union, on free trade and labor. Indeed, his thoughts on abolition are exemplary of the gradualist positioning shared at the time. Recurring to different sets of notions which were structured according to racial precepts, Barinetti shivered at the thought of a black population outnumbering the white one. When describing the misery of the enslaved in Cuba, Barinetti also invoked family separations, the hideous travel across the ocean, the severe physical punishments, and the constant noise of the lash hitting somebody’s back. However, these abolitionist topoi were not mobilized to advocate for immediate emancipation, quite the opposite.

Broadly referring to Cuba and the south of the United States, Barinetti argued slavery simply could not be abolished at that moment: time was not yet ripe.

“Come! come here abolitionists! emancipate them, spread knowledge among them, give them equality of rights, and you will see the result. Release them from the natural bonds which form the bulwark behind which the whites feel sheltered, and then what makes me shudder if I only think of it will happen.“

Echoing Barinetti’s warnings, from the 1810s to the 1840s the different governors of the Capitanía General de Cuba (General Captaincy of Cuba)put in place harsh preventive measures, safeguarding the nights of sleep of the enslavers, the plantation owners, and colonos (settlers). These policies severely impacted the already constrained agency of enslaved men and women, and free people of color in Cuba. Being black, in the eyes of planters, creole thinkers, and travelers among which Barinetti was no exceptional teller, equated to being on the verge of plotting a Haitian-style fierce uprising. Nonetheless, the relentless rules detailed by Barinetti and his peers were only the beginning.

The mere presence of enslaved and free people of color, walking on the streets of Havana, busy in their numerous occupations, progressively became a serious threat posed to the maintenance of the colony’s social order: the terror took over. Barinetti was not the only one “shuddering”, and the colonial elite was unwilling of taking other risks. The number of deported people from the African continent was augmenting, notwithstanding the treaties with the British and their navy, as the Italian traveler repeatedly underscored. Measures were to be taken, locally. Cuba became a relatively safe harbor for slave owners (and their lucrative economic activities), for it offered an escape from their plantations in Saint Domingue which were quite literally burning since the end of the 18^th century. All the while, networks of formerly enslaved and free-born people of color (libres de color) who traveled around the Caribbean were formed. With them, so did ideas of liberation, of living according to one’s own terms. However, they did not level the Haitian terror, together with its harsh social and economic consequences, hunting the very existence of black people around the globe for centuries.

Just three years after the publication of Barinetti’s travel accounts, authorities in Cuba put on an exemplary mass punishment, to the detriment of the libres de color, and particularly targeted to once and for all discourage potential efforts of aligning Cuba’s destiny with that of the former French colony. Gone down in history as the Conspiracy of La Escalera, a scheme supposedly plotted by libres de color of African descent, as well as slaves, creoles, and British abolitionists to burn the bridge built by Spanish rulers in Cuba through the institution of slavery, the 1843 event went down in history as a bloody massacre that ended the lives of thousands. Taking its name from the “ladder” (escalera) employed to break down potential suspects, the alleged insurgency, with the enslaved revolts in western Cuba, have been given great scholarly attention, as has been the case, more recently, with the unutterable repression that followed in January 1844.  

Far from being an isolated, blood-soaked, singular episode in the history of Cuban slavery, the terrain around the repression specifically dedicated to the Escaleraconspiracy had been prepared for years, as Barinetti’s notebooks display. The increased militarization of the island began with the 1837 Constitution – expressly stating  the will to administer Cuba through so-called “special laws” –  the curfew, the unbearable working conditions on the plantations, and the construction of the barracoons all contributed to the muscular violence enforced in repressing the potentially revolutionary Escalera plan. In this respect, Barinetti’s work, printed in New York, circulated in the United States and, most likely, in Italy as well, is particularly significant because of its capacity of foreshadowing future Atlantic happenings. Indeed, his “tremors” were widely shared. Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell, for example, would make sure he did all he could to eradicate any revolutionary febrility plaguing the island. A dramatic break for the libres de color’s relative autonomy, La Escalera repression was the result of a longstanding repressive apparatus which had been patiently built by Spanish and other foreign viewers who reproduced systematic racism. Works like Barinetti’s shed light on the context surrounding the upcoming repression and emphasize the ideological and material preparation that was enacted through institutions and actors who actively prompted the growth of a rampant anti-black and anti-slave sentiment.

In the aftermath of the Escalera repression, the libres de color in Cuba lost almost all their economic stability, military standing, and everything related to their already precarious social status. However, the impressive resilience shown by the Afro-descendant community in Cuba strenuously proved the weaknesses of O’Donnell and the slave owners’ attacks on black populations.

Indeed, ideas on freedom and emancipation from masters and mistresses, which were far from mild and reconciliatory, did stick around. They dot the juridical transcripts presented to the courtrooms by the enslaved and were embodied in everyday forms of resistance.  In the interstices of standard wording, and formal juridical formulas, enslaved men and women in Cuba spoke up in the tribunals, asserting their rights to be heard. Presenting family reconstruction lawsuits, negotiating the time and conditions of their labor, protesting the vexations of their enslavers, their petitions brought conflicts over race, gender, and power relations directly into the seats of colonial institutions. Over this unequal jurisprudential terrain, gradual emancipation, albeit partial, fragmented, and precarious, was being constructed well before the official royal proclaims that sanctioned a transition out of slavery in 1870 with the free womb law, and ending in 1880 with the abrogation of the patronato (forced apprenticeship) institution.

Barinetti’s travel writing is thus a privileged lens for exploring the entanglements between the Haitian Revolution’s heritage and the Escalera repression. Presenting conversations with doctors, slave and property owners, as well as functionaries, Barinetti’s text reconstructs the extremely abusive context that configured black people’s everyday lives in 19^th century Cuba. However, by reading his work against the grain, the actions of the enslaved themselves stand out all the more, forged by experiences of coercion and violence, while being projected towards the construction of an aftermath that eventually tore down the legitimacy of such institutions.  

Elena Barattini is a Global History of Empires Ph.D. candidate at the University of Turin, Italy. Her work examines the legal petitions filed by formerly enslaved women in Cuba, within the Patronato law framework. Her primary research interests are the history of labor and coercion, the place of gender in it, Atlantic slavery and the colonial history of the island of Cuba.

Edited by Matias X. Gonzalez

Featured Image: Entrada del Puerto de La Habana tomada desde el Colegio de Sn. Carlos. (Entrance to the Port of Havana taken from San Carlos School). Artist: Mialhe, Frédéric, 1810-1881 Lit. de la Rl. Sociedad Patriótica, 1839. Courtesy of University of Miami Library Digital Collection.

By Anne M. Thell

The pursuit of long life has a long history, from Socrates to Jeff Bezos. Less known but no less intriguing in this genealogy is Margaret Cavendish (1623–73), an English writer, philosopher, and demagogue of the Restoration period who devoted much of her career to questions of mortality and developed a corresponding set of strategies to cheat death. The author’s thinking on this subject is timely not only in light of ongoing global affairs, but also for other reasons: Cavendish scholarship is exploding in both literature and, more recently, philosophy, while 2023 marks the 400^th anniversary of her birth.

Cavendish was a vitalist-materialist, while she also espoused panpsychism. This means that she viewed nature as a living, moving, and sentient thing, while she also believed that nature is both eternal and infinite. Even when a particular creature dies or “dissolves,” its matter simply dissembles and migrates into new forms. For her, there was no entirely new matter in nature, nor was there entropy. Instead, the matter that composes the universe—from the furthest stars to our fingernails—exists in a state of “perpetual transformation” and thereby exists forever. 

Perhaps the most obvious expression of Cavendish’s interest in immortality appears in her career-long quest for fame (or, in her words, her desire to scale “Fame’s Tower” and “Live in Many Brains”). This emphasis on the continuance of her ideas in “after-Ages” typifies what Michael W. Clune has called “the classical tradition of literary immortality,” whereby authors strive to combat time by claiming that art lives on in perpetuity. This rubric is especially important to Cavendish because she wrote in a period that did not look kindly on female philosophers. She thus imagined her texts as progeny who might achieve “glorious resurrection” in the minds of more enlightened future readers.

But Cavendish moved beyond literary tactics by writing the possibility of eluding death into her metaphysics. Across her later philosophy, which includes Philosophical Letters (1664), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), she offered a more totalizing approach to dodging annihilation via the transformational properties innate in natural matter. In the Cavendishean universe, nothing really dies. Instead, natural matter exists in certain formations—a human, say, or a tree—for varied durations before dissolving and then reconfiguring in new ways.

However, the author’s most spectacular—and speculative—solution to preserving bodies against the violence of time appears in the concluding pages of her final philosophical treatise, Grounds of Natural Philosophy. Here, she hypothesizes “Restoring-Beds, or Wombs” that restore life to annihilated bodies. These peculiar devices can restore any natural creature—animal, mineral, vegetable—which means that any given person or thing could be revivified exactly as it existed before decay or illness set in.

Cavendish clearly enjoys theorizing these “Beds, or Wombs.” She reasons that they could not be “Fleshy by reason the nature of Flesh is so corruptible,” yet must be “like Flesh, for Softness, or Spunginess; as also for Colour.” She also suspects that they would be located in “the Center of the World,” which is most likely a rocky island in “the Center of the Sea.” The devices consist of a “compounded” substance that contains the building blocks for “all the Kinds and Sorts of the Creatures of this World,” and, obeying laws of self-motion, automatically open once their work is done to release a perfectly restored creature.

We might recall that Cavendish was the author of Blazing World (1666), one of the earliest pieces of science-fiction in English, and thus no novice to the imaginative dimensions of scientific speculation. In keeping with these interests, she places on this island of regeneration a center within the center where the beds themselves are produced. Here we find a spectacular sci-fi vision of a massive “Rocky Creature” that is “all covered with its own Productions”—some wombs “hung by Strings, or Nerves: others stuck close,” some grow out of the “upper parts,” others “the middle” or “lower parts.” This creature is “as lasting as the Sun, or other Planets,” and thus “not subject to decay” (a smart detail that eliminates the problem of finding restoring beds for the restoring beds).

If this all sounds pretty wild, both for the 1660s and today, it is. But it is also canny, self-aware, and largely consistent with her later philosophy. One might immediately notice that these contrivances provide a natural, material, and decidedly gendered account—they are wombs, after all—of revivification that overtly competes with religious notions of resurrection (a rather risky postulate in seventeenth-century England). Indeed, these devices provide a more satisfying explanation for what is essentially a fantasy of an infinite series of lives. One might also notice that these “Beds, or Wombs” eradicate the need for men, sex, or god. In this way, Cavendish reformulates the search for everlasting life in a feminist-materialist way.

Broadly, the wombs also demonstrate Cavendish’s interest in nature’s sentient resilience, as well as its ability to repair and renew its constituent parts. Unlike most scientific thinkers of the period (and notably experimental scientists like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, or Robert Hooke), Cavendish insisted that humans are part of nature—not above it—and thus that we lack the perspectival leverage to see and understand its operations. A committed probabilist, she believed that human knowledge is always approximate (certain options might shave closer to truth than others, but are never perfect or comprehensive). In Grounds, she recognizes that bodily regeneration is wildly conjectural and thus frames the debate as a lighthearted argument between the parts of her mind and pokes fun at herself for too zealous an interest in immortality. Yet in the end, she decides that it is “at least, probable, there were such things in Nature as Restoring-Beds, or Wombs.” Thus Cavendish concludes her career engaging a type of philosophical speculation that produces open-ended pleasure (i.e., the beds are fun to think about and cannot be ruled out entirely). Such inconclusiveness thwarts death, too, as it becomes an interpretive puzzle for future readers.

If rocky “Wombs” seem too eccentric to demonstrate the regenerative impulses that define Cavendish’s later views on nature, we might return to their logical underpinning: her concept of “translation.” Cavendish was a devout materialist—rivaling only Thomas Hobbes as the Restoration thinker most committed to this doctrine—yet she also recognized that bodies tend to slow, decline, and fail. In response to this problem, translation allows infinite transmutation: When any “particular motion” or “Society” ends, its matter is “not annihilated, but changed.” Organic matter exists “by a perpetual supply and succession of particulars,” or “perpetual alternations, generations, and dissolutions.” Hence, “infinite varieties” of combinations generate “infinite varieties” of “Productions,” which are always temporary and contingent.

Surprisingly, this topic—“Restoring-Beds, or Wombs” in particular and regeneration more broadly—has received only scant attention from Cavendish scholars, although an increasing number are approaching her work from the perspective of eco-criticism, human/non-human relations, and the medical humanities. Cavendish was a thinker uniquely in and out of her time; her work has deeply syncretic aspects—she was well-versed in both ancient and contemporary philosophy—as well as a restless, idiosyncratic streak, which often anticipates much later thinking (e.g., materialist understandings of consciousness, many-worlds theory, deconstructions of the Anthropocene, Romantic views of imagination, biotech-fueled rejuvenation). She is also one important voice in a long line of literary authors who seek to counter neurobiological time and its inevitable erosion of pleasure, sensation, and self.

As is likely obvious by this point, Cavendish was a unique voice of the later seventeenth century. In her thoroughgoing materialism, she shares much with Hobbes; however, unlike Hobbes, she rejects mechanism and claims instead that all of nature lives, thinks, perceives, and moves itself, with intent and volition. Her hylozoism might seem to align her with thinkers like Henry More or Anne Conway; unlike those vitalists, though, Cavendish adamantly denies “spirits” or incorporeal substances in nature: as she argues, nothing can exist “between Something and Nothing.” She does acknowledge the possibility of a “divine soul,” but this supernatural entity falls far beyond the scope of natural philosophy. Along with Hobbes, Descartes, and More, Cavendish sparred with Jan Baptiste van Helmont, whose materialist understanding of disease clearly influenced her medical thinking. But she disparaged his fusing of theology and natural philosophy and his interest in supernatural substances like blas. In sum, her rigorous brand of materialism stands apart because it infuses all natural matter—rocks, algae, humans—with life, sentience, and free will.   

Cavendish’s materialism is also what connects her most vividly to the present day. Indeed, her material theory of mind is a clear precedent to contemporary understandings of consciousness. Anil Seth, for instance, has demonstrated that our sense of self is based on the experience of our bodies, as we perceive our physical condition via internal sense organs. Thus, consciousness is rooted in our nature as biological organisms: we are “beast machines,” a term Seth adapts from Descartes, and the brain ensures our survival and organismic self-regulation. Seth views consciousness as an embodied system (like many other recent thinkers who seek to reconnect body and mind), and locates us firmly within nature, an approach that Cavendish anticipates. Like Seth, Cavendish concentrates on embodied sentience, while she also, as a rationalist-materialist, examines the phenomenology of consciousness as bodily phenomenon.

In these virus-haunted days, lethal threats to life on this planet seem a uniquely modern predicament. Cavendish reminds us to historicize our entreaties for health and longevity, which extend into past and future—from ancient elixirs to a new quest for immortality in Silicon Valley. Jeff Bezos (Altos Labs, Unity); Peter Thiel (Methuselah Foundation, Unity); Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Calico)—all invest massive sums in life-extending research, or “biohacking,” which does not strive to eradicate death entirely but, over future decades, to control the body’s relationship with time by, say, arresting bodily degeneration (e.g., sustaining heart or brain health), or reprogramming our bodies on a cellular level (e.g., cell-tissue rejuvenation via didactic proteins). These are appeals for a radical extension of life, if not immortality in the Ponce de León sense. But these dreams of living forever on a dying planet—and then shooting into space to set up new colonies—remain noticeably ego-driven, masculinist, and anthropocentric (whatever trickle-down effects they might have on ordinary people). (Here one cannot help but think of Jonathan Swift’s Struldbrugs.) By contrast, Cavendish’s “Wombs” restore all natural things, not just humans, even after their expiry. She therefore reconfigures a familiar yearning in a way that displaces humans as sole beneficiaries.

Today, with our materialist leanings, our ongoing tussle with the “hard problem” of consciousness, and our tendency to view humans as just one small part of nature, we are perhaps better positioned to notice Cavendish’s ingenuity. Indeed, within the academy at least, she has found her “glorious resurrection.” Her work is now standard fare in literature classes, following the pioneering work of feminist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s (here I think of Sylvia Bowerbank, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sara Mendelson, Anna Battigelli, Sarah Hutton, and Eileen O’Neill, to name only a few). More recently, she has made her way into the philosophy canon, which is notoriously slow-changing. This is long overdue, since she responds with intelligence and creativity to the same fundamental questions as her more famous male contemporaries. She is vital to understanding more fully the philosophical and scientific debates of her era because she noticed and critiqued their masculinist assumptions, while she also articulated alternate explanations of a universe that she saw as infinite, sentient, and alive. We might even say that this renegade thinker offers a secret history of the so-called “Scientific Revolution,” one that envisions nature as a self-knowing, self-governing system that produces and sustains life in ways far beyond human perception.

Cavendish’s “Restoring-Beds, or Wombs” are one distinctive iteration of the human drive to imagine lives that continue on beyond the grave. They are also the final display of Cavendish’s lifelong investment in preserving natural productions against the indignities of time and, broadly, in refuting the temporal-material conditions of our lives. She strives to enrich experience—and to ennoble bodies—in an intense yet secular battle against “the Nature of Blood and Flesh.” In 2023, as we celebrate the 400^th anniversary of her birth, she scores one point in that arduous contest and inches further towards “monumental fame.”

Anne M. Thell is Associate Professor of English literature at National University of Singapore and, in 2022-23, a Sassoon Fellow at The Bodleian Library, Oxford. Her most recent book is the Broadview edition of Cavendish’s Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020). She is now at work on two new projects: One on mental illness as it relates to early British fiction, and another on Cavendish and time.

Edited by Shuvatri Dasgupta & Tom Furse

Featured Image: “The Fountain of Youth,” 1546, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Image Wikimedia Commons.

By Luz Ainaí Morales-Pino

Zarela: novela feminista (Zarela: A Feminist Novel) by Leonor Espinoza de Menéndez (Arequipa, Peru 1876-?), narrates the tragedies of a group of women who, regardless of their best efforts, are vulnerable due to their poor education, the lack of access to a remunerated job and the imperative of marriage as their only resource for survival. Confronting the naturalist discourse dominant in the period, as Gabriela Nouzeilles has noted, the fact that Zarela, the main character, belongs to a line of socially condemned women, none of whom manage to survive, does not determine her destiny. In fact, relating to a positivist ground that considers education as key to progress, once she was abducted by the wealthy—and anti-normative woman– Luisa de Espanet, Zarela manages to change her destiny and that of those around her, thanks to her privileged access to education that led to a paid job. Therefore, the text showcases that blood inheritance, race, or place of origin are not determining forces for the individual, which turns even more relevant when it comes to female subjects traditionally considered as inclined to socio-sexual degeneration. The novel suggests that female subjects are not condemned by their own nature, but by the very dysfunctionalities of a social order that relegates them to the margins. Moreover, in dialogue with what Doris Sommer has conceptualized as the “foundational fictions” of Latin American Literature, the novel presents a happy ending with Zarela’s celebrated marriage to Rafael, a young man who embodies an exemplary masculinity supporting Zarela’s endeavors and considering her an equal.

Understanding marriage as the key to a happy ending marks the ambivalent reading of feminism in the novel, as pointed by Tauzin Castellanos, as well as the silence of the critics. As it usually happens to literature written by women during the 19^th and early 20th century, its unclassifiable nature leads to minoritization or erasure. The silence towards the novel strengthens with its murkiness in terms of its date of publication and biographical information about the author (not even a precise date of death). Such absences give an account of women writers’ difficult access to history and historicizations, while they make visible tacit but effective forms of erasure. Never re-edited before, Editorial Aletheya re-launched Zarela in 2020. Among the few critical studies about it, I underscore the works of Isabelle Tauzin Castellanos, Lady Rojas Benavente, and Martha Leticia Salas Pino’s introduction to the newest edition, who refers to the existence of copies only in the Biblioteca Nacional de Arequipa, the Instituto Riva Agüero, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú’s digital repository. Tauzin Castellanos agrees with Rojas Benavente in pointing to 1914-1915 as the feasible dates of publication, whereas the PUCP repository indicates the date of 1900 in the file’s metadata. However, this copy of the novel includes a signed dedication by the author, in her own handwriting, with a date of 1910 (based on such annotation, Salas Pino proposes 1910 as the novel’s date of publication). These inconsistencies emphasize the difficulties of anchoring women into the historical discourse, especially when considering this novel written by a woman not based in the capital city of Lima, and with the term “feminist” in its title.

In addition to the problematic metadata, the emphasis on social conflicts during a time when male writers were experimenting with modernism and other aesthetics and ideologies has linked the text to the realist aesthetic. However, realism tends to constitute an overly generic label used to typify proposals that overflow and problematize classifications outlined by the critical tradition. Such classifications respond to what is dominant within certain zones of the cultural field, which leads to a reductionist perspective, especially when it comes to novels written by women. Nevertheless, Zarela is not only a fundamental piece within a genealogy that has still got many missing links, but an eloquent example of how Peruvian women writers of the period used literature as means to problematize the socio-cultural order and the patriarchal aesthetics and ideologies, at the same time as they created what we have conceptualized with Grau-Lleveria as paths for women’s transit towards modernity.

Whereas traditional studies about the literary productions from the turn of the century tend to emphasize the predominance of modernist and decadent aesthetics, as well as the naturalist ideologies, I propose Zarela sheds light upon a silenced aesthetic and ideological line prevalent in women’s writings from the period, which is fundamental to problematizing hegemonic literary histories. Zarela is part of the aesthetics of reform that confront imaginaries that celebrate decadence, degeneration, and the counter normative. Therefore, whereas male writers used literature as a means of escaping their realities (modernist or decadent aesthetics), or as a way of pointing out the total lack of possibilities for our nations (naturalism), women writers such as Leonor Espinoza de Menéndez focused instead on shaping a set of reforms with specific sociosexual agendas.

Despite the title and the novel’s emphasis on women, the reforms proposed in Espinoza de Menéndez’ text illuminate the subtleties of feminist ideology during the turn of the century (as it was conceived by white, lettered women), as well on its subjects, objects, and programs. The women it displays are middle-and-upper class females whose privileged social status impeded them from working and making a living unless married to a wealthy man (usually in troubled and loveless unions condemned to diverse forms of violence). This calls out for an intersectional approach that considers the multiple layers that condition and affect the individual’s existence, opportunities, exclusions, and vulnerabilities, all of which surpass sexual identity. The term “woman” at the time comprised complexities, heterogeneities, and silences. As Lee Skinner explains,

The intersectionality of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, sexual, and gendered identities means that speaking about “women” entails careful differentiations around race, class, and region […] Many lower-class women in nineteenth century Latin America may have seen their interests as aligned with lower-class men, not with elite women, and many, although not all, white women did not always understand their experiences as similar to those of women of color.

A scene in which Luisa de Espanet, Zarela’s foster mother-to-be, along with her sister and her maid, Rosalía, take advantage of the two poor women who were looking after the baby, Zarela sheds light on the impossible solidarity among women within a perilous system that can only lead to perversion. Luisa de Espanet and her sister run away with Zarela condemning her real mother, Soledad, to a string of misfortunes. Her husband will reject her after their daughter’s disappearance, dying of sadness years later. Moreover, Skinner’s statements turn even more complex if we consider how Rosalía does not express any kind of solidarity towards those women, who were her equals; instead, she is always loyal to her betters. Societal linkages are corrupted and fractured, especially among women, given their vulnerable situation. Therefore, even though the novel presents a reform that aims to improve their situation, racialized and female subjects belonging to lower classes are not Espinoza’s object of concern.

            Another relevant tension comes up with the text’s ambivalent feminism, especially if considered from contemporary standards. As stated by Tauzin Castellanos, Zarela’s happy marriage and the need of constantly negotiating with a patriarchal system of consent could seem to neutralize the text’s revolutionary potential. Nevertheless, such ending sheds light on the author’s dialogue with what Eliana Rivero conceptualizes as a feminine feminism: a type of advocacy for women that is willing to adapt itself to the conventions of the patriarchal system, especially when it comes to the roles it outlines for female individuals. Moreover, Zarela’s need to convince the most strong-minded defenders of the patriarchal system, the entomologist Peñaloza and the astronomer Alcázar, discloses the author’s very understanding of feminism as a political praxis that needs conciliation and, foremost, networks of consent to overcome the realm of ethereal ideas. Peñaloza and Alcázar were scientists that used their knowledge to avail their contempt towards Zarela’s feminist agenda in episodes that would qualify nowadays as mansplaining:

Zarelita [little Zarela], my dear daughter—said Mr. Peñaloza in a fatherly tone—how is it possible that you, clever and rational, contribute or, more specifically, create this feminist confusion? How can you oppose the natural laws? Don’t you consider convenient, fair and natural, what is predetermined by such laws and those of the reason, i.e., that woman continues to be the tender hemiptera that accompanies man or the mischievous orthopteron that entertains him and makes life pleasant?

Zarela’s dialogue with male figures that embody a hegemonic knowledge and condescending tone sheds lights on the importance of community and communication for Espinoza Menéndez’ aesthetic and ideological project. Therefore, what would appear conservative from our perspective was, in fact, a strategy of power acquisition fundamental for crafting paths for a feminist agenda whose subtleties do not necessary diminish its potential, as we can see in Zarela’s response:

“Rest assured. The modern woman will continue to be the loving and obedient man’s companion, though more spiritual and suitable for performing the solemn roles of the mother, the educator, and the useful member of society.

Our main aspiration is to be considered equals to men, in the real understanding of equality.”

Zarela’s explanations comply with the need of alleviating men’s anxieties and fears about the emerging paradigm of “the new woman” in European and North American settings, which was considered a threat for male writers and the social establishment of the period. Reinforcing the ethics-aesthetics of reform posed by the novel and its transformative agenda, Zarela’s character manages to turn her main antagonists into advocates of her cause.

The sense of community is also present in the reference to Zarela’s entrance into the university. Rather than embodying an exceptional desire, the narrator comments that Zarela joins the medical school accompanied by a girlfriend whose name and identity, however, we never learn. Entering the university accompanied emphasizes a particular ethical positioning that confronts the traditional masculine modus operandi. Espinoza de Menéndez stresses the need of acting within a network, rather than carrying out the typical egotistic and narcissist endeavors relatable to male figures. Moreover, rather than presenting the network as homogeneous, the novel highlights De Espanet’s participation in it, even when she originally opposed her daughter’s initiative. De Espanet uses her social power and influence to grant the two girls a place in a traditionally masculine setting:

The girls’ presence at the medical school was a novelty. It was so unusual to find skirts there! Some classmates treated them with evident irony. Others were enthusiastic about the possibility of flirting with them. However, the girls’ righteous attitude soon bewildered the ill-intentioned ones. Their non-arrogant severity granted them the respect and consideration they, in fact, deserved. Professors distinguished them with paternal affection, and treated them deferentially, especially when it came to contents that could affect their decency. They knew how to receive the lessons with seclusion and healthy interest. Therefore, they would not be detrimental to their decorum and innocence. They were protected by the ambience of purity that surrounded their noble souls.

Avoiding the possibility of threats, the text continues to link the feminine to a traditional apparel (skirts) and behavior: the girls remain humble and submissive to patriarchal rule, whereas ethically ascending thanks to education. This showcases an eloquent dialogue with other Latin American women writers from the 19^th century that used literature as a means for proposing improved projects of modernity that they envisioned as adequate for our context. Such project pose clear confrontations to the traditional 19^th century letrados and intellectuals, whose ideas of modernity were grounded in the mere imitationof the European model, leading them later on to disappointment and despair (as we can read in the evasive and dystopic tones of modernist and naturalist fiction of the time). On the contrary, Espinoza de Menendez articulates a feasible project of modernity for the region: one that is even more relevant once we consider the participation of female subjects within the socio-national order with roles that go beyond motherhood and the labor of care—although without discarding them. Additionally, this reformed and Latin Americanist project of modernity dialogues with Martha Nussbaum’s approach to feminism and human development from the notion of capacities, especially what she conceptualizes as the capacity of affiliation. Adding layers of complexity to the narrative about rights, the notion of capacities analyzes the political and social setting in which such rights can actually be exerted. In that sense, the capacity of affiliation to other women becomes key for female subjects’ transit towards modernity. This leads to the articulation of a different imaginary of progress marked by the emphasis on community, rather than individuals, as Zarela complex sociosexual scenarios exemplify.            

Luz Ainaí Morales-Pino obtained her Ph.D. in Romance Studies at the University of Miami (2017). She is an Assistant Professor of Spanish American Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research focuses on literary and cultural productions from the 19th and early 20th century Latin America, with emphasis on feminisms, gender studies, visual culture studies, and history of ideas. A selection of previous works is available here.

Edited by Pablo Martínez Gramuglia 

Featured Image: First page of Prisma (Lima, 1907), depicting modern women in a defiant attitude (photo by Marcel Velázquez Castro).