by Mayra Bottaro, Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages

Nineteenth century Latin American literary canon has always been predominantly masculine. Taught from an early age culture was codified within the confines of that canon, Latin American academics grow up reading foundational narratives produced by male authors and adopting patriarchal interpretative frames to decipher them. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that a number of female scholars emerged to successfully question this constitutive logic along with the epistemological biases attached to the male interpretative gaze. While producing new readings of the canon, this body of feminist critics also took on the work of recovering, preserving, promoting, and studying previously forgotten—if not altogether neglected—nineteenth-century Latin American cultural production written by women. A generous Faculty Research Grant from the CSWS helped me advance the goal of contributing with these ongoing efforts by funding a trip to Argentina to complete research for my critical edition of the virtually unknown 1863 novel by Argentine writer Mercedes Rosas de Rivera, Emma ó la hija de un proscripto (Emma, or the daughter of a political exile).  

Before arriving at the UO, I had published in collaboration with Dr. Beatriz Curia (CONICET/UBA) the first critical and facsimilar edition of Rosas de Rivera’s first novel, María de Montiel: novela contemporánea, published in 1861 under a pseudonym (M. Sasor). A few years later, while undertaking research for an unrelated project in the Chilean National Library in Santiago de Chile, I came across an obscure novel, Emma ó la hija de un proscripto (1863), which I identified as the only known copy of Rosas de Rivera’s second novel. It is unclear how or why a copy of this novel got to be housed in the Chilean National Library, while I have been unable to identify any remaining copies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is not surprising, however, that these two novels and their author have been almost erased from the annals of post-independence female literary writers and overlooked by even those scholars who have devoted their work to the vindication of female production in nineteenth-century Latin America.  

This neglect is as much a result of how Rosas de Rivera was regarded in life by foundational liberal male writers, as it is a product of a tradition of misreading her figure and work as the embodiment of patriarchal values which reinforced oppressive domestic feminine ideals and representations, like the common trope of the “Angel of the House,” that claimed that a woman’s virtue was measured by her dedication to domestic life, self-sacrifice, and servitude to her family.  

On one hand, Rosas de Rivera’s political sympathies and family affiliations have complicated the reception and preservation of her work. She was the sister of infamous Argentine dictator in the Platine Area, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), a wealthy populist caudillo who ruled through the cult of personality and controlled all aspects of society through a totalitarian regime that lasted from 1835 to 1852. After his downfall and subsequent exile in England, liberal intellectuals took over the Argentine government in what became known as the period of National Organization and a concerted effort of erasing practices, customs, and figures associated with the previous “federal” government was deployed. So if throughout the nineteenth century, women writers in general were often scorned by their male counterparts for preferring a writer’s desk to the hearth within a male-dominated culture, Rosas de Rivera’s non-liberal affiliation posed an additional challenge to establishing herself as a writer. Not only was she publicly scorned in social gatherings, but her writing was also relentlessly mocked and dismissed in foundational liberal landmark novels, like Amalia (1851-1852) by José Mármol, where her style is characterized as flowery and uneducated, fed by “instinct, feelings and nerves.”  

On the other hand, Rosas de Rivera’s first novel has been read as reinforcing the ideals of Republican motherhood through the use of a fundamental trope at work in nation building narratives of the first half of the nineteenth century: the “Angel of the House.” This trope shaped the role of women as spouses and mothers of the future citizens of the nation and traditionally portrayed the perfect woman as the Christian, chaste, maternal guardian of the happiness and success of her family, negating the real presence of woman as individual (as autonomous social, economic, and moral being). At the same time, this trope helped provide a perfectly relaxing and safe haven for the men who had to deal with the day-to-day challenges of an unpredictable environment in a newly formed nation in flux and conserve the bourgeois family space as an exclusively white one.  

The purpose of my critical edition is twofold: first, I am interested in the preservation of Rosas de Rivera’s second novel; second, my project proposes a re-evaluation of this author’s work from a feminist perspective that takes into account a more complex and nuanced understanding of the workings of gender, class, and labor in her novels. My claim is that in her second novel, Rosas de Rivera takes apart and reappropriates the “Angel of the House” trope to reconfigure women’s role in the domestic economy, in which they had been cast as idle and unproductive consumers. By doing this, she offers a critique to the increasing interest in feminine style, which did not help women gain notoriety as writers and artists, but instead codified femininity as a mode of carefree exhibitionism and consumerism that severely limited women’s participation in meaningful debate and cultural production. I consider gender and class as fundamental markers in the definition of multiple unstable fetishisms that subtend Rosas de Rivera’s criticism of the female role within systems of economic exchange that range from the functioning of women as both a sign (representation) and a value (object) for these systems, to their role as producers/consumers that stimulate an economy that sustains the survival of the post-independence family unit.  

Emma ó la hija de un proscripto is the story of an aristocratic family forced to go into exile when their properties are confiscated as a result of the father’s support in favor of the Jacobite cause and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim to the English throne. Her family’s exile thwarts Emma Thorton’s chances to marry Eduardo Monrrose, the son of a political rival. When her father Carlos flees into exile, mother and daughter are left to fend for themselves, borrowing money from friends, until insinuations of sexual favors are brought up. Once all their material possessions had been sold, the Thorton family finally reunite in Marseille, where they have to resort to manual labor in order to earn a living. In this new social context, dispossessed men become useless and it is only through mother and daughter’s capacity to earn a living wage that the family can modestly survive. Formerly considered idle household crafts, Emma and her mother’s education in embroidery and painting become central to the survival of the newly transformed family unit. The novel traces the adjustment to a new family dynamics and the transformation of the household space and schedule to serve the needs of production. In this sense, the novel posits the problem of the materiality of the living who do not have a State, within a context in which to be a citizen and to inhabit a nation are conceived as paramount for the production of subjectivity. It also marks a transition towards a reconfiguration of female citizenship through labor, which is not the one articulated in the model of republican motherhood (labor as childbirth), but actual wage labor. Challenging deterministic views on gender and the construction of class as an inalterable essence, women not only become a productive source in the economies of exchange that figure in the novel, as is the case with the protagonists, but their choices—whatever they may be—are construed as personal freedom (as is the case of Hortensia, a character who chooses to remain unmarried).  

Finally, my project also addresses the critiques of flowery and uneducated style leveraged against Rosas de Rivera’s writing as part of the rhetorical system that created the conditions for this author’s exclusion from literary historiography, based on the faulty binary opposition between masculinity, rationality, and public sphere, and femininity, the private-domestic, and the emotional. Produced outside national systems of prestige and authority, excluded from romantic or realist literary networks, this novel embraces a conversational, dialogic tone, that destabilizes the primacy of writing within the constitution of male foundational narratives. The technical linguistic, graphic, and graphological choices made in this novel invoke local, contingent, historical knowledges that offer traces of a complex relationship between post-colonial subjectivity, gendered modes of engagement, and written Spanish as a body of norms. Through Rosas de Rivera’s use of oral register, I propose to reconstruct creole female body as materially and locally signified.  

To conclude, CSWS’s support has allowed me to rethink the scope of this critical edition and the study of this novel will now become a part of a larger project on labor, credit, and women writing in nineteenth-century Latin American narrative.  

—Mayra Bottaro is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages. She received a 2016 CSWS Faculty Research Grant in support of this project.