On Englishmen, Women, Indians and Slaves: Modernity in the Nineteenth-century Spanish-American Novel

Catherine Davies

«la felicidad pública depende de la felicidad privada»

(Eduarda Mansilla, El médico de San Luis, 1860)

Flicking through a book I was recently sent to review, a collection of essays on testimonial literature by Spanish-American women, I noticed that of the fourteen contributions only one was written by a man. This was not in itself surprising given the topic under discussion. What did surprise me, however, was to find that the sole male contributor was a certain Donald L. Shaw¹. Seeing his name made me smile, for here again was proof of what makes Donald special-unabated intellectual curiosity. On this occasion he was getting to grips with women's testimonial writing (Nidia Díaz's Nunca estuve sola) in the context of Boom fiction, teasing out the literary techniques in the reportage. Donald never fails to surprise and impress. Bearing in mind his unfailing interest in the Spanish-American novel (and, no doubt, in women, Indians and slaves, though less so, I suspect, in Englishmen) I would like to dedicate this article to him, and to thank him for the hours he spent attempting to extricate the limpid poetry of Rosalía de Castro from the fog of my turgid prose.

I begin with Carlos J. Alonso's essay «The Burden of Modernity», a useful summary and foretaste of the complex set of ideas further elaborated in his book of the same name². Alonso argues that Spanish-American cultural discourse is characterized by a «simultaneous embracing of and distancing from modernity»; Spanish-American writers and intellectuals, fearful of becoming the «objects» rather than the «brandishers» of discourses of modernity, and fully aware that Spanish America «was always at risk of becoming the negative object of modern Western knowledge», devised contradictory rhetorical strategies that at one and the same time confirm and subvert discourses of modernity. In cultural discourse and literature these writers «adopt a rhetorical mode identified as "modern" yet simultaneously argue that it is incommensurate with Spanish American circumstances»³. At the core of every Spanish-American text, then, there is a «turning away» from a modernity that fails to take into account Spanish-American particularities and a claim for continental specificity. There is an acute awareness that modernity was potentially coextensive with dependency.

This brief summary fails to do justice to the subtle reasoning informing Alonso's engagement with Spanish-American narrative fiction from Sarmiento to García Márquez. Nevertheless, his concept of the negative object of modernity employed in this context, neatly identifies a similar ambivalence I have noticed in nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels written by women, and has prompted me to think how this particular discursive conundrum might be considered from a gendered perspective. I will consider three novels, Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), El médico de San Luis (1860) by Eduarda Mansilla (1838-1892), and Aves sin nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909) which, as a corpus, extend throughout the century and provide insights of cultural rhetoric in Cuba, Argentina and Peru at key moments of national development. With respect to modernity these novels inscribe the paradoxical strategies of compliance and resistance, proposition and revocation and, ultimately, affirmation and disavowal but here with a distinctively gendered twist. The issue in these novels is not just to grapple with the myth of modernity vis-à-vis Spanish-American specificity, but to inscribe the subaltern (women, Indians and slaves) into liberal discourse as subjects rather than objects of modernity.

The distinguishing feature of these novels is that they were written by Spanish-American women, women of the white creole elite, of course, but nevertheless exceptional. Furthermore, the novels propose social reform, engaging with modernity according to local circumstance. They present versions of progress (synonymous with abolitionism, secularization, and judicial reform) that range from the contentious to the downright subversive. Two of the three novels were transgressive in the extreme, resulting in censorship and, in the case of Matto de Turner, a public burning of the book, exile and political persecution. Given the dearth of women letrados, these are indeed remarkable texts.

The importance of gender difference in the hierarchical societies of Spanish America cannot be overstated; people were treated differently on grounds of gender at all levels of civil society, across races, castes and classes, not least with respect to the law and the new constitutions. As Susan Midgen Socolow writes, in Latin America «women were defined first and foremost by their sex and only secondarily by their race and social class». In colonial documents «the lack of attention to women's race and class suggests that these attributes were malleable. Sex was not»⁴. The enforced control of women's bodies and sexual activities was a serious matter. In the words of Verena Stolcke:

Whenever social position in a hierarchical society is attributed to so-called racial and hence allegedly inherent, natural, and hereditary qualities, it is essential for an elite to control the reproductive capacity of its women in order to preserve its social pre-eminence. As a nineteenth-century Spanish jurist argues, only women can introduce bastards into the family5.

In fact, racism stems from the fact that this strict hierarchy was never fully imposed and that sexual relationships took place across the social divides⁶.

Recent historiography focusing on gender ideologies has revived interest in everyday life, sexuality and the moral order in colonial Spanish America and the immediate post-Independence period. Research on the juridical, medical and psychiatric discourses of the newly established professional elites has opened up new parameters for the study of Spanish-American history and culture. Studies of masculinity, for example, have led to a radical revision of the nineteenth-century honour codes⁷. Before engaging with these novels written by women I will give some indication of the shifts in meanings of gender ideologies as represented in mid-nineteenth-century Spanish-American cultural discourse.

The period immediately following the Wars of Independence, the pre-modern moment, witnessed a marked conceptual repositioning of gender. During the revolutionary period traditional categories (including gender) were disrupted. Women were allowed to take a more active part in politics and public life, sometimes taking up arms and fighting alongside (or, indeed, leading) men. In these times of violent struggle masculinity (performed by men and women) was concomitant with authority, subjectivity, courage, but also violence and bloodshed. Conversely, signs of weakness such as concession, negotiation, and conciliation (performed by men and women) were signs of femininity and subordination. After the Wars, from the late 1820s on, for stable government to prosper masculinity would need to be reconfigured to represent authority and subjectivity, but restrained within the parameters of peaceful political process and the rule of law. «Civilized» men would be identified with this partially «feminine» space, whereas women, along with indigenous peoples, slaves and other disenfranchised sectors of the population, would take up the position of objects of this order and authority⁸. They would become the passive subordinates to be governed and civilized, without whom such order and authority would be meaningless. In this way women, slaves, and Indians could be said to be situated as the receptors of modernity; modernity (legal reform, education, sanitation, and so on) would be applied to them (by the male elites in authority), and it was through the development of the subaltern that modernity would be calibrated. Spanish-American women were at risk of becoming the negative objects of Spanish-American modernity, which in itself (as noted by Alonso) was in danger of becoming the negative object of modern metropolitan knowledge. Novels written and put into the public domain by elite women, whose status allowed them to do so, provided a means for these women (doubly-negated as woman and as Spanish-American) to reposition themselves as authors of the discourses of modernity and to present alternatives, or at least complementary gender-sensitive accounts of Spanish-American modernity's ambiguous processes from their own radically ambiguous social perspective and subject position⁹.

The dependency, for good or bad, of Spanish-American women, Indians and slaves on «liberating» man is represented in these three novels by their relationships with Englishmen or, to be more precise, Anglo-Americans. Britain (often referred to as England) and, towards the end of the century, the United States (often conflated with England) epitomized modernity: trade, commerce, industry, and technological invention. Modernity signified economic liberalism and the free market, «Anglobalization» in short¹⁰. As the substantial bibliography on the subject demonstrates, Britain's involvement in nineteenth-century Spanish America was pivotal -not only in the Independence Wars but also in the massive British investments (and losses) in the mines, railways, infrastructure and so on. The attitude of Victorian Britain towards the new South American republics (typical across the Empire) was one of paternal guidance and evangelical moral redemption. A common analogy used at the time was that of the experienced adult who trains and educates the child in matters of civilization, providing him with an income to get started. In his book The English in South America, published in Buenos Aires in 1878, Michael G. Mulhall writes, «in the course of the following work it will be seen how much South America is indebted to Englishmen, in arms and commerce». His book commemorates the «deeds of so many gallant Englishmen who were [...] first in the race that led to Glory's goal», where Glory means modernity. Mulhall concludes:

Every day fresh undertakings are begun, in which British capital is called on to perform the wonders of a magician [...] Whatever may be the fortunes of South America in the next fifty years one thing seems certain, that its development in the art of peace will be in a great manner identified with the growth of its relations with Britain11.

The scope of this influence may be gauged by the topics covered in the final third of the book entitled «Since the Independence»: settlers (English, Scots, Welsh, Irish and North Americans), mining, science, railways, telegraph, steam navigation, public works, banks and capital, loans in London, charitable institutions, clubs, societies, the press, literature and trade relations, among others. Bolívar, who died in 1830, publicly recognized the assistance of British soldiers in the independence struggles. Had he lived longer he may have further developed the oedipal analogy he used repeatedly in his letters and speeches to describe relationships with Spain thus: the fully-fledged young American (boy), having finally broken away from his tyrannical mother, Spain, was now being educated and equipped for adulthood by his friendly old guardian, Britain.

However, only the most naive could believe that British interests in South America were motivated entirely by altruism; investors expected high returns. This was obvious for all to see, but what was the alternative? Was the problem the lack of modernization or modernity itself? Development was necessary, but might easily slip into dependency¹². Metropolitan programmes might be progressive in Europe but inappropriate in Spanish America; long-standing autochthonous traditions and identities could be lost; and cherished customs and lifestyles threatened, with possibly devastating effects. Such is the dilemma noted in the novels to be discussed. They demonstrate a shrewd awareness of the potential neo-colonial implications of modernity in the informal Empire and point up the consequences, negative and positive, of the adoption or imposition of Anglo values. Most significantly, they do this from a gendered perspective¹³. Modernity, then, is figured here not so much as a burden as a double-bind and a double-risk.

In Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab, the Englishmen Jorge and Enrique Otway represent foreign commercial incursions into 1820s Cuba. The narrator explains:

Sabido es que las riquezas de Cuba atraen en todo tiempo innumerables extranjeros, que con mediana industria y actividad no tardan en enriquecerse de una manera asombrosa para los indolentes isleños que [...] se adormecen, por decirlo así, bajo su sol de fuego14.

The Otways are typical of the English and American traders, «Shylocks subtropicales» in Roland Ely's words, who made their fortunes at the time¹⁵. Their business strategy is chartered in detail: George starts out as a pedlar in England, but makes money by trading in cloth in the United States (probably after US Independence, in the 1790s). He owns a shop when he first arrives in Cuba, and increases his fortune to become one of the richest merchants in Puerto Príncipe (today's Camagüey). Although he is a foreigner and a Protestant (later a Catholic convert) his wealth, in the form of cash rather than land, enables him to wield power over the creole planters by controlling their credit and achieve his ambition of marrying his son into one of the region's most respected families. Enrique marries Carlota purely for her wealth (her exchange value), provided by her slave Sab. The outcome is disastrous for Cuba. All the Cuban characters die and Enrique, who has taken his unhappy bride to «la populosa Londres» lives in style with the fortune he has acquired in the Caribbean¹⁶. There is no doubt that the English traders are the villains of the novel: cruelly materialistic, deceitful and discourteous, they represent the less commendable side of human nature while the mulatto slave apparently embodies all that is noble and pure. On a first reading, then, the novel strongly rejects modernity in favour of the traditional family values of the Cuban landed oligarchy. Reading between the lines, however, this message is not so clear.

The Cuban planter family is shown to be frustratingly out of touch with the modern world and on the verge of bankruptcy. The pater familias is kind but useless. Crucially, there is no mother figure in his family to give sound advice and further the domestic cause. Moreover, the two Cuban characters who are most fully aware of the economic crisis and between them demonstrate the greatest energy and the soundest common sense (the poor orphan Teresa and the slave Sab) are both so entirely marginalized by colonial society that they can find no openings for the fulfillment of their aspirations and enterprise other than the nunnery or suicide. Sab laments the impossibility of an autochthonous Cuban modernity which is obviated by the degenerate oligarchic structures that, in another reading, the novel apparently applauds. In fact, the novel inscribes a grudging admiration for the entrepreneurship of the Otways. For the Otways, for whom all objects are part of temporary transactions in a system of production, distribution and consumption, Carlota is no more than an object of exchange. As I have argued elsewhere, Sab turns Carlota into a commodity by putting her on the market (by giving her his lottery winnings) so that she is purchased like a slave¹⁷. Nevertheless, it is the English Otways who serve to contrast the commodity relations of bourgeois capitalism with the social relations of the «good faith economy» (to use Bourdieu's terms) of the traditional Cuban planter family¹⁸.

The novel also stresses the importance to the collective good of all sectors of Cuban society, the hegemonic and the subaltern: women, mestizos, slaves, mulattos, rich and poor. All are necessary to the modernization programme. In other words, from a gendered perspective the novel turns the objects of modernity -women and slaves- into subjects by giving them speech and agency. At the end of the novel, it is the voice of a feminized Sab that demands justice for the oppressed. In this way the impetus for progress and social reform is seen to be rooted in newly configured gendered values: rational women (Teresa) and sentimental, idealistic subaltern men (Sab) are the modernizing motors¹⁹. Only by allowing the subaltern to participate as the subjects of modernity might an autochthonous modernity be achieved. Modernity imported from abroad by dishonourable foreign men is another form of exploitation. No less importantly, this drama is played out in the home; family relations cannot be separated from the political economy.

Unlike Sab, Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido (1889) set in the Andean village of Kíllac, denounces the old order of the colonial legacy explicitly. Matto was influenced by the positivist politician Manuel González Prada who proposed rapid industrialization to replace the traditional oligarchy and to enable Indians to become small property owners. He was most celebrated for his 1888 Politeama speech in which he declared:

No forman el verdadero Perú las agrupaciones de criollos y extranjeros que habitan la faja de la tierra situada entre el Pacífico y los Andes: la nación está formada por las muchedumbres de indios diseminados en la banda oriental de la Cordillera20.

Like González Prada, Matto was an ardent critic of the Catholic Church²¹. At the age of seventeen, she married an Englishman, Joseph Turner, who, after the loss of their first (and only) child, encouraged her to write and to found a newspaper in Cuzco (El Recreo, 1876); she was devastated by his death in 1881 and never remarried. Aves is partially autobiographical in that the modernizing young «forasteros» Lucía and Fernando Marín, who flee the suffocating atmosphere of Kíllac, might well be modelled on Matto and her husband and their unhappy sojourn in the Andean village of Tinta²².

In Matto's travelogue, Viaje de recreo, describing her journey through Europe in 1908, London is presented as the epitome of modernity²³. For Matto the signs of progress were located in urbanization, civil society and public institutions (the museums, parks, banks, strong currency, mutual respect, police, public lavatories, trains, underpasses, streets, shops and so on), underwritten by consensus and the rule of law: «¿Cuál es el secreto de este progreso y de esta grandeza?» she asks as she takes her leave of the city:

Sin duda alguna, el sentimiento religioso y el respeto a la ley. Sí. La ley respetada y cumplida constituye la felicidad del hombre y la grandeza de los pueblos. ¡Londres! ¡Capital del orbe civilizado!24

Matto situates women as the linchpins in this modernizing enterprise and expresses her admiration for the middle-class English woman who, she writes «reina y gobierna» not by means of coquetry or lasciviousness, but «por el imperio de la rectitud»²⁵. These women are upright and religious (not Roman Catholic, of course, but Protestant), they enjoy but do not abuse their freedom, and they are at the centre of close-knit families²⁶. The suffragettes are no longer ridiculed: some study at university, and they demand their rights according to principles of law and justice and, above all, she claims, as mothers:

La gran causa del feminismo asume proporciones colosales en el terreno fundamental del derecho, y hoy no son las frívolas, ni las desocupadas, ni las desengañadas, como dicen los adversarios, las que piden leyes al Parlamento: ¡son las madres!27

In Aves there is little doubt as to the desirability of modernity and here too the motors of reform are mothers (Marcela, Doña Petronila) or women performing the mothering role (Lucía). Progress is associated with the urban middle classes while the rural oligarchy, the Church, the Judiciary and the State, are shown to be absolutely corrupt and evil. The victims of the novel are the Indians (who constitute, in González Prada's view, the Peruvian nation); they are brutalized and exploited by the degenerate oligarchy of white elite men representing the colonial legacy. Matto's main target of criticism is the priesthood, the enforced celibacy of which leads to the sexual abuse of women irrespective of class and race. Most of the action takes place in the domestic sphere and all the women characters, white and Indian, are good. They collaborate to bring about progress and social justice and as such embody the moral fibre of the nation. The most distinctive sign of modernity in the novel is Lucía, «la señora Marín» taking her two adopted Indian daughters away from the rural backwater to the modern city²⁸. The feminine in this novel represents honour and integrity, while the traditional concept of masculinity associated with violence, bloodshed, and corruption, is presented as ridiculous and barbaric. The new Peruvian man (such as Fernando Marín or Manuel Pancorbo) is the young Creole professional: contained, respectable, domesticated, and above all, law-abiding, characteristics which during the earlier violent decades of the century would have been perceived as feminine. In this novel gender is reconfigured so that the feminine is forward-looking, while unreformed masculinity is retrogressive. Nevertheless, the women's victory is short-lived. Their local influence may only be exercised in informal domestic networks as the state machinery of the public sphere is still entirely in the hands of the male elite. The progressive family, the Maríns and their adopted Indian daughters, cannot remain in the unchanging sierra and must move to the modern city to survive and progress.

The final chapters of the novel follow the family's journey from Kíllac via Arequipa to the capital, Lima. The setting switches from the village, first to a train compartment and then to a modern Arequipa hotel. In order to reach the train the family has to first complete a five-day horse-ride across the mountains. From the heights, they look down on the locomotive below «que con su silbato anuncia el progreso llevado por los rieles»²⁹. They all board the train without mishap, but not without Lucía and the girls first undergoing a complicated change of clothing which signals their newly donned modern identities. However, while crossing a bridge over a shallow river the train is derailed by a herd of cattle and the passengers, apparently, plunge to their death. These scenes are crucial for an understanding of the novel yet they have been strangely overlooked or dismissed by critics. In the preface to her English translation of Aves, Naomi Lindstrom states:

the train wreck, which produces melodramatic suspense but scarcely furthers the plot, is probably the most complained-of feature of the plot. Its suppression [in the 1904 translation] shows that J. G. H. [the translator] was eager to improve the work.

As she explains, this was the view of Antonio Cornejo Polar, for whom the train derailment «has no other function than to create suspense and anxiety in the reader», later repeated by John Brushwood who suggested, like Cornejo Polar, that the incident might underline the isolation of the Andean villages, but found little significance in this sub-plot³⁰. Indeed, Cornejo Polar had described the incident as «de alguna manera sobrante», merely emphasizing Kíllac's remoteness³¹.

The episode extends over four chapters, ordered alternately between scenes depicting events taking place simultaneously back in Kíllac. The effect is to contrast the corruption and venality of the rural location with the modern life-style represented by the train and the hotel. The train is associated in the novel with punctuality, comfort, order, culture and education (the women and the new man read books -Peruvian classics- and the other passengers play cards). Like a time-capsule, it catapults a cross-section of Peruvian society (a general, a priest, two businessmen, a woman and two Indian girls), at a heady fifteen miles per hour, «tragando las distancias [...] con rapidez vertiginosa», forwards, onwards and upwards to modernity and the city³². Unfortunately, the journey is fraught with unexpected danger. The train's speed is too great for local conditions. It cannot brake in time and it is the first-class carriage with its elite passengers that jumps the tracks and runs off the narrow bridge that crosses from the sierra to the coast, from the rural to the urban, and from the past to the future. The train journey functions as an allegory of derailed modernity. But this is a temporary derailment; the set-back is not permanent.

The journey to future modernity is initiated by the English-speaking Mr Smith, the train driver, and it is he and his assistant Peruvian «brequeros» (brakemen), who, in Chapter 19, save the day. The «valiente maquinista» is even prepared to sacrifice his own life to save the passengers by bursting the boilers with his revolver. Due to his competence and skill the train is put back on the rails and the passengers conducted safely to their destination -they arrive late but in one piece. Mr Smith, who leads them forward, is not English but «[un] hijo de la América del Norte», working with «la energía que distingue a la raza»³³. There are several references to British/US goods in the novel, notably the Davis sewing machine and Barry hair colourant for men (which, according to Efraín Kristal, were advertised regularly in El Perú Ilustrado, edited by Matto) and Arthur Field biscuits³⁴. Modernity, driven by foreign investment, is shown to be risky when exported to Peru. As one of the passengers exclaims, «estos gringos brutos son capaces de llevarnos a los profundos!», though his comment is immediately turned into a joke, «me lo temía desde que vi al reverendo»³⁵. Modernity is risky but absolutely necessary in that it leads the enlightened away from the rural pre-modern past to the progressive urban coast. This urban/rural, progress/stagnation, future/past polarity is reinforced by the gender polarity between femininity (empathy and common sense) / masculinity (violence and disorder). Like Sab, then, the novel stresses the centrality of domestic politics, a morality represented as feminine, and women as subjects, in the national political economy.

Nevertheless, Aves inscribes some ambiguity regarding the advantages of modernity; the novel dramatizes the risks involved. The ambiguity is less noticeable than in Sab, because Aves (set in 1820s Peru) tends towards modernity while Sab (set in 1840s colonial Cuba) tended away from it. Yet even at the end of Matto's novel, when the family are happily ensconced in the luxuriously decorated Arequipan hotel, surrounded by Louis XV furniture, Belgian carpets, and a French Monsieur Petit, seemingly at the very heart of European-like civilization, the reader cannot fail to note that the name of the hotel is Hotel Imperial³⁶.

A different position is taken up in Mansilla's novel, El médico de San Luis published in 1860. Eduarda Mansilla was the niece of the dictator Rosas, daughter of his sister Agustina (the most beautiful woman of the times according to José Mármol in Amalia)³⁷, and sister of Lucio V. Mansilla, army general and writer. El médico de San Luis is prefaced by a paragraph taken from the foreword of Anglo-Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), on which it is clearly based. Goldsmith's paragraph, extolling the Vicar's simple life and «modesto hogar de provincia» in times of opulence and refinement, was meant ironically, but Mansilla takes its meaning at face value³⁸. There is little or no irony in El médico de San Luis (though see below), but this is not surprising as critics, astoundingly, did not pick up on the irony in The Vicar of Wakefield until the 1940s, 175 years after publication. Robert Hopkins describes Goldsmith's novel as sustained satire, an anti-romance that «satirizes the complacency and materialism of a certain type of Anglican clergyman»³⁹. By contrasting morality and materialism Goldsmith's novel criticizes malevolence and lust in human nature. The undoing of the Vicar and his family is due to financial insolvency. He is thrown into prison for his debts accumulated, it appears, by misfortune and his own naivety but, in fact, as the reader comes to realize, the Vicar is a sanctimonious, self-deluding hypocrite who is as greedy and ambitious as the rest. Mansilla's Doctor, like the Vicar, is the narrator of his own misfortunes and similarly demonstrates a large dose of self-satisfaction and ingenuousness, but he is not portrayed satirically. He too has a compliant wife, a wayward son and two daughters looking for a good match. He also spends time in prison, from which, once liberated by a generous and honourable gaucho inmate, he dutifully learns his lesson. But the moral of this rewrite of Goldsmith's novel from an Argentine feminine perspective is quite different from the original⁴⁰.

El médico de San Luis is less tightly composed but, far from being an inferior copy, it adapts the English novel, set in the 1760s, to take into account the specific conditions of the Argentine a century on. In El médico the problem is not greed and material interests but, as in Aves sin nido, thirty years later, state corruption, particularly at the level of the judiciary. Here the conflict is between the good individual and his family on the one hand, and the deformed republic (weak government, inept ministers, and depraved judges) on the other. The Doctor in question is an Englishman, James Wilson, educated in Edinburgh. He settles in Argentina with his sister Jane and (like the Otways in Cuba) becomes thoroughly acculturated. Although Protestant he marries a Catholic woman and his children (one son and twin daughters) are brought up in the Catholic religion, though they take afternoon tea, can speak English, and read from his library: Cooper, Milton, Scott, Macaulay and, of course, the Vicar of Wakefield⁴¹. The Englishman in question, unlike the Otways in Sab, prefers the simple life of the Argentine countryside to the urban bustle of the metropolis which in this novel is associated with stress and danger. The Doctor's English friend, Carlos Gifford, loses (rather than makes) his fortune in the British Empire (in India). The Doctor, not associated with trade and commerce, cloth retailing or steam locomotives, represents the caring liberal professions: his house of whitewashed adobe is typical of rural Argentina; he helps the poor for free, and grows enough fruits and crops to keep his family fed. Unlike Sab, in which the English stand for a certain type of modernity that depends for its success on the exploitation of Cuba and the destruction of the island's cultural identity, thus obviating an autochthonous modernity, and unlike Aves in which the road to modernity is clearly signposted but achievable only if suitably adapted to Western models and propelled forward by foreign investment, despite local Peruvian conditions which make the transition risky, El médico proposes a third way.

The issue is not how to tailor Argentina to the requisites of metropolitan modernity, but rather how to tailor concepts of modernity to fit Argentine priorities. Argentina is still suffering from the legacy of the Wars of Independence -so much so that Wilson's son leaves his father to join an outlawed «banda» of rebels, while Pascual, the gaucho prisoner who usefully kills the tyrannical Judge («El tuerto»), is himself a victim of internecine fighting originating in the Wars. The rural idyll of the Wilsons is threatened by bloody violence and death, unlike that of the Vicar of Wakefield where there is no violence. The problem of social class and mobility raised by Goldsmith is translated as a problem of state governance in the Argentine text. In Mansilla's novel virtue conquers all, the old generation of corrupt governors and murderers is killed off, order is restored, and the new generation (Sara Wilson married to Jorge Gifford, Carlos's son) looks forward to future rural (not urban) prosperity. This prosperity will be achieved not by copying European models, however, but by developing local strategies. As the Doctor explains:

La educación que aquí dan a los hijos, y cuando digo aquí, hablo de toda la República, es semejante al atavío del guaso paraguayo: con sombrero para saludar, pero sin camisa para cubrir su desnudez. Llénanse la cabeza los muchachos de teorías inaplicables al país en que viven, persuádense al salir del colegio que están en Londres o París y que la máquina del edificio social no espera ya para funcionar sino el ligero impulso que ellos van a darle, y el error es tanto mayor, cuanto que los inconvenientes del europeo son aquí facilidades y viceversa; resultando confusión por la manía de querer aplicar un remedio opuesto al mal de que adolecen42.

As Francine Masiello argues, the masculine (and, we might add, Anglo-European) voice of the narrator addresses the reader on this point from a position of authority denied to women in the world of letters⁴³. The argument, another version of Spanish America's ambiguous relationship with modernity, was not new. But it is more forceful put in the mouth of an Englishman who was already fully acquainted with the city-life of the metropolis and yet finds happiness and prosperity in the rural provinces of Argentina. The novel censors the corrupting influence of money that leads to venality, but this is not, as in Aves, due to the legacy of colonial hierarchies but the result of a freer society in which money circulates and social mobility is made possible: «En las sociedades democráticas en donde por medio del dinero se alcanza poder y se llega a los primeros puestos, la necesidad del dinero llega a ser una fiebre»⁴⁴. If, in Sab, it is the English who do the money-grabbing, in Mansilla's novel both the Doctor and Jorge Gifford, whose probity and diplomacy save the day, are dissociated from the attractions of filthy lucre. Jorge Gifford, the quintessential blonde, suited, well-mannered Englishman, is entirely honourable. Although, like Enrique Otway, he buys up land and marries a local creole girl, unlike Enrique he settles in the region and produces local wealth rather than syphon it off to the metropolitan capital. It is Jorge's natural courteousness and diplomacy that solve the Doctor's problems. In other words, civilization (represented here by English customs and behaviour) is dissociated from the free market; happiness is not forfeited to business (as in the broken engagement between Jane Wilson and Carlos Gifford, or for that matter in the marriage between Carlota and Enrique in Sab). In El médico modernity is achieved through the tilling of the land, adherence to the Catholic religion, and the strengthening of family values which enable virtuous men and women to resist the threats of the state. Unlike Sab which ended with the unhappy marriage between a Cuban woman and an Englishman who live abroad, El médico ends with the joyful nuptials between the Doctor's Anglo-Argentine daughter and the acculturated Englishman, Jorge Gifford, who converts to Catholicism and settles in San Luis⁴⁵.

It goes without saying that Mansilla presents her analysis of 1860s Argentina from a peculiarly gendered perspective. The lack of progress, the tendency towards anarchy, is due not only to the adoption of inappropriate foreign models but to the diminishing authority of the mother in the Argentine family:

En la República Argentina la mujer es generalmente muy superior al hombre [...]. Las mujeres tienen la rapidez de comprensión notable y sobre todo una extraordinaria facilidad de asimilarse [...] todo lo bueno, todo lo nuevo que ven o escuchan. De aquí proviene la influencia singular de la mujer, en todas las ocasiones y circunstancias46.

Women are the agents of change and progress. But, the Doctor complains, although an Argentine woman might be allowed to exercise her superior qualities as a wife, a lover or a daughter, she is not allowed to do so as a mother. This is not so much a question of the domination of the pater familias, in his view, but a generational problem. Young people, particularly young men, will not recognize the authority and cultural traditions of their parents. So, whereas in Europe the mother is at the centre of the family, «aquí, por el contrario, la madre representa el atraso, lo estacionario, lo antiguo, que es a lo que más horror tienen las americanas» who tyrannize their husbands and fathers⁴⁷. For many Argentines modernity is synonymous with the rejection of the past, the mother and autochthonous cultures, but the novel warns that this is not the route to take. The way to prosperity is to «robustecer la autoridad maternal como punto de partida»⁴⁸. Thus the violence, hatred and bloodthirstiness accruing from the Wars and, until the mid-century (under Rosas), associated with masculinity and courage must be rejected as the model to aspire to. «Cesen las luchas de palabras, basta de sangre vertida por añejas preocupaciones», declares the Doctor; Argentina must move on. It should, moreover, emulate «la raza sajona que son hoy el asombro de las naciones». The secret of this success is education: «Educad al pueblo, fortificad en él los sentimientos morales, y sólo por ese medio seréis grandes, respetados y félices [sic]»⁴⁹. As in Aves, modernity is achieved in the domestic space of the home and the family, and progress is concomitant with the maternal-feminine.

In all three novels the role of women is pivotal: Teresa represents a potential Cuban modernity in Sab, and Lucía a Peruvian version in Aves. In El médico, the most conservative novel of the three, the Doctor's wife and his daughter Sara stand for autochthonous Argentine values married into acculturated modernity. In Mansilla's and Matto de Turner's novels modernity entails the rejection of government corruption and violence, and the adoption of values inscribed as feminine from which ensue stability, integrity, and virtue. The nation-state apparatus such as it is, fragile and fraught with the legacy of colonial institutions and hierarchies, actively impedes the realization of the values and practices which will lead to modernity. These in their turn are represented by women who nevertheless have no obvious formalized place in the development programme. These novels situate gender at the centre of their engagement with modernity, and at the centre of the political economies of their respective countries. Yet all three show symptoms of ambiguity towards modernity, in that their rhetorical strategies both inscribe and subvert discourses of modernity. The novels identify a space for the articulation of female subjectivity in societies where, nevertheless, such spaces were increasingly limited. Through the novels the women can contest the process whereby they, like the Indians and slaves, were becoming the objects of a modernizing discourse by means of which modernity is shown to be effective.

In what way could women be said to be central to the project of modernity and yet at the same time represent its potential subversion? They were implicated in modernity not only as the beneficiaries or receivers of progressive governance (for example, in education) but also in the important role they played in conspicuous consumption. As Rebecca Earle has shown, two of the most important ways in which consumption was made conspicuous in Latin America was via the female body and the domestic interior; modernity necessitated the importation of luxury goods⁵⁰. Latin American women were notorious for their displays of wealth; until the nineteenth century even their maids were bedecked in finery. Earle argues that this was often associated by the metropolis with decadence and an incapacity for self-governance. The textile imports that inundated Latin America were mainly of British manufacture -popular on account of their quality, availability and low price⁵¹. Textiles comprised three-quarters of British exports to Latin America in the 1820s, the main recipients being Brazil and Argentina⁵². Evidently, a man's social standing was marked by what he and his family, daughter, wife, and mother wore, and by the objects and decor of his house⁵³. As mentioned earlier, the luxurious «Hotel Imperial» in Aves sin nido signifies its modernity in these terms.

In as much as elite women were objects of display of their husbands' and fathers' wealth (minors and married women could not administer their own wealth without authorization)⁵⁴, and in as much as they were the personification and embodiment of social status in the context of accelerated capitalist commodification, they were fetishes. Women's clothes and possessions were, like them, irrationally revered status symbols, indicating reified social relations and, at the same time, commodities acquiring «a life of their own». As Marx remarked, a commodity (such as a woman's dress) «appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties». It becomes a «social hieroglyphic» that needs to be «deciphered»⁵⁵. The demand for imported manufactured goods was created to a large extent by and on behalf of elite women; women were major cogs in the capitalist system. They created demand in the market, but the goods were paid for by the men who often accrued excessive debts. To put it crudely, the demand for imports with which to dress up women as men's status symbols could be said to contribute to massive national debt. The demand for modernity, imported from abroad rather than self-generated, to convert women into its hieroglyph, the sign of modernity, undercut the very possibility of achieving modernity in that it impeded autochthonous economic independence. It is this ambiguity or self-defeating irony which is inscribed in the three novels.

In all the novels, cloth is important. In Sab the Otways make their fortune trading in cloth. The creole Carlota, though dressed tamely by Cuban standards, nevertheless shows her social status, her modernity, by sporting an English riding habit and a beaver hat (despite the tropical climate), a costume which at the same time turns her into a fetish of her father's wealth (shortly to become the Otways'). Teresa and Sab are both dressed plainly, and therefore refuse to become fetishes in this way. But as non-consumers they can take no part in modernity. The Otways' business is «toda clase de lencería» (lingerie and linen)⁵⁶; Enrique spends most of his time galloping between Puerto Príncipe and its port at Guanaja to supervise trade consignments, much to Carlota's annoyance. In Aves Lucía's dresses are sober: in order to make this point they are described in great detail, resulting in a stylistic feature which, again, has been much criticized and misunderstood. Brushwood, for example, expresses the view (apparently endorsed by Lindstrom) that Matto writes «in excruciating detail», which becomes

overwhelming when the course of action is interrupted in favour of describing a lady's attire. There are paragraphs that sound something like the commentary at a fashion show57.

This is precisely the point: a family's social status (its class and race) is signified by dress. Lucía uses a sewing-machine to make clothes for her adopted Indian daughters. Her home, though tasteful, is not filled with luxury objects. She too refuses to be a fetish of modernity. As mentioned earlier, she propels modernity forward: the dramatic events which lead to the demise of the old order and set the pace for modern progress are triggered by Lucía herself when instead of using the money given to her by her husband to purchase a velvet dress, she hands it over to Marcela the Indian woman so that she in turn can pay her debts to the church. Lucía's Peruvian husband earned his money legitimately in connection with the mines. Therefore the decision to spend the funds accruing from an autochthonous industry on the indigenous poor is entirely Lucía's⁵⁸. The production of wool (spun and woven by women such as Marcela and her daughters) and clothes-making, the domestic economy in short, is shown to be central to the national economy and, for the same reason, the source of social injustice and conflict. By recognizing this, the novel raises women's social status and acknowledges the importance of their work at home⁵⁹. Finally, in El médico the Doctor's daughters dress with taste, but not ostentatiously. Indeed, women are ridiculed when, «más adornadas y vistosas que ramillete de día de San Juan», they attempt to show-off their fallacious social status by the clothes they wear⁶⁰. Apart from the Doctor's purchase of an Indian rug in Mendoza and his subscription to the Edinburgh Review, his family do little in the way of shopping. In fact the economic model proposed in this novel is that of a pre-bourgeois domestic self-sufficiency in which the social relations between people are not, as Marx put it, «disguised as social relations between things»⁶¹.

In conclusion, these women-authored novels challenge the view of the times that conspicuous consumption denoted modernity, worth and value, contesting the system which turns women into fetishes for the display of men's wealth, into the objects that constituted and confirmed capitalism and modernity. The ambiguous relationship with modernity represented in these novels is a reformulation of women's ambiguously dependent status as gendered negative objects in a project that was itself «at risk of becoming the negative object of modern Western knowledge»⁶². In these novels women's dependency on men prefigures Latin America's dependency on the metropolis. The common solution, at least as hazarded by these women novelists, would seem to be autonomy, founded not on the rejection of one party or the other but on collaboration to the mutual advantage of both. Prosperity and progress will be achieved by women collaborating with men on equal terms in the context of the home and the family, and by Latin America collaborating with the Anglos as equal partners in the context of the global economy. This is an idealistic programme, to be sure, and for that reason best appreciated in works of narrative fiction⁶³.