Crying out for Feminine (Un)Happiness: María Rosa Gálvez's Search for Sapphic Immortality

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis

María Rosa Gálvez was born in 1768 in the southern port town of Málaga to a family with ties to the Bourbon court in Madrid¹. She is the youngest of the three writers studied here and the one who most challenged male power in her work, and in her life. Although, like many women of her time, she married young (most likely for economic and social convenience), her marriage to José Cabrera, a captain in the militia, did not last. The couple separated shortly after moving to Madrid in 1790². After the unhappy break-up, Cabrera took a diplomatic post with the Legación de España in the United States, but he continued to bother his former wife with a plague of lawsuits encouraged by her husband's friends -Antonio Escorza, Nicolás de Arias and Diego de Rute. In fact, Gálvez was forced to defend herself from these men until her death, and she adamantly opposed their claims in her will:

Declara también para descargo de su conciencia que por parte de Don Antonio Escorza Fiesco y Quevedo, Don Nicolás de Arias, Don Diego de Rute y otros amigos y paniagudos de estos ha padecido crueles persecuciones que la han afligido mucho en su persona, honor y intereses...

(Serrano y Sanz 446)

She also declares, for the discharge of her conscience, that on the part of Don Antonio Escorza Fiesco y Quevedo, Don Nicolás de Aria, Don Diego de Rute and other friends and comrades of the above, she [Gálvez] has suffered cruel persecutions that have afflicted her greatly in her person, honor and interests...

This is but one example of Gálvez defending herself tenaciously, and this same determination carried over into her plays. María Rosa Gálvez refused to follow the traditional roles set aside for eighteenth-century women. She was not the enlightened wife and mother Josefa Amar y Borbón had been, nor did she choose to enter the convent after the dissolution of her marriage as María Gertrudis Hore had done. Gálvez, rather, made the unusual choice to remain as a single woman in the secular world and pursue her profession as an artist, which she equated with happiness, her «feliz elección, grato consuelo de mis inmensos males» («happy choice, pleasing comfort to my immense troubles»; «Oda a un amante de las artes de imitación», Obras poéticas. Vol. I, 25). In this statement and others, happiness for Gálvez was tied to the poetic/intellectual process, as it was for Amar and Hore. It was also connected with female independence, which had special and personal meaning for Gálvez. As with Amar and Hore, happiness was found in «virtuous» friendships among women. But Gálvez, more than the others before her, dealt with the many obstacles that impeded women's happiness in Spain at the turn of the nineteenth-century. Through numerous examples of «excessive» male behavior towards women, and through the oximoronic «amazon slave-woman» figure she created, Gálvez decries female unhappiness. Her female characters, in both the tragedies and the comedies, struggle to overcome the unjust unhappiness inflicted upon them, often alone in seemingly hopeless situations, but at times in solidarity with their sisters who help them to achieve their own happy outcomes.

The relative freedom Gálvez achieved from male control through her separation led to rumors of sexual excess, and of an illicit love affair with Court favorite Manuel Godoy. Serrano y Sanz records comments made by the nineteenth-century historian Guillén Robles in his 1873 book Historia de Málaga y sus provincias (History of Málaga and Its Provinces). According to Robles, Gálvez:

corrió vida azarosa y libertina, viniendo a parar a Madrid a expensas de Godoy, a quien tenía por costumbre presentar un soneto liviano a la hora de tomar el chocolate.

(445)

led a reckless and libertine life, and she ended up in Madrid supported by Godoy, to whom she had the custom of presenting a racy sonnet at the time when he took his hot chocolate.

Several critics, notably Cook and Alborg, concur with Robles and believe that the intimate relationship between Gálvez and Godoy was the impetus behind the inclusion of three of her plays in the Teatro nuevo español (New Spanish Theater) as well as the publication of her three-volume Obras poéticas (Poetic Works) by the Royal Press at Court expense. However, other critics, such as Daniel Whitaker, Julia Grinstein and Emilio Palacios Fernández, believe their relationship to be more an alliance between artist and patron than between lovers³. Nonetheless, the perceived connection between a woman's «happy choice» and her transgression of acceptable feminine behavior was not lost on Gálvez and these issues are «played out» in various ways through her drama.

Besides the Prime Minister, Gálvez also had connections with other important men on the political and literary scene of the period. She maintained a friendly relationship with poet Manuel Quintana, to whom she dedicated two poems in the first volume of her Obras poéticas. There are also indications that she could have been an acquaintance of important Enlightenment thinker Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos⁴, and Palacios Fernández believes it possible that she even participated in the same social and cultural circles as playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín («Noticas sobre el parnaso dramático femenino» 107). But men were not the only ones who helped her progress in her career as a dramatist. She also maintained an apparently close relationship with the Countess of Carpio, María Rita de Barrenechea, who was an active playwright in her own right and whom Gálvez called a «faithful friend» and an «immortal genious» («La Noche», Obras. 1: 45)⁵.

Of the sixteen plays that María Rosa Gálvez wrote, fourteen were published and seven represented on the Madrid stage⁶. With the exception of Ali-Bek, all of the plays presented on stage were comedies. While it might be tempting to give staged drama more credence, Palacios Fernández reminds us that drama of the period was often published specifically to be read (and not necessarily to be performed) and was popular among men and especially women readers, much like sentimental novels of the period («Noticias» 90-91). As we shall see, some of her most daring female characters and her most biting criticism of men were not represented on the stage, but rather published, presumably to be read by a growing female audience. Gálvez was also an avid poet and published several of her poems in both her Obras poéticas and in journals of the period.

Despite her relationship with Godoy, Gálvez still had problems gaining access to public exposure for her work. The first obstacle for any eighteenth-century playwright, male or female, was gaining the approval of the censors from the Consejo de Castilla and the Church. When in one case the ecclesiastical censors denied her permission to perform one of her plays, Gálvez refused to accept their unfavorable decision without a fight. In a letter to the Governor of the Consejo, Gálvez protests what she believes to be an unjust decision about her play Familia a la moda (The Fashionable Family). She complains that the censors, who had called the play immoral and a «school of corruption and libertinism», did not understand this comedy:

Si solo se hubiese negado la licencia, acaso habría tolerado este acaecimiento la autora por no mover contestaciones dilatadas y molestas; pero el motivo que expresa la relacionada nota, sobre ser en cierto modo denigrativo, denota claramente que no ha sido la comedia bien comprendida.

(Serrano y Sanz 451-2)

If only they had denied the license, perhaps this author would have tolerated this in order to avoid long and bothersome disputes; but the motive that was expressed, more than being somewhat denigrating, clearly denotes that the comedy has not been comprehended well.

Gálvez did not let the recent resurgence of the Inquisition's power in Spain intimidate her criticisms of the ecclesiastical censor's unfairness. Permission for performance was eventually granted, but the play was never published, perhaps due to another problem that troubled Gálvez -lack of financial resources.

Despite being sole inheritor of her parents' estate, Gálvez had money problems throughout her life, and they proved to be the second hurdle in her path toward artistic success⁷. Several letters written by Gálvez, which are included in Serrano y Sanz, deal with the search for funds to publish or stage her plays. Her strongest argument in her own favor was the uniqueness of being a female playwright in Spain:

A esto puede agregarse el deseo de hacer público un trabajo que en ninguna otra mujer, ni en nación alguna tiene ejemplar, puesto que las más celebradas francesas solo se han limitado a traducir, o cuando más han dado a luz una composición dramática; mas ninguna ha presentado una colección de Tragedias originales como la Exponente.

(449)

To this one may add the desire to make public work that no other woman, in any country, has exemplified, since even the most celebrated French women have only limited themselves to translations, or at the very most have brought to light one dramatic composition. But none of them has presented a collection of original tragedies like the present author has.

Here as in other documents we will examine, Gálvez exaggerates her importance as a woman dramatist. Although their numbers may have paled in comparison to male playwrights, Gálvez was not the only woman writing drama in eighteenth-century Spain⁸. Yet judging by the number of her works that appeared in public, it seems to have been an argument that worked⁹.

Once the obstacles of censorship and financial sponsorship were overcome, Gálvez, like any other playwright, had to face the critics. In 1805, a reviewer for the Memorial Literario said of Gálvez's play Las esclavas amazonas (Amazon Slave Women) that «el argumento no es muy interesante, y que carece de novedad» («the plot was not very interesting, and that it lacked novelty»; 177). This review, Gálvez's response to it, and the play itself will be studied in depth later in this chapter. Despite not being one of her best works (the reviewer was in many respects correct in his negative assessment of it), this play serves as an excellent point of entry into the important ideas and literary techniques of her dramatic work.

Since her death at age 38 in 1806, several critics have taken interest in Gálvez's work. Manuel Serrano y Sanz included her in his Apuntes para un biblioteca de escritoras españolas at the turn of this century. She is mentioned briefly (and unfavorably) by John A. Cook in his Neo-Classic Drama in Spain: Theory and Practice (1959) and by Juan Luis Alborg in his Historia de la literatura española, volume 3 (1972). Eva M. Kahiluoto Rudat is the first critic to take Gálvez's work seriously, evaluating her contribution to the Neoclassic movement in Spain through the previously mentioned «Advertencia»¹⁰. But it was Daniel Whitaker who brought María Rosa Gálvez's work out of the shadows of almost two centuries of neglect and into the light of modern criticism¹¹. Since Whitaker, others have taken interest in Gálvez's work, including Fernando Doménech, Joseph R. Jones, Emilio Palacios Fernández and Julia Grinstein.

In the history of Spanish theater, Neoclassicism seems a mere brief interlude between the Baroque drama of the seventeenth-century (known as Spain's «Golden Age») by great playwrights like Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, and the giants of nineteenth-century Romanticism such as Zorrilla and Rivas. Yet Enlightenment dramatists saw their role in evolution of the Spanish stage to be that of reformer: to correct what they saw as the excesses of Baroque period and its aftermath in order to create a more realistic and believable theater, and to bring Spanish drama into the modern age with a more «European» sensibility. True Neoclassic drama had only two pure forms -the comedy and the tragedy. Comedy, with its cast of common characters, was meant to ridicule the behavior of the non-aristocratic classes and teach them important lessons about living in a modern society. Tragedy, on the other hand, dramatized the lives of the nobility, with the intention of exalting noble ideals of patriotism and good citizenship. While both forms were important in their primary political goal to produce a better, more enlightened society, Spanish literary reformers from Ignacio de Luzán to Leandro Fernández de Moratín more often turned to comedy as the most effective medium to encourage social and political change in the masses. René Andioc finds a real socio-political basis for the common themes in the Neoclassic comedies. For instance the theme of May-and-December marriages, found in Leandro Fernández de Moratín's plays El viejo y la niña (The Old Man and the Girl) and to a lesser extent in El sí de las niñas, was an important concern to Spanish leaders. In 1787 the number of widows was triple that of widowers as a result of these marriages. Francisco Cabarrús complained that these unions were «un-natural», resulting in fewer children and thus a smaller workforce for a Spain that was desperately seeking economic development (Andioc 436-37).

Kathleen Kish, who has also studied the socio-political implications of Neoclassic drama, outlines the enlightenment reformers' attempts to subdue women through their comedies, which Kish calls a «school for wives»:

What is perhaps unexpected is the kind of lesson the so-called progressive spirits of the Enlightenment wished to teach wives and those responsible for them. The school for wives embodies in eighteenth-century Spanish theater did little to encourage feminine advancement. The small gains which do emerge resulted not from any desire on the part of the reformers to champion women's rights as a goal in itself but rather as a side effect of the advocacy of their real purpose: social stability.

(187)

Studying the plays of both the so-called progressive dramatists like Moratín, as well as the conservative traditionalists like Ramón de la Cruz, Kish finds throughout that rebellious women in their plays were frequently ridiculed while submissive women received praise. Perhaps this attitude towards women characters is reflected in a statement made by Ignacio de Luzán in his influential Poética (Poetics). Speaking of the lack of verisimilitude in contemporary Spanish drama, Luzán asserts:

No puedo dejar de decir que las mujeres en nuestras comedias hablan con más erudición y elegancia de lo que es natural y propio de su sexo y capacidad.

(544)

I cannot refrain from saying that the women in our comedies speak with more erudition and elegance than is natural and proper for their sex and their capacity.

These female characters, claimed Luzán, were «excessive» in their behavior -more than what was «natural and proper». As we shall soon see, that was also the reviewer's complaint about Gálvez's last play, Las esclavas amazonas, and an opinion which Gálvez fought both by presenting strong female characters in her plays, and by pointing out male excess.

Tragedy for these Enlightenment reformers offered another opportunity to diffuse their morals through the medium of theater. Donald Shaw has argued in articles on Huerta's Raquel and Montiano's Ataulpho that the fundamental problem with Neoclassic tragedy is that its search for causes and effects in a harmonious world preclude truly tragic situations:

Montiano, like others in his age, seems to have assumed that reason, emotional restraint and allegiance to humane ideals were vulnerable only to the operations of uncontrolled passion, malice and ignorance, and that it was this vulnerability which was the source of tragic pathos. By bringing this out, tragedy could not only produce pity and fear, but also teach a moral lesson.

(«Montiano's Ataulpho» 161)

This attempt to teach morality through tragedy came from the Neoclassic interpretation of the cathartic value of this genre:

If catharsis means anything, it means that we emerge from the test with deepened insight, but not with our acceptance of the scheme of things totally undermined. Would-be tragedians in the eighteenth-century were not unaware of this important condition; but they tended to interpret it as meaning that tragedy could (and indeed should) be used to reconcile the audience to specifically moral values.

(Shaw, «Montiano's Ataulpho» 154)

During the reign of Carlos III a «boom» of sorts in Neoclassic tragedy took place, populating the stage with Spanish heroes from the past. Plays like Pelayo by Jovellanos, Hormesinda, Guzmán el Bueno and Lucrecia by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, as well as Numancia destruida by Ayala and Sancho García by Cadalso all represented in a way King Carlos's attempts to revive an ailing Spain (Andioc 385). The renovation of the tragedy was seen as a vital part of Spain's overall restoration, and almost fifteen years after Carlos III's death, María Rosa Gálvez felt it necessary to continue where the earlier Neoclassicists had left off, by emphasizing not the heroes of the past, but rather great heroines.

By the time María Rosa Gálvez was writing for the theater in the early nineteenth-century, drama was no longer separated into these two rigidly defined categories. A revolution of sorts had taken place in the «sensibilities» of the era, which emerged out of the medical study of the body's reaction to stimulus, but soon became a major cultural and social movement:

The cult of sensibility favoured the growth of sentimentality. Praise was lavished on works which moved tears by their «pathetic» style. A sentimental aesthetic developed, emphasizing the nuclear family, the virtue and simplicity of country life, the innocent vulnerability of children, the capacity of women to feel grief and terror, and the godlike sensations experienced by those who relieved the woes of others.

(Williams 92)

The sentimental genre flourished in Spain too, following important models from England and France. As María Jesús García Garrosa asserts, for most ilustrados the combination of reason and sensibility was «la virtud más apreciada en este siglo de hombres honestos» («the most appreciated virtue in this century of honest men»; 7). She goes on to describe the importance of feeling to Enlightenment Spain:

Esta sensibilidad, lejos de contenerse, debía manifestarse abiertamente. El hombre del XVIII no oculta sus emociones, reacciona espontáneamente ante ellas, y las traduce en gestos, en palabras, en lágrimas.

(7)

This sensibility, far from being contained, should be manifested openly. The eighteenth-century man doesn't hide his emotions, he reacts spontaneously to them, and translates them into gestures, words, tears.

In the theater, sensibility and sentimentality were expressed through various dramatic forms -the comedia sentimental, the tragedia or drama burguesa, and the comedia lacrimosa to name a few¹². These forms exceeded the strict interpretations of Aristotelian concepts of tragedy and comedy, since their authors refused to believe «that virtuous and heroic persons cannot be found in the sphere of the middle-class» (Kosove 30). Instead of awe-inspiring cosmic powers overwhelming the protagonists of these new kinds of tragedies, the hero of sentimental drama struggles with social and political injustice -domineering parents, unhappy marriages or harsh laws (31). These bourgeois problems were expressed with great emotion, often through the frequent shedding of tears by the heroes and heroines. The most notable play of this sort in Spain was Jovellanos's 1773 El delincuente honrado (The Honorable Delinquent), although many others followed, written by authors such as Francisco Comella, Gaspar Zavala y Zamora, and Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor.

The «sensibility cult» of the late eighteenth-century also changed the way women were perceived and portrayed. Earlier in the eighteenth-century philosophers such as John Locke advanced the idea that the human brain, male and female, was a tabula rasa -a «blank slate» shaped by the forces of experience alone. Under this view, women had the potential to be the intellectual equals of men. Yet by the end of the century emerging theories about the «sensibility» of the body re-asserted the differences of the sexes. Women, by virtue of their finer, more delicate senses, were also considered to be weaker both physically and intellectually than men. This supposed «finer» sensibility of women had ambiguous meaning for them:

The aggrandizement of a certain kind of consciousness on the one hand was associated with the powers of intellect, imagination, the pursuit of pleasure, the exercise of moral superiority, and the wished for resistance to men. On the other hand, it betokened physical and mental inferiority, sickness, and inevitable victimization, circumstances throwing severe doubt on the effectiveness of the female will.

(Barker-Benfield 35-36)

For women, sensibility and sentimentality were both sources of power and subjugation. The ambiguity itself represented women's precarious position in post-revolutionary Europe as they were increasingly being excluded from political, social and cultural domains, whereas earlier in the century they had begun to make their mark. The pursuit of happiness was beginning to look more and more dubious, and women like Gálvez reflected their anxiety through the copious tears of the sentimental genre.

María Rosa Gálvez was influenced and informed by the dramatic trends and philosophic debates of her day. While she wrote Neoclassic comedies and tragedies, adhering as much as possible to Neoclassic precepts such as the three unities and a strict concept of verisimilitude, her dramatic works are also filled with elements of popular drama. She wrote musical theater, composing and/or translating popular forms like the zarzuela, opera, even a one-act melologue. Her comedies incorporated elements of the popular one-act sainete, while her tragedies reflected the fashionable sentimental drama of her day.

Although she dedicated herself to a career in drama, when deciding how to present her life's work to the public in her three-volume Obras poéticas of 1804, María Rosa Gálvez chose to begin volume 1 with thirteen lyrical poems, a genre which in the introduction to the tome she admits are merely «hijas de circunstancias» («daughters of circumstances»; 3), coming from «una imaginación guiada solo por la naturaleza» («an imagination guided only by nature»; 3). Many of these poems reveal a more personal look at Gálvez and her deepest emotions: her friendships, intimate moments of joy and pain, her patriotism, her love of literature. Yet while most of these poems are personal in nature, they reveal a series of themes that are at the heart of her dramatic works, the bulk of which fill the pages of the three-volume collection. Among these themes, the idea of happiness appears throughout. In an ode dedicated to «un amante de las artes de imitación» («a lover of the arts of imitation»; 21), Gálvez gives us a glimpse of how she views the creative process:

¡Oh feliz elección, grato consuelo de mis inmensos males! ¡Oh lira bien hadada! De tu armonía el atrevido vuelo resuena en la morada, donde tu protector la mente inclina a elevar de tu numen las tareas; y como de la fuente cristalina los humildes raudales aspiran a llegar al Océano, cayendo de los montes entre colinas desiguales, [...] las rocas evitando apresurada, hasta que en la cascada del soberbio torrente impetuoso sus aguas junta, el curso facilita, y al ancho mar con él se precipita.

(Lines 111-128)

Oh happy choice, pleasant comfort of my immense troubles! O very fortunate lyre! From your harmony daring flight resounds in its abode, where your protector the mind inclines to elevate the labors of your genius; and as from a crystalline fountain the humble streams aspire to reach the Ocean, falling from the mountains among uneven hills, [...] hurriedly avoiding rocks, until in the cascade of the proud and impetuous torrent the waters are united, the course eased, and to the wide sea with it are cast.

Writing for Gálvez was a «happy choice» that helped alleviate her sufferings. It also was something greater than herself -it came from within, bubbling up like a spring that quickly became a great torrent of water rushing towards the sea.

The women characters of María Rosa Gálvez's dramatic production spring forth from this torrent of her imagination and they, like Gálvez the real woman, navigate a sea of obstacles to their happiness. In their search for such Enlightenment ideals as virtue, friendship, freedom and immortality -the components of feminine happiness for Gálvez- they face an often violent, male-dominated world that takes advantage of their acute sensibility and threatens to punish and isolate them. Yet while men of the late Enlightenment period would have most likely accused these «sensible» female creatures of emotional excess, Gálvez viewed it differently.

Excess for María Gálvez is both theme and technique. Karen Jackson Ford, studying American women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth-century, has found in their works what she calls a poetics of excess: «A poetics of excess can contradict, revise and affirm existing meanings, but it can also generate new ones. These excesses of style enable crucial and liberating excesses of meaning» (10). Catherine Craft-Fairchild, turning to Toril Moi and Luce Irigaray to explain women writers' frequent use of the «art of excess», finds in eighteenth-century England's Fanny Burney an excellent example of «overdoing it» in the sentimental genre:

Burney's is an art of excess, subversive in its over abundance... If, as Luce Irigaray posits, the feminine role is one of «mimicry» -a woman playing out her culturally assigned role in order to expose the operative structures by which women are marginalized- then Bumey over mimes, over acts.

(126)

Much like Burney, Gálvez too «over acts». Her «poetics of excess» is everywhere. The tragic heroines suffer excessively, while male antagonists are excessively cruel.

The comic heroines point out the excesses of their male counterparts, who often indulge excessively in material goods or false social and cultural sophistication, at the expense of the women around them. Some of these plays seem contrived, overly sentimental, overly dramatic, overly done. Quintana even criticizes the number of plays that Gálvez writes, finding them to be too many, too quick¹³. Yet a close look at the use of excess as both theme and literary device in Gálvez's work as a whole and its connection to the themes of feminine happiness, virtue, friendship, and feminine independence, reveals more than simply the mistakes of an unpolished writer. Rather Gálvez formulates a «poetics of excess», much like other women writers had before and after, to protest feminine unhappiness and advocate women's true felicidad.

Perhaps the best point of entry into María Rosa Gálvez's dramatic work is by beginning with the end, her last and arguably worst original play, Las esclavas amazonas (Amazon Slave Women). After having seen a performance of this play in November of 1805, a critic for the Memorial Literario asserts that «este drama, a más de ser muy vulgar, no despierta la curiosidad...» («this drama, besides being very common, does not spark curiosity...»; 177), and despite the reviewer's efforts to be polite, his criticisms throughout the article are quite harsh. Yet by almost any standard Las esclavas amazonas is a bad play. Its setting and plot are full of often contradictory commonplaces, many of which are chauvinistic even for eighteenth-century standards. Why then waste our efforts studying it? Clearly the reviewer thought it wasn't worthy of the spectator's time, and critics and historians since have given it very little coverage. However, Las esclavas amazonas, despite its many objectionable points, is worthy of some attention. A closer look at the play reveals some important implications for the study of María Rosa Gálvez, especially her use of excess to decry the feminine condition.

Las esclavas amazonas, María Rosa Gálvez's last play before her death in 1806, ended her remarkable yet troubled career as a playwright. Her previous fifteen original plays were daring in their portrayal of strong, positive female characters and in the presentation of some very controversial, and often feminist themes such as rape, incest, free love and the African slave trade. The number of works that she composed, and the time she spent both promoting and defending them, points to her desire for success as a writer and her yearning to achieve recognition as a serious dramatist. Being one of the few women writing drama in the late Enlightenment period was difficult and lonely, but it was a position that Gálvez seems to have secretly relished. Although she claimed not to desire what she called «extraordinary» fame, the following quote from the «Advertencia» to volume 2 of her Obras poéticas illustrates her underlying dream for artistic immortality:

Ni ambiciono una gloria extraordinaria, ni puedo resolverme a creer tanta injusticia en mis compatriotas, que dejen de tolerar los defectos que haya en mis composiciones con la prudencia que juzgo merece mi sexo. Si me engaña esta esperanza; estoy bien segura de que la posteridad no dejará acaso de dar algún lugar en su memoria a este libro, y con esto al menos quedarán en parte premiadas las tareas de su autora.

(7-11)

Neither do I aspire to extraordinary glory, nor do I resolve myself to believing my compatriots capable of such injustice, that they would fail to judge the defects of my compositions with the prudence that I think my sex merits. If this hope deceives me, I am very sure that posterity will not fail to give this book some space in its memory, and with this at the least the labors of its author will be rewarded in part.

Gálvez perceived herself as a reformer of the theater, like Ignacio Luzán or Leandro Fernández de Moratín. In the above-mentioned «Advertencia» she preached against the excessive number of plays translated from French, and called for more original Spanish drama. She also criticized the affectation and false pedantry of some playwrights (much like Moratín had twelve years earlier) in her comedy Los figurones literarios. In almost all of her plays, Gálvez displayed the aesthetic ideals of Neoclassicism -attention to the three dramatic unities, simple and direct language, and of course didacticism. In addition, she adapted Enlightenment themes such as equality, personal freedom, and the «inalienable» rights of man, and applied these to the situation of women. This combination of Enlightenment ideals with feminist ideas created Gálvez's unique «poetics». Much like Amar before her, Gálvez too was a theorist, not only of feminine happiness, but also of a Neoclassic feminist drama. As we study the development of the aforementioned «poetics of excess», we shall see how Gálvez simultaneously embraced and protested stereotypical images of feminine excess, joining this to her desire to reform the Spanish stage and society.

We find throughout her plays incredibly strong female characters, as we shall soon see. Some are models of Gálvez's idea of enlightened femininity, while others are tragic figures that protest the plight of Spanish women. All of them are daring and challenge the status quo. For example, in the one-act tragedy Safo, the famous Greek poetess searches for personal autonomy in her love relationships, rejecting marriage completely. El egoísta is a comedia lacrimosa that treats the issue of spousal abuse. Florinda seeks to vindicate the legendary Spanish anti-heroine and the tragedy Zinda criticizes the African slave trade. But Gálvez's original brand of neoclassic drama seems to end when she arrives at her last play, Las esclavas amazonas. And yet this play, so full of extremes and incongruities, is the perfect place from which to begin a study of Gálvez's evolving use of excess as both theme and technique to protest the feminine condition.

One of the first complaints by the aforementioned reviewer of Las esclavas amazonas was its extremely confused and convoluted plot: «estamos fastidiados de ver en el teatro encuentros de hermanos largo tiempo hacía separados; reconocimientos de esposos, de amigos, etc...» («We are fed up seeing in the theater the reuniting of long-lost siblings; the recognition of spouses, friends, etc...»; 177). The play breaks noticeably with the Enlightenment call for a unified and believable story line, something Gálvez had never done before in her other plays. To briefly summarize, three women, Hipólita, Adelaida and Flora, are held captive by the king of Siam after having been brought to him by Emir, who in turn had bought them from English pirates. Emir (and I will treat this as a name and not a title, since Gálvez uses it this way) intended the head Amazon, Hipólita as a wife for the king, but when she refused, the king agreed to allow her and her girlfriends to train as guards for his palace -his «Amazon slave-women». While Hipólita and Adelaida only know that they were born in France, Flora (a Spaniard) was kidnapped as an adult after having been abandoned by her husband. The Amazon slave-women guards are in turn guarded by Emir and a black eunuch, Abujar. Emir is bitter over Hipólita's refusal to marry the king, for which he had expected to be highly compensated. When the ambassador from France, Carlos Dorval, comes with his entourage (including compatriot Alberto Dumenil and sargent Trapantoja), Emir tries to keep them from seeing the Amazons, afraid that they will fall in love with them and ruin his future hopes of favor with the king. However, Carlos, Alberto and Trapantoja do meet the women, they do fall in love, and eventually they do marry them, but not without some complications. While the secondary characters of Adelaida and Alberto fall in love immediately, Hipólita treats the French Ambassador Carlos with disdain. As in Moreto's seventeenth-century comedy (El desdén con el desdén), this more modern Carlos plants his servant Trapantoja inside the castle to influence Hipólita, and by fighting disdain with disdain, he too is able to stir her emotions. After an initial false report that the two couples are actually siblings, we find out that Hipólita is Alberto's long lost sister and Adelaida is the sister of the ambassador, Carlos, thus clearing the way for the ladies' release by the king of Siam and the inevitable marriages. As a subplot, the gracioso Trapantoja is revealed to be the husband that had abandoned Flora and they are reunited in marriage also.

But besides its complicated plot, there are other highly objectionable elements to an Enlightenment aesthetic in this play. Gálvez normally displayed a certain level of realism in her plays, which were generally historically, geographically and culturally accurate. But Las esclavas amazonas throws aside the very important element of Neoclassic mimesis, dragging her play down to a ridiculous level. Amazon slaves, kidnapped by English pirates, living in Siam, guarded by a black eunuch and a Muslim «Emir» seem a cultural improbability. Underscoring the cultural absurdities of the play is a song in scene 3 of the third act performed by Trapantoja who is posing as an African named Candonga. The humorous song and dance make blacks the butt of the joke, mimicking the words, accent and music of Africans:

Din, don, din, doy, con la mandinga din, don din doy vamo a cantal din don din doy cantemo zinga din don din doy pala aleglal.

Din, don, din, doy, with the mandinga din, don, din, doy, let's sing din, don, din, doy, let's sign the zinga din, don, din, doy, to make merry.

The odd combination of words of seemingly African origin (mandinga/zinga)¹⁴ with an accent that could be African (aleglal/cantal for alegrar/cantar)¹⁵, but also perhaps Asian (given the setting of the play), point to another cultural incongruity. Interestingly, the reviewer praises this as one of the few entertaining moments of the play. It appealed to contemporary chauvinism, ridiculing Africans, their language and their music.

But perhaps what most shockingly violates Gálvez's «poetics» is the sexism of this play. Hipólita, despite being a strong warrior, is ridiculed -she is the shrew that is eventually tamed, just as Carlos teaches Diana her lesson in Moreto's seventeenth-century comedy, upon which this play seems to be loosely based. Even so, the reviewer found her initial strength objectionable:

No nos parece muy probable que una mujer sea capaz de tanta perseverancia en su dictamen, y mucho menos en materia de amor.

(177)

It doesn't seem to us very probable that a woman could be capable of such perseverance in her judgment, much less in matters of love.

Gálvez, in a letter to the editors of the Variedades de Ciencias, Literatura y Arte, defended her heroine with biting sarcasm:

¡Oh felices Adonis de nuestro siglo! ¡Cómo se conoce en vuestra explicación que no encontráis a ninguna orgullosa Amazona!, acaso la mía, a pesar de la educación que había formado su carácter, vista de uno de vosotros se hubiera derretido; pero acaso también os hubiera hecho la mamola, y por esto cuidé de que el galán que había de rendir a mi heroína, tuviese figura de hombre.

(360)

Oh happy Adonises of our century! How much it is revealed in your explication that you cannot find any proud Amazon woman! Perhaps mine, despite the education that had formed her character, would have crumbled at your sight! But perhaps also she would have patted you under the chin, and this is why I was careful that the courtier that was to conquer my heroine had the figure of a man.

Hipólita's defeat in the play was uncharacteristic of Gálvez, and perhaps was intended as a concession to a sexist society. The indignation with which she responded to the criticism of this already compromised character reveals the level of her frustration. But the critics weren't the only persons with whom Gálvez was frustrated:

Ítem, dicen, que la comedia tiene defectos: Eso ya me lo sabía yo, así como sé que todas las que se compongan en las actuales circunstancias los han de tener forzosamente si el autor ha de contentar a los actores y al pueblo: así yo me vi en la precisión para no alarmar a los primeros, de ponerle a mi comedia traducida del francés; y para complacer, o placer al segundo, de imitar las bellas escenas del Desdén, aunque en otras costumbres, y la inimitable versificación de nuestros poetas antiguos.

(360)

Item, they say, that the comedy has defects. That I already knew, just as I know that all comedies that are written today have them, necessarily so if the author is to please the actors and the audience. Thus I found myself forced not to alarm the first and to put down that my comedy was translated from French. And to humor the second group, I imitated those lovely scenes from the Desdén, although in a different way, along with the unequaled versification of our ancient poets.

Gálvez tried to please everyone in this play -the critics, the actors and the audience. By calling her play a translation so the actors would perform it, and imitating the «bellas escenas del Desdén» to please the audience, Gálvez addressed box-office pressures of the time, since translations of French drama and the refundiciones of seventeenth-century plays saw much greater success than most original compositions by Spanish Neoclassicists.

But Gálvez made other compromises that she doesn't mention, or defend. She traded the Neoclassic aesthetic of a unified and believable plot for convolution and inaccuracy. Instead of employing the Enlightenment ideals of human dignity and freedom she had applied to women in previous plays, she chose seemingly to exalt bigotry, racism, and most astonishingly, sexism. In the end Las esclavas amazonas is just another comedy in which the woman is put in her place. Its heroine, Hipólita, is the object of ridicule in a ridiculous play.

Had María Rosa Gálvez's desire for fame finally led her to this? Had she compromised all of her ideals merely to write what sells? Was she finally «throwing in the towel» as it were and joining with the latest trends -the excesses of the «comedia popular», the exotic chinoiserie of the French stage, the lack of dramatic innovation of the refundiciones? Did financial pressures finally force her to search for a box-office hit? Perhaps, and yet this play, which is the antithesis of Gálvez's life's work, the seeming opposite of everything she had previously struggled for, seems more than mere acquiescence.

Perhaps Las esclavas amazonas was as much a protest as it was submission to box-office pressures. The dominating image of this play, the esclava amazona herself, leads us to question Gálvez's intentions. The Amazon was a frequent image evoked by eighteenth-century men to criticize women who transgressed (exceeded) societal norms. As Barker-Benfield notes, speaking of eighteenth-century England:

To many male writers, the Amazon was a bogey, embodying their fears and intended as a warning to women who crossed the «bounds of female authorship». Women's self-assertion in writing was a declaration of war, threatening to disable men. To female writers, however, the Amazon was a figure of remarkable ambiguity, one to which they were attracted and one from which they attempted to distance themselves.

(352)

In Spain the negative image of the Amazon was also used to rein in women who went too far. For sainetista Ramón de la Cruz, who frequently ridiculed women in his brief comedies, the Amazon women of his 1772 play La república de las mujeres (The Women's Republic) were an easy and effective way to ridicule feminine independence and to warn of the dangers of allowing women even the least bit of power¹⁶.

Gálvez's use of this image of the Amazon in the title to her play was undoubtedly meant to attract the curiosity of audiences hungry for ever more unusual and exotic situations. Coé lists six other plays of the period that had either «slave» or «Amazon» in their titles. Yet none of them have this combination -the Amazon slave-woman. It is an absurd image. A warrior slave-woman, both guard and guarded, a creature of myth, a strange mélange of cultures -she is an impossibility. An esclava amazona, thus, can be seen as a symbol of late eighteenth-century woman. She had been educated and allowed some intellectual autonomy. Many, like Gálvez herself, were led to venture into areas normally reserved for men, because they believed the preachings of the Enlightenment. Yet also like the amazonas of her play, women in Gálvez's day were only afforded very limited power by the men who ultimately controlled them. They were denied happiness, since they were denied true independence. Gálvez the single career woman, the woman who sought fame and independence through her art, was, like the esclava amazona, also an impossibility -an Enlightenment absurdity. But her search for gloria and her constant battles with the male establishment in the Church, the government and the theater, left her weary and defeated at the end of her life. In the play, the only choice for an esclava amazona was to resign herself to marriage. For María Rosa Gálvez it was artistic submission. She never wrote another play after Las esclavas amazonas, and within months she died tragically of an unknown illness, at the age of 38. Las esclavas amazonas, therefore, seems so much more than just a really bad play. Its excesses and absurdities shout out a last bitter protest by a woman who spent her career searching for happiness and decrying the female condition, and the play points out the importance of excess to María Rosa Gálvez's writings.

The Amazon women of Gálvez's last play were not her first Amazon-like female characters. Her comedies are full of powerful women who dominate and ridicule the excesses of the men around them¹⁷. The most powerful and Amazon-like of them all is Guiomar, the widowed country aunt of Familia a la moda (The Fashionable Family), first performed in April of 1805, but never published during Gálvez's lifetime. In it doña Guiomar comes to town to set her lazy brother and his frivolous family straight before promising them her estate in her will. Neither subject to husband or father, the widow Guiomar is free to speak her mind, and Gálvez uses her to represent the truly liberated eighteenth-century woman. Since she is also rich, it is she who mandates the actions of the others. In fact, male concerns are peripheral in this play. Although there is the issue of don Canuto's gambling debts and the son Faustino's inheritance, the main conflict is between doña Guiomar, her sister-in-law Madama de Pimpleas, and the Madama's daughter, doña Inés. Inés has been shut away in a convent, not for religious concerns, but because of her mother's vain jealousy of her own daughter's youth and beauty. Although betrothed to the hardworking Carlos, Inés is being forced by her mother to become a nun or to marry the arrogant Marqués de Altopunto. Don Canuto reveals even more about the motivations of his wife:

Obra, hermana, con cordura, por que harás una diablura si traes aquí a la muchacha. Ya verás que es muy hermosa, joven, llena de candor, y así no la hace favor su compañía a mi esposa.

(4.8)

Tread carefully sister, because you'll be in trouble if you bring the girl here. You'll see soon that she is very beautiful, young, full of candor, and thus her company is not appreciated by my wife.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), study the fairy tale «Snow White» and its implications for female literary archetypes. They find represented in this traditional story the two principal images of woman held by Western society -the selfless and angelic Snow White, versus the individualistic yet evil Queen:

The Queen's husband and Snow White's father [...] never actually appears in this story at all, a fact that emphasizes the almost stifling intensity with which the tale concentrates on the conflict in the mirror between mother and daughter, woman and woman. self and self.

(37)

The contrast between these two opposite yet connected selves -the angel versus the witch- is one that Gálvez explores in La familia a la moda, as well as in her tragedy La delirante. However, in La familia a third woman is added, one who is strong and self-minded like the wicked Queen of «Snow White» but who is also good and loyal to her family, looking out for the weaker innocent girl. That third woman is Guiomar.

Guiomar stands strong, despite being opposed by almost everyone she meets at Canuto's house. She endures insults about her «backwards» dress and behavior, as well as threats from her rival, Madama de Pimpleas. At first the Madama fights Guiomar by fainting, a calculated move to paint Guiomar as the culprit of the family problems and to control her daughter. The good-hearted Inés believes her mother:

INÉS Madre... Carlos, llamad a mi padre.

CARLOS Ya voy

INÉS También a Faustino. Válgame Dios, ¡qué desgracia! ¿No ves tía, lo que os dije?

GUIOMAR ¿Ese histérico te aflige? Vaya, pues si es una gracia.

(2.6)

I Mother... Carlos, call my father.

C I'm going now.

I Also call Faustino. Oh dear God. What a misfortune! Don't you see, aunt, what I told you?

G Those hysterics bother you? Come now, it's quite amusing.

Finally Guiomar's prudence prevails over the Madama's extravagance and in the end, Inés and Carlos are to be married, Faustino will get the proper education of a young gentleman and Canuto will become the head of his household again. Guiomar's closing words express the moral intent of the play:

Yo, a pagar lo que tu debas, hermano, y tu a gobernar tu casa sin malgastar, que ya un escarmiento llevas: puesto que a nadie acomoda invitar en sus sandeces todas las ridiculeces de una familia a la moda.

(3.12)

I will pay what you owe, brother, and you will govern your house without wasting your money, since you already nave had one punishment. Therefore it benefits no one to invite in their folly the ridiculous behavior of a fashionable family.

The happy ending of this play is a result of Guimar's actions. Excessive spending is squelched and excessive behavior corrected. However, there is an underlying message for women in La familia a la moda that is far more important to the play than its stated purpose of correcting societal vanity. As we have seen, most of the play's action centers around the relationships between the three female characters. As Kathleen Kish has noted, a primary concern in drama was the correction of female manners, but here instead of using the «carrot and stick» approach that Kish finds in male-authored drama -filling the stage with negative women characters while opposing them with self-effacing positive heroines- Gálvez goes much further. Madama de Pimpleas is the typical enlightenment anti-heroine: selfish, vain and a bad mother¹⁸. Opposite her is Inés who, although being a good daughter, is too weak to triumph over ignorance and tyranny. Balancing the two is the Amazon-like Guiomar. She represents enlightenment morality, yet departs from the conventional representation of angelic female virtue. Guiomar is an overbearing, stubborn and bossy old woman. Gálvez's model of female virtue is not necessarily a likeable one, but Guiomar, prudently rational and her loyal to her family, presents a positive and strong figure for women to emulate.

While similar in plot to Moratín's famous and very popular El sí de las niñas (which appeared a year later in 1806), Gálvez's play has some important differences, especially in the figure of Guiomar. Although she serves a similar function in the union of the two young lovers, Guiomar is not as directly involved in its outcome as the aging don Diego of El sí de las niñas, who loses his bride to his nephew. Thus instead of the love triangle of Moratín's comedy, La familia has a female conflict triangle of Isabel-Madama-Guiomar. Marriage is only indirectly important to Gálvez's play, with its main concern being the proposal of a new model of feminine happiness. When Guiomar wins the battle against her vain sister-in-law over control of the young Isabel, her model of feminine virtue symbolically wins over the next generation of women to «guide» them, as her name suggests. We have already seen similar attempts to guide and influence the younger generation of women in Josefa Amar y Borbón's «Oración gratulatoria» and Discurso de la educación física y moral de las mujeres, as well as in María Gertrudis Hore's poems to her young friends. Happiness as expressed in all of these texts, is found in part in solidarity with other women.

Los figurones literarios (The Literary Figures)¹⁹, published in 1804 in her Obras poéticas but never presented on the official stage, also advocates feminine power, especially the power to choose a mate. Since it also criticizes the poor artistry and false pedantry of contemporary dramatists, some critics have maintained that this play was a mere imitation of Leandro Fernández de Moratín's earlier La comedia nueva (A New Comedy), Juan Luis Alborg and John Cook among them. Yet Daniel Whitaker, in his article on «Los figurones literarios of María Rosa Gálvez as an Enlightened Response to Moratín's Comedia nueva» adeptly discredits this view. After comparing the similarities between Moratín's play and Gálvez's -both ridicule an inexperienced playwright, in both a projected marriage is canceled and both call for reform of Spanish theater- Whitaker focuses on the many differences. He concludes, «Whereas La comedia nueva supports the traditional role of women obeying a masculine authority, Gálvez in Los figurones literarios provides different role models for women» (11). For Whitaker Los figurones literarios is not a poor imitation of Moratín, but rather a response to him, joining with his call for reform of the Spanish stage while rejecting the patriarchal message of La comedia nueva (12).

In Los figurones literarios, Gálvez develops her strong female characters even further, while she ridicules excessive male behavior. As Whitaker states, the heroine of Los figurones, Isabel, is «a key character in Gálvez's comedy» (9). She, like Guiomar of Familia a la moda, is not only the voice of reason in the play but also the model of reasonable behavior, which contrasts to male unreasonableness. The uncle Panuncio, one of the figurones, has an exaggerated opinion of his intellect and talent:

Que la ciencia universal infusa está en mi cerebro, y mi vasta erudición es el científico fuego que ameniza, que fecunda los estériles talentos de nuestra España.

(2.2)

Universal knowledge is infused in my brain, and my vast erudition is the scientific fire that fertilizes and makes pleasing the sterile talents of our Spain.

Panuncio's over-inflated opinion of himself blinds him to the true nature of his silly friends (whose names are Epitafio, Cilindro and Esdrújulo -or Epitaph, Cylinder and Three-Syllable), and he plans to marry his niece Isabel to one of them, the pedantic don Epitafio. While Isabel is amused at the ridiculous prospect of marrying Mr. Epitaph, her cousin and lover Alberto overreacts:

Casarse Isabel con otro a mi vista... ver burladas mis finezas, mis deseos, y sobre todo la ingrata celebrar con alegría la noticia que me mata.

(1.5)

Isabel marry another right in front of me... see my expressions of love, my desires and most of all see the ungrateful woman happily celebrate the news that is killing me.

Alberto is controlled so much by his emotions, that in the last act he even seeks a solution to his problems through violence.

The real power in Figurones, however, is gained peaceably by Isabel. Her rejection of male authority that Whitaker has noted is an important step in her move toward gaining this power in the play. First she rejects male dominance in order to be the ruler of her own actions. In act 2, scene 4, Alberto questions Isabel about how she plans to oppose his father's authority. For Isabel the solution is simple: «¡Grande esfuerzo / de resolución! Negar / mi mano y mi amor a un necio». («Some great effort of determination! I'll just deny my hand to a fool»). Isabel achieves her freedom by simply claiming liberty for herself, rejecting male authority over her and choosing her own mate.

Throughout the play stereotypes of feminine sensibility are debunked, as Isabel's cool confidence is contrasted to Alberto's hysteria. Isabel speaks of Alberto's «extremos» and comforts him in act 2, scene 4, saying: «Ven, ven a mis brazos. ¡Pobre Alberto, qué susto has pasado! Vamos a arreglar estos enredos, y ensancha tu corazón» («Come, come to my arms. Poor Alberto, what a scare you have had. We're going to fix this mess, and cheer up your spirits»). Time and again, Alberto looks more like the pitiful sentimental heroine and Isabel his «manly» savior.

Gálvez further ridicules the sexist sensibility cult in a conversation between Isabel and her mother, Evarista. Isabel, who has been reading travel literature, tells her mother of the custom in India of a widow burning herself in her husband's funeral pyre. Evarista is scandalized at such a practice, exclaiming that this custom must be prevented from entering Spain:

¿Qué fuera de nosotras las viudas, si nos privaran de aquella satisfacción de llorar al que yace? ¿Y cuántas de ellas, relevando su hermosura con sus lágrimas y quejas, sacaron del novenario quien minorarse su pena?

(3.1)

What would become of us widows, if they deprived us of the satisfaction of crying for the deceased? And how many women, who by revealing their beauty with their tears and sighs, Have found during the mourning period someone to lessen their pain?

While sensibility teaches that women are most beautiful when they are most vulnerable and unhappy, women use this appearance of debility to their advantage to find pleasure, even happiness, as Isabel adds:

Y también dice un adagio, que no tenemos en nuestra vida un día más feliz que aquel, en que come tierra un marido.

(3.1)

And also an old adage says that we never in our lives will have a happier day, than that day a husband bites the dust.

Again, feminine happiness is equated with freedom, especially from the domination of men.

Not only does Isabel claim power over herself -her liberty-, but her calm rationality wins her power over the men in the play as well. In the end, Panuncio declares:

Desde ahora, Lucas, no has de abrir la puerta a nadie, si mi sobrina no te concede licencia.

(3.12)

From now on, Lucas, you will not open the door to anyone if my niece does not give you permission.

Isabel concludes the play as the voice of reason, pronouncing the moral of the story:

Quiero que de mis vivezas me perdonéis, y que unidos en la amorosa cadena, que para nuestros placeres formó la naturaleza, para elegir los amigos usemos de más reserva; pues hombres de bien y sabios son pocos los que se encuentran.

(3.12)

I hope you pardon me my ardor, and that united in the loving chain that nature formed for our pleasure, we use more reserve in choosing friends. Since one rarely finds wise and good men.

The happy ending of this play again comes about through the active efforts of a woman, and teaches everyone -men and women- how to achieve happiness: seek the pleasurable company of the friends of your own choosing, but choose them wisely. But for women, it teaches a less obvious lesson: reject the ideals of women's «sensible» nature and instead stand up for yourself, finding happiness in personal autonomy.

Un loco hace ciento (One Madman Makes One Hundred) also criticizes male excess and advocates female independence. This comedy, which was her first, was intended as a concluding fin de fiesta for her first original tragedy, Ali-Bek in 1801. Un loco hace ciento combined two popular themes of the day -false foreign sophistication and a woman's right to choose her mate. The first was a topic of much discussion, both in literary works -especially in the sainetes of Ramón de la Cruz where the feminized images of male and female petimetres are ridiculed -as well as in public policy- such as Prime Minister Floridablanca's call to end lujo by establishing a national «dress» for women. Yet despite these typical associations between excess (in dress and behavior) and the feminine, Gálvez makes lujo in Un loco hace ciento a male sin.

The female figure most often ridiculed by men in eighteenth-century Spain was the petimetra, a French-influenced character type who, obsessed with consuming the latest fashions from Paris, often neglected family, home and the social duties of her class. She embodied for the Enlightenment fathers the dangers of female independence. Jerónima, the object of ridicule in Nicolás Fernández de Moratín's play La petimetra (1762), consumes both fashion and time in excess, wasting her uncle's money on clothes and accessories, and most of her day dressing in them. For Jerónima, her fancy dress is a sign of sophistication, placing her in a higher social class, as she tells her servant in the first act:

Dime, ¿dónde has visto tú que una mujer de mis prendas use dos veces seguidas una cosa mesma? Que eso se estilará en tu lugar, donde todo el año entero la propia saya y jubón trae la mujer del Alcalde, y, si no lo halla de balde, no se muda ni un cordón. Mas yo que tal cual me veo, a Dios gracias, poderosa, ¿por qué he de usar una cosa, como tú dices, arreo?

Tell me, where have you ever seen a woman of my status wear the same thing two times in a row? That might be acceptable where you are from, where the wife of the mayor wears the same skirt and jacket all year long, and she won't even change the trim if she doesn't find it somewhere for free. But I, thank God, who find myself powerful, why should I have to wear something, as you put it, daily?

Jerónimas's excessive consumption of fashion not only gave her a skewed notion of her own social class, it perhaps more importantly gave her a sense of «power», which male writers sought to control. As Carmen Martín Gaite comments:

El aire de petimetra tenía que ver con el deseo de llamar la atención, con la extravagancia, con los cambios de humor [...] era, en definitivo [...] desbaratar la imagen de La perfecta casada de fray Luis, echarse en brazos del lujo.

(87)

Putting on the air of a petimetra had to do with the desire to call attention, with extravagance, with changes of humour [...] it was, definitively, to break the image of the Perfect Housewife by Fray Luis, and throw oneself in the arms of luxury.

The petimetra, though criticized harshly by both men and women, represented on one level a rejection of the prescribed role for women as the «perfect housewife» that had dominated thinking about women's place in Spanish society since at least Fray Luis's book on the subject in the sixteenth-century, La perfecta casada²⁰.

Ramón de la Cruz is another playwright who criticized the petimetra's subversion of social order. His one-act sainetes abound with both petimetras and petimetres, and they came to represent for Cruz everything anti-Spanish. One such play, La civilización, voices another «power» of the petimetra that needed to be controlled, her sexuality. In this play a rich marqués has inherited a small, and in his opinion, backwards rural village. In his attempt to «civilize» the town, he brings in some city folk, notably two pairs of petimetres and petimetras. The two city ladies set about their task of bringing the country women up to speed and the first thing they suggest is that they adopt the custom of the cortejo, whereby a married woman takes on a male suitor as her companion. In a country where women had been guarded from contact with men other than their husbands, fathers or brothers behind the reja of their homes or of the convent, the idea of actually welcoming another man into her home, and often into her bedroom, as a «companion» was scandalous, and from the point of view of conservatives like Cruz, it was a female liberty that needed to be stopped²¹.

Therefore, petimetras became for many eighteenth-century male authors the symbol of many social ills. They represented transgressive female independence, an Amazon-like figure that broke with traditionally strict gender and class roles. They also embodied the anxieties of a changing Spanish economy and society. Rebecca Haidt has called the petimetra (along with her male counterpart, the petimetre) «the most obvious urban sites of the reign of fashion and luxury» and argues that this figure must «be understood as an important reference of contemporary cultural tensions around the importing and marketing of specific types of luxury goods» («The Names of Clothes» 71-72)²². Enlightenment thinkers were often ambivalent about the presence of luxury in the new economy since, «in a world of mercantile consumption, the desire for luxury, the satisfying of desires rather than needs, is the mainspring of the economy» (Bell, «Adam Smith» 106). Luxury posed another problem for Spain, because most «luxurious» goods were imported. In fact, this sector of the economy was so important, that, in an attempt to develop the Spain's own textile industry, the government set out to force a «national dress» on women, which would have been comprised exclusively of domestically produced goods. A proposal was first set out in a 1788 treatise by an anonymous, and supposedly female writer, who suggested not only that women be forced to wear clothes made exclusively of domestic goods, but also that women dress according to their class²³. The matter was referred to the women's auxiliary group of the important Economic Society of Madrid, the Junta de Damas. When first approached by their male colleagues, the Junta de Damas agreed to join in their campaign to end lujo. But when the Prime Minister Floridablanca, acting on behalf of the King, tried to force them into accepting a proposal for a national uniform for women made solely of domestic goods, they balked. The Junta's secretary, the Countess of Montijo, was charged with the negative response to the king's minister, which she carried out with surprising candor. Among her arguments against this national dress is the following:

El querer, pues, que se establezca un traje [...] nos parece que no sería seguir el natural, sino chocarle abiertamente [...]

(Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes I, 120)

To want, therefore, to establish a uniform [...] seems to us not to follow natural instinct, but rather openly goes against it [...]

Montijo objected to both the practicality of the proposal, as well as its serious limits on female independence. She especially opposed the proposal to distinguish women in their dress by class, which she found offensive and «hateful». Theresa Smith concludes in an article about the controversy that «[L]urking behind the proposal for a female national dress was a desire to reinstate notions about gender and class that liberal ideology ultimately challenged» and that «[I]t suggests that women's emergence into the public sphere was both a significant and contested social transformation of the era» (84).

Thus, in 1801, after so much had been written and performed criticizing women's excessive behavior, María Rosa Gálvez presented her very first play to the public, Un loco hace ciento, employing similar themes of excessive consumption of foreign goods, false sophistication and women's independence. The play opens in don Pancracio's salon. From the first lines, Gálvez turns the tables on her male counterparts. Much like the shallow petimetras of Moratín and Cruz, don Pancracio is fussing with his servant Ginés over his hairstyle:

DON PANCRACIO.-  Pues vamos pronto, que ya no tardará en venir el marqués, y no quiero que me halle sin peinar

GINÉS.-  ¿Y cómo ha de ser hoy el peinado?

DON PANCRACIO.-  Bestia, ¿no has visto ayer la lámina, y te pones a peinarme sin haber estudiado antes el modelo? Ve aquí lo que yo digo: toda la vida sirviendo, y cada día más torpe. Si no se te puede tolerar.

(1.1)

DON PANCRACIO.-  Now let's hurry, the marquis will be here soon, and I don't want him to find me without my hair done.

GINÉS.-  And how do you want it today?

DON PANCRACIO.-  You brute, didn't you look at the picture I gave you yesterday? And you've begun to fix my hair without having studied it? This is what I am saying: he spends his life serving, and yet grows more stupid every day. This is intolerable.

Throughout Un loco hace ciento male narcissism, not female, is criticized, and fathers, not mothers, are duped by the false sophistication of their daughters' suitors. Don Pancracio is vain, frivolous and impatient with his servants and family. He plans to marry his daughter Inés to the Marqués de Selva-Amena, whose false sophistication impresses Pancracio but not Inés:

DOÑA INÉS.-  [...] esa insustancialidad, ese desprecio de todo cuanto no ha venido del otro lado de los Pirineos, esa afectación ridícula de los aires extranjeros, y en una palabra, el ningún juicio que Ud. manifiesta...

EL MARQUÉS.-  ¡Soberbio discurso! Estoy encantado de ver las expresiones que dicta a Ud. el amable rubor de la doncellez. ¡Ah! En breve aprenderá Ud. a mi lado a desplegarse, y mejorar sus ideas.

DOÑA INÉS.-  Jamás estaré al lado de Ud. Jamás podré sufrirlo.

EL MARQUÉS.-  Mejor. Después de casados nos visitaremos con ceremonia. Eso es más del gran tono.  (EL MARQUÉS se mira en el espejo.)

(1.5)

I.-  [...] that lack of substance, that disdain for everything that hasn't come from the other side of the Pyrenees, that ridiculous affectation of foreign airs, and in a word, your lack of judgment...

M.-  What a proud speech! I am enchanted by the expressions that the lovely modestly of maidenhood has spoken to you. Oh! Soon you will learn at my side to open yourself up and improve your ideas.

I.-  I'll never be by your side. I could never stand it.

M.-  After we are married, we'll just visit each other ceremoniously. That is more the way things are done. (THE MARQUIS looks at himself in the mirror.)

The marquis and don Pancracio constantly examine themselves in mirrors. Later, as the servants go through the pockets of some of the ridiculous costumes that are brought for the two men, they find little mirrors tucked into the pockets, and declare «¡Qué exceso de prevención!» («What excessive preparation!»; 1.15). Their excessive behavior is evident to everyone but to Pancracio and the marquis, but Inés has a plan to bring her father to his senses.

The young Hipólito, to whom Inés was previously betrothed, arrives in scene 10, with all the affectations of another petimetre. He brings with him a trunk full of the «latest fashions» from Paris and insists that the entire household dress in the ridiculous garb. The plan, revealed in scene 28 to have been instigated by Inés, was to deceive her father and the marquis, by exposing their excesses:

Venzamos esta preocupación por medio del artificio. Preséntate mañana a mi padre cargado con todas las ridiculeces de un joven viajero aturdido, y por pocos instantes de ridiculeces de fingimiento tienes segura la posesión de tu fiel amante.

Let us overcome this worry by means of artifice. Present yourself tomorrow to my father loaded with all the ridiculous trappings of a silly young traveler, and for a few instants of pretend folly you will have sure possession of your faithful lover.

Hipólito not only convinces don Pancracio with his ridiculous behavior and dress, but he also convinces the marquis to give up his claim on Inés with the help of a trunk full of the «latest» fashions from Paris (scene 21). Hipólito passes out the clothes to prepare for his farcical wedding. Even the notary public, who has come to prepare the marriage license, is bedecked in a silly hat and robe. Don Pancracio dons an outfit that reads «Un loco» («One Madman») on one side and «hace ciento» («Makes One Hundred») on the other, exposing his laughable behavior. An element of meta-theater is cleverly added when the Marqués exclaims «¡Oh! ¡Qué bello título para una petite pièce!» («Oh what a beautiful title for a petite pièce»). The Marqués is eventually exposed as a fraud and don Pancracio, having learned his lesson, pronounces the last lines of the play speaking for the author herself, further underscoring the meta-theatrical aspects of the piece:

Y si él sirve para corregir la preocupación de las personas extravagantes, quedarán premiados los desvelos de una española amante de su nación, que por desterrar este defecto, ofrece esta pequeña pieza a la diversión del público.

If this play serves to correct the preoccupations of extravagant people, the anxieties of a Spaniard who loves her nation will be rewarded, and in order to banish this defect she offers this little piece for the entertainment of the public.

The figure of the male petimetre, was frequently ridiculed in eighteenth-century literature. Rebecca Haidt finds in this male character type the expression of a number of eighteenth-century anxieties over sexuality and «otherness»:

Signaled through the likening of petimetres to foreigners, women and animals, the differences resident in petimetres' bodies were configured by interpreters within a cultural logic inherited from ancient physiognomic systems of mapping bodies and outside of equally traditional cultural constrictions of appropriate behavior for upper-class men.

(Embodying Enlightenment 111)

Gálvez uses many of the same comic devices as Ramón de la Cruz and other male playwrights to ridicule the effeminate petimetre, but with one important difference. The petimetres of previous plays were often single and young. But in Gálvez's Un loco hace ciento, the figure being ridiculed is the father. So while audiences laugh at him for the same reasons they laughed so many times at his type before, Gálvez uses the anxieties of «otherness» expressed in their laughter to subtly show that the «other» men fear is not other at all, but rather is part of themselves. It is the father. Instead of the wise old father being the voice of reason in the play, a young woman shows the way to all the male characters.

While Inés is only present in nine of the twenty-one scenes, and only has a substantial speaking part in five of them, she is nonetheless instrumental to the play and in many ways its most important character. She serves as the female voice of reason, almost hovering above the mundane concerns of the men around her, and the happy ending of this play depends on her carefully contrived plan to shock Pancracio and the Marqués de Selva-Amena into seeing their folly. In later comedies Gálvez expanded the role of her female characters, but Inés is a start towards a comedy that asserts the power and wisdom of women, through which the playwright shows that the utile dulce enlightenment reformers sought was possible without belittling women.

Despite the typical association between excess (in dress and behavior), and the feminine in male-authored literature and in male-dominated politics, Gálvez makes lujo a strictly male sin. Ironically, the laughter at the excessive imitation of everything foreign in Un loco hace ciento relates to the excessive tears of the tragedy that accompanied it that opening night in 1801, Ali-Bek. In Ali-Bek, the object of consumption is not clothes, but rather a woman, the heroine Amalia. In the end, masculine excess tragically triumphs over woman, and Gálvez's dreams of a reasonable and ordered world where women gain the independence and power of the Amazon was only that, a dream.