Familial Triangles: Eduarda Mansilla, Domingo Sarmiento, and Lucio Mansilla

Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe

Una escritora, y más si pertenece a la alta sociedad, no está sujeta a la crítica que podemos soportar nosotros.

In a newspaper article in which he examines the writing of the high-society author Eduarda Mansilla, Domingo Sarmiento questions the degree of criticism to which a woman writer should be subject. Upper-class women must be treated with respect and cannot be included in the «nosotros» of male writers who criticize (and thus publicize) each other's work. A woman's writing is too frivolous to be seriously engaged or critiqued, and is only brought to the public eye because her male audience condescends to agree to this. Here I examine the critical reception of Eduarda Mansilla's texts by two male writers: Sarmiento and her brother, Lucio V. Mansilla. Both enact critiques that heed Sarmiento's injunction and act as her conduits into the world of letters, although by praising her they are also dismissive or patronizing. In doing so these men also enact their anxieties about their own fraught relationship with each other: their criticism demonstrates more about their respective uncertainties towards questions of identity, social position, nationalism, and «civilization» than it does about the relative merits of her oeuvre. Through their responses to Eduarda's writing, the two men enhance their own authorial claims, bolster their political views, and subtly provoke each other. The woman in the triangle becomes the locus of these internecine patriarchal battles, and her writing is subject to a strategic misreading that reveals the class and gender tensions that strained not only Argentine letters but also definitions of national identity in the late nineteenth century.

In this period, European culture permeated Argentine politics and society, not only because of a strong foreign presence, but also because many Argentine intellectuals and members of high society traveled to Europe and kept up with European literatures, fashions, philosophies, arts, and gestures¹. Sarmiento was President of Argentina from 1868-74. His statesmanship revealed not only his belief in education and civilization according to European tenets, but also his simultaneous fascination and fear of the barbarous elements that emanated from the Argentine provinces and threatened to impede progress and order in the new country. This worldview was already defined in his famous 1845 essay, Facundo, in which he insisted on the division between civilization and barbarism despite his obvious attraction to the details of gaucho lore and life. Reviewing Sarmiento's upbringing in a poor yet respectable provincial Spanish family, Adolfo Prieto takes a psychoanalytic approach to Sarmiento's position which helps clarify the pressures of his identity: «el odio de Sarmiento hacia la chusma vil y el gauchaje podría interpretarse como una proyección de su inconsciente temor a ser confundido con ellos. Un medio de defensa trabajado por oscuras experiencias de la niñez y la juventud» (71). Sarmiento was not from Buenos Aires, and though he was president in the 1860s, he was not part of the founding generation of 1837 because of his geographical and social background. Unlike the Mansillas, his family was not influential and he was an autodidact, a self-made man who taught himself the languages and literatures of Europe and North America. What could Sarmiento, positioned as he was, make of the Mansilla family with its connections to the Argentine oligarchy and to Europe, and their infamous, barbaric uncle?

While their familial relation to the Federalist dictator Rosas linked them to the type of despotism against which Sarmiento writes, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla were prime examples of the Argentine identification with Europe. The siblings' prose is imbued with a strong sense of what Argentine identity should be at the same time that it is riddled with European references². Lucio's literary identity was inseparable from his public persona, and in both he commingled the European with the Argentine. In his prose as well as in his life Lucio was, variously, a dandy, a hero, and an Indian, inhabiting all those identities precariously yet productively. Like her brother, Eduarda was also highly educated, multilingual, and at ease in both European society as well as with the crème-de-la-crème in porteño circles, and her personal and literary choices were noticed and admired by the public. While both siblings attracted attention not only to their writing but also to themselves, Eduarda's public persona was often divided from her literary one. Through the use of pseudonym, foreign language, and varied narratorial positions, she distanced her public self from her literary one in her fiction, enacting a strategy that many women writers of the period used in order to fight the restrictions placed on their writing because of gender norms.

My vision of the relationship between these three authors builds upon the insights of Francine Masiello and Carlos J. Alonso. These critics have focused, in the first case, on Lucio's translation of one of Eduarda s novels, and, in the second, on the family romance that is played out in Lucio's quest for a father figure and his rejection by Sarmiento. Both Masiello and Alonso analyse the familial structure in each of the particular relationships that they describe: between Lucio and Eduarda on the one hand, and between Lucio and Sarmiento on the other. I take this familial drama to its furthest configuration by adding the Eduarda/Sarmiento piece and triangulating the relationships between the three writers. My triangle is both a biographical and a textual one, based on the details of these figures' lives as they are represented in various written discourses. This new intervention into the critical literature on Sarmiento, Lucio, and Eduarda allows for a deeper understanding not only of the societal pressures levied on the nineteenth-century authors, but also on the gender and power norms of the period.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on triangulation sheds light on certain components of the tripartite relationship. In Between Men, she examines René Girard's configuration of erotic triangles, in which the bonds between two male rivals prove to be as strong as the love for the woman they are pursuing. Sedgwick expands upon Girard's notion and conceptualizes the bond between men as a homosocial one that uses the woman as property and a conduit towards the male partnership. Sedgwick theorizes that «in any male dominated society there is a special relationship between male homosocial [...] desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchy» (25). The woman's role is to control the parameters within which men express their desire or intimacy.

The Argentine triangle of this article demonstrates the complexities of the attempt to «maintain and transmit patriarchy» in the consolidation of the nation. These three authors inhabit the semi-periphery, so that while they consider Buenos Aires to be the cosmopolitan nucleus of an unevenly civilized country, they are constantly aware of the superiority of Paris or London to the provinciality of the southern New World. Each writes his or her texts with the concomitant knowledge of Argentina's relative underdevelopment and their own Europeanized attributes. Lucio and Sarmiento's treatment of Eduarda's text displays their insecurities towards each other, towards Argentina's possibilities, and towards their role as writers and statesmen. Eduarda exerts the power that she has as a Europeanized upper-class woman writer, but -when read through the critiques of her brother and Sarmiento- she functions as an instrument through which they establish their credentials and aggrandize themselves. A reading of the identifications and rejections between these three authors enables us to reflect on the intersections of gender, language, and power during the national consolidation and identity formation that characterized the 1860s and beyond.

In her chapter on Eduarda Mansilla, María Gabriela Mizraje describes some of the interconnections between the Mansillas and Sarmiento and cites various texts where Sarmiento praises Eduarda's writing. One instance in particular stands out as embodying the ways in which his enthusiasm for Eduarda is inseparable from his own self-acclaim. In El Nacional in 1879, Sarmiento publicizes Eduarda's support of his presidency:

Pero es preciso ser mujer y mujer de letras, y autora de bellas composiciones, para escribirle a un cofrade con su letra diplomática, es decir grande y clara, lo siguiente: «¡Si usted no es nuestro presidente será que no lo merecemos, y es lástima! ¡Qué brío, qué vigor, y permita a la literata, qué sal ática! ¡Bravo! mil veces, bravo. Con un abrazo repito: Sarmiento ¡for ever!».

Sarmiento's admiration of her status as a woman writer is inextricable from the use of her words in adulation of himself. Eduarda's praise of Sarmiento, and Sarmiento's praise of her, is predicated on the fact that she is a woman writer: «es preciso ser mujer y mujer de letras». It is only by establishing the gender divisions between them that Sarmiento can garner the full repercussions of her allusions to his vigor, now masculinized through opposition to her womanliness. Without having to promote himself through his own words, he uses the «bellas composiciones» of the woman writer to praise himself and his political aims, and, in addition, comes across as benevolently accepting of feminine writing.

This benevolence is insidious in its praise. By relegating Eduarda's prose to the realm of «womanly» or «feminine» writing, he disassociates himself from any need to really engage with her writing that questions either his politics or the handling of social problems in Argentina. In the article that Sarmiento publishes in El Nacional about Eduarda³, he specifically concentrates on her more «feminine» reviews of balls and society affairs that she publishes in the newspaper, alluding only briefly to her more influential and potentially more disturbing novel, Pablo, which we will discuss later. In the article, he seems, at first glance, to admire her position and her writing:

Es escritor versado, mujer muy mujer y, lo que es más, habituada a los refinamientos del «High life» europeo en cuyo medio ha brillado muchos años en París y en Estados Unidos. En materia, pues, de gasas, flores, brillantes, en elegancia del vestir, en las reglas del 'bon ton' ha de poseer su paleta de colorista tintes que nosotros, escritores de hacha y tiza, no sabríamos combinar.

By using the masculine form of «escritor», Sarmiento elevates her writerly status and signals her accomplishment at having remained «mujer muy mujer» while writing as well as a man. This point is emphasized later in the same article when he uses the word «escritoras» about women writers of dubious quality. Not only is Eduarda a woman and a writer, she is also accustomed to the «High life», to the «bon ton» of Europe, and this gives her a cultural capital that Sarmiento both admires, and perhaps even envies. Through this praise that limits itself to the biographical facts of her gender and her class, he can avoid engagement with her political stance or her ideological concerns found in some of her other texts. Instead, he pleads ignorance about a genre of writing that is devoted to finery and frippery, and emphasizes the dichotomy between that subject matter and the seminal writing of the state that must be carved out with rough materials. The inflection of this statement can be more clearly appreciated if we recall Sarmiento's 1851 letter to Alsina about his Facundo, in which he defends its «fisonomía primitiva y la lozana y voluntariosa audacia de la mal disciplinada concepción» (Facundo 51). Called a «caudillo of the pen», Sarmiento is proud of his hasty and impassioned writing about important matters of politics and history (Shumway 153). Facundo would seem to belong to the masculine sphere of «escritores de hacha y tiza».

The rest of the article continues to patronize Eduarda's writing from the viewpoint of the benevolent and overly generous critic. First, Sarmiento starts the article by alluding to a survey sent to the United States about its women writers, so that he seems poised to write about the state of such matters in Argentina. But how is Mansilla's description of a ball to be considered part of an overview of the role of women authors in the Argentine literary tradition? Sarmiento obviously does not think it qualifies as literature in the same way that an account like Facundo, or, for that matter, Pablo, does. Pablo establishes Eduarda as a real writer, and it should be included in Sarmiento's discourse on Argentine literature in this article, but he lauds her instead for more minor triumphs of writerly skill. In reducing Eduarda's oeuvre to these journalistic accounts (and calling them literature), he misrepresents her writing as frivolous and stemming from a naturally female sense of fashion.

The parameters of women's writing, according to Sarmiento's article, are constrained. He most disparages Mansilla, and women's writing more generally, with his final gibe. Lubricated with courtliness, his last words assure the reader that even if Eduarda's writing were bad, he would be too gentlemanly to say so, considering her gender and her class:

una escritora, y más si pertenece a la alta sociedad, no está sujeta a la crítica que podemos soportar nosotros, pues que una autora cualquiera que sea la medida de su talento, de su instrucción o su estilo nunca deja de ser una mujer, una dama que escribe bajo la égida de la cultura, de la caballerosidad y del respeto de los hombres.

What can we make of this backhanded compliment? Through his defense of Eduarda from the harsh truths of criticism because of her gender and class, Sarmiento also excludes her from the privileged space of literary debate. As Nancy Hanway rightly points out, «In this formulation, women writers -particularly if they are 'ladies'- are isolated from the general body of Argentine writers» (139). Eduarda Mansilla is not a figure that Sarmiento would purposely alienate because of her connections, her family, and her social standing. She represents exactly what Sarmiento professes to want for the civilization of his country: a Europeanized Argentine who can bring high culture to Buenos Aires through her fluency in European languages and customs. Yet she is also disturbingly superior, gaining her European aura and her immersion in high society through her familial background. This lineage is not only rich and conservative, but also federalist and barbaric in the worst way. Her position as a woman renders her peripheral vis-à-vis matters of state or of literature, but at the same time she cannot be so easily dismissed from the centre because of her European status and her writing. Sarmiento finds himself in the ambiguous, yet ultimately empowered, position of eulogizing her while at the same time condescending to her feminine attributes, thus establishing a hierarchy of importance in which the male statesman's writing is higher than the feminine social texts. In the next section, I shall discuss the novels that Sarmiento does not, giving the reader a sense of what Sarmiento chooses to overlook in his evaluation of the admirable Eduarda.

As the wife of the Argentine diplomat Manuel R. García, Eduarda wrote a travel text, entitled Recuerdos de viaje (1882), about their posting in the United States. Towards the end of her account, she describes how her own cosmopolitanism and education do away with North American preconceptions of Argentine culture as primitive or uncivilized. She receives a compliment from U. S. Senator Sumner, who asks her, «'Supongo, querida señora, que allá en el Plata Vd. y Mr. Sarmiento son excepciones? [sic]'»⁴ (Recuerdos 191). The implicit flattery encapsulated in this question bears inclusion in her travel account, because its praise puts her in the same category as the central figure of Sarmiento. However, she also demonstrates a womanly reticence to self-promotion and an acute sense of diplomacy when she proceeds to conceal her response: «mi respuesta no viene aquí al caso: hay cosas que deben decirse fuera de la patria, y callarse en ella» (191). The locus of writing determines what is permissible and what is appropriate, and Eduarda is always careful not to overstep those lines. A closer examination of Eduarda's writing demonstrates her awareness of the norms and strictures that constrain a woman writer's positionality and locus of enunciation.

While I may assume my reader's familiarity with, at the very least, the names or most famous texts of Domingo Sarmiento and Lucio V. Mansilla, I cannot do as much for Eduarda Mansilla. Though Eduarda's writing was popular with her contemporaries and she was a well-known figure in Argentine society, her fame has faded and her work has not been included in the Argentine literary canon. The patriarchal hierarchies that cause such exclusion are due for a revisionist literary history that is beginning to take place, but works by most women writers of the period remain out-of-print and have not yet received substantial critical attention.

Eduarda was famous for her role in upper-class society, her beauty, her fashion, and her wealth. The daughter of a Federalist family, she married a well-known Unitarian diplomat, thus causing a thrilling scandal. She attempted to establish herself as an author, writing journalistic prose and travel narrative, as well as theatre, children's literature, and short stories. Two of her novels are particularly well-known: El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas (1869). Both are set in the provinces of Argentina far from the cosmopolitan life of Buenos Aires, and may be interpreted as attempts to describe certain Argentine realities not so readily available to urban audiences.

In El médico, which she published under the male pseudonym «Daniel», Eduarda tenders a vision of the nation through the use of the domestic plot. She describes the predicament and ultimate success of a provincial family, emphasizing the importance of education and domestic order⁵. The main character, Dr. Wilson, declares views on class, race, education, and progress that are in keeping with the liberal Argentine agenda of the era. Significantly, Wilson is not English but Scottish. His nationality carries a similar status to that of Argentina, since both are peripheral to «proper» civilized and reserved England (or more broadly, Europe). Settled in the provinces of Argentina, the Scotsman is a provincial himself, but he is also considered English in the novel because of his language, education, and temperament. His credentials are never doubted in much the same way that Eduarda, the niece of a barbaric tyrant, remains a representative of high culture because of her Europeanized sensibilities.

The novel is rare in nineteenth-century Argentine literature because it is written in the first person, whereas more canonical texts like Amalia and El matadero are narrated in the third person. Describing the life of this provincial doctor in his own words, El médico could almost be called a fictionalized autobiography. Ricardo Piglia has posited a fundamental generic distinction in Argentine letters of the nineteenth century. He states:

In Argentina, fiction is developed in an attempt to represent the world of the other, whether he be barbarian, gaucho, Indian, or immigrant. This is because, during the nineteenth century, in order to speak of oneself, to tell about one's group or one's class, autobiography is used. Learned men account for themselves in the form of true tales; they account for others with fiction.

In Piglia's argument, autobiography is the privileged genre of the civilized metropolitan writer who defines the ideal citizen through a description of him or herself. The number of autobiographies written by canonical Argentine authors is evidence of the centrality of this form to the project of national definition⁶. Fiction enables the writer to enter into imagining the other's way of life, because the other must also be known in order to become civilized and made part of the national project. In order to understand the problematic other, the civilized writer must immerse him or herself into that being through the use of fiction. El médico is a work of fiction that seems determined to be about the self, about the educated Europeanized family living in the provinces of Argentina and civilizing it according to progressive liberal tenets. The fictionalized European self is both himself and part of the future of the nation through the writing of his autobiography.

Yet this is clearly not Eduarda's autobiography. Much as she shares Wilson's views on mother's rights and domesticity, she does not pronounce these ideals herself but rather puts them in the mouth of a male British narrator. Her position as a woman does not allow her the space within which to articulate such liberal concerns. That said, it is worthwhile to point out that Wilson's masculinity is markedly different from that which Sarmiento posits as his own. He has «feminine»-coded attributes evidenced in his propensity to cry and his emotional reactions to beauty.

In attempting to describe the provinces and to predict their possible future, Eduarda does not imagine a creole narrator, but rather relies upon the agency and perception of the European Wilson. In choosing a non-Argentine narrator, she demonstrates her fundamental distrust of Argentine creoles to populate and civilize the provinces according to the norms that she proposes⁷. Like Sarmiento, Eduarda puts stock in the Northern European immigrants who will help civilize the barbaric interior of Argentina. As Beatriz Urraca has argued, «Her views on race echo Sarmiento's ideal of engineering Argentina's national character out of carefully selected immigrants from northern Europe, eradicating both the Indians of the pampas and the Southern European remnants of colonization» («Yankeeland»). In El médico, Eduarda seems to be walking a fine line between demonstrating her support of Sarmiento's immigration theories (and thus, more generally, his ideas for the future of the nation), and at the same time affording herself the power to say what she thinks about the provinces through the voice of the male European narrator. This empowerment is of course ambiguous, because through it she forfeits the Argentine citizens' ability to develop their own nation and social order, and instead cedes authority to her European character.

In Eduarda's 1869 novel, Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, the narratorial authority is gleaned not so much from the standard third-person point-of-view, but from the place of publication: France. Published when she and García were stationed in Paris, Pablo is written in French. It is a novel wherein are described not only the forced inscription, defection, and death of a young gaucho, but also, with more originality, the place of the women who are left behind and for whom life loses meaning as their roles as mothers and wives are not fully enjoyed. In its descriptions and its commonplace analogies of the pampas with the sea or of Argentina with Arabia, Pablo alludes to a long tradition encapsulated in Facundo but originating in the European travel narratives of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Eduarda takes an objective tone to describe the gauchos and Indians that figure in this text, and thus detaches herself from the emotions and disappointments felt by the characters. While the story itself is tragic, we do not find in the narrative the kind of affect that a Romantic novel of the same era produces. Instead, we have a narrator whose job it is to explain to the European reader the idiosyncrasies of the region that surrounds her city. Not from the provinces herself, she is still informed enough about them to describe them and define them for her audience⁸.

Pablo is a novel that shows the poetic circumstances of barbarism as well as the political mistreatment that cosmopolitan ignorance imposes on the interior. It deals with complex issues of national debate about the pampas, thus confronting Sarmiento's policies as president as well as his writing in Facundo. While El médico has more in common with Sarmiento's ideology, in Pablo Eduarda's federalist family background comes to bear and her novel takes a dim view of many of the policies of Sarmiento's government. However, she accuses both political factions of their failures to educate and engage the gaucho as well as for their disregard of women's situations. Thus Eduarda chose to write Pablo while out of the country because of its possible inflammatory discourse («hay cosas que deben decirse fuera de la patria»). Eduarda's writing engaged with Sarmiento and Lucio's texts on the same subjects, but she struggled with the disempowerment of being a woman who was not expected to have opinions on matters of state⁹.

Pablo was received well in France as an insightful account into the exotic interior of Argentina. The fact of its Frenchness also garnered her prestige in her native land. María Rosa Lojo claims that she wrote in French because it strengthened her credentials in a way necessary for the niece of Rosas:

Esto se explica porque en esa época Eduarda vive efectivamente en Francia, pero también por una necesidad de legitimación cultural (que pasa por su país de proveniencia, por su género y por su filiación política familiar): el afán, acaso, de demostrar que una mujer, argentina y sobrina del «bárbaro» Rosas, puede escribir para los franceses, y tan bien como ellos.

For the Argentine intellectuals of the day, as with their Latin American contemporaries, the French stamp of approval would lead to a more careful and respectful reading of Pablo than if she had published it in Spanish in Argentina. For instance, the only comment that Sarmiento makes about Pablo in the aforementioned article is about its place of publication: she is «una escritora argentina, que se inició con éxito en el romance en Francia, sobre asuntos americanos» (48). Though she may at first glance seem to be distancing herself from her own country and writing an exotic text for foreign perusal, she is also writing for those cosmopolitan Argentine elite who form her social and literary circle. Into the twentieth century, many Argentine figures of the upper class were raised speaking European languages and felt as or more comfortable in English or French than in Spanish¹⁰. Eduarda herself was famous in Argentine circles for her role as a French interpreter for her uncle Rosas and a diplomat when she was only eleven years old. Known for her fluency in French, it is in keeping with this reputation that she writes her novel in that language.

Masiello argues that Pablo «evokes questions about building a nation from the traces of foreign languages and cultures» («Lost» 74). Pablo itself is not about building a nation, however. It decries injustices in the political system and inequalities of social class but, because of its tragic consequences, does not offer a model for the aspiring nation. Thus it is not the content of Pablo that provokes Masiello's questions, but the form in the fact that it was written in French. Eduarda writes of the gaucho in a language that the gaucho does not speak, thus articulating the distance between the reality of the provinces and her ideal of them. As with the choice of Dr. Wilson as a narrator, the multilingual Eduarda is imagining a future Argentina that will be influenced by European patterns, discourses, and languages. Unable to extricate her own creole status from the European legacies and influences that form her identity, Eduarda cannot and will not imagine an Argentina free of the foreign. It is always already part of the nation that she inhabits.

Like Eduarda, Lucio was both Europeanized and federalist. On the paternal side the family was linked to that of the Duke of Normandy, and thus might be considered war heroes not only in Argentina but also in Europe. Yet on the maternal side loomed large the figure of their uncle, Juan Manuel Rosas, the Federalist dictator who embodied a conservative strain of isolationism that sought to establish an Argentine identity separate from the infiltration of European customs and mores. Lucio was a highly educated metropolitan intellectual who hovered adroitly, but anxiously, between the pleasures of civilization and European society and the manly Argentine culture of barbarism, embodied by his uncle and by the pampas. He was both a multilingual Europeanized dandy and a tough army colonel on the frontier of Indian-held land. In «Siete platos de arroz con leche», he describes his return from Europe to Argentina in his early twenties. He was wearing the latest French fashions, but insists that he had not adopted the mannerisms and pretensions that other young Argentines did. He goes to visit his uncle the day after he gets back, and the dictator approves his integrity: «Sí, pues, agregó: estoy muy contento de usted -porque me han dicho [...] que usted no ha vuelto agringado» («Siete platos» 77). Told by an older Lucio, this anecdote reveals a nostalgia and a desire for a time when it seemed that he would be able to be both European and Argentine, both dandy and federalist, and have that stamp of approval from the governing forces.

When Rosas was overthrown in 1852, however, Lucio's federalist past did not serve him well in his quest to find a place for his talents and abilities in the society of the mid-century, as Nicolas Shumway indicates: «At some level, the burden of being a nephew of the most reviled man in Argentina took a daily toll [...] Repeatedly he tried to find a political patron» (256). After a few years, he switched sides but only succeeded in losing former Federalist allies and not particularly ingratiating himself with Presidents Mitre or Sarmiento. He befriended Sarmiento's son, Dominguito, and was by his side when Dominguito was killed in action in Paraguay. Lucio interpreted Sarmiento's appreciation of such a friendship as an expression of the latter's support for his own advancement in society. He promoted Sarmiento's presidential campaign in hopes of being named Minister of War, but was instead sent to the frontier.

It was then that he wrote Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870), a text that blends travel narrative with aphorism, digressionary introspection, journalistic writing, and anecdotes. Many critics have seen Una excursión as a critique of Sarmiento's Facundo and his definitions of civilization and barbarism¹¹. In his reading of Una excursión, Alonso extends Shumway's reading and interprets the reasons for Lucio's trip to the Ranquel Indians and subsequent narrative as the psychological quest for a father figure. In Lucio's life, his uncle Rosas and Sarmiento, almost a surrogate father at one time, vied for precedence in his mind. The publication of Una excursión can be seen, according to Alonso, as a turning point in which Lucio, dishonourably discharged from the army by President Sarmiento, embraced his federalist family heritage and retrospectively adopted Rosas as his father figure.

This adoption occurred most definitively in 1898 with the publication of Lucio's biography of his uncle: Rozas: ensayo histórico-psicológico. By writing it, Lucio acknowledged the familial bonds that tied him to the violent Federalist dictator, Juan Manuel Rosas. In the biography, he attempts to explain and elucidate controversial moments of Rosas' regime, and also reflects on the current state of Argentine politics. In discussing the ambiguities and crossovers between the terms civilization and barbarism and their manifestation in Argentine culture, Lucio disparages Sarmiento's perceptive abilities: «Sarmiento, que era más gran pintor decorativo que pensador, un Víctor Hugo desgreñado de la prosa abrupta argentina, ha pretendido con dos palabras, 'civilización y barbarie', salvar la dificultad, si es que con ella tropezaban; y porque pintaba creía sin duda que definía» (ch VIII). After having established his own credentials as a critic of civilization and barbarism in Una excursión, Lucio savages Sarmiento's Facundo, calling its author a dishevelled writer of abrupt prose who thought that he was definitive when in fact he was descriptive. Like Hugo, Sarmiento is a fiery Romantic who contradicts himself and does not hold to his convictions. One cannot help but recall Sarmiento's derogatory allusions to the descriptive qualities of Eduarda's feminine prose and wonder if there is a gendered insult in Lucio's statement, in which being a thinker is masculine and being a decorative painter is feminine. Sarmiento is, in sum, incapable of understanding the complexities of Argentine culture, but rather he can only perceive them in his abrupt way that does not allow for thoughtful definitions. Una excursión is, by implication, quite the opposite; far from abrupt, its digressions and observations demonstrate the insightful and thoughtful qualities of its author, who refuses to reduce the realities of Argentina's interior to two terms¹².

Alonso argues that «history is projected in [Lucio V.] Mansilla's texts as a family affair, as reducible and reduced to the emotional coordinates of the familial» (95). And indeed, the historical nexus of the relations between the Mansilla/Rosas family and Domingo Sarmiento have all the ingredients of a family romance. A family romance in which the highly charged feelings of Lucio for Sarmiento seem to be reciprocated by Sarmiento, at least when he writes to the young Lucio, «quiero servirle de padre» (Alonso 98). So the anger that Lucio feels towards Sarmiento after his betrayals (both in politics and the military) is manifested not only through his questioning of the civilization/barbarism dichotomy in Una excursión, but also with his turn towards his family.

Sarmiento might be describing in fact, in a veiled fashion, the failures of the relationship and his frustrations with Lucio in the previously analyzed 1879 piece on Eduarda. While eulogizing women's charming power to observe fashion, Sarmiento argues that men cannot imitate women because «nuestro juicio barbudo» would cause these beaux mots to lose «la gracia, el colorido y el 'cachet' femenil». Or worse, «lo haríamos también como una de tantas y nos creerían hijos de mujer» (48). We can speculate that Sarmiento is referring to a man who is capable in fact of rendering detailed observations on fashion, conversation, and style in his writing and even in his public persona: Lucio the dandy. Lucio's accounts of fashionable conversations about cultural events are not so different from those of his sister, and thus he is writing «como una de tantas». What worse insult could a man who has offered to be Lucio's father insinuate? By inferring that his dandyism makes him «un hijo de mujer», Sarmiento denies Lucio the symbolic fatherhood that either he himself or Rosas could offer him. The effeminate man does not belong in the patriarchal structure of influence and patronage that Sarmiento represents, and these comments represent the ultimately damning repercussions of Sarmiento's presence in Lucio's life.

I have already argued that we can find criticisms of Sarmiento's influence and ideas in Lucio's Una excursión and Rozas. Similarly, Lucio used his sister's writing to bolster his battle against Sarmiento, that unfaithful father figure¹³. In his translation of Pablo from the French to Spanish, Lucio both attempted to prove himself superior as a writer to Eduarda, and at the same time made sure that Eduarda was seen to form part of the federalist Mansilla family. She was to become a true ally, firmly on his side of the triangle and not someone whose criticisms of the federalists Sarmiento could enjoy. In 1870, from May to September, Lucio published Una excursión in serial form in La Tribuna. In that same year, Lucio translated Pablo, and it was published serially, again in La Tribuna, in November, only two months after Una excursión. Though Pablo is Una excursión predecessor, both chronologically and thematically, Lucio does not make it available to La Tribuna audience until after he has published his own text on the pampas. His translation, sprinkled with added footnotes that undermine what Eduarda wrote about Indian or gaucho customs, provide an arena for Lucio to demonstrate his superior knowledge of the Argentine interior. For instance, he corrects her terminology: «The author describes 'chañar' as a small thorny tree. She is wrong; the 'chañar' is a corpulent tree» (quoted in «Lost» 75). As Masiello signals in this article, «Through correction and emendation, [Lucio] mutilates his sibling's text and presents himself as the final authority on Argentine rural life» («Lost» 76). Lucio's translation not only adds footnotes, it also slants Pablo politically in ways that Eduarda had not intended. Sibling rivalry may indeed explain the corrections, but it does not explain the reasons for his misinterpretation of her politics. Her brother chose to translate Pablo as a more traditionally federalist text, thus misrepresenting many of the moments of political criticism in the text. Coming soon after his discharge from the army and his feelings of bitterness, this translation may be seen as a way to position his sister more strongly in his camp and against Sarmiento. I contend that this political mistranslation is less an attempt to assert power over his sister than a triangulated gesture where he is attacking Sarmiento by using his sister's text as pawn.

By translating his sister and twisting her ambivalent text to bolster his newly-embraced federalism against Sarmiento, Lucio risks turning himself into an «hijo de mujer», because he is speaking through a position of female authority. The translator's role is one in which his own agency is masked by the name of the author, in this case a feminine version of his same last name. By manipulating Eduarda's text to injure Sarmiento, Lucio is a man using woman's words, and is thus, in Sarmiento's terms, a man without a father through whom to strengthen his identity and affirm his masculinity. In a patriarchal literary culture, to be a woman's amanuensis (and is a translator or transcriber anything other than that?) is to risk the strength of one's position as a male writer. Like Sarmiento, Lucio speaks through Eduarda, using her name and her words to express his own anxieties.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to writing that would establish Eduarda's feelings or reactions to her brother's translation because they are not commonly available. It could be either because they have been lost, or do not exist, or because I have not been able to locate them. Whatever the reason, the implications of this absence are telling. It is not uncommon in the literary canon for works by women to undergo the kinds of strategic misreadings that I have described here. These male readings elide or erase the woman's voice, if in fact there was one. It could very well be that Eduarda kept quiet, knowing that her place in society was to be admiring of the influential men who supposedly supported her desire to be a writer. I cannot fully complete the angles of the triangle because the side of the woman is lost and I, therefore, can only conjecture and speculate. Thus is the familial triangle that I am describing rendered. The woman is the third element used to further or reflect upon the relationship between the two powerful men, who profess their love and admiration for her while engaging in a much more intense struggle/embrace between each other. She is expendable in ways that they are not, and her voice is ultimately less important than the use of it by the patriarchal figures that surround her.

While it may seem that Sarmiento, Eduarda, and Lucio have in common their Europhile tendencies, their concern for defining Argentine identity, and their focus on the provinces as the site of autochthonous culture, upon closer inspection their writing reveals the tensions and rifts in their triangulated relationship. Writing in the liminal space of the urban periphery, they each struggle with their own insecurities. The relations between the three ultimately disempower the woman's texts in order to establish the male credentials of nationality and power. The woman's texts were relegated to the dusty shelves of archives after having been used to make canonical the names of the famous men that praised, usurped, and warped her words.

• ALONSO, Carlos J. «Oedipus in the Pampas: Lucio Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles». The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 84-107.
• CARILLA, Emilio. Literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Educación de la Nación, 1954.
• FREDERICK, Bonnie. «El viajero y la nómada: los recuerdos de viaje de Eduarda y Lucio Mansilla». Mujeres y cultura en la Argentina del siglo XIX. Ed. Lea Fletcher. Buenos Aires: Feminaria, 1994. 246-51.
• HANWAY, Nancy. Embodying Argentina. Body, Space and Nation in 19th Century Narrative. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003.
• JAGOE, Eva-Lynn Alicia. «Pace and the Pampas in Argentine Travel Narratives». Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 81.3 (2004): 361-77.
• LOJO, María Rosa. «Con la transgresión en la sangre». La Nación 8 January 2003. <http://www.lanacion.com.ar/EdicionesAnteriores/Nota.asp?nota_id=463484>.
• MANSILLA DE GARCÍA, Eduarda. El médico de San Luis. Buenos Aires: Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1962.
• MANSILLA DE GARCÍA, Eduarda. Pablo o la vida en las pampas. Buenos Aires: Confluencia, 1999.
• MANSILLA DE GARCÍA, Eduarda. Recuerdos de viaje. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Juan A. Alsina, 1882.
• MANSILLA, Lucio. Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. Caracas: Ayacucho, 1984.
• MANSILLA, Lucio. Rozas: ensayo histórico-psicológico. Buenos Aires: «La Cultura Argentina», 1898. <http://www.biblioteca.clarin.com/pbda/ensayo/rozas/b-372650.htm>. Path: ch VIII.
• MANSILLA, Lucio. «Los siete platos de arroz con leche». Entre-nos. causeries de los jueves. Buenos Aires: Elefante Blanco, 2000. 68-85.
• MASIELLO, Francine. Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992.
• MASIELLO, Francine. «Lost in Translation: Eduarda Mansilla de García on Politics, Gender, and War». Representing the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Ed. Doris Meyer. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 68-79.
• MATHIEU-HIGGINBOTHAM, Corina. «El concepto de 'Civilización y barbarie' en Una excursión a los indios ranqueles». Hispanófila 30.2 (1987): 81-87.
• MIGNOLO, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
• MIZRAJE, María Gabriela. Argentina de Rosas a Perón. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1999.
• MOLLOY, Sylvia. At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• PIGLIA, Ricardo. «Sarmiento the Writer». Sarmiento: Author of a Nation. Ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 127-44.
• PIGLIA, Ricardo. ed. Yo. Buenos Aires: Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1968.
• PRIETO, Adolfo. La literatura autobiográfica argentina. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982.
• RAMOS, Julio. «Entre otros: Una excursión a los indios ranqueles de Lucio V. Mansilla». Filología, 21.1 (1986) 143-71.
• SARLO, Beatriz. La máquina cultural: maestras, traductores y vanguardistas. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1998.
• SARMIENTO, Domingo F. Facundo, o Civilización y barbarie. Ed. Roberto Yahni. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999.
• SARMIENTO, Domingo F. «Páginas literarias». Printed under heading «Literatura argentina». Las escritoras 1840-1940. Ed. Élida Ruiz. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1980. 47-49.
• SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
• SHUMWAY, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
• SZURMUK, Mónica. Women in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2000.
• URRACA, Beatriz. «'Quien a Yankeeland se encamina...': The United States and Nineteenth-Century Argentine Imagination». Ciberletras 1.2 (2000). <http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v01n02/Urraca.htm>.
• VIÑAS, David. Literatura argentina y realidad política: De Sarmiento a Cortázar. Buenos Aires: Siglo XX, 1974.