Florbela Espanca: The Limbs of a Passion

SUNY Plattsburgh

With the advent of the «Flower Revolution» in Portugal in 1974 and the subsequent reevaluation of twentieth-century women writers, Florbela Espanca (1894-1930) emerges as the first in a long line of feminist protest voices. When she died in Matosinhos near Oporto from an overdose of barbiturates on December 7, 1930, the eve of her thirty-sixth birthday, «Bela» was relatively unknown in Portuguese literary circles except for a small coterie of friends and admirers including her Italian translator and confidant Professor Guido Battelli and the poet Américo Durão, the latter who dubbed her «Soror Saudade.» The combination of an unconventional life style, three husbands, and an uncommon drive to compete in an Iberian macho world of sexual prowess and sentiments scandalized her fellow townspeople of Vila Viçosa, and greatly contributed to her detractors dismissing her and her poetry as the prattle of a neurasthenic, the «derrocada louca» of her verse.

Yet the eminent poet and critic José Regio in his preface to the 1946 edition of her sonnets considered Florbela Portugal's greatest woman poet, a «caso único» in Portuguese letters (V-XIV). Her poetic voice is indeed «unique» for a Portuguese woman of her generation. It represents a liberated female voice speaking openly and directly to men and women, lovers, relatives, especially her beloved brother Apeles, and friends about her «coração chagado». But from another vantage point, her voice stands as a demonstrative precursor of the Latin feminist «cri de guerre» against the constraints of marriage, and in behalf of the right of women to live, love and sing their sexuality. In answer to many of her critics who view her poetry as simply a faint echo of António Nobre, the Portuguese poet she most admired, it can be stated that she differs from «Auto» in anchoring her poetic inspiration not in sentiment per se but rather in the sexual imperative of «otherness.» In the sonnet titled «Amar» published in a collection Charneca em Flor in 1930, Florbela dared to utter what constitutes perhaps the single most revolutionary statement in the entire history of the Portuguese love sonnet:

The above eight lines summarize the essential Florbelian conflict, the consuming desire to satisfy her need to love freely as a woman and her inability to channel that love into a socially acceptable, exclusive, monogamous mode. Her severest critics are quick to identify what they perceive to be pure feminine confessional sentiment with a paucity of ideas⁴⁸. But one is reminded of the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé's admonition to his friend the painter Edgar Degas as quoted by another famous Symbolist poet Paul Valéry: «But Degas, it is not with ideas that one makes poetry... It is with words» (140). Admittedly, Florbela does not display great technical mastery of the sonnet form, and her thematic scope is rather limited, but her poems ring true nonetheless because of their captivating intensity, clarity and naiveté coupled with an equally alluring verbal simplicity. She is never vulgar nor pedestrian. On the contrary, her muse displays great restraint

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and finesse. Eschewing the excesses of both a neo-baroque «painterly» style, so common in Portuguese poetry, as well as the vaporous heights of a more cerebral projection, Florbela's verse is characterized above all by the elemental and the sensual, the telluric and the erotic, couched in a plaintive, pastoral minor key. Like a flower in bloom («Trago no nome as letras duma flor»), she lets her body sing naturally, cloaked only in her earthiness. Her originality stems in no small measure from the identification of her body with her passion, and both with the flora and fauna of her native Alentejo province: «Sou a charneca rude a abrir em flor.» In a revealing letter to Guido Battelli, she confesses to what extent she is bound to the earth:

A close reading of Florbela's sonnets reveals the coordinates of her terra mulieris punctuated by the association of three key emblems: «hands» and «arms», «rose», and «mouth», the limbs of her passion forming a triptych within which evolves her entire imagistic system. That she calls attention to the human body in her poetry is clearly evident by the sheer number of times key words reappear in the text. The words «hands» and «arms» appear no fewer than eighty-seven (87) times, more than that of any other single part of the anatomy, including numerous references to «eyes», «breast», and «feet», to name just a few. Love sprouts a limb, the nourishment and growth of which is invariably tactile: «Deus fez os nossos braços pra prender.» But in addition, the grasping hands of love («Dize que mão é esta que me arraste?») are also the generative organs that fashion and refashion her world, creating in its own image an earth-flower of perpetual enchantment in the life-death-life cycle of nature:

Like taproots, hands «tontas de amor» reach out perfuming and embellishing the dark sod, the harsh realities of matter («deram as minhas mãos aroma aos nardos») in their search for the infinite but mortal male embrace:

In more concrete terms, however, the union of limbs of the «divinos braços de Mulher» represents a desperate Sisyphean maneuver to which women are condemned in their «natural» attempt to identify their gender through physical contact with the male. The «otherness» results in the diverse antithetical forces which are self-defeating precisely because they try to unite what cannot be «pieced» together, namely, the outer perimeters of pleasure, sexual identity and the void. To quantify and qualify the «infinite» by enclosing it in a «body» is the ultimate goal and failure of the Florbelian libidinous praxis:

But if hands were made for grasping love, they were also made for feeling pain: «Tuas mãos foram feitas para a dor.» The paroxysm of «prender» must invariably give way to its converse «desprender», the unfastening of the love-hold, the other term of the locus of love. Hands, therefore, become sacrificial limbs representing the outward manifestation of an internal fragmentation, bearing the scars of love's precarious hold as the most visible sign of woman's martyred existence:

«Macerated» female hands are synecdochically transformed into both the stigmata and timepiece by which woman gauges the inner confines of her aging desire and quest. By the same token, limbs soon learn to dress themselves in society's posture and cant, and give themselves over willingly like slaves to physical captivity and emotional servitude:

At the very heart of Florbela's poetic stance lies the omnipresent flower, the ex-voto of both her identity and passion. Indeed, the fate of the flower cycle, «florir», «desfolhar», «pisar», symbolizes the development of her groping for fulfillment in love:

In the Florbelian imagistic bouquet of carnations, lilies, lilacs and violets, and many others too numerous to mention here, the rose incarnates nature's absolute, the «rainha da graça e da beleza» and occupies a privileged and hallowed place appearing thirty-two (32) times, more than that of any other single flower. Long the conventional poetic symbol of passionate love as well as the fragile and ephemeral qualities of female beauty, in Florbela's hands the rose represents an obsessive palpitating presence in affirmation of the nubile female whose petal limbs yearn to be «presas» and «desfolhadas» by the hands of her lover. In an unpublished sonnet titled «Rosas», dedicated to her epistolary friend and confidant Julia Alves, Florbela alludes to the rose as the very quintessence of femininity, synonymous with grace, beauty and nature itself:

Florbela's rose imagery conceals, however, a «thistle», a «nard» and «a broom flower», reflecting the opposing forces at work in her personal life, the vicissitudes of her marital and social entanglements including what she called the «porcaria» of her second divorce: «Fui a heráldica flor de agrestos Cardos.» The flora she wished to display was soiled by an unsympathetic public: «Sob es urzes queimadas nascem rosas.» The recognition she so eagerly sought as a poet was turned into derisive laughter by her contemporaries who preferred to see in her emotionally charged poetry only her unorthodox love fife. It is this pain and disappointment that she echoes in a sonnet «A Maior Tortura» dedicated to «Um grande poeta de Portugal»:

The polarization of the thistle-rose bouquet underlines yet another conflict -the androgynous ramification of Florbela's poetry to which many critics have alluded⁵⁰. Society traditionally has rejected the aggressively vibrant vertical female force that sexually ambiguous youth idealizes: «Que vê num cardo a folha duma rosa.» Equally imposing but perhaps less evident at first glance are the numerous variations of the rose-thistle motif suggesting another ex-voto of spent love: «Quem pisou minhas rosas desfolhadas?» Throughout her oeuvre including her short stories, letters, and poems, Florbela opposes harsh, human, maleoriented «existencia» to fey «florescencia,» the ideal form and essence of female presence and vitality, untrampled by society's oppressive and constraining feet:

Death figures prominently in Florbela's work because love joins life to death. Not only does the eros-thanatos thematic structure form a constant in Florbela's quest for fruition and plenitude, it completes and gives closure to her insatiable hunger for a lyrical desire to be «a rose in bloom» in supine death by returning the «flower» to the origins of life itself, the «nourishing earth», the inner sanctum of identity:

If love is a limb and a rose, it is no less a mouth, «a boca em flor.» It is not coincidental, therefore, that the word «mouth» occurs fifty-three (53) times in Florbela's published son nets, making it second only to «hands» in frequency of citation. Like hands, the mouth is synecdochically depicted as a microcosm of the female ethos, a body within a body, associated with three reference points: «kiss», «soul», and «dream.» Concomitantly, the mouth functions as an active extension of the limbs as well as the point of juncture of two «opposite» beings: «Tua boca desfolha-me num beijo.» Not unlike the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Florbela tends to identify the female mouth with the soul, the tabernacle of florescence and plenitude:

It is the act of kissing perhaps more than any other point of contact that offers the female yet another means of exploring an un known world of «otherness»: «Sabe-se lá um beijo de onde vem?» The kiss, the prelude to coitus, thus defines, internalizes and even perpetuates a tactile dream beyond the grave:

Not only is the mouth the orifice of life itself, it is also the creator of beauty: «Bocas unidas, hemos de bebe-la!» As the transmitter of the spoken word, the mouth is also the font of knowledge as well as a point of articulation where the verbal reality interprets the physical fantasy. But while the woman poet is «aquela que diz tudo e tudo saber», the comeliness of the female mouth emanates precisely from its inner fight, hidden knowledge manifested in its restraint and discretion:

Rejection, which plays a significant role in both Florbela's personal life and in her work as a whole, enters the female through her mouth and limbs, for the rejection of the female kiss is tantamount to the rejection of the female soul: «A flor da minha boca des denhou.» However, once bestowed upon an other female, the kiss serves to heal and affirm other «disdained mouths.» In the sonnet «Crucificada» which forms a companion piece to «Amar», Florbela makes what amounts to her boldest and most unequivocal statement concerning woman as the victim of love and woman as the redemptrix of wounded love for other rejected women:

The sexual freedom she so eagerly desired for herself, she generously accorded others, for in the Florbelian garden, love is openended, never exclusive, where there are no rivals as she reminds her lover:

That Florbela was so uncommonly willing to share her sexual favors and her bountiful love was not as might appear proof positive of her «immoral» behavior because as is often the case, she did not always act on her feelings. Poetry became for her a «surrogate» lover, or as Augustina Bessa-Luis has so aptly suggested «she was simply ingenuously creative» (44). In fact, a childlike attitude characterized all her relationships with both men and women in a desperate attempt to conceal the illegitimacy of her birth. Very often in her poetry the poet sees herself as a child grown old and weary before her time. Sex for her was not an end in itself but rather yet another effort to establish a rapport of equals impossible in her social milieu. Sex, love and self were hopelessly intertwined in «otherness» so that they colored and delineated all Bela's pretentions, artistic, emotional, and social. On another level, creativity formed an import ant part of her «posture», her way of being a «flower» in the world just the way Felisbella Espance, the pen name she adopted in her translations, was her attempt to redefine her self in «other flora» in the literary world. For the pariah-flower, art would transcend the values of this world and give her what married life could not in the beyond, namely, legitimacy and worth: «Porque eu sou Eu porque Eu sou Alguém.»

Any discussion of Florbela's sonnets, no matter how cursory, would be remiss if it did not at least mention their eminently visual quality, which explains to a large measure their accessibility. With no fewer than one-hundred and eight (108) references to «look», «appear», «see», and «vision», in addition to forty-nine (49) instances of «eyes» Florbela invites her reader to contemplate her «olhar interrogador», but she then curiously averts her eyes:

The paradox of sight is in effect the other term of the paradox of love. In wanting to see all, she wanted to love «toda a gente» which in turn translates into a denial of both love and sight. She is in fact sending out the wrong signal because the terms are reversed. Because she couldn't love herself, she couldn't love anyone else. In this sense her poetic view is dysfunctional to a certain degree. To see is to love, but she cannot see; therefore, she cannot love. Hence Florbela projects the desire to blot out the surfs rays and life itself, much like Racine's dark transgressor Phèdre, herself related to the sun from whom she cannot escape⁵³. The recreation she seeks is one of another light, another body, another life. In the perplexing sonnet, «Eu não sou de ninguém», the first quatrain of which is either non-existent or else has been expurgated from all published editions, the quest of her intense, inquisitive gaze is identified with the blind luminescence of her passion to

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be «remade» by the «earth» into «another»:

In conclusion, with each one of her onehundred and fifty-four (154) published sonnets, Florbela Espanca traces the limbs of a passion on her map of love. The poetics of a rose become in turn the romance of a «thistle» rejection in a terra dolorosa. Her flora defiantly erect in life, tellurically supine in death, never ceases to proclaim and feminize with a chiaroscuro palette the «good and friendly earth» of which it forms an integral part, sprouting anew in the eternal cycle of «love» -«earth»- «nature», the menses of florescence:

It is no wonder that the Lusophone world has been paying more attention to Florbela's poetry these past few decades, for in her work is to be found Portugal's first modern «minimalist» female poet who consistently rejects both sentiment in itself as a way of «being» and the labyrinthine baroque style as a way of «creating.» In Florbela's hands Portuguese poetry acquires rough earth tones, speaking at times with a raucous voice, but always enriched by the dark humus of a scarred life.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 73, Number 4, December 1990