An Enlightened Premiere: The Theatre of María Rosa Gálvez

Daniel S. Whitaker

In Las Románticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-1850, Susan Kirkpatrick convincingly argues that Spanish women begin to produce a significant amount of written discourse in the decade of the 1840s, the heyday of the Romantic movement. During these years, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Carolina Coronado, Cecilia Boehl, and other women cultivate influential self-reflexive narratives in numerous newspaper articles and books, and many female authors enjoy a national following. The foremothers of these accomplished literary women live in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century in Spain. Few in number, their voices nonetheless can be heard today in the works of such authors as the poet María Gertrudis Hore, the journalist Beatriz de Cienfuegos, the essayist Josefa Amar y Borbón, the translator Francisca Javiera de Larrea (the mother of Cecilia Boehl), and the dramatists María Rosa Gálvez. Although most of the latter women lack a wide audience and access to the press of the day -Adolfo Perinat designates them the «ínfima minoría "ilustrada"» (16)- their works in prose and verse nonetheless are the first collective challenge to the masculine centuries-old domination of Spanish letters¹.

Among the Spanish enlightened women writing during the reigns of Charles III (1759-1788) and Charles IV (1788-1808), the playwright María Rosa Gálvez probably faced more opposition to her literary activity than her sisters. In contrast to the genres of essay and poetry, the theater had long been the exclusive domain of males. The situation in Spain mirrored that of many countries of Western Europe, in which there were no women dramatists until the seventeenth century (Case 5). Indeed, more women dramatists have flourished during the last half of the twentieth century in Europe and America than in all the centuries before (Hart 3). In all, the masculine guardians of the stage considered the theater's public space, with its potential for instigating social change and even political upheaval, an inappropriate forum for female creativity. In this regard, Michelene Wandor comments, «No wonder, then, that even the woman playwright with the mildest of messages is bound to be seen as an anomaly, if not an actual threat. Who knows what she will say once she gives voice?» (Carry on, Understudies 128).

As is the case with most of her contemporary female writers, María Rosa Gálvez has left us only a tantalizing glimpse of her personal life in a few letters and miscellaneous documents². Born in Málaga in 1768, she was adopted by Colonel Antonio Gálvez and María Ana Ramírez. Antonio Gálvez was the brother of José Gálvez, the Inspector General of Spain (1765-1771) and a key official in the government of Charles III. María Rosa Gálvez married José Cabrera y Ramírez, a captain in the militia, and the young couple moved to Madrid around 1790. In the capital, while her husband pursued a military and diplomatic career, Gálvez entered the cultural life of the enlightened minority, becoming friends with Manuel José Quintana and probably Leandro Fernández de Moratín and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, along with Manuel de Godoy³. Outraged because of her relation with the Príncipe de la Paz, Gálvez's husband abandoned Spain to accept a post in the Spanish embassy in the United States. Gálvez died in 1806 at the age of 38 years; according to her will, she suffered from an unspecified chronic illness and was in financial difficulty at the time of her death.

Towards the end of her life (1801-1805), Gálvez began her remarkable career as an accomplished playwright for the Madrid stage. During these brief years she composed six tragedies, three comedies, three one-act dramas, and a zarzuela; she also translated three plays⁴. Seven of her works were performed in the leading theaters of the capital, including the Príncipe and Los Caños del Peral. Reviews of her plays appeared in such journals as the Memorial literario, instructivo y curioso de la corte de Madrid and the Variedades de ciencias, literatura y artes. Isidoro Máiquez, one of the most beloved actors of the first years of the Spanish nineteenth century, played the leading role in the comedy La familia a la moda. Moreover, the plays of 1804 demonstrated a notable improvement in dramatic skill over those works written and performed in 1801. Without doubt, the tragic death of the young playwright prematurely removed a promising voice from the theater during those last years of the Spanish Enlightenment.

With few exceptions, Gálvez has yet to receive a fair and accurate evaluation of her theater by the critics. During her own time, comments concerning her plays often are colored by the fact that she is a woman working in a masculine sphere of influence. A typical reaction is the response in Memorial literario in 1802 of an unidentified critic (most probably a male) writing about Gálvez's tragedy Ali-Bek. The reviewer begins by underlining his concern about literary women («[...] la naturaleza les ha destinado [a las mujeres] para ocupaciones, sino [sic] incompatibles, a lo menos poco conformes con el cultivo de las letras [...]» 10). Later, after giving a plot summary of the work, the critic excuses himself from a more rigorous examination of the play, saying, «[...] ¿quién se atrevería a esgrimir la crítica contra el bello sexo, y a resistirse a tributarle el incienso de la lisonja?» (12). In our own century, several critics, including John A. Cook and Juan Luis Alborg, have maintained inexactly that Gálvez's success was due in large part to two men, Godoy and Moratín. These and other modern critics exaggerate the role of the Príncipe de la Paz in the production of Gálvez's plays and claim that the dramatist from Málaga imitated the author of El sí de las niñas (Alborg 659 and Cook 393, 395).

María Rosa Gálvez's theater presents a rich selection of eighteenth-century themes, some of which are shared by her male contemporaries. For example, her tragedies Amnón, Florinda, and Blanca de Rossi, like Vicente García de la Huerta's Raquel (1778), stress the right of a society to punish those who threaten its stability as well as the peril of uncontrolled passion. As René Andioc has affirmed, «[...] sea cualquiera el género dramático, tragedia o comedia neoclásica, ambas tratan de infundir en el espectador la idea de una virtud que viene a reducirse al control de los propios impulsos de rebeldía» (400). In addition, Gálvez's Los figurones literarios parallels Moratín's La comedia nueva o el café (1792) in calling for reform of the national stage and the censoring of unqualified playwrights. The affected customs of a Spanish nobility intrigued with foreign fashion and language are satirized by Gálvez in Un loco hace ciento and Ramón de la Cruz's sainetes, such as La comedia de maravillas.

Nevertheless, in contrast to these prevalent universal concerns of the stage of the Spanish Enlightenment, Gálvez's theater differs radically from her male contemporaries in her treatment of women. As Kathleen Kish has stated, the masculine eighteenth-century theater is nothing more than a school for wives, an affirmation of the status quo «designed to demonstrate that woman has good reason to be satisfied with her traditional role» (200). Many works of María Rosa Gálvez, on the other hand, underscore the injustices endured by women and challenge her audience to reevaluate their play in society.

To begin with, Gálvez addresses the topic of female insanity in the tragedy La delirante, in which the demented daughter of Mary Stuart haunts the palace of Elizabeth I of England. Gálvez's historical play parallels other such works of Western European literature underlined by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination) in which the mental health of female protagonists is threatened by the restrictive roles assigned to them by a patriarchal culture. Closely related to this theme is that of female suicide, examined by Gálvez in her tragedies Florinda, Safo, and Blanca de Rossi. In each case, the death of the female protagonist is the direct result of abusive male behavior. In addition, the lachrymose comedy El egoísta confirms the wife's right to separate herself from her husband when the latter threatens her or her family⁵.

Still other themes of interest to women are developed in Gálvez's theater. In the zarzuela El califa de Bagdad, the widow Lemaida defends the right of a woman to receive a pension based on the loyal service of her dead husband⁶. El egoísta documents the financial and emotional drain of the eighteenth-century male escort (the cortejo) on the woman he accompanies as well as his own family. In many of Gálvez's plays, female protagonists unite with each other to defeat aggressive males. For example, as a result of their close cooperation, the white, upper-class Angela and the black Queen of the Congo, Zinda (in the play Zinda) vanquish the Dutch merchant Vinter, who desired Ángela as his wife and Zinda as his slave. Finally, in Un loco hace ciento, Los figurones literarios, and Blanca de Rossi Gálvez anticipates Moratín's El sí de las niñas (1806) in defending a woman's right to choose her own husband.

In three tragedies, Florinda, Amnón, and Blanca de Rossi, Gálvez further develops a common eighteenth-century European topic of great concern to women: male sexual aggression. Perhaps the most famous contemporary work on this subject is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, a novel about the seduction, rape, and eventual vindication of an upper-class, eighteenth-century English woman. Significantly, all three of Gálvez's above tragedies are published in the same year that a dramatic version of Richardson's Clarissa appear on the Madrid stage (Miss Clarissa Harlowe, by Antonio Marqués y Espejo).

In Florinda, Gálvez describes the most famous rape of Spanish lore: the assault of Florinda, daughter of Count Julián, by Rodrigo, the last King of the Goths. Echoing Feijoo's spirited exoneration of La Cava in his «Defensa de las mujeres», Gálvez underlines the physical mistreatment and mental affliction of Florinda as well as her anguish over the loss of Spain to the Moors. Amnón is based on the biblical version of the rape of Thamar by Amnón, David's oldest son (2 Samuel 13:1-39); in Act V an outraged Thamar confronts her royal father and calls for the punishment of Amnón (a punishment the King refuses, for Amnón is his favorite son). Similarly, the five acts of Blanca del Rossi delineate the efforts of the protagonist Blanca to escape the sexual advances of the soldier Acciolino. Only her suicide at the end of the play prevents the achievement of his desires. Considered together, these tragedies highlight masculine sexual abuse and demonstrate that the status quo of female victimization can no longer be continued.

Furthermore, in her comedies and tragedies, Gálvez often presents women as well as men in non-traditional roles. Catalina (in Catalina, o la bella labradora) supervises a large country estate; Bety (El egoísta) oversees a thriving English Inn. Safo is a celebrated poet with an international public. Zinda and Blanca are fierce warriors; and both Zinda and Elizabeth effectively govern their respective countries. On the other hand, Bautista, the husband of Blanca (Blanca de Rossi), earns the respect of his fellow citizens in battle, but at the same time is a compassionate human being and tender lover. Through these roles, the dramatist from Málaga shares with her contemporary, Josefa Amar y Borbón, a desire to dispute the accepted gender-defined behavior of her time. Thus, what Elizabeth Franklin has written of the famous Spanish essayist would also apply to María Rosa Gálvez: «Amar y Borbón, dealing with misconceived physical stereotypes of women and men, asserts that there are men who are beautiful and delicate as well as women who are strong and ugly» (193).

María Rosa Gálvez's theater champions in dramatic form the side of the woman in the three major debates concerning the other sex in the Spanish eighteenth century: the intellectual equality of women and men, the need to improve the education of women, and the specific right of women to choose their own husbands. Consequently, Gálvez's female protagonists are the intellectual equal of their male antagonists and often outwit them; the dramatist's fictional daughters and nieces subvert their fathers' and uncles' will and select on their own more worthy life partners. In addition, many of Gálvez's most articulate female protagonists are those who have received an education equal to the men of their times (the royal Elizabeth in La delirante) or have studied on their own (the bourgeois Isabel in Los figurones literarios). In the latter work, the protagonist begins Act III of the play by commenting on a recent book that she has read.

In all, María Rosa Gálvez's theater allots her an indisputable role in the opening moments of the women's movement of Western Europe. In Julia Kristeva's scheme of modern Western feminism, the dramatist from Málaga falls within the initial phase, or what Kristeva designates «linear time» (36). In this opening period, women aspire an equal status with men, «[...] taking power in social institutions on an equal footing with men; the rejection, when necessary, of the attributes traditionally considered feminine [...]» (36-37)⁷. Likewise, Gálvez approaches Elaine Showalter's category of «feminist», or those women writers of nineteenth-century England who «challenged many of the restrictions on women's self expression denounced the gospel of self-sacrifice, attacked patriarchal religion...» (A Literature of Their Own [29])⁸. Gálvez thus brings to the stage many of the same concerns that «Las Románticas» and other European women authors will cultivate later in the nineteenth century.

María Rosa Gálvez's tendency to call into question the roles assigned to women and men in the patriarchal Spanish Enlightenment parallels another inclination of the dramatist: she will often experiment with the dramatic form in which she unfolds her thematic message. For example, Gálvez many times will modify the neoclassic unity of place in order to enhance the dramatic action on stage. In the tragedy Blanca de Rossi, for example, the action occurs in various parts of the Italian city of Bazano: the town square, Blanca's bedroom, the grand hall of a palace, and the family cemetery. These varied dramatic spaces allow Gálvez to demonstrate Blanca's expertise as a warrior (the town square) as well as Acciolino's undaunted public and private pursuit of Blanca (in the grand hall of the palace and her bedroom). Also, Blanca's suicide at the grave of her husband during the last act (she kills herself to escape Acciolino's lust) is a moving scene that would have lost its dramatic impact had it transpired in another location.

On the other hand, the tragedy Zinda, which underscores the injustices of the slave trade in the Congo, lacks a traditional tragic denouement⁹. In the first two acts of the play, the Queen is the perfect suffering heroine whose only flaw is to trust the white Europeans who are colonizing her country. By the end of Act II, the noble Zinda seems doomed: she has become a slave herself, and she and her entire family are threatened when they refuse to reveal the location of the Congo's gold mines. Yet in the last act the fortune of the Queen improves: with the help of black warriors and sympathetic white settlers, she overthrows the slave trader Vinter, frees her family, and restores order to the kingdom.

The fact is that Zinda, although designated by Gálvez as a «drama trágico», is a propaganda play which calls for termination of the slave trade as a precondition to the European colonization of black Africa. While the death of Zinda would have reinforced the audience's reaction against the abuses of the slave trader, the Queen's demise would have limited the other half of the play's thesis: that responsible Europeans should maintain a presence in black Africa for commercial and religious reasons. As Zinda tells the settler Pereyra in the concluding moments of the play:

Thus, Gálvez's tragic heroine triumphs at the conclusion of her tragedia de tesis and consequently maximizes the play's advocacy of a benign European presence in the Congo and its African neighbors.

In addition, Gálvez as an Enlightened dramatic innovator often ignores the boundaries between the popular dramatic forms of the end of the eighteenth century. In this regard, she adds scenes reminiscent of the sentimental comedy to her tragedy Amnón: a weeping King David persuades Amnón to repent in Act IV, and similarly the King's sobbing softens Thamar's call for vengeance in Act V. These tearful scenes, paralleling other soul-stirring moments in such typical comedias lloronas as Jovellanos' El delincuente honrado and Gálvez's own El egoísta, augment the emotional pitch of the tragedy as well as enhance the characterization of King David. Accordingly, the audience perceives the monarch in Amnón to be a compassionate ruler, much grieved over the conduct of his children. In Los figurones literarios, Gálvez includes scenes that are suggestive of Ramón de la Cruz's sainetes. These farcical moments ridicule the ignorant friends of Don Panuncio and ultimately are the basis for their expulsion from his home.

In the combining of such different dramatic constructs as the sentimental and the tragic, or the sainete and the comedy, Gálvez resembles the Romantic dramatist José Zorrilla. Zorrilla, as David T. Gies has pointed out, mixes elements of the eighteenth-century comedia de magia with the Spanish romantic stage of the 1840s to create the box-office hit, Don Juan Tenorio. Gies concludes: «Zorrilla descubrió una combinación no vista antes en el teatro; enlazó las dos tendencias más populares de su época y llegó a escribir la primera "comedia de magia romántica" en España» (15). María Rosa Gálvez likewise realizes that the enrichment of such plays as Amnón and Los figurones literarios could be achieved by disregarding formal eighteenth-century dramatic confines.

In addition, the incipient European Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century attracts Gálvez's dramatic attention. Russell P. Sebold is the first to observe the Romantic aspects of Gálvez's theater and maintains that she belongs «artística y filosóficamente al primer romanticismo español» (136). In many of her tragedies, Gálvez incorporates such Romantic leitmotifs as the theme of impossible love (Amnón, La delirante), hostile destiny (Amnón, Blanca de Rossi), suicide (Blanca de Rossi, Florinda), and romantic heroines and heroes (Amnón, Florinda, Saúl, Leonor). In general, Gálvez typically combines familiar neoclassic elements and the new Romantic trends to create a work which exemplifies both literary tendencies. Such a play is Safo, a one-act tragedy which describes the last day in the life of the famous poet.

As the drama opens, the lightening of an early morning storm silhouettes Safo as she sits on the edge of a cliff of the Greek island of Leucadia. Her voice, competing with the wind and thunder of the tempest, recounts her love for the youth Faón, his abandonment of the poet of Lesbos and marriage with another, and Safo's decision to kill herself that very day. She receives solace only from the harsh weather that duplicates the distress of her soul during these troubled moments: «Noche desoladora, fiel imagen / de mis continuos bárbaros tormentos» (2: 24). Later that morning, a bitter Safo explains why Faón, on the urging of his father, the priest of Apollo, has deserted her: she wished to live with the young man, but she rejected the rites of matrimony. Scandalizing the society of her time, Safo defiantly declares: «[...] preferí ser su amante, a ser su esposa, / que amor de libres corazones dueño / huye un lazo que impone obligaciones» (2: 40). A few moments before jumping from the famous rock of disillusioned lovers, Safo addresses the women of Leucadia:

From this brief summary of the principal events of Safo, one can easily perceive its Romantic aspects: pathetic fallacy, the theme of impossible love, rebellion against accepted social norms, suicide. Yet the chief Romantic characteristic of Safo is the poet herself, who is a romantic protagonist in the tradition of Don Álvaro and other Romantic roles of the 1840s. Similar to the hero of the Duque de Rivas's play, Safo is a much admired, larger-than-life figure whose theater of operations is a hostile cosmos controlled by an unfathomable destiny. She is an introspective being completely absorbed in her love for Faón, and she expects the universe to reflect her torment. Moreover, similar to her Romantic male protagonists, Safo is sexually attracted to her lover and reminds a friend that she admires Faón's «hermosos miembros / [...] que envidia el mismo Apolo, / y que el amor pueden inspirar a Venus» (2: 45). In all, Safo, in Susan Kirkpatrick's words, is a «Romantic subject in quest of autonomous selfhood» (121).

Safo, nonetheless, does not abandon completely the neoclassic legacy of the stage of the Spanish Enlightenment. The one-act play closely adheres to the unities of time, place, and action; it is written in the romance heroico (the eleven-syllable verse with assonant rhyme), a favorite of the tragedians of Gálvez's time. The most significant neoclassic characteristic of Safo remains the play's dual didactic message (the utile dulci), which underscores the perils of uncontrolled passion and speaks out against a dangerous superstition. The voice for both these lessons is the compassionate priest Aristipo, who early on in the work warns Safo of the pitfalls of her unbridled love for Faón, a love Aristipo contends is a «pasión funesta» (2: 45). More importantly, in words which seem to echo those of Feijoo, Aristipo condemns the tradition of the suicide rock of Leucadia (from which many youths have plunged to their deaths, despondent because of unrequited love), a practice condoned by his religion termed a «cruel superstición» by the priest (2: 35). Nonetheless, Aristipo feels helpless to stop the slaughter and disobey the wishes of the priest of Apollo, since «la religión me manda obedecerlo» (2: 35). Safo herself, just moments before her death, recognizes the «supersticioso engaño» she has suffered at the rock of Leucadia 92: 56).

In conclusion, Safo is illustrative of the dramatic repertoire of María Rosa Gálvez. In the tragedy's intertwining of two literary movements, neoclassicism and Romanticism, Gálvez appropriates the art of Luzán as well as the new currents of European literature. Safo herself rejects the role of the obedient wife of the eighteenth-century masculine stage and the chaste «Angel in the House» figure of the nineteenth-century romantic male writer¹⁰. Rather, similar to many of Gálvez's women protagonists, she liberates herself from masculine control and exists outside a specific domestic sphere in a non-traditional female pursuit. Furthermore, she explores in a self-reflexive text her deepest longings and even sexual desires, opening her heart to the reader/audience¹¹.

Furthermore, Safo and many of Gálvez's other plays, through their subversion of accepted literary norms and rigid gender hierarchies, echo the cultural crisis occurring during the last few decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth-century in Spain. Those years of political instability, men's uneasiness with women, and the rise of feminism are reminiscent of the turbulent years at the end of the nineteenth-century, a period examined by Elaine Showalter's book, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle. In general, Showalter contends that the ends of centuries seem «to intensify crises», and these crises «are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning» because human society often associates with these final years the metaphors of death and rebirth Sexual Anarchy 2)¹².

Also suggestive of Gálvez's times is the cultural backlash which occurred during the fin de siècle, a resistance to new ideas which Showalter portrays as an intense «longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality» (Sexual Anarchy 4). At the end of the eighteenth century, María Rosa Gálvez resisted this nostalgic yearning for a cultural status quo in both dramatic forms and sexual role models. Her message of change, silenced by her early death as well as the Napoleonic invasion and the dark reign of Fernando VII, was not to be equaled again until the feminine creativity of the 1840s. From that time on, including the end of the nineteenth century and now at the end of the twentieth, her voice has not been alone.

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