Visor de obras.

Although Gálvez tried to create strong female characters who brought about the happy endings of her comedies and who corrected the excesses (of consumption, of false sophistication, of pedantry) of society and the theater, it was really in the tragedy that she concentrated her artistic efforts. In this form, Gálvez presents the world not as it should have been for women, as she does in the comedies, but rather as it was. These tragedies, which abound with elements of popular sentimental theater, show women of many times, places and ethnic backgrounds struggling to be happy -to be free to live as they please, to find solitude or to live in the community of other women, and to escape from suffering caused by male oppression.

Gálvez's first tragedy, Ali-Bek was presented at the Príncipe Theater in August of 1801 and published as part of the Teatro nuevo español that same year. Although chosen at the time as an «exemplary» work -part of the Junta de teatro's collection of state-sanctioned works- Ivy McClelland calls it «full of unnatural inversions and empty of ideas» (Spanish Drama of Pathos 1: 266). In the «Advertencia» the author wrote to introduce Ali-Bek, Gálvez makes a case for the acceptance of this historically-based original play²⁴:

La novedad de ser esta composición obra de una señora española, la del asunto mismo, no tratado hasta ahora por otro, y la indulgencia que debe esperarse de un público civilizado, dan a la autora fundadas esperanzas de que la crítica de este drama será juiciosa y urbana.

(117)

The novelty of the composition being a work by a Spanish lady, the novelty of the subject matter which has not been treated up until now, and the indulgence that one should expect from a civilized public give the author well founded hopes that the criticism of this drama will be just and urbane.

Ali-Bek does not represent the same kind of craftsmanship and original female contribution to the Neoclassic tragedy that her later dramas do. Whitaker believes that the character of Ali-Bek is flat, and that the conflict between him and the evil Mohammed forces this «tragedy» into a melodramatic struggle between good and bad (Voz malagueña 12). Nonetheless the play is more complex than a simple Manichean struggle of good versus evil. In fact, it is difficult to identify the opposing forces in this play. It opens with the character Morad contemplating his pending victory over Ali-Bek and recovery of his former slave Amalia, who was stolen from him by Ali-Bek, another former slave turned warrior and ruler of Egypt. This alone could have produced a good tragic situation, but instead Gálvez complicates the plot with the introduction of a long-lost father bent on revenge and the expected tragic ending turns melodramatic.

Yet despite the unbelievable plot, seeds of what will be Gálvez's greatest dramas can be found in this early play. While the title might suggest that the tragic pathos of this play was intended to focus on its hero, Ali-Bek, the real center of the tragedy is its heroine, Amalia, who suffers through no fault of her own. The male characters fight over possession of her. Even the villain Mohammed's plans for usurping Ali-Bek's noble and fair rule over Egypt are overshadowed by his desire to own Amalia. She has never known freedom from male domination, since in spite of being Ali-Bek's only wife she has also remained his slave. In her soliloquy that opens act 3, Amalia expresses the anguish that her bondage has caused her:

Esta infeliz, que nunca ha conocido la dulce libertad, sobre la tierra no tiene más apoyo, que su vida. Mi padre me abandona, y aun me niega el placer de su vista: el Mundo todo es para mí un desierto, donde fieras la maldad, la ambición, y la perfidia disputan el poder y la grandeza. Horror por todas partes, sangre, muerte respiran estos climas, donde quiera que el rostro vuelvo, que mis ojos fijo, veo desolación. ¡Ah!, qué existencia tan miserable gozo [...]

This unhappy woman, who has never known sweet liberty, has no other support on earth than her life. My father abandons me, and even denies me the pleasure of his sight: the whole world is for me a desert, where evil, ambition, and treachery like beasts dispute power and greatness. Everywhere horror, blood, and death breathe in these climes, wherever I turn my face or fix my eyes, I see desolation. Oh! What a miserable existence I lead [...]

In one of the moments of artistry in this play, Amalia expresses the same frustration with the male world that many of Gálvez's other heroines will experience. A later tragedy, Zinda further develops the theme of slavery, this time the African slave trade perpetuated by white European imperialism. Gálvez had also used the figure of the female slave in the ill-fated Esclavas amazonas, as we have seen. Her contemporary Josefa Amar y Borbón employed the image of the female slave in her «Defensa», while for María Gertrudis Hore the caged bird represented a sort of slavery through female restriction and confinement. Whether they have been sold into bondage, imprisoned unjustly or metaphorically bound by madness (as we shall see in La delirante) Gálvez's female characters, like the female images in Amar's and Hore's texts, all struggle with the restrictions placed upon them by patriarchal society.

Trapped in man's violent world, Amalia cannot defend herself against male folly. She can only remain a loyal wife and daughter, even when these two roles conflict with each other. In act 5, scene 3, Amalia is presented with the horrible news that her father and husband have poisoned each other:

¡Oh asesinos de toda mi terneza!, basta, basta no destrocéis mi corazón unidos por medio de tan bárbaros tormentos:  (A ALI-BEK.)  Y tú esposo cruel, que vengativo no pensaste que si era delincuente era mi padre al fin, ¿y así has podido pagar mi fe, y mi amor?

Oh assassins of all my affection! Enough, enough, don't destroy my heart united by means of such barbarous torments:  (To ALI-BEK.)  And you cruel husband, who out of revenge never thought that even if he were a criminal, he was my father after all, this is how you have repaid my faith and my love?

Yet ironically this source of great pain is also the key to her liberty. She begs to be sent back to Europe a free woman, a request that is granted to her at the end of the play. The play ends with Ali-Bek's death.

Although the frequent tears and lamentations of Ali-Bek might not appeal to our twenty-first century sensibilities, the excessive emotions of melodrama provided Gálvez with the perfect tool to decry the feminine condition. Much as the outlandish outfit created for don Pancracio in Un loco hace ciento exposed his excessive consumption of foreign fashion, the melodramatic form of Ali-Bek reveals the excesses of a male society that sought to possess and consume women. Because of male domination, says Gálvez here, as in many of her plays, women are denied their freedom and their happiness.

El egoísta (The Egoist from volume 1 of her Obras), is another drama about excessive male behavior, and, as Gálvez's only true comedia lacrimosa, («tearful comedy») it too utilizes the techniques of sentimental theater to underscore its message. In this play the crazed Milord Sidney plots the murder of his innocent and devoted wife, Nancy. The play treats the issues of separation and divorce -two very important subjects in Gálvez's personal life- as well as child custody. As with the previously studied plays, male excess -this time the excesses of a turn of the century dandy- is again criticized, and it is conquered by the very important element of solidarity among the female characters, which ultimately points the way to real happiness for women.

Gálvez's Egoísta carries on in the tradition set by Jovellanos by creating a play about contemporary middle-class problems. Her play, dramatizing the plight of an ordinary woman, speaks out against the egotistical upper-middle-class dandies of the period. The play takes place in a London inn owned by Bety. Nancy and her child Carlos have been staying there while Sidney, Nancy's husband, has been gambling and seducing women throughout the country. In act 1 we learn of Sidney's escapades and of Nancy's tragic situation, which mirrors Gálvez's personal life and her difficult separation from her own husband²⁵. Nancy and Sidney's marriage had been arranged by her parents, and after their deaths Sidney has exhausted Nancy's inheritance. He now only comes back to his wife to demand more and more, most recently demanding that Nancy use her connections with the Court to obtain a post for him as governor of the English colony in India. In act 1, Sidney comes back to London to see if Nancy has obtained the position yet. He scandalously brings along his mistress, La Marvod, whom he also uses for her money. In this act we also meet Belford, one of Sidney's cohorts, and Smith, Sidney's sneaky butler. Opposite these four are Nancy, the loving and forgiving wife; Nelson, a friend of Nancy's parents and guardian of the heroine; and Bety, the benevolent inn-keeper who protects Nancy from Sidney and his cronies.

The friendship between Bety and Nancy is highlighted early in the play. In act 1, scene 3, Nancy expresses her feelings for Bety: «¡Ah, Bety! Siempre en mi pecho / grabadas vuestras finezas / estarán» («Oh Bety! Your kindness will always be etched in my heart»). Bety supports Nancy throughout the play, offering the abused wife her understanding and support. While in many of her dramas solitary women struggle against patriarchy, female friendship and solidarity is important in this play, as it is in several others that we will soon study. These plays present the image of a nurturing and protective female environment, much like that of María Gertrudis Hore's convent, from which women are able to defeat male tyranny.

Through her relationship with other women, the abused wife is able to see the truth of her situation and face her tyrannical, egotistical husband. Sidney's «excessive» character is portrayed in acts one and two as a spoiled playboy. Nancy tells her friend Nelson that shortly after their marriage «no hubo exceso, ni infamia / en que no incurriese [...]» («there was no excess or infamy in which he did not act [...]»; 1.3). His own description of himself is most telling:

Y sobre todo, quererme a mí mismo: ésta es la gran filosofía de un petimetre, que lleva como yo, con su persona y su elegancia, la prueba de que su cuerpo y su alma son de fábrica moderna.

(1.11)

And above all to love myself: this is the great philosophy of a dandy, who like me carries with him and his elegance the proof that his body and his soul are made of modern fabric.

This «modern» man seeks his own pleasure at the expense of others. He cheats, borrows money incessantly with no intention of repaying his debts, uses women for money and sex, and laughs at anyone who reprimands him. He is the early nineteenth-century version of the famous archetype Don Juan, whose selfish behavior earned him eternal damnation in the seventeenth-century drama El burlador de Sevilla and the admiration of Romantic writers from Byron to Zorrilla. Gálvez also describes the type in a poem entitled «La vanidad de los placeres»²⁶. Her version of «Don Juan» in El egoísta is a tyrant who ruins the lives of the women with whom he is involved -an aspect of the burlador's actions that didn't much concern the male writers who preceded or followed Gálvez. He is described as insensible («unfeeling»; 1.3), and his lack of emotion contrasts with the delicate sensibility of his innocent wife.

Jenny Marvod, Sidney's mistress, warns Nancy about her husband's egotism in another act of female solidarity:

os le vuelvo, a costa de mi inocencia, y mi fortuna, opulento; pero, Nancy, desde ahora temblad; ved en mí un ejemplo de su ingratitud; vos sois su esposa, y os compadezco; pues seréis más desgraciada si es posible, que yo [...]

(2.7)

I return him to you an opulent man, at the cost of my innocence and my fortune; But Nancy, from now on beware; See in me an example of his ingratitude; You are his wife, and I pity you; For you will be more unfortunate, if it is possible, than I [...]

We learn of Sidney's plan to poison his wife in act 2. His selfishly justified reasons are in keeping with his self-centered personality:

en cualquiera parte logra más distinción un soltero que un hombre casado, y trae mil mozas al retortero. Sobre todo, no le está continuamente moliendo su mujer con quejas, llantos y sermones indiscretos; ¿Y si acaso está negada mi pretensión?... nada pierdo. Muerta Nancy, tengo un hijo, y por consecuencia heredo.

(2.9)

everywhere a bachelor wins more distinction than a married man, and he deceives a thousand young women. More than anything, his wife is not continually harassing him with complaints, tears, and indiscreet sermons. And if my pretension is denied [For a position in India]... I lose nothing. Once Nancy is dead, I still have a son and consequently I'll inherit.

Sidney pours poisonous powder into Nancy's cocoa, stirs it with a pen and carries it to her room to give it to her himself. «Is a pen a metaphorical penis?» ask Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (3). It is significant that Gálvez chose this particular phallic image to betray Nancy, for it not only symbolizes Sidney's masculine power over her, but also male authorial power, especially in the sentimental genre, to create and destroy submissive female characters like Nancy -quite literally the pen is mightier than the sword here.

As act 2 closes, Sidney returns and reports to the audience his criminal deed. For a brief moment he shows some remorse, but he is motivated by physical desire aroused by her pitiful weakness:

Estaba tan linda Nancy sentada sobre su lecho, llorosa y agradecida, que sentí cierto deseo de que viviese... Era tarde; al fin ya bebió el veneno [...] Vaya, que cada vez me avergüenzo más de haberme enternecido.

(2.13)

Nancy was so pretty seated upon her bed, so tearful and grateful that I felt a certain desire that she live... But it was too late; Anyway, she already drank the poison. [...] Come now, I'm more ashamed of having softened every time I think about it.

Sidney, like the rapists we shall see in Florinda and Amnón, sees women only as receptacles of his poisonous desire. The phallic imagery of the pen, the poisonous liquid he literally inserts into his wife, and the morbid sexual desire her weakened state produces in him combine to make Sidney's attempted murder of Nancy a metaphorical rape similar to others found in Gálvez's tragedies.

But the masculine power of the pen does not prevail in Gálvez's play, and act 3 opens as the sun is rising, a symbol of Nancy's perseverance and eventual triumph. Although she has spent a sleepless night with the effects of the poison, Nancy is not yet dead. Throughout the act the pieces of the crime are put together until it is evident to Nancy's friends that Sidney has tried to kill his own wife. At first Nancy refuses to admit the truth, but soon she finds part of the poison and the instructions for its administration in Sidney's jacket. Realizing that she soon will die, she decides to flee London for Gloucester where she can meet her fate far from her beastly husband and alone with her son, asserting herself for the first time to her tyrannical spouse:

Que el cielo, aunque bendice los santos vínculos del matrimonio, también manda separarlos, si la salud o la vida en él están arriesgados. Bien sabes mi amor, Sidney, y cuanto me habrá costado el resolverme a vivir siempre a tu lado.

(3.11)

Heaven, although it blesses the holy ties of matrimony, also commands that they be separated If health or life is at risk in it. You know well my love, Sidney, how much my resolve to always live by your side has cost me.

Later in the same scene her indignation goes even further, as she begs God to punish egoists like Sidney:

¡Oh Dios de eterna bondad! Si acaso hasta tu trono mis ruegos y mis penas se elevaron, duélete de mí, aniquila el egoísmo; tu brazo justiciero hunda por siempre este vicio detestado [...]

(3.11)

Oh God of eternal goodness! If by chance my pleas and my pains rise to your throne, have pity on me, and eliminate egotism; with your just arm destroy this detested vice forever [...]

The play ends when all of Sidney's previous transgressions come back to haunt him and he is arrested. It is also revealed that Sidney was tricked by the apothecary who, fearing Sidney's malevolent intentions, gave him a poison that wasn't lethal. Sidney realizes the error of his ways, and begs Nancy's forgiveness. She, of course, concedes and they embrace before Sidney is carried off to jail.

While El egoísta may be a typical «bourgeois tragedy», several aspects stand out to make it an engaging and original piece. First, it deals with an issue rarely treated by other enlightenment writers -the situation of abused wives. The heroine Nancy remarkably demonstrates many of the characteristics that we know today to be typical of abused women: she refuses to recognize the extent of her husband's neglect, she tries to make up for his short comings, and she stubbornly holds out hope that he will change when it is obvious to everyone else that he will not. She is described at the beginning of the play as an «infeliz mujer» («unhappy woman»; 1.1, 112) yet by the end it is she who pities Sidney:

¡Ah! Sidney, tú no has logrado el gozo de hacer felices; nunca este placer tan grato conoció tu corazón. ¡Qué infeliz eres!

(3.11)

Oh! Sidney, you have not achieved the joy of making others happy; Never has your heart known this happy pleasure. How unfortunate you are!

Gálvez ends the aforementioned poem «Vanidad de los placeres» with the same idea -what she calls the «supreme pleasure of making others happy» (34). In an age that valued feeling, including feeling good, pleasure was often exalted. However, in contrast to the happiness of Sidney's self-centered pursuit of pleasure, Nancy's selfless empathy with others brings a lasting happiness, what Carolyn Williams has called the «luxury of doing good»: «The most exquisite raptures known to mankind were supposed to flow from the ability to feel for the suffering of others, and to relieve it by acts of unselfish courage and generosity» (77). Nancy, like other heroines created by Gálvez, knows pleasure through her ability to empathize and connect with others. She finds this happiness in solidarity with other women (Bety and La Marvod) and by forgiving her husband in the end, she leaves the scene a free and truly happy woman.

A later play, La delirante (The Delirious Woman, published in volume 3 of the Obras poéticas) also uses the free-flowing tears of sentimental theater to explore issues of feminine happiness. Like El egoísta, it too takes place in London, but is set in the palace of Elizabeth I. The action in the play centers around the conflict between the Queen of England and Mary Queen of Scots's fictional daughter, Leonor. Isabel (we will refer to her by her character name in the play instead of by her English name), is insanely jealous of her dead rival's daughter, since the handsome Conde de Essex loves Leonor and not Isabel. Isabel betroths Leonor to the evil Lord Arlington, who uses his new wife to plot against the crown in an attempt to gain the throne for himself. When his plan is discovered by the Queen, he frames his wife for the conspiracy. Lady and Lord Pembroke, friends of the Scottish princess as well as loyal subjects to Isabel, fake Leonor's death and hide her in their home so that she might avoid Isabel's wrath. Thus the play begins after several years have passed and Leonor, Essex, Arlington, the Pembrokes and Isabel find themselves together again in the Queen of England's palace.

The subject of the conflict between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I was not a new one in Spanish literature. While in Protestant countries Elizabeth was portrayed as the heroine and Mary as the tyrant queen, in Spain:

the «centro de catolicismo», [...] consistently venerated Mary almost, indeed, as a «saint» throughout the Golden Age and on into the eighteenth-century while Elizabeth was generally reviled as a lascivious and sacrilegious tyrant.

(MacKenzie, 202)27

Whitaker, in his introduction to La voz malagueña, highlights the female issues raised in La delirante. He makes a comparison with Gilbert and Gubar's analysis of female-authored books like Jane Eyre, in which the figure of the madwoman is a key element to their fiction. Isabel embodies for Whitaker male authority, while Leonor represents «lo femenino» -«el papel de la madre, la importancia de la familia, la voz en contra de la muerte de víctimas inocentes» («the role of the mother, the importance of the family, the voice against the death of innocent victims»; 16). In another article Whitaker expands his conception of the character Leonor:

La delirante has a «deep structure» or, employing the terminology of Marianne Hirsch, a «submerged» mother-daughter plot in which Leonor fights for and eventually achieves her own selfhood and an identity independent from that of her famous mother.

(«Absent Mother» 169)

This internal battle with her deceased mother is expressed outwardly through Leonor's apparent madness. She regains her mental health, says Whitaker, because of her love for Essex. He refers to Julia Kristeva's idea that love, in the words of Toril Moi, «allows the patient tentatively to erect some kind of subjectivity, to become a subject-in-process in the symbolic order» («Introduction», Kristeva Reader 15). Building upon this development of the independent female self that Whitaker has traced in the character of Leonor, I hope to show that the «deep structure» of La delirante not only involves Mary Queen of Scots' young daughter's search for self, but her search for happiness through the creation of a new feminine subject. This version of feminine subjectivity combines the best «masculine» characteristics of Queen Isabel -her strength and independence- with the positive «feminine» traits of Leonor -her sensibility and loyal friendship. After an analysis of La delirante, we will recognize its similarity with Gálvez's comedy La familia a la moda, as it too sets up a new model for femininity that breaks the traditional Snow White-versus-Wicked Queen construct Gilbert and Gubar have found.

Leonor, who has been hidden from public view for three years prior to the action of La delirante and who is hidden, confined and even imprisoned throughout the action of the play, appears for the first time in act 2. The description of her character is typical of the image of the madwoman popularized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dressed in black with her hair left down, Leonor is another romanticized image of the beautiful young maniac whose origins can be traced back to Shakespeare's Ophelia (Showalter, The Female Malady 10). In fact in many ways Leonor is an eighteenth-century reinterpretation of Shakespeare's delirious young lady from Hamlet. From her very first appearance, the similarity is apparent. Leonor, like her Shakespearian predecessor, is desperately searching for imaginary flowers:

PEMBROKE  (A LEONOR)   ¿Qué buscas? ¿Pues qué es esto? No te han dicho...

LEONOR Buscaba aquellas flores que en el campo formaban otro tiempo mis placeres.

ESSEX  (Aparte.)  ¿Qué escucho?

PEMBROKE Ven conmigo ven, yo te las daré.

LEONOR  (Suspirando.)  Ya se perdieron. ¡Ay! Las secó el poder, pero las flores   (Señalando al pie del trono.)   del sepulcro aquí nacen. Yo las veo crecer al pie del trono. ¿Y qué? ¿Marchitas las regará mi llanto?

(2.2)

P  (To L.)  What are you looking for? What is this? Haven't they told you...

L I was looking for those flowers that formed my pleasure in another time.

P   (Aside.)  What do I hear?

P Come, I'll give them to you.

L   (Sighing.)  They've already been lost. Oh! Power has dried them up, but the flowers of the grave stem from here   (Pointing to the throne.)  I see them growing at the foot of the throne. What is this? Will my sorrow water these wilted flowers?

Spatially and mentally confined by physical imprisonment and by her lunacy, Leonor is another «madwoman in the attic». But in her case the restrictive «patriarchy» that enslaves her is ironically represented by a queen's (and not a king's) tyrannical monarchy.

By scene 3 of act 3, it is the Queen who is tormented by ghastly hallucinations. Like Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Isabel is unable to get thoughts of her bloody transgressions out of her mind:

Pero ¡ay triste!... ¿Qué quieres, Estuarda?... Leonor... ¿Por qué presentas de tu madre la cabeza a mis ojos?... Quita... aparta ese horroroso objeto... ¿Tú me arrojas su sangre en mis vestidos? Esta mancha jamás se borrará... Jamás... Perdona...

But oh, woe is me!... What do you want Stuart?... Leonor... Why do you present your mother's head in front of my eyes? Take it away... Remove this horrible object. You stain my clothes with her blood? This spot will never be erased... Never... Forgive me...

But when she learns from Lord Arlington of Leonor's faked death, Isabel returns to her old ways, threatening her rival with the same fate as her famous mother.

The conflict between these two characters is resolved in the last act when Leonor, having regained her sanity, risks her life to defend the Queen from a group of rebellious soldiers. Isabel is moved to tears of joy, signifying the end of her «delirious» anger and the beginning of her reasonable and virtuous behavior:

¡Oh heroísmo! ¡Oh virtud!... Leonor, recibe mi llanto por tributo...  (Llora.)  Él manifiesta toda mi admiración y ternura.

(5.8)

Oh heroism! Oh virtue!... Leonor, receive my tears as a tribute...   (Crying.)  It manifests all my admiration and tenderness.

However, this tearful yet happy reconciliation is abruptly and tragically ended when Lord Arlington stabs his wife in a fatal embrace. Having learned the lesson of this tragic situation, Isabel re-establishes order by pronouncing the last words of the play:

He aquí de la venganza el execrable fruto que nos resta. Anhelamos por ella, y conseguida nos cubre de ignominia, y se detesta.

(5.8)

I have here the detestable fruit of vengeance. We yearn for it, and once achieved, it covers us with disgrace and is abhorred.

This melodramatic ending is probably the reason Ivy McClelland said that Gálvez's «later tragedies, which [...] improve in poetic style, at the same time grow more melodramatic». Yet is melodrama necessarily a fault? As one of the «lower» forms of writing, melodrama is generally associated with popular literature and culture, but it was an important part of eighteenth-century literature, especially of the comedia lacrimosa, and often served moralistic purposes. Melodrama also was, and still is, a form frequently used by female authors, and male criticism's devaluation of it has been questioned by feminists like Nina Baym²⁸.

Susan Kirkpatrick also notes the frequent use of melodrama (again for moralistic purposes) in the female literature that followed Gálvez's generation, most notably found in Fernán Caballero's important novel La gaviota. As in Caballero's novel, Gálvez's sentimentalism and melodrama serve a very definite didactic purpose in La delirante. Although the characters may be excessively good or evil, this contrast is necessary to bring about Gálvez's symbolic intent -Isabel and Leonor as opposite sides of femininity. Queen Isabel is a strong leader, independent, even «masculine» as Whitaker has described her, but she is also extremely jealous and ruthlessly vengeful. Leonor on the other hand is sensitive, self-sacrificing and pure. Together they represent the wicked-witch and Snow-White selves of woman outlined by Gilbert and Gubar (38-43). Whitaker believes that Leonor's dementia represents woman oppressed by male authority. Yet the reconciliation of these two archetypal women signifies more than protest against male domination. In her discussion of female subjectivity, Susan Kirkpatrick finds that the women writers of the mid-nineteenth-century developed a divided self: «a victim of the contradictions between the Romantic concept of the sovereign individual subject and the nineteenth-century ideology of gender» (Las románticas 24). The female author was torn between reconciling her professional aspirations as an artist and the expectations placed on her by patriarchal society. Isabel of La delirante represents in many ways the kind of woman María Rosa Gálvez the artist was, an Amazon criticized for her independence and strength. Yet Gálvez must have had to struggle with the image of the helpless Leonor, driven to madness by her dependence on others. La delirante represents on one level a process of healing for these two sides of divided femininity, which culminates in the final tearful and happy reunion of the two halves -each expressing her respect for the good qualities of the other. Good does not triumph over evil, but rather they combine to become a stronger, saner and happier woman.

As we have seen in her comedy Familia a la moda, and perhaps even more in La delirante, Gálvez's repressed and «hysterical» girls (Inés and Leonor), who are almost completely silent in the plays, are contrasted to and combined with her strong Amazon-like women (Guiomar and Isabel) to create a model for feminine happiness that advocates both virtue, strength and feminine solidarity²⁹. But perhaps her strongest Amazon-like character is the African queen of the play Zinda, published in the third volume of her Obras. In this play again, by banding together, women are able to triumph over tyranny and find happiness for themselves and others.

Zinda is set in the African Congo, where the Portuguese have set up a small colony in the region governed by Queen Zinda and her husband Nelzir. Although its events and characters are purely fictional, this play highlights problems with slavery and colonialism and contains many details that parallel the history of the slave trade in Spain and the Spanish colonies³⁰. In this melodramatic drama trágico as Gálvez calls it, Queen Zinda's tribe fights against the domination of the evil Dutchman Vinter, who has seized command of a nearby Portuguese settlement in the absence of its commander Pereyra. Vinter kills Pereyra's son, and forces his daughter Ángela to marry him. He has also taken Zinda's young son Zelido prisoner and threatens to sell him into slavery if Zinda and her kinsmen do not reveal the whereabouts of their tribal gold. The «tearful comedy» form, with its use of melodrama and extremes of emotion to explore very serious contemporary issues, becomes a very effective tool for Gálvez in this play. Through it she is able to explore two important themes of this play: the struggle between forces of passion and the forces of reason to combat evil, and the importance of personal freedom to both individual and collective happiness.

The play opens to the light of a violent bonfire, reflecting the extreme passions of hatred and distrust between black and white:

La hoguera disponed, valientes Negros; hoy nace el sol a ver nuestra venganza. La aborrecida sangre de este Blanco avivará la abrasadora llama, mientras su corazón abominable, arrancado del pecho por la espalda, se ofrece en sacrificio a nuestros dioses

(1.1)

Prepare the bonfire, valiant Negroes; today the sun rises to witness our vengeance. The abhorred blood of this white man will hasten the ardent flames while his abominable heart, torn from the chest through his back, will be offered as a sacrifice to our gods.

This shocking introduction would have certainly grabbed the attention of an all-white Spanish public concerned with recent unrest in the colonies, especially with the successful slave revolution in Haiti in 1798³¹. This scene also sets up the debate between passion and reason that will continue throughout the play. The warrior Alcaypa's passionate words, reinforced by the image of the bonfire, is contrasted by Zinda's immediate squelching of those flames with her words of reason:

Pereyra me ha enseñado a ser piadosa; cuando llegó su nave a estas comarcas por la primera vez, en nuestro suelo reinaban las costumbres sanguinarias de la ferocidad; pero vosotros al mirar sus virtudes, la tirana fiereza depusisteis que enseñaba. Pues, ¿cómo os olvidáis de estos ejemplos?

Pereyra has taught me to be merciful; when his ship arrived in these territories for the first time, the bloody customs of ferocity reigned in our land, But you men, upon seeing his virtue, ceased your tyrannical cruelty, and I too imitated the clemency that he taught. Thus, how can you forget these examples?

Zinda is a black African who has adopted white ways. Yet despite her appropriation of European ways, when she is betrayed by the very culture she had adopted, the external struggle in which she acts as the voice of reason will also soon become her internal battle.

Zinda is a warrior-queen, a strong Amazon figure who fights for herself, her family and her people. When reason does not prevail, Zinda finds herself compelled to attack Vinter to win her son back. Her action in battle is described by an observer:

con que al verse cercada de enemigos, y que el riesgo era evidente, arroja el arco y flechas, como inútiles armas, y esgrimiendo el hacha cortadora, hiere, mata a cuantos a su vida se atrevieron.

(2.1)

so that upon seeing herself surrounded by enemies, and the danger being evident, she threw her bow and arrows down, like useless arms, and brandishing a sharp hatchet, she wounded and killed anyone who threatened her life.

She and her husband are eventually taken prisoner as Vinter in his greed for wealth tries to coerce them into revealing the location of their tribal gold mines. The third and last act opens like the first, with the image of fire -this time the charred remains of the villages surrounded the Portuguese fort, the glowing embers mirroring Zinda's own sense of deception:

yo vi teñidos de sangre sus hogares: y que el fuego aumentando el horror de este conflicto dejó abrasadas las sencillas chozas, y en cenizas los pueblos convertidos; en tanto que los viles Europeos, consumando tan bárbaro exterminio, esclavos mis vasallos arrastraban a su infame país, sin que los gritos de tantos infelices conmoviesen su corazón feroz.

(3.1)

I saw their homes stained with blood: and the fire, increasing the horror of this conflict, left their simple huts burned up and their towns turned to ashes; Meanwhile the vile Europeans, carrying out such a barbarous extermination, took my subjects away as slaves to their infamous country, their ferocious hearts unmoved by the screams of so many unhappy victims.

Her people suffer, «unhappy» in their forced bondage. Earlier, when Vinter threatens to enslave Zinda and her young son Zelido, she exclaims: «Mi hijo Zelido y yo libres nacimos; / infelices, mas libres moriremos». («My son Zelido and I were born free; Unfortunate, but free we will die»; 2.2). «Infeliz», which can mean both unhappy and unfortunate or miserable, describes life under this system of slavery. Liberty is so cherished that even death is preferable to losing it. In the last act, Zinda even threatens to throw her son to his death so that he could not be taken a slave (3.5).

But Zinda and her people are not the only ones who are unhappy in their lost liberty. Ángela, the daughter of the Portuguese commander, is also unhappy. Her father absent, her brother dead, and forced to marry a man she doesn't love, Ángela asks: «¿Qué gozo para mí habrá que me consuele?» («What joy is there for me that would console me?»; 2.1). She describes herself as an innocent victim:

Cual víctima adornada, que previene al sacrificio el inocente cuello, así yo de estas galas mal vestida me preparo también a ser el precio del común alborozo [...]

(2.1)

Like an adorned victim, who prepares her innocent neck for the sacrifice, so I, poorly clothed by this beautiful garb prepare myself also to be the price of the common disturbance.

Married against her will, Ángela is a victim, taken as «booty» in the struggle for political, military and economic power. While Zinda refuses to submit her body to slavery, Ángela is resigned to give hers up in marriage, explaining to her African friend, «Zinda, yo la entrego / para salvar mi honor de una violencia» («Zinda, I give my hand in order to save my honor from a sexual violence»; 2.3). Although the physical result of rape and marriage would be the same for her, Ángela can at least protect her virtue, the only possession she has.

This innocent, white European woman -an angel as her name suggests- serves to both contrast and complement Zinda's character. Their friendship is key to the happy outcome of the play and they mutually support each other as they both strive for freedom. Ángela reunites the African queen with her young son, and keeps Zinda informed on the welfare of her husband, while Zinda tells Ángela of her father's return and protects Ángela not only from Vinter, but from her angry kinsmen. While Zinda encourages strength in Ángela, Ángela encourages virtue in Zinda, especially in her acceptance of Christianity.

In the end, although it appears that passion might triumph when the African warriors penetrate the fort to liberate their monarchs, measured reason and virtue, not extreme emotion, succeed in the end. Pereyra agrees to end colonization by pulling his troops out of the Congo and Zinda proposes the following:

Escucha. Si la fuerza jamás sobre nosotros ha podido mantener sus derechos, las virtudes nuestros pechos conquistan: el antiguo tratado de alianza y de comercio en nombre de mis pueblos ratifico con Portugal, Pereyra; y si renuncias al tráfico de esclavos, te permito que de ese Dios que adoras, los preceptos Enseñen en mi Imperio sus ministros.

(3.7)

Listen. Since force has never been able to reign over us, Virtue will conquer our hearts: The former treaty of alliance and commerce with Portugal I ratify in the name of my peoples; and if you renounce the traffic of slaves, I will permit your ministers to teach the precepts of that God you so adore.

The fires of unbridled emotion are quenched with the calming waters of reason and virtue, and comforting order is reestablished at the play's close.

Zinda is one of the few dramas to have a happy ending. While Gálvez, a white woman, most likely saw the black Zinda as a symbolic rather than a real character (despite her historical roots, as noted by Fernando Doménech³²), she, like other female artists before and after her, found in the plight of the African slave a parallel to the situation of women³³. This «tragic drama», as she calls it, clearly teaches the message that happiness for women, black and white, is possible through individual freedom, virtue, and the mutual support of friendship. Likewise, happiness for women is beneficial to all of society -women and men. When women are given freedom, when they are treated with respect, then society too is able to be truly happy. Yet not all of Gálvez's heroine's have this «happy» advantage of female friendship, and they suffer male domination alone.

When Ángela speaks of fearing a violencia -a «sexual violence»- she voices a common fear. In fact, the possibility of rape lurks in the background of most sentimental novels³⁴. This threat of sexual abuse, another kind of male excess, connects two quite disparate trends of eighteenth-century «sensibility» literature -sentimentality and sadism. Both the Marquis de Sade and the writers of the sentimental genre paired the excesses of the monstrous exploitive rake with the «helpless, oversensitized female who identified her 'virtue' with helplessness» (Barker-Benfield, 349). While De Sade sought to explore and reveal sexual taboos, to «say everything», in the words of Marcel Hénaff, through the sexual excesses of his philosopher-adventurers in an «encyclopedia of excess»³⁵, writers of the sentimental genre warned women of the physical risks of their excessive sensibility. While sensibility, often aimed at a female audience, offered women a similar sort of taboo knowledge, exposure «to that worldly improving knowledge of "others" that [...] made men what they were; at the same time, it exposed women to the still greater risk of sexual abuse, even sadism» (Barker-Benfield 350). María Rosa Gálvez too writes of such risk. Two plays in particular treat well-known rapes of historical women, presenting these legendary events from the woman's point of view -Florinda and Amnón. In them, helpless and innocent women, are not only the victims of a sexual assault, but also of their own sensibility³⁶.

Florinda, published in volume 2 of Gálvez's Obras, treats the legendary rape of Florinda -who is also known in Spanish tradition as la Cava- by King Rodrigo, for which her father, don Julián, took revenge by aiding the Moors in their invasion of Spain in 711. Although many Neoclassic tragedies dealt with Spain's history, this one topic was avoided by most Spanish dramatists since it portrayed a rapist king³⁷. This three-act play opens in a battlefield in Andalusia and all of the action takes place in one day, beginning at dawn and ending at midnight. Tulga, Florinda's uncle, is fighting against the Moors to protect Spain. Echoing the opinions of history, he blames the invasion of Christian Spain on his niece, and on uncontrolled passion:

¡Ah cuánto anhela mi corazón su muerte! Sí, su sangre sólo puede lavar de mi nobleza la mancha que mi honor ha amancillado por la infame pasión y por la afrenta con que sació Rodrigo su apetito.

(1.2)

How much my heart yearns for her death! Yes, only her blood can wash away the spot that has stained my nobility for the sake of vile passion and the dishonor with which Rodrigo satiated his appetite.

As Spanish soldiers struggle to defeat the Moors on the battlefield, some of Rodrigo's own men conspire against him, using the fight with the Arabs as a distraction. However, the king ignores these political and military crises around him and instead focuses on his sexual control of Florinda:

... Florinda bella, yo te volveré a ver... ya el fuego activo, que en mi amoroso pecho se conserva, vuelve a excitar violento la esperanza: bendigo los estragos de la guerra, que a mi poder te vuelven [...]

(1.5)

... Beautiful Florinda, I will see you again... already the active fire that is conserved in my loving breast excites violent hope again: I bless the ravages of war that bring you back to my power [...]

Yet neither the king's excessive passion, nor the conspirators' betrayal receives the ultimate blame for Spain's defeat. That blame is placed on the helpless Florinda, «causa de nuestro daño» («the cause of our injury») in the words of her uncle (1.2). Florinda reveals the extent to which she is blamed by the public for Spain's defeat, when even her own mother curses her:

Vive, dijo, Florinda, vive, y sea tu nombre abominado de las gentes, mísera, ¡oh nunca yo te concibiera para que me cubrieses de ignominia, para que de tu padre la nobleza por tu venganza manchen las traiciones! Vive, y que las edades venideras como yo te maldigan... Estas fueron las últimas palabras que su lengua articuló.

(1.6)

Long live, she said, Florinda, and let your name be abhorred among the people. Miserable woman, would I had never conceived you so that you might never have covered me with disgrace, so that your father might stain his nobility to avenge your betrayal! Long live, and may future ages curse you as I do... These were the last words that she spoke.

If the audience's sympathies aren't with Florinda already, this horrifying speech makes the injustice of her situation real to them. By 1804, Florinda's mother's words had come true and the early nineteenth-century spectator/reader would understand and sympathize with the plight of this innocent woman blamed unfairly for the vices of men.

Although there are many interesting details to this play, it is the treatment of rape, and the attempted vindication of a much maligned historical figure, that make Gálvez's tragedy unique and fascinating. It does not repeat the mistakes of Ali-Bek, for the main characters, especially Florinda, are complex and human. Florinda, the innocent girl who suddenly finds herself hurled into an unfeeling world that blames her for its mistakes, searches for a way to survive. She is angry at Rodrigo for causing her lost innocence and happiness:

Ni tus tesoros, ni el brillante esplendor de tu diadema me puede compensar las desventura, el llanto y la deshonra que me cuesta tu criminal amor. Lo perdí todo cuando me envileciste: yo antes era feliz con mi candor; era el consuelo de un padre ilustre, de una madre tierna.

(1.7)

Neither your treasures nor the brilliant splendor of your diadem can compensate me for the misfortune, the weeping and the dishonor that your criminal love has caused me. I lost everything when you degraded me. Before I was happy in my innocent purity; I was the comfort of a celebrated father, of a tender mother.

When Rodrigo asks what he can do to ease her sorrow, Florinda replies: «Que en libertad me dejes» («Let me go free»; 1.7). Florinda begs to be released to live alone as a hermit far away from the frenzied male-dominated world («this accumulation of horrors» she calls it) in a place where «el astro que ilumina la tierra aun no penetre» («the star that illumines the earth cannot even penetrate»; 2.1). However, Rodrigo refuses to release her: «Solo Rodrigo es árbitro en la tierra de tu suerte» (Only Rodrigo is the earthly arbiter of your fate; 2.4).

Her sorrow gradually turns to rage, and when accused of being «sensible» («feeling» or «sympathetic») to Rodrigo's love, Florinda responds angrily: «Jamás ha merecido ese tirano / de mí sino rencores y odio eterno» («That tyrant has never deserved anything more than bitterness and eternal hatred from me»; 3.5). Far from her happy days of innocence, Florinda hopes to find her pleasure now in revenge, and to have Rodrigo killed: «Que sirva de tapete su sangriento / cadáver a mis pies; y en fin, que goce / del horror de sus últimos momentos» («May his bleeding body serve as a cover for my feet; and in the end, may I take pleasure in the horror of his last moments»; 3.5). In the end, however, she rejects the «bárbaro placer de la venganza» («barbarous pleasure of revenge»; 3.8), and takes her own life. The closing words of the Moorish king Tarif, lend an enigmatic conclusion to the play: «El crimen, la traición y la venganza / siempre tal recompensa merecieron» («Crime, betrayal and vengeance always deserved such recompense»; 3.9). These crimes of passion not only deprived Florinda of her happiness, but also deprived Christian Spain of its «happiness» and its domination of the peninsula. Just as in Zinda Gálvez connects feminine happiness with societal happiness, so too in Florinda she turns the history books against men, and shows how devastating depriving women of their happiness can be on society.

María Rosa Gálvez, like Josefa Amar y Borbón did in her «Defensa», clearly defends Florinda against a misogynist tradition that blames her unjustly, and thus by association all women, for the excessive sexual behavior of men. Yet, although sympathetic to her plight, the story of Florinda also contains a warning for women. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft warned of the possible pitfalls for those women who entered the unprotected male-dominated public sphere, that in the words of Barker-Benfield «the price of growth -in effect growing up- was labor and the risk of real sorrow» (350), so too Gálvez warns women of the dangers of leaving their places to seek notoriety. Sometimes the fame they achieve is not the desirable kind -«Con su desdicha / llega a ser inmortal el desgraciado» («With his misfortune, the unlucky achieve immortality) says Florinda»; 1.3). Florinda, perhaps like the author herself, was isolated from the very society she sought to enter, finding a much different kind of fame than she had imagined.

Amnón, which Gálvez presented as the opening tragedy to the third and last volume of her Obras poéticas, is based on the biblical account of the incestuous rape of Thamar by her brother Amnón, both children of the great Hebrew king, David³⁸. This play is very much like Florinda, especially in its theme of rape and in the heroine's isolation and even social and familial rejection. The familiar biblical story, contains all the best themes of tragedy -incest, fratricide, and ambitious political intrigue. In Gálvez's version, Amnón, heir to the throne of Israel, is possessed by an uncontrollable passion for his sister Thamar. Upon the advice of his friend Jonadeb, he decides to face his fears by spending time alone with his sister. Despite his best intentions, Amnón cannot control himself and rapes Thamar. At the urging of Thamar, Absalón avenges his sister's shame by killing his brother Amnón. Daniel Whitaker traces the adaptations of this story throughout Spanish literature. From the early medieval ballads to a novel by Lope de Vega and a play by Tirso de Molina, María Rosa Gálvez's rendition takes its place in a long line of interest in this biblical tragedy that continues into the twentieth-century in García Lorca's poem «Thamar y Amnón», from his Romancero gitano (Whitaker, «Darkness in the Age of Light» 439-440).

Amnón's struggle with his incestuous passion for Thamar, set against the concept of an all-powerful and judging God, produces a truly tragic situation very different from the standard Neoclassic tragedy. Gálvez achieves this both through the characters of Amnón, David, Thamar and Absalón -basically good people whose tragic flaws have hurled them into adverse destiny- and through the ironic commentary of the coro («chorus»), whose psalms of praise to a powerful and benevolent God at the end of each act contrast with the predicament of the main characters.

This coro begins the play with words of collective happiness:

Gloria al Dios de Israel poderoso, alabanza al heroico David; venturosa Sion, celebremos su victoria, su triunfo feliz.

(1.1)

Glory to the mighty God of Israel, praise to the heroic David, fortunate Zion, let us celebrate his victory, his happy triumph.

Their joyous song is soon reflected in the words of the innocent Thamar, who joins in the celebration:

yo más que todas, de esta feliz victoria participo, como hija de David. ¡Oh amado padre! Mis manos ornarán tu encanecido cabello con la palma vencedora. Sobre tu corazón el brazo invicto que aniquiló los fieros amonitas, estrecherá a Thamar enternecido. Seguidme, amigas, festejad mi gozo.

(1.1)

I more than any other woman, join in this happy victory as a daughter of David. Oh my beloved father! My hands will decorate your gray hair with the victory wreath. Your unconquerable arm will tenderly embrace Thamar over your heart. Follow me, friends, delight in my joy.

Yet feminine happiness, which innocently rejoices in the good fortune of family and nation, is abruptly and sharply contrasted with the emotional sufferings of Amnón. In the words of his friend, Jonadeb:

Una horrible dolencia ha consumido al fuerte de Judá; tiene ofuscada su razón, su valor quedó marchito.

(1.2)

A horrible pain has consumed Judah's strong one; his reason is clouded and his courage has withered.

Amnón struggles with his passions for Thamar, an excessive, obsessive love which he describes as a fire that consumes «el incendio [...] que por tanto tiempo me ha consumido» («the fire [...] that for so much time has consumed me» and he fears that his father will note the «extremos de mi afecto» («the extremes of my affection»; 1.3). He decides, upon the advice of his well-meaning friend Jonadeb, that the only way to cure his desire is to experience his sister's platonic love:

A mi razón atiende. La privación fue siempre el incentivo mayor de las pasiones.

(1.3)

Listen to my reason. Deprivation has always been the incentive for the greatest passions.

Yet Jonadeb warns Amnón:

examina si de tu incertidumbre es el principio algún deseo criminal, alguna centella delincuente, que al abrigo de la seguridad nace en tu pecho.

(1.3)

check to see if your uncertainty is the beginning of some criminal desire, some delinquent flash, that under the cloak of security is born in your chest.

Amnón refuses to recognize the power of his own passion, and denies his incestuous desires -«¿No conoces a Amnón? ¿Te has olvidado / de que ama la virtud?» («Don't you know Amnón? Have you forgotten that he loves virtue?»; 1.3).

Amnón convinces his father to send Thamar to him, to comfort him. She is, Amnón tells his father, the only happiness he has known: «En mi largo penar he conocido / que la imagen feliz, consoladora / de la infancia, calmaba el desvarío / de mi tétrico espíritu» («In my long suffering I have found out that a happy image, the consoler of childhood, would calm the delirium of my sullen spirit»; 1.6). He believes that Thamar is this «happy image» that will calm his excesses. The coro's closing song in act one becomes ironic as the focus shifts from Amnón and his good, but misguided intentions to Thamar and her victimization:

Exaltaré tu gloria, oh soberano Dios; pues contra el enemigo me diste tu favor. Salvásteme, atendiendo benigno mi clamor; libraste al alma mía del infernal furor.

(1.6)

I will exalt your glory O sovereign God; Since you showed me your favor against my enemies. You saved me, benevolently heeding my cry; you freed my soul from infernal furor.

When finally alone with Thamar in act 2, Amnón becomes delirious as he struggles against himself: «Defendedme de mí mismo. Salvadme de las furias que me cercan» («Defend me from myself. Save me from the furies that surround me»; 2.5). As Thamar tries to comfort her brother, the chorus of maidens («doncellas») and warriors («guerreros») warn the audience of the imminent rape: «Alerta, alerta / velad, velad, / contra el delito / y la maldad» («Keep guard, keep guard, Keep watch, keep watch / against sin / and against evil»; 2.6). Not only does the coro's song serve as foreshadowing, but also comments ironically about the true situation. One stanza of the song stands out as perhaps the main theme of the play:

En la infelice suerte, contra el destino adverso, contra el hombre perverso Dios me defenderá.

(2.6)

In unhappy fortune, against adverse destiny, against perverse men God will defend me.

But Thamar is not protected by a benevolent God, or brother or even father. The irony of this and other statements underscores the vast difference between appearance and reality -the happy victory celebration and the despair of a troubled mind, the seemingly caring father and the father who refuses to see the truth of his children. As Whitaker notes, the rape that follows off stage occurs in the middle of the night in the exact middle of the play («Darkness» 449), and it is the turning point for the play's heroine, who loses her innocence and her happiness in this moment offstage.

By the third act, the sweet and innocent virgin of acts 1 and 2 has undergone a significant change. Thamar enters the stage «con el cabello suelto, cubierta de ceniza, el velo roto [...]» («with her hair let down, covered with soot, her veil torn [...]»; 3.5). She reveals Amnón's crime against her and begs her other brother, Absalón, for revenge. Thamar calls herself «infeliz» («unhappy») and she begs for restitution:

Venganza, sí, venganza. Yo la invoco, Absalón, y mis clamores no cesarán en tanto que respire de implorarla.

(3.5)

Revenge, yes, revenge. I invoke it, Absalón, an my clamoring will not cease as long as I breathe to implore it.

At the beginning of act 5, Thamar's character has come full swing. Once an innocent young girl whose greatest desire was to please the men around her, Thamar is now full of anger. The ironic commentary of the coro is not lost on Thamar. While they sang at the end of act 4: «Alegraos, varones justos / alegraos en el Señor, / que a los justos les conviene / dar alababanzas a Dios». («Be happy righteous men, be happy in the Lord, / since it is right that the righteous / give praises to God»; 5.7), Thamar opens the act 5 by bitterly responding to the happy song of the «doncellas»:

¡Ah! Felices vosotras, cuyo gozo a Dios alaba con festivo acento, en tanto que yo gimo abandonada en mi angustia cruel del universo.

(5.1)

Oh! Happy are you, whose delight praise God with festive accent, while I grieve abandoned by the universe in my cruel anguish.

Her father's first reaction to her is one of reproach:

Thamar. ¿Qué es esto? ¡Tú, perturbando el público alborozo, a la vista de todos mis guerreros te presentas llorosa?

(5.3)

Thamar. What is this? You dare to present yourself crying in front of my warriors, disturbing public merriment?

She begs for justice, appealing to his position as king, as father, even as the keeper of God's law -«Acordaos / de que Abraham humilde obedeciendo a la voz del Señor, contra su hijo / aunque inocente, levantó el acero» («Remember that humble Abraham, obeying the Lord's voice, lifted his sword against his innocent son»; 5.3). But despite her pleas, David refuses to listen to his daughter and defends Amnón's actions. Boys will be boys, David says: «¿Quién en el centro / de la felicidad y la grandeza no ha ofendido al Señor?» («Who in the midst of happiness and greatness has not offended God?»; 5.3). He accuses Thamar of excess, which impedes the happy reconciliation of her brothers: «¿Y cómo tu rencor llega al extremo de que esta unión feliz de tus hermanos aun a mi vista aumente tu despecho?» («And how can your rancor reach such extremes that your brothers' happy union increases your indignation even in front of me?»; 5.5). Thamar decides to leave Jerusalem to live in isolation in «una caverna ignota a los mortales» («in a cavern unknown by mortals»), a place where she can live and die alone (5.5). The play ends when Amnón is brought to the palace after being mortally wounded by Absalón. Thamar is horrified to see her assailant, and Amnón curses her as he dies:

¡Tú aquí odiosa mujer! ¡Ah! Tu presencia emponzoña mis últimos momentos... Por ti he perdido la virtud... Aparta... Padre, por mi perdón clamad al cielo... Arrepentido... víctima infelice... de amor, de odio, y de venganza muero.

(5-6)

You here detested woman! Oh! Your presence poisons my last moments... For you I have lost my virtue... Get away... Father, plead heaven for my pardon... Repentant... unhappy victim... of love, of hate, and of vengeance I die.

In one last irony, Amnón claims to be the real victim. But the unresolved conflict at the end, so unlike most Neoclassic tragedies, underscores the tragedy of a woman victimized, rejected and isolated, and her impossibility for happiness -in unhappy fortune, against adverse destiny, against perverse men, no one can (or will) defend her.

Whitaker has stated that Amnón:

signals the future course of Spanish drama in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Accentuated by the numerous lamenting speeches of the protagonists, the play's focus on adverse destiny and impossible love prefigures similar themes which explode on the Spanish romantic stage thirty years after the publication of Amnón.

(«Darkness» 451)

Certainly Amnón has a great deal in common with the dramas that follow it. Its principal theme of incest was one that intrigued Romantic authors since, as Sebold reminds us, «para el amor no hay mujer más inaccesible que la madre, la hermana o la hija» («in love there is no woman more inaccessible than the mother, the sister or the daughter»; «El incesto, el suicidio y el primer romanticismo español» 670). Yet Gálvez did not seem to be so interested in the «inaccessible woman» as she was in the woman who was powerless to the domination of men, as is evident in her many plays that deal with rape, slavery and abuse. Amnón, as the heir to the throne, is similar to the rapist-king Rodrigo in Florinda. Yet by being an incestuous brother, the story of Amnón allowed Gálvez to also explore other issues surrounding patriarchy. David, who is both father and king, favors his son and begs his daughter to keep this embarrassing family secret quiet. Her final surrender to her father's insistence that she pardon her brother rings hollow when the criminal dies blaming his victim.

Yet while plays like Florinda and Amnón decry the feminine condition, one very unorthodox play by Gálvez defies it: Safo. This one-act tragedy dramatizing the last moments of the famous Greek poet is a daring play about desire and lost pleasure and the emotional and physical excesses of a woman who values her freedom above all else. Safo, who has decided to plunge to her death over the loss of her lover, Faón, opens the play with a soliloquy describing the night and her own state of mind:

Noche desoladora, fiel imagen de mis continuos bárbaros tormentos; no cese tu rigor, no tus furores: el hórrido silbido de los vientos, el rayo desprendido de la esfera, el ronco son del pavoroso trueno halaga un corazón desesperado. ¡Ah!, perezca en tu horror el universo perezca la morada que mantiene al hombre entre los hombres más perverso.

Desolate night, faithful image of my continuous and barbarous torments; Cease not your rigor, nor your furors: A desperate heart praises the horrid hissing of the winds, the lightening bolt let loose into the skies, the coarse sound of the terrible thunder. Oh! Let the universe perish in your horror, perish the dwelling that maintains that most perverse of men.

Nature mirrors Safo's own rage over her lover's inconstancy, as she prepares to jump from the precipice into the sea out of her desperation.

By scene 2 Faón's father, Cricias, finds Safo in her agitated state and fears that if his son saw the «loco exceso» («crazy excess») of Safo's passion, he would be tempted to go back to her. Faón, who has been rescued from the sea where his wife drowned in a fatal accident, speaks of his unforgettable passion -the «delicioso goce del deseo» («delicious joy of desire»)- with Safo, sparked by «su ternura, sus gracias, sus talentos, / su lira» («her tenderness, her graces, her talents, her lyric»; scene 3). The desire that Safo inspires is as much spiritual as intellectual -her talent and art- as physical. Other men are attracted too by Safo's talent. In scene 5, an admirer, Nicandro, is shocked to learn that the poetess, whom he has come to woo, is planning to take her own life, an excess that he cannot believe:

¿La poetisa Safo a tal extremo reducida se ve? ¿La que de Atenas mereció los aplausos y los premios? ¿Por la que suspiraron vanamente millares de rendidos, y yo entre ellos?

Has the poetess Sappho been reduced to such an extreme? She who received deservingly applause and awards from Athens? For whom thousands of devotees sighed in vain, I among them?

Nicandro is attracted to Safo first by her poetry, not by her physical beauty. In scene 6 he offers to sacrifice himself in her place, telling her of his unrequited love without revealing that it is her affection he seeks. But Safo responds in scene 6:

¡Ah! No es igual el tuyo a mi tormento. Tú no has perdido más que un insensible. Pues oye por Faón lo que pierdo. Por él abandoné mi patria y nombre, por él sufrí de mi envidioso sexo la más atroz calumnia. Por su causa de los hijos de Apolo el rendimiento altiva desprecié. Y en fin, llevando mi constante fineza hasta el extremo preferí ser su amante, a ser su esposa, que amor de libres corazones dueño huye un lazo que impone obligaciones.

Oh! Your torment is not equal to mine. You have only lost an unfeeling one. But listen to what I have lost for Faón. For him I abandoned my country and my name, because of him I suffered the most atrocious calamity of my envious sex. For him I haughtily disregarded the devotion of Apolo's sons. And finally, taking my constant love to the extreme, I preferred to be his lover, rather than his wife, since love between free hearts flees ties that impose obligations.

This is the extreme of which Safo is guilty, and which she inspires in men -the «delicious joy of desire»- that is free from the restrictions of social convention. She later elaborates on this very sensual and passionate love for Faón, describing their first encounter:

Casi desnudo aun de la lucha, los hermosos miembros descubría, que envidia el mismo Apolo, y que amor pueden inspirar a Venus. También me vio él entonces, y previno con su declaración mi amante fuego. [...] si has logrado las delicias que logra quien viviendo solo en su amante, en él se vivifica, lleno de amor, y de deleites lleno; no extrañarás que yo que así me he visto, pienso morir cuando gozar no espero.

(Scene 7)

[...] still almost completely naked from battle, he revealed his beautiful limbs, which Apolo himself envies, and that could inspire love in Venus. He saw me too then, and anticipated with his declaration my loving fire. [...] if you have experienced the delights of one who lives only in her lover, who is refreshed in him, full of love, and full of pleasure; you will not be surprised that I, who have experienced this, have decided to die when I can no longer hope to experience joy.

The same sensibility that created the artist and her happiness -the intense emotion and sensation of pleasure- is what impels her to kill herself. Without it, happiness is impossible. At her death she lays down her laurel wreath, symbol of her success as a poet:

Laurel glorioso, que la sabia Atenas concedió a las tareas de mi genio, deja mi frente, y queda donde sirvas a mi nombre y mi amor de monumento.

(Scene 10)

Glorious laurel, that the wise Athens gave for the works of by genius, leave my forehead and stay here where you will serve as a monument to my name and my love.

While Safo may appear to be a libertine who refuses to adhere to societal norms her death conforms to the required didacticism of Neoclassic tragedy. She survives the fall long enough to testify to her mistake:

¡Oh tú... sea, quien fueres... que has visto de mi muerte el triste ejemplo, publica que es... supersticioso engaño buscar aquí el olvido... pues yo muero... adorando a Faón... y hasta el sepulcro... su imagen y mi amor conmigo llevo!

(Scene 12)

Oh you... whoever you might be... who have seen the sad example of my public death, it is a superstitious mistake to seek to forget this way... since I die adoring Faón... and even to the sepulchre I carry his image and my love!

(XII)

Safo, the ultimate Amazon, the «sensible» artist, the one who defies social convention and male domination to advocate free love, is an example of feminine excess. Her suicide represents the ultimate act of autonomy over her own life, yet it is not the answer since even in death Safo is incapable of forgetting Faón. The autobiographical elements in the character of Safo -both she and Gálvez were women who chose unconventional lifestyles and professions- make her an important symbol in María Rosa Gálvez's work. This great Greek poet who has served as a fingerpost to generations of women artists, including María Gertrudis Hore, represents to them the female artist who rebels against men and societal mores in order to pursue her personal and artistic freedom and happiness. Yet even she does it unsuccessfully.

This trite, even «excessive» ending, and especially the closing image of the play, with Safo «moribunda, conducida en un lecho de yerbas por los nadadores» («dying, carried by swimmers on a bed of grass»; scene 12), seem to detract from it and push Safo the play towards melodrama. Gálvez «over acts» in this play, just as her English contemporary Fanny Burney has been found to do³⁹. Yet in the excesses of Safo, much like those of Esclavas amazonas, Gálvez still seems to be sending a message about women's access (or lack of access) to happiness. While male excess hurts innocent women and upsets both their happiness and societal harmony, feminine excess is a reaction against this male domination, an often futile attempt to find independence and, if not happiness, at least satisfaction.

In both the letters she wrote to the censors and editors defending her plays, and in the «Advertencias» that introduced them, we see Gálvez's self-perception as an enlightened, Spanish, female reformer and author. She participated in the Enlightenment, which by the first decade of the nineteenth-century was waning, through her choice of genre, use of Neoclassic precepts, and her didactic purpose. Not only did she compose numerous Neoclassic comedies and tragedies, she also wrote a melologue and a comedia lacrimosa, both forms of sentimental drama developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. All of her plays conformed to the unities of time, place and action with very little deviation from Luzán's guidelines. Like her contemporaries Leandro Fernández de Moratín and Manuel Quintana, Gálvez also called for the reform of Spanish theater and tried to apply it to her work. Proof of her success at being perceived as a reformer is in the inclusion of three of her plays in the Teatro nuevo español, set up by the Junta de Reforma to reward writers of original plays that were accepted for performance (Cook 377). Most of her plays, especially the comedies, sought to teach audiences a moral lesson about life in modern society. However, unlike her Neoclassic colleagues, Gálvez embraced another eighteenth-century genre that was outside the intellectual circles of her day, the sainete, reconciling the two opposing camps in her comedies.

In a world where women were valued for their service to others, fame was often denied them. Patricia Meyer Spacks, speaking of the autobiography of seventeenth-century duchess, Margaret Cavendish, declares:

It is all very well today that women win renown by their chaste lives and noble souls -but such renown is unlikely to persist through the ages. The Duchess partly recognizes [...] her desire to achieve public as well as private recognition. Her writing is an obvious way to do so [...]

(192)

María Rosa Gálvez knew this too, and she chased after elusive immortality with a pen, which perhaps only Sappho before her had truly achieved. In the «Advertencia» to the second volume of Gálvez's Obras poéticas, the author speaks to her desire for artistic fame. This introduction, which is also her treatise on the status of the tragedy in Spain, makes some very personal revelations. At first Gálvez seems apologetic:

Atrevimiento es en mi sexo, y en estas desgraciadas circunstancias de nuestro teatro, ofrecer a la pública censura una colección de tragedias; pero espero que se me disculpe por el buen deseo que me estimula a promover o excitar los ingenios españoles.

(7)

I realize that it is daring for my sex, especially given the unfortunate circumstances of our theater today, to offer up for public censure a collection of tragedies; but I hope that you will forgive me for the good desire that stimulates me to promote or encourage Spanish genius.

Her modesty here contrasts with statements she makes elsewhere, including the aforementioned letter preserved by Serrano y Sanz in which she distinguishes herself as the only woman (Spanish or French) to have created an entire collection of tragedies, as she has⁴⁰. Gálvez seems to have an ambivalence about her work as artist, or does she?

Gálvez sees herself in a lonely position as the only female playwright of her times. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim that as a result of their isolation from the mainstream of the male literary world, women writers have often suffered from an authorial anxiety quite different from Harold Bloom's masculine «anxiety of influence»:

Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention -all these phenomena of «inferiorization» mark the female writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts from those of her male counterpart.

(50)

Gálvez undoubtedly felt that same isolation, but she also decided to use it to her advantage. The fact is that María Rosa Gálvez was not the first dramatist in Spain, and especially not the first woman to attempt tragedy as she implies here and states elsewhere. While the names of seventeenth-century Spanish women dramatists like María de Zayas, Ana Caro or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz could have been unknown to her (and indeed they are only recently being «re-discovered»), it is quite possible that she knew of contemporary dramatists like Olympe de Gouges and Françoise de Graffigny in France, or María Martínez Abello and Isabel Morón in Spain⁴¹. Despite her calls for feminine solidarity in her plays, Gálvez's project in her «Advertencia» and other comments about her drama, was to single herself out from the rest, both by virtue of her sex and in spite of it.

Gálvez, obviously concerned about how the public will judge her efforts to become part of a great male tradition of tragedians, belittles her own accomplishments in this field, perhaps as a result of the «anxiety» described above⁴²:

En las mías faltará mucho para la perfección; pero el sexo, y las continuas ocupaciones, y no vulgares penas que acompañan mi situación, no me han permitido limarlas con más escrupulosidad; ni yo creo que por haberlo hecho adelantaría mucho; puesto que tal cual sea su mérito, es más bien debido a la naturaleza que al arte.

(7)

In my tragedies there is much lacking for their perfection; but my sex, and the continual occupations, and not so vulgar pains that accompany my situation, have not allowed me to refine them with more scrupulousness; nor do I think that by having done so I could have advanced much; since whatever be its merit, it is due more to nature than to art.

This absence of Neoclassic refinement that Gálvez excuses here is part of her friend and colleague Manuel Quintana's complaint about her work, as previously mentioned. Quintana could have influenced Gálvez's opinion of her own work through private conversations prior to the publication of her collection of original tragedies, but perhaps also it could be the opposite -that Gálvez's belittlement of her own work through statements in her introduction convinced him and others that her work was not a serious challenge to them. Alison Weber has called a similar strategy in Teresa de Ávila's writing a «rhetoric of incompetence» (Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity 104):

Teresa's rhetoric of feminine subordination -all the paradoxes, the self-depreciation, the feigned ignorance and incompetence, the deliberate obfuscation and ironic humor- produced the desired perlocutionary effect. Her words were taken as an ingenuous act: «This woman is not a deceiver».

(159)

By diminishing public expectations of her tragedies, Gálvez hides her real intentions, which she outlines in the last sentence of this «Advertencia»:

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.

(8)

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.

María Rosa Gálvez wrote tragedies because she saw them as a way to gain lasting fame as an artist. Just as we have seen in our study of María Gertrudis Hore, Gálvez took her vocation as an artist seriously and wanted recognition for what, despite her claims to the contrary in the «Advertencia», required a great deal of work and determination. She saw the tragedy as a path to greatness for both Spain and herself, and she dedicated herself to it almost exclusively after 1804.

Unfortunately, despite her best efforts at creating a truly unique opus of tragedies, modern critics like Rudat -who praises the «Advertencia» as an example of the Neoclassic move for reform of a decadent national theater- have continued to believe that, despite her best efforts, Gálvez's tragedies never reached the same artistic level as her comedies (Rudat, «María Rosa Gálvez» 244). Yet, when the comedies and the tragedies are considered together, as examples of women's ongoing search for happiness, it is possible to see them not simply as separate and unequal forms, but rather as two parts of a whole body of work that together explored the female condition and women's unique pursuit of happiness. At times they showed the world as it should have been, as in the comedies, where women achieve their own happiness and the happiness of their families through independence and solidarity with other women. Other times they portrayed the world as it was, as presented in the tragedies, where the excesses of men dominate women's lives, separate them from other women, keep them from happiness and consequently threaten all of society, not just women. In order to best dramatize the effects of excess, melodrama was a frequent element in Gálvez's work. Excess became for Gálvez both theme and technique, and thus in her «poetics of excess» she both criticized excessive male behavior, and ironically embraced some of the excesses of independence for which women were often criticized.

Many of Gálvez's heroines mirrored aspects of her own life. She also would have been called an Amazon: independent and unconventional, but also isolated and ridiculed for her social transgressions. Happiness ultimately was elusive for Gálvez, just as it was for her tragic heroines. Perhaps the strange image of the Amazon-slavewoman applied to Gálvez as well as it did to most women writers of her day. María Rosa Gálvez died in 1806 at the age of 38, having made remarkable strides for herself in the world of Spanish drama, but never really achieving that much desired recognition for the work that she thought would bring her, and perhaps other women too, happiness.