Feminine Discourse/Feminist Discourse: Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer

Maryellen Bieder

The literary movements that dominate nineteenth-century Spanish literary history -romanticism, realism, and naturalism- have come to overshadow the existence of other contemporaneous fictional modes. The last century also witnesses the remarkable proliferation of literary creativity by women, principally in works addressed primarily but not exclusively to a female readership. This literary activity does not take place in isolation but finds support and sponsorship in the male literary community. Dictionaries of Spanish women authors and their writings, compiled by men in the second half of the century, attest to a desire to document the extent and scope of this burgeoning phenomenon¹. One of the early catalogues of women artists and writers is, however, the work of a young author, María de la Concepción Gimeno, in her book on La mujer española².

Throughout the last century, the number of women who, as poets, novelists, dramatists and essayists, seek a forum for their writing and an identity in the world of letters continues to grow. By mid-century, literary and cultural magazines, published by men but written either entirely by women or with a strong female presence, multiply in tandem with the expanding female readership in both Spain and Spanish America³. As the issues of female education, emancipation and suffrage reverberate throughout Europe, women in Spain insert themselves into the debates in essays and fiction. These women writers never secure a place in the collective memory of Spanish literary history. Perhaps because their audience is predominantly female, perhaps because of the conventionality of much of their writing, perhaps because of their overt moral didacticism, or perhaps because of the lingering dominance of post-romantic sentimentalism well after the realist mode has established itself in Spain, little trace of their writings remains. Only the fiction of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and to a lesser degree the poetry of Carolina Coronado and Rosalía de Castro retain their standing and their readership across the decades.

From among the scores of Spanish women who publish in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Concepción Gimeno stands out both as representative of the tensions and competing impulses evident in the writings of women and as one of the most accomplished Spanish women novelists of her day. Juan Valera, not known for his support of literary women, voices grudging admiration for her talent. Writing to Menéndez y Pelayo, he acknowledges that «La tal Concepción [...] tiene extraordinaria facilidad, ingenio y hasta chiste y sentimiento⁴». Valera's less charitable assessment of Gimeno herself as «presumida, pedantesca y con poco juicio y menos saber» exemplifies the difficult reception awaiting the woman writer who thrusts herself so visibly, so unfemininely, into the public arena of letters and its inevitable backbiting.

The literary biography of Concepción Gimeno replicates many of the activities and achievements of her more famous, more prolific and undoubtedly more gifted contemporary, Emilia Pardo Bazán. Like her, Concepción Gimeno pens essays, gives lectures, collaborates in the periodical press, publishes her own magazine, writes novels and short fiction, and takes a public stand on the social issues of the day. Unlike her contemporary, Gimeno gains recognition and acclaim less as a creative writer than as a journalist and essayist. Although she moves less visibly within the intellectual and literary circles that Pardo Bazán penetrates to greater acclaim, Gimeno is nevertheless one of only a handful of women writers in a position to attain a degree of recognition from and attract the collaboration of members of the (male) literary establishment. The contrast between the two women comes more sharply into focus in Gimeno's interactions with the female literary community and her contributions to women's periodicals. And whereas Pardo Bazán's Nuevo Teatro Crítico is a vehicle for her own, multifaceted writing, Gimeno uses the illustrated magazines she founds and edits to build a network of contacts with many of the principal male and female writers of Spain and Latin America, including Juan Valera and Emilia Pardo Bazán. In social terms, she seeks support from the same titled class that attracts Pardo Bazán, and she receives royal patronage for several of her books. Already an author of fiction and articles on women when she marries, in her literary career Gimeno has the support of her journalist husband, Francisco de Paula Flaquer. In Mexico she is «Directora propietaria» of El Álbum de la Mujer, to which he contributes the opening column; in Spain she remains the editor of El Álbum Ibero Americano, while his name figures as publisher. She may well have overshadowed him in his lifetime; in any case, her name, but not his, survives in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries.

The recoverable biographical data on Concepción Gimeno, as on most women writers of her era, is scant. In great part it lies scattered across a range of contemporary periodicals, with almost no published letters or personal papers. In the case of Gimeno, the prologues to her works draw verbal portraits of her, but these are penned either by elder statesmen of letters or by younger male admirers. Formulaic in nature, they tend towards hyperbole and veer away from a straightforward appraisal of the writer and her work. Even the writer's date of birth becomes problematic, casting into doubt our whole perception of her literary career and the relationship of her writing to other central events in her life. In 1877 in his prologue to La mujer española, Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto states Gimeno's age as 24, making 1852 (as we shall see) the year of her birth⁵. An established writer and public figure, Cueto may well provide reliable information about the young, unmarried writer.

If 1852 is the year of Gimeno's birth, she is 16 when she sends a Zaragoza newspaper an essay entitled «A los impugnadores del bello sexo» that declares itself to be her first foray into print⁶. In Madrid her initial contact with the literary community comes, as she records, through the «tertulias literarias de Ayguals de Izco⁷». In 1871 the Prospectus for La Mujer. Revista de Instrucción General para el Bello Sexo lists Gimeno's name among the «Redactores y Colaboradores», in the company of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Juan Valera, and other writers. Her first novel, Victorina; o, Heroísmo del corazón, is serialized in a Madrid newspaper when she is age 20. The same year she founds and edits La Ilustración de la Mujer⁸. Her marriage in 1879, at the age of 26, thus takes place after her emergence as a writer of both fiction and essays on women. In contrast, Emilia Pardo Bazán, born in September 1851, marries at 16 and publishes her first novel a decade later, at age 27. (Of course, Pardo Bazán's poetry appears in print as early as 1867 and in 1877 her essay on Feijoo brings her scholarly recognition.) In Gimeno's case, however, the question of dates does not resolve itself so easily.

Prefacing Gimeno's 1890 novel, ¿Culpa o expiación?, is a lengthy biography by a Mexican writer who records her birth as occurring in Alcañiz at the end of 1860⁹. This date is repeated in later biographies and eventually adopted by the Library of Congress. The symmetry of the dates (1860 and 1890) and the appeal of age 29 suggest the facility of this eight-year slippage in her date of birth. Nevertheless, the implications of accepting 1860 as the year of Gimeno's birth are startling. First, it necessitates a precocious literary awakening that credits her with both founding her own journal and publishing her first novel at age 12. Secondly, the earlier birthdate casts Gimeno as a young bride of 18 on her marriage in 1879, and indeed the prologue makes reference to her youthful marriage¹⁰. These twin motifs of an early marriage and precocious talent appear to coalesce in Gimeno's years in Mexico, where her husband's career takes the couple from 1883 to 1889 and where she publishes El Álbum de la Mujer. Valera considers Gimeno to be a vain woman, a useful weakness in the editor of a handsome weekly magazine, and he urges Menéndez to exploit the potential for publication: «Si usted plantifica en el ejemplar una dedicatoria con cuatro piropos -crítico-galantes- se quedará ella muy hueca y agradecida y nos valdrá¹¹». Flaquer himself confirms his wife's enjoyment of attention and admiration, while the frequency with which her books display her portrait evinces the pleasure she takes in her own beauty. Vanity aside, Gimeno doubtlessly finds youth an asset too precious to squander. However, nothing in the 1890 prologue itself convincingly supports the 1860 birthdate. Gimeno may well have constructed a life story for her Mexican biographer that confirms her femininity by granting her the requisite motifs of both a youthful literary debut and an early marriage. The prologue does, however, stipulate that Gimeno's birthday falls at the end of the year, a fact that makes December of 1852 the date that corresponds to Cueto's earlier statement of her age¹².

Although the outlines of Gimeno's literary career in Madrid following her return from Mexico are relatively well documented, the date of her death is not. Her weekly illustrated review, rebaptized in Spain El Álbum Ibero Americano, serves as her literary base from 1889 until at least 1909. Active as well in social and intellectual circles, she gives lectures before various cultural organizations and serves as the first President of the Sección de Señoras of the Unión Ibero-Americana¹³. Her last volume appears in 1909, but 1911 finds her lecturing on feminism in Buenos Aires, and in September 1917 she is still on an extended tour of South America¹⁴. Although I cannot confirm the date, she apparently dies in 1919, two years before Emilia Pardo Bazán.

If Concepción Gimeno's biography is problematic, her articles, her illustrated reviews and her books survive intact, if widely dispersed. From the beginning of her career, with the publication of her paean «A mi adorada hermana Rosario¹⁵» and her essay «A los impugnadores del bello sexo», her writing evinces two different modes of discourse, the sentimental and the polemical, that address two different audiences. A writer of fiction, Gimeno publishes at least four novels: Victorina (1873), El doctor alemán (1880), Suplicio de una coqueta (1885), ¿Culpa o expiación? (1890), and, after a silence of almost twenty years, a novela corta, Una Eva moderna (1909)¹⁶. In her other writings she employs a range of popular genres to explore the construction of woman as subject and as reader. A participant in the debates over the intellect, rights and responsibilities of women, she addresses the limitations and potential of the contemporary Spanish woman in La mujer española, estudios acerca de su educación y sus facultades intelectuales (1877), La mujer juzgada por una mujer (1882), Evangelios de la mujer (1900), La mujer intelectual (1901) and Mujeres de raza latina (1904). She contributes to the writing of women's history with collections of essays on the lives and achievements of famous women. These works seek to counterbalance the sense of vulnerability and isolation experienced by writing women by affirming the existence of a long tradition of prominent and gifted women in the Western world: Madres de hombres célebres (1884), Mujeres, vidas paralelas (1890), and Mujeres de regia estirpe (1907). Adopting popular modes for women, she adds a volume on social and moral deportment, En el salón y en el tocador (1899), and a devotional tome, La Virgen Madre y sus advocaciones (1907). Her lectures at the Ateneo de Madrid on Civilización de los antiguos pueblos mexicanos (1890), Mujeres de la Revolución francesa (1891) and El problema feminista (1903), and her lecture at the Sociedad Española de Higiene on Iniciativas de la mujer en higiene moral social (1908), also appear in print¹⁷.

In her review of a polemic play about a modern woman, Gimeno lays bare the dichotomy at the heart of much of her own writing. While she recognizes in Enrique Gaspar's La huelga de hijos a defense of la mujer fuerte, she nevertheless rejects the conclusion of the play in which the educated and morally superior protagonists unite in a marriage she condemns as immoral by association¹⁸. The moral resolution she proposes would separate the young lovers, keeping each one chaste and their mutual love unblemished by contact with their corrupt parents. Gimeno's verdict awards the victory to exemplary virtue rather than to the future regeneration of society through marriage, while in terms of dramatic tension it suspends closure indefinitely. Gimeno's rewriting of the play's conclusion underscores the tension in her writing between normative moral judgments and sentimental plotting, on the one hand, and her own espousal of social reform on the other.

Concepción Gimeno enters the debate over the role and rights of women in 1877 with her essays on La mujer española, in which she voices her sense of the unjust margination experienced by the woman writer. By this time she has already published her first novel, Victorina. In dedicating her book of essays to King Alfonso XII, she reminds him that she has had «el honor de leer capítulos del tomo a Su Majestad». Despite these successes, she expresses a sharp awareness of the strictures placed on la mujer literata: «El hombre español le permite a la mujer ser frívola, vana, aturdida, ligera, superficial, beata y coqueta, pero no le permite ser escritora» (p. 211). Gimeno argues against the perceived incompatibility of the woman as writer and the traditional roles of wife and mother, insisting instead on a fusion of intellectual development and family identity. «... queremos que la mujer enarbole la bandera del progreso dentro de la familia, porque fuera de ella es la mujer un ser incompleto» (p. 227). Gimeno's view of the woman's place in Spanish society attempts to retain the strengths of the integrated roles of wife, mother and daughter, while allowing for intellectual growth and expression¹⁹.

Gimeno's less than flattering characterization of women shows her impatience with what she perceives as their endemic inertia:

Her message is that education and self-improvement are essential for a wife to meet the needs of an educated husband and realize society's vested interest in a stable marriage. She redefines the relationship between marriage partners in terms of more open and equitable communication. Her negative portrait of the traditional woman underscores the urgency of her call for women to educate themselves and take responsibility for their lives: «Hemos alentado a la mujer para que sacuda el ominoso yugo de la ignorancia, convencidas de que el hombre ha de hacer poco a su favor, y de que todas las prerrogativas que ella conquiste se las deberá a sí misma» (p. 227).

This last asseveration sharply delineates the distance that in Gimeno's own view separates her from the majority of her Spanish sisters: she has charted her own path and takes credit for her own success. Her very sense of her own achievement leads her to mark her distance from other women and project herself as an educated and published author alongside other (male) writers. (This is, of course, essentially the strategy that Emilia Pardo Bazán adopts.) At the same time, however, Gimeno's awareness that society resists women's writing provokes her to affirm the inequality that her implicit assertion of equality with her male confreres denies. Beneath the surface of Gimeno's call for greater self-realization for women lies the tension between process and result. She argues for the practical need for parity between marriage partners -that is, within marriage but not precisely as the basis for marriage- while at the same time urging women to achieve a sense of identity independent of male guidance. The potential for social change inherent in this formulation is tempered by a highly traditional view of social structure and conventions. At base Gimeno seems to desire enhanced self-worth and self-determination that break with inherited gender roles without violating traditional social boundaries.

Writing almost 25 years later in La mujer intelectual (1901), Gimeno voices concerns similar to those expounded in her earliest essays. Reprising the negative images of the female in history, myth and literature, she records the «Eva antigua» as «frágil, impura, germen del pecado, espíritu del mal, órgano del diablo, varón imperfecto, eterna convaleciente» (p. 9). In reiterating these male-centered formulations of women (i. e., «varón imperfecto»), she conveys the antithesis between the Old Eve and her new counterpart: «La Eva antigua, caprichosa, tímida, llorona, neurótica, mimada y adulada, no valió lo que vale la mujer moderna [...]» (p. 14). In turn she pens new metaphors to convey the universal and enduring values embodied by modern women: «Sol del mundo moral, caricia de la vida, alma de la humanidad» (p. 9). No longer defined as a defective male, the ideal new woman is by contrast self-less and other-centered. Nevertheless, at base Gimeno's definition of the modern woman has much firmer social roots than this metaphorical language, with its lingering romantic tinges, suggests.

In La mujer intelectual, Gimeno displaces physical motherhood as the central definition of the woman's role by enlarging the moral scope of her mission to embrace social regeneration: «La mujer moderna, sacerdotisa de las ideas redentoras, apóstol de la regeneración, tiene una maternidad moral, ilimitada e infinita²¹». Again using metaphorical language, Gimeno is suggesting something much more concrete than the virtuous woman; she proclaims an action-oriented manifesto for the modern woman: «lucha, resiste y vence» (p. 16). Beyond the rhetorical language and the exalted mythifying, she sets precise goals for the educated woman in contemporary Spanish society: «La mujer de otros tiempos no debía ver, oír ni hablar, la de nuestros días discute en Ateneos, preside Congresos, forma parte de tribunales, asóciase a la vida espiritual del hombre, a la vida del progreso, a la vida de la patria» (p. 18). Within the carefully drawn spheres of female intellectual activity, Gimeno creates a public space for women in the arenas of intellectual debate and social reform. In short, an educated woman capable of taking a moral stand on the social issues of the day benefits the nation. This vision is far more sweeping than Gimeno's call in her earlier volume for education in order for a woman to satisfy her husband's need for intellectual companionship.

If we compare Gimeno's language in La mujer española with her 1903 lecture at the Ateneo on El problema feminista, the reformulation that accrues across nearly three decades comes clearly into focus²². The rhetorical excesses of the early work contrast with the more concrete images and more clearly defined social demands in the Ateneo lecture. Once again Gimeno reads in the presence of royalty; the late King's sister, the Princess Eulalia de Borbón, regarded as independent in thought and action, attends her lecture and sets the social tone for support of feminist reforms: «La libertad que piden los feministas para la mujer no es la licencia, es el derecho de ejercer las profesiones liberales, siéndole retribuido su trabajo como al varón, a fin de que pueda encontrar en su pobreza un escudo que defienda su honra [...]» (p. 7). The economic dimension of women's exclusion from the marketplace receives attention here, but Gimeno's concern lies with the educated woman, not the working class. Marriage again emerges as a central concern in her lecture, but she now formulates a marriage based on equality in all spheres: «Anhelan los feministas que el matrimonio sea la asociación de los seres conscientes, libres e iguales; exigen la misma ley moral, civil y económica para los dos sexos, alcanzando con el triunfo de sus ideas que la mujer deje de ser moralmente menor, civilmente esclava» (pp. 6-7).

Although Gimeno has expanded the range of vindications to include not only moral and intellectual equality, but economic and legal rights as well, her emphasis continues to fall on the recognition of women's moral parity. A tone of disillusionment shows through in her characterization of Spain's lack of response to feminism, turning bitter the optimism of her youthful call for change: «Uno de los problemas sociales que más preocupan hoy a los pensadores es el problema feminista [...]. No ha encontrado todavía eco en España; no se ha tomado en serio, porque nuestro carácter préstase más a la ironía que a la investigación; porque es más fácil entre nosotros condenar con sátiras un sistema filosófico que estudiarle» (pp. 5-6). Gimeno's condemnation of the deaf ear Spain turns to the issue of «female emancipation» seems to echo with the sounds of the ridicule that has rewarded her own writings on the subject. And yet her audience on this occasion could not be more proper or less likely to express its disapproval.

The ground that Gimeno stakes out for herself in the feminist arena is «feminismo moderado», a careful distancing of herself from the more radical dimensions of feminism that threaten the social fabric with violence: «no es revolución, sino evolución» (p. 13). She allays the most common fear aroused in opponents of change, but her argument is purely pragmatic: «El credo de los feministas moderados es conservar a la mujer muy femenina, porque masculinizada perdería la influencia que ejerce sobre el hombre, precisamente por su feminidad: la virago es repulsiva» (p. 13). The power women currently wield resides in their traditional roles in society and in those attributes admired by society as being «feminine». A woman who steps totally outside these roles -«viragos o marimachos, Herodes con faldas, o vírgenes fuertes, como se dice hoy por eufemismo» (p. 265)- loses her hold on the woman's place in society and thereby loses her power within that (male) society.

As a moderate feminist, Gimeno sets defined limits on the extent and nature of equality for women, rejecting the right to participate in politics: «siendo inevitable que la política desmoralice a un sexo, evitemos que corrompa a los dos. Si la mujer tuviera voto, haríanla responsable de la falta de sinceridad electoral que aquí se observa, y que hoy no le pueden achacar» (pp. 13-14). Gimeno's concern seems to lie with protecting women's moral character and avoiding any association with the existing corruption and vice. There is no suggestion here that moral purity might serve to further social reform. This curiously convoluted rationale for Gimeno's tempered stance on the divisive issue of the franchise for women -a right that many women as well as men oppose- keeps her advocacy of equality for women within socially tolerated limits. In the economic arena, however, she argues forcefully for adequate compensation for women and increased opportunity for employment. Again she takes education as her point of departure:

Perhaps the most radical proposition put forth by Gimeno is the call to give women control over their own money. Starting from her own personal concern over the marginal position occupied by the woman writer in the literary arena, Gimeno has evolved a broader social and economic manifesto that, while carefully tempered, contains within it the seeds of major social reforms. Nevertheless, her conceptual frame remains almost exclusively middle class in her focus on education as the vehicle for social change and in her concern not to ruffle the feathers of the established social order.

During the decades in which her feminist discourse takes shape in books and lectures, Gimeno elaborates an alternate discourse in her novels. Her repeated calls for education, for a marriage partnership, and for financial independence for women raise the question of how these social concerns manifest themselves in her fictional construction of women and society. Does Gimeno adopt the conventions of the «silly novels by lady novelists» (in George Eliot's memorable phrase) or does she mold the novel to her own design? In short, do her heroines take their place alongside Tristana, Feíta, Henny, and other protagonists in whom the flame of the New Eve flickers, however briefly? The key lies in Gimeno's deployment of fictional conventions and in the nature of her two modes of discourse.

Her first novel, Victorina, written before her marriage and published in La Época, conforms in overall shape and tone to the romantic conventions that dominate serialized fiction²³. Its florid language, exotic Granadine setting, and sentimental plotting -a young, penniless poet in love with a poor, uneducated but eternally faithful first love- all bear the stamp of lingering romanticism. The counterpoint of cosmopolitan Madrid society, which introduces the more cultured and sophisticated Victorina, sets up the tension between the traditional woman, both millstone and victim, and the urban woman, intellectually and socially sophisticated. The poet finds himself trapped between fidelity to his Granadine love, a sacrificial romantic heroine, and literary success in the company of the urbane heroine, Victorina. But Gimeno does not intend Victorina to exemplify the modern woman: her social skills may be impeccable but her education is superficial. It is tempting to see a reflection of the author's own upbringing in her description of Victorina's youth in a motherless household: «La sociedad de hombres eminentes de que su padre la había rodeado, había cultivado su clara inteligencia y elevado su espíritu. Nunca se la oía introducir en su conversación esas frivolidades de mujer superficial. Jamás hablaba de modas y bailes, y no toleraba se comentaran los actos de nadie de un modo desfavorable para el ausente. Odiaba la crítica rastrera instintivamente. Se mostraba atenta con los hombres de mérito, y tolerante con las medianías» (3, 20 April 1873). Beyond the social grace and discrimination of a flawless hostess, it is the triumph of Victorina's moral abnegation that the novel highlights.

Each in her own way, the two central women of the novel are fully idealized; both are morally superior beings contrasted by their geographical, socioeconomic and intellectual environments. Gimeno does not intend to reiterate the antithesis between the Old Eve and the New Eve, but rather the antithesis between two literary images of the woman, the constant victim and the triumphant heroine. Married by her father to a wealthy man to resolve his own economic difficulties, Victorina falls in love with the poet, whom she considers still bound to his first love. Despite her unsanctioned emotion, Victorina models the woman of unshakeable virtue who takes responsibility for her life and shapes her own destiny through an exercise of will. When her husband abandons her, Victorina views her new independence only as a potential trap: «Esta libertad que disfruto cautivaría mi voluntad, en el caso de que algún día tuviera la debilidad de amar a quien no fuera mi esposo» (2nd part, 4, 5 June 1873).

Victorina first attempts the moral regeneration of both her admirer and her dissipated husband, but fails to rescue her equally degenerate stepdaughter from a life of evil. Since both the poet and Victorina find themselves trapped in relationships to which they have made a moral commitment, the resolution lies wholly within the established conventions of sentimental fiction. Their love remains unsatisfied as both expiate their passion in lives of religious meditation. (This is essentially the resolution Gimeno later proposes for Gaspar's La huelga de hijos). The shadow of Don Álvaro lingers over the convention of the separated lovers, commingled with the inviolability of marriage. Victorina's consolation for a life of sacrifice is the constancy of eternally deferred love and the satisfaction of having fulfilled her duty as daughter, wife and even step-mother. It is her will to resist the temptation of her love for the poet that constitutes her «heroísmo del corazón».

The decade from 1880 to 1890 sees Gimeno's most concentrated attention to the novel. Three titles appear in these early years of married life before her return from Mexico to Madrid, where she abandons the novel while continuing to write and lecture on women. Published in Zaragoza the year after her marriage, Gimeno's second novel, El doctor alemán (1880), continues the sentimental mode of her first. Set this time in the picturesque Valencian countryside, the novel is structured on a series of antitheses: nature/city, natural man/corrupt man, love/hate, faith/atheism, vitality/illness. At the core of the novel Gimeno places a debate on the nature of women between a freethinking detractor, the German doctor, and a defender of women, the young Hersilia disguised as a man, who asserts: «Los que niegan la virtud en la mujer son estólidos pedantes; los que niegan la virtud en la mujer aplauden el vicio en el hombre» (p. 123). This closing verbal thrust cuts the doctor to the quick, and he demands satisfaction for the insult from Hersilia-disguised-as-Herminio. Gimeno's resolution of the conflict brings opposites into harmony and, through the power of love, transforms the misogynistic doctor into a man of faith and a husband who proclaims: «El amor mata el ateísmo, porque amar es creer». Manifest once again in her mission of love and abnegation, the power of women serves in this novel to regenerate men, social institutions and faith in God.

Gimeno's next novel, Suplicio de una coqueta (1885), published in Mexico five years later, carries a foreword situating it within the realist genre and calling attention to «los atrevimientos a que obliga [el realismo]». The novel represents a conscious shift in generic conventions on Gimeno's part, and she clearly feels the need to alert her readers to the challenge to their expectations: «no busques en los personajes de mi obra la inmaculada pureza de los ángeles ni la clásica perfección de las estatuas griegas; porque son seres humanos compuestos de grandeza y miseria, seres que sienten el hervor de la sangre en las venas» (p. vi). In short, she is no longer writing wholly within the sentimental mode. As a woman she anticipates resistence to her adoption of realism, and she voices the incompatibility of author and mode in an oxymoronic juxtaposition of naturalist and femenine language: «Ruégote olvides mi personalidad para que no te hiera ver el escalpelo anatómico en mano femenina» (p. vi). Juan Valera, for one, is not put off by Gimeno's daring and concedes after receiving a copy of the novel: «No se puede negar que la autora tiene talento²⁴».

The novel itself is considerably less subversive than the prologue suggests and indeed the title, Suplicio de una coqueta, leaves little doubt as to its underlying conventions. Nevertheless, the setting in contemporary Madrid and Mexico City, the upper middle class characters, and the attention to the process of selecting a marriage partner shift it away from the terrain of the sentimental novel. Popular fiction by both male and female authors targets the coqueta as the emblem of the disruptive excesses of uncontrolled female power and the antithesis of decorum, sacrifice and moral responsibility. Gimeno's protagonist combines innate and pleasing female coquetería with the manipulative and destructive egoism of coquetismo²⁵. Cuban and an orphan, Margarita is not only alien and exotic in Madrid society, but, in the absence of a mother and role model, morally weak. (In women's fiction the absence of the mother produces a defective moral character in the daughter.) Courted by many men, she chooses a husband for his prestige and social position, thus provoking the death from despair of two other suitors, and comes only belatedly to recognize her true passion for a third rejected suitor.

The crisis comes when Margarita's lover proposes adultery as the natural response to the «leyes de atracción que rigen el mundo», considering it only a falta leve. His frame of reference is social, not moral: «-No se ofusque vd.: en el pecado de adulterio no hay más pecado que el escándalo» (p. 266). She accuses him of being a positivist, and indeed for Gimeno he seems to embody realism in characterization. Contrasting virtue and chaste love with carnality, Margarita declares: «Yo le amo, vd. me desea. ¡Caer, caer!, horrible idea para una mujer que quiere estar siempre en el pedestal» (p. 263). Once aware of the danger, she consciously guards her honor and privileged status as wife from further erosion. As does Victorina in the earlier novel, Margarita ultimately resists the temptation of passion, defining herself and her moral worth in this act of self-abnegation. Arguing with her happily married sister, she proclaims the supremacy of sacrifice over love: «el amor al marido no es una virtud, es una felicidad, una suprema dicha que tal vez a mí me está negada como expiación de mi pasado coquetismo; pero mientras yo pueda conservar mi honra, seré más grande que tú, con todo tu amor a [tu marido]» (p. 240). Margarita's decision to resolve her conflicting emotions through sacrifice links her firmly to the sentimental heroine who chooses resistence to facile pleasure over personal happiness and isolation over a shared future. As in her essays, Gimeno is arguing that if women place themselves on the same moral level as men, they loose their power.

In Suplicio de una coqueta the realism of setting, detail and external characterization does not diminish the underlying dichotomy of good and evil, just as the language that speaks of adultery and desire does not reshape the unmitigated moral dimension of the conflict. Gimeno has strengthened the cautionary framework of the sentimental novel by conveying the destructive power both of the coquette (woman as temptress) and, turning the tables, of passion (man as seducer). Margarita's moral philosophy echoes Victorina's: «Sufrir y abstenerse» (p. 226). Her moral fortitude so awes her former suitor that he can only repeat her words: «"[La Virgen de la Pureza] me protege contra vd. y contra mí misma". ¡Contra sí misma! ¡Cuán heroica es esta mujer!» (p. 267). The enemies of Margarita's virtue are dual: her tempter and herself, but it is the victory over herself that Gimeno showcases. Trapped by her own actions, Margarita triumphs by defeating temptation.

Gimeno strikes an unexpected note by ending the novel with a direct query to the reader that elicits a moral judgment on Margarita: «¿qué fue el amor para esta mujer, culpa o expiación?» (p. 315). She invites the reader to determine whether an adulterous passion, even if heroically controlled, condemns Margarita, or whether her refusal to yield redeems her. The negative image of the devouring woman is brutally drawn, and Gimeno surely intends Margarita's resistence to temptation as a rewriting of the fictional adultress. Against the heavily romantic plotting with its treatment of love as a totalizing passion, the realistic detail comes to the fore in the discussion of adultery and the attempts to define Margarita's physical decline and timely demise in medical terms.

When Gimeno republishes the novel five years later, she replaces the original title with the closing query, ¿Culpa o expiación?, and appends a «Post Scriptum» in which a doctor and a lawyer join the author in analyzing Margarita²⁶. The lawyer, refusing to condemn her for a defect common in contemporary society, cites Margarita's unsatisfied passion as expiation of her coquetismo. The doctor, rejecting a verdict of death from a broken heart, attributes her demise to medical causes only, asserting: «Es algo injusto querer disculpar a una mujer, que saboreó con la imaginación el fruto prohibido» (p. 280). The prologue thus keeps open the question of Margarita's redemption, as Gimeno turns freedom to choose into the freedom to accept responsibility. The novel rejects the sentimental closure of death from a broken heart, the realist closure of consummated adultery, and the moral closure of a sure salvation. By maintaining an open ending, Gimeno turns back on the reader the decision as to whether atonement is possible and whether woman-as-devil can regenerate herself into woman-as-angel. With Margarita's moral regeneration culminating in her death, the author avoids addressing the broader question of social regeneration.

Gimeno's most controlled literary work is her last, Una Eva moderna, a novela corta published almost 20 years later in 1909²⁷. It is Gimeno's least predictable work, remarkable for its taught construction, straightforward dialogue, and consistency of style and tone, as well as for integrating the aspirations of the modern woman into the conventions of the sentimental novel. By drawing on a recent Spanish parliamentary debate over female enfranchisement, a debate in which her own name has arisen, Gimeno draws her social vision firmly into her fiction.

A reader of August Bebel and Stuart Mill, the protagonist Luisa differs markedly from other Gimeno heroines in the attention the novel focuses on her intellectual development: «Luisa leía estos libros en el idioma en que los escribieron sus autores: su cultura permitíala hacer del arte y la literatura fiesta del espíritu. Era una intelectual que, no encontrando atractivo en el visiteo a que son tan aficionadas las mujeres ignaras, dedicaba su tiempo a la lectura y a la contemplación de obras artísticas esparcidas por pinacotecas y museos» (p. 4). This opposition between the social butterfly and the cultured woman suggests that Luisa is the embodiment of «la Eva moderna», the woman whose education prepares her to make intelligent decisions about her own life. She is the answer to Victorina's lack of education, while her moral fortitude, deriving from her education, proves as strong as that of previous heroines.

In one of many discussions between women, Luisa's friend formulates the dilemma facing an educated woman in a society that has no place for marriage based on shared intellectual interests: «Nuestros hombres, cuando son ilustrados, quieren a su mujer ignorante, y buscan a la instruida en el huerto del fruto prohibido» (p. 2). Thus in this novel, as in earlier ones, marriage remains an alliance between intellectually incompatible partners. Despite her extensive education and her moral character, Luisa finds herself tempted by an illicit relationship with one of those rare men who admire women of talent and intellect. A dutiful daughter like Victorina, Luisa has married to resolve her father's financial difficulties and, again like Victorina, only after her marriage meets a man, Carlos, with whom she can share her intellectual and social interests. To some degree, then, Una Eva moderna is a reworking of the earlier plot with less romantic baggage and more contemporary character detail. The novel breaks most clearly with sentimental conventions in the potential and opportunities for change that Luisa embodies.

As a member of Congress, Carlos has the power both to introduce and to support social reform, but he and Luisa are far ahead of their own society on feminist issues. Indeed, Luisa reverses her author's lack of support for women's suffrage a few years earlier, although the difference between an elite Ateneo audience and the readership of a popular weekly magazine may account in part of this change. Confronting the recent defeat of the franchise for women proposed by a liberal group in Congress, Luisa outlines her goals:

Just two years prior to the publication of Una Eva moderna Gimeno's name surfaces in a debate in the Spanish Senate. Calling for the enfranchisement of all women over 25, thus according women equal status with men, the Liberal senator Emilio Alcalá Galiano argues that men and women are intellectual equals. In support of his premise he cites exemplary Spanish women from Isabel la Católica to Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer²⁸. As in her novel, the amendment loses overwhelmingly, but the Senate debate seems to have stirred Gimeno to frame the issue in a story that treats sympathetically the aspirations of its male and female supporters. (Viewed within the competing conventions of the sentimental mode, Luisa is of course a morally flawed woman straying from domestic duty.) Reformulating her own earlier compromise position, Gimeno has Luisa favor the right to vote, in parity with universal male suffrage, while avoiding the dirty business of politics by not supporting the candidacy of women for public office. Like Gimeno, Luisa is a moderate feminist who rejects full integration of women into the morally disreputable arena of politics, but Luisa challenges the male/female dichotomy when she recognizes that a woman is not necessarily less well prepared to vote than the average man. Although Luisa also argues for economic independence for women, the novel itself takes her own economic well-being for granted without accounting for her economic autonomy.

As in the earlier novels, a triangular conflict traps the protagonist between duty to a man she married in an act of filial devotion but does not love, and her passion for a man with whom she could enjoy a shared partnership. Rejecting Carlos's romantic invocation of destiny as the controller of their fate, Luisa turns to Kant to find a resolution within herself: «Mi padre me hizo amar la filosofía kantiana, y en ella esa ley moral que la razón impone a la voluntad con la fórmula del imperativo categórico» (p. 18). Strengthened by this moral law and remembering «los sagrados deberes olvidados», Luisa chooses to overcome her love for Carlos and devote her life to her daughter: «la educación de una hija puede llenar una vida» (p. 18). The moral responsibilities of motherhood triumph over passion and self-gratification, remanding Luisa to the mold of abnegation that characterizes all Gimeno's heroines.

In Una Eva moderna Gimeno dramatizes the competing values of sentimental fiction, with its privileging of sacrifice and subordination of the individual to family and social obligations, and moderate feminism, with its goal of social reform through enhanced individual fulfillment and self-direction. Her dual discourses intersect at the point of greatest tension: the conflict between interests of the individual and those of society. But this time Gimeno casts the choice between passion and honor less in terms of a marriage/adultery dichotomy than of a dishonor/motherhood dialectic, with the result that the privileging of motherhood restores Luisa to herself, to society and to the future. Despite her temporary abandonment of her daughter to a boarding school, the treatment of Luisa is essentially sympathetic, and Carlos is not so much a villain as a victim of his impossible passion for Luisa. In addition to the careful characterization of the modern woman, a striking aspect of Una Eva moderna is Luisa's invocation of Kant and not, as in Suplicio de una coqueta, the Virgen de la Pureza, in arming herself to still «los rugidos de la bestia humana» (p. 6). Luisa's rejection of Carlos is not merely a sentimental convention; it is the result of her education and forms an integral part of her modern identity. Even though she reaches her decision by very modern reasoning, Luisa's resolve is yet another form of «heroísmo del corazón». Nevertheless, in building a bridge to the future through her daughter, Luisa's life is a far cry from the romantic isolation and chaste passion of a Victorina transformed into Sor Lágrimas. By overlaying the idealized figure of the modern woman onto the moral framework of the sentimental novel, Gimeno's last novel writes contemporary social concerns into women's fiction.

As a novelist Concepción Gimeno develops her individual voice slowly, although consistent patterns resurface in all her fictional works. The tension between social responsibility and individual pleasure, between social reform and received norms, underlies all her novels. Her defense of a modified, socially-acceptable, middle-class feminism precedes her adaptation of novelistic structures to the expression of these social concerns. From the conviction of her own intellectual parity and her personal sense of the injust margination of the woman writer, she comes to espouse a broader spectrum of social reforms that give women a stronger, more balanced role in the home and in society. Her stand on issues is tempered by her awareness of the trade-offs involved in reshaping the rights and responsibilities of women and by her acceptance of the practical limitations on change. Prior to Una Eva moderna her novels deflect most of the burning feminist issues and dramatize only the inequality of marriage. Indeed the earlier novels embrace a cautionary framework in setting a moral example of resistence to the excesses of individual freedom, as if warning against the extremes to which her feminist ideas might lead women. After suggesting that in Luisa we have the modern woman who, in her earlier phrase, «lucha, resiste y vence», Gimeno closes off all but the moral dimension of her character and its embodiment in the totalizing sacrifice of motherhood. Here as elsewhere the dual dimensions of caution and pragmatism guide her elaboration of a flawed heroine. Gimeno's unwavering invocation of self-sacrifice, abnegation, and virtue as a woman's highest obligations ultimately subordinates feminist concerns to fictional conventions.

In her essays and fiction Gimeno makes the case for the reform of social institutions, not their violation. The question of divorce raised by a later generation of Spanish women writers finds few allies among her contemporaries. Responding to Carmen de Burgos's survey in 1904, Gimeno reiterates her long-standing thesis that change will lessen rather than enhance a woman's control over her life. Acknowledging that women themselves oppose divorce, she adds: «no sé si la oposición de ellas consiste en que están muy encantadas de sus maridos, o en que tienen tan mala opinión de ellos que les aterra se les facilite el medio de satisfacer sus inconstantes pasiones²⁹». Better the known evil...

Working within different modes and addressing different audiences, Gimeno shapes two separate discourses in her writings. On the one hand, the regenerative discourse of her essays on women espouses a carefully moderated feminism. On the other, the cautionary discourse of her novels reworks romantic conventions and plotting within the moral strictures on women's fiction. Her essays project a forceful vision of the future: «La mujer moderna, educada entre el ocaso de un siglo y la aurora de otro, no es una muñeca destinada a exhibir la fortuna del marido, sino un ser intelectual en nada inferior al hombre, ya que piensa y trabaja» (La mujer intelectual, p. 16). In Una Eva moderna this equality and independence are both realized and deferred, and it is here that her social and fictional discourses draw together in striking syncretism.

Curiously, Una Eva moderna also sheds light on the problem of conflicting dates of birth for Gimeno. When Luisa attends a charity afternoon, the novel brings us into the private world of women and women's language. Their discussion turns to whether honesty requires a woman to reveal her true age. Characterizing age as «el secreto que guardamos mejor», Luisa agrees that deception «es lícito, no hay que censurarlo [...]. Todas las mujeres quisieran gozar con Hebe de eterna juventud». A spinster, perhaps thinking of Gimeno, rudely interjects: «Por eso [...] algunas se lo tiñen todo, hasta la partida bautismal, ¿verdad Luisa?». Since Luisa enjoys the sympathy of her author, we may perhaps accept Luisa's assent as reflecting Gimeno's own resolution of the problem of age. In any case, Luisa's calm agreement echoes phrases from an earlier essay by Gimeno: «Defensa justificada: sabido es que la mujer muere dos veces, la primera al dejar de ser bella» (p. 12). In a striking similarity to her own slippage between age 40 and 30, Gimeno contends in her essay that a woman's «malestar, su desasosiego empieza a los cuarenta³⁰». This correlation of femaleness and beauty lies at the heart of her own definition of herself as a female author. Thus in her last work of fiction, Una Eva moderna, biographical discourse, feminist discourse and feminine discourse coalesce.