new and mysterious literature that in such a strange way had come to renew the Western imagination, exposing it to the world of fatal, illicit or fanciful passions, of love affairs or of mystical yearnings) (Ménéndez Pelayo, 1946: 257–8). The link is promptly established between ‘narraciones bretonas, en que casi siempre ardía la llama del amor culpable’ (Breton narratives, where the flame of adulterous love almost always burnt) (267) and the question of ethnic difference: ‘los héroes de la epopeya germánica, francesa o castellana, eran motivos racionales y sólidos’ (the heroes of Germanic, French or Castilian epic poems were rational and solid motifs) (266), while those produced by a differentiated Celtic race were ‘arbitrarios y fútiles’ (arbitrary and futile), generally pursuing the principle of pleasure with no transcendental aim or sense of moral rectitude (266). Among the harmful features of the Celtic literary traditions, Menéndez Pelayo singles out their differently portrayed feminine ideal, which he established as alien to Spain’s classical tradition. In his words, the problem lay with:
la intervención continua de la mujer, no ya como sumisa esposa ni como reina del hogar, sino como criatura entre divina y diabólica, a la cual se tributaba un culto idolátrico, inmolando a sus pasiones o caprichos la austera realidad de la vida; con el perpetuo sofisma de erigir el orden sentimental en disciplina ética y confundir el sueño del arte y del amor con la acción viril. (1946: 273)
(the continuous intervention of women, not as submissive wives or queens of the home, but as creatures halfway between the divine and the diabolical, to whom idolatrous worship was directed, as life’s austere reality sacrificed its passions or whims to her; with the perpetual sophism of erecting sentimentality into an ethical discipline and mistaking the dreams of love and art for virile action.)
In an association that betrays more than it expresses about early twentieth-century Spanish discourses on Galicia, the historian subsequently adds that the above rhetorically debased literary forms found an accommodating host only in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, in the ‘reinos de Galicia y Portugal’ (kingdoms of Galicia and Portugal), he specifies, ‘de cuyo primitivismo céltico … sería demasiado escepticismo dudar, aunque de ningún modo apadrinemos los sueños y fantasías que sobre este tópico ha forjado la imaginación de los arqueólogos locales’ (of whose Celtic primitivism it would show too much scepticism to doubt, although by no means do we subscribe to the fantasies and fancies that the imagination of local historians shaped) (1946: 276). An elusive yet key concept of Spanish colonial discourses on Galicia was being consolidated, which linked the myth of Celtic origins to a lack of morals and decency that was most disturbingly displayed by the female members of the population.
Indeed, images of sexually active Galician female peasants were not infrequent in late nineteenth-century Galician popular prose and poetry. As anthropological studies such as Allyson Poska’s Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain (2005) have neatly demonstrated, the lives of Galician peasant women since the early modern period and up until recently were not determined by the culture of sexual honour that permeated other parts of the Iberian Peninsula, mostly on account of a combination of distinct legal traditions that empowered women’s authority in the household and a history of massive male migration, which left peasant women the full responsibility of house and land management, as well as child care. At the level of cultural representation, such historical conditionings were partly to account for the images of women as unconcerned with restrictive moral codes, images that appear in profusion in the early Galician-language texts of the Rexurdimento, the Galician literary revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Galician-language poems of Benito Losada or the novels of Xesús Rodríguez López are populated with sexually active single women, pregnant servants and adulterous wives. Worryingly, as we shall see, for early theorists of the language’s role in Galician regionalism, such as Eugenio Carré Aldao, Galician was fast becoming the preferred vehicle for a literature of sexual mischief and innuendo, in which women played a far from submissive role. This was a problem for a nationalist movement that was at a crucially formative stage of its political development. As has been argued in feminist approaches to nationalisms, women in colonial nations have been expected to ‘uphold standards of “civilized” respectability’, thus turning the question of women’s sexual propriety into a central national concern (Day and Thompson, 2004: 109). It is therefore not surprising that positions antagonistic to the construction of a robust Galician nationalist discourse seized upon these images and presented them as a debilitating national trope within a moralistic frame for national construction. Leopoldo Pedreira’s anti-regionalist texts, for example, include references to how ‘el pueblo gallego no da importancia á la virginidad de la mujer’ (Galician people do not grant importance to women’s virginity) (1894: 161). The novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán, particularly those linked to Galician rural life and settings, as in Los pazos de Ulloa (The Houses of Ulloa) (1886), are interspersed with references to Galician female peasants or servants as sexually ‘irresponsible’.4 By 1916, when the Galician conservative politician Augusto González Besada selected the theme of Galician women as the topic of his acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), it is evident that the ‘Galician woman question’ had turned into a contested zone for discourses on the nation competing to be regarded as representative in Spain and Galicia. I shall analyse González Besada’s speech in more detail in the next chapter, but I would like here to dwell on the seldom discussed link between sexualized representations of Galician rural women and the discourse of Galician celtismo.
Just as the myth of Celtic origins had supplied the metaphors for centralist/colonialist representations of Galician identity as humble, sentimental and inactive, a parallel discursive mutation was developing apace that conceived of Galician rural women in terms of a sexualized colonial fantasy. For the network of interacting discourses of the nation developing in Galicia and Spain in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, this meant that, while Galician nationalism was invested in the political and social mobilization of women partially through a Celticist discourse that depicted them as valiant and sturdy, centralist/colonialist narratives on Galicia were working towards a different characterization, one geared towards the weakening of the nascent Galician nationalist movement through a most effective assault: the questioning of its women’s decency. In the past two decades, a solid body of feminist work on nationalisms has shown how ‘[w]omen especially are often required to carry this “burden of representation”, as they are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour, both personally and collectively’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 45). In the logic of patriarchal nation-building projects, women’s decency and honour has been the subject of a particularly protective order. For the Galician context, this has had far-reaching implications. The proliferation during the first decades of the twentieth century of popular narratives on Galicia written for a Spanish readership can be taken as an example of the kind of texts aiming to subvert such order. Novels such as Wenceslao Fernández Flórez’s Volvoreta (Butterfly) or Rafael López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas (The Grandchildren of the Celts), both published in 1917, serve as cases in point. Both novels exploit the romantic plot between a Galician rural girl and a male protagonist who either is not Galician or has returned to the region after a long spell abroad. It is the female characters, however, and, crucially, their sexual attitudes and behaviours that act in both novels as the motivating argument, with the male protagonists’ perplexed reactions functioning as manifestations of normative identity. In Fernández Flórez’s novel, Federica goes by the name of ‘Volvoreta’ (Galician for ‘butterfly’) for the reason that she ‘[t]enía muchos novios … Á lo mejor, tres á un tiempo’ (had several boyfriends … sometimes three at a time) (1917: 51). Sergio’s jealousy is incited throughout the novel by Federica’s reluctance to censure what appear as the lax sexual mores of her rural environment, which are described from the young man’s unsettled perspective as ‘un drama bestial’ (a bestial drama) (1917: 105). What remains in the realm of suggestion and allusiveness in Fernández Flórez’s novel is spelt out more clearly in López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas. Here, depictions of Galician rural women are almost always sexualized, even when they are described as ‘mujer[es] recia[s] con los huesos sólidamente ensamblados’ (tough
