the metropolitan canon of feminine beauty. More importantly, the text is replete with references to Galician rural lifestyles as permeated by a sexual permissiveness that is classed as either atavistic or plain immoral. Single motherhood is described as rife in the Galician countryside, and met with ‘una indulgencia plenaria’ (plenary indulgence) by its society (1917: 80). Popular celebrations such as the fiada, based on a group’s singing and dancing around the spinning of linen, are depicted as ‘una tertulia en promiscuidad donde se bebe, se baila y se retoza’ (a gathering of promiscuity, where they drink, dance and frolic) (52). The association between such customs and the Galicians’ Celtic origins is made explicit from the book’s title, of course, but also in the frequent references to characters as ‘uno de tantos documentos vivos en que pueden apoyar sus asertos los partidarios de la teoría céltica, en lo atañadero a los probables aborígenes de Galicia’ (one of the many living documents that provide backing for the supporters of the Celtic theory, as regards the probable original inhabitants of Galicia) (71). As one of the novel’s main aims was, as acknowledged by the author in the prologue, ‘ensayar un psicoanálisis de los elementos ancestrales del alma de la mujer gallega’ (to attempt a psychoanalysis of the ancestral features of the soul of Galician women) (1917: 8), the link between Galicia’s Celtic origins and the characteristic proneness to promiscuity of its women is turned into a central leitmotif.
The process of turning Galician women into national embodiments of abnegation and virtue was, therefore, a circuitous one for the nascent nationalist movement in Galicia. A crucial discursive struggle was taking place between those positions presenting Galician women as both the bearers and the essence of national legitimacy and, conversely, those which described them in ways that could prove demeaning for the national cause. One text produced in the context of Galician emerging nationalism stands out for its overt engagement with this struggle: Francisca Herrera Garrido’s article ‘A muller galega’ (‘Galician women’). The article was first drafted, as the author said, in 1916, but she then made a series of additions to it before it went to print as a contribution to the Ourense-based nationalist magazine Nós (Ourselves), in 1921. Herrera’s article can and has been read as a paean to Galician women from a staunchly conservative, anti-feminist perspective (Blanco, 1986). Yet the additions that Herrera made to it before publication turn the text also into a document responding to the heated question of Galician women’s morality, and one that evinces the high stakes that a nascent Galician nationalist movement had in this debate. As Blanco has noted, the added material included a loaded reference to certain novels about Galicia published after she had finished the first draft. Choosing not to mention the authors’ names to avoid granting them greater fame (Herrera Garrido, 1921: 12), Herrera nevertheless elaborates on the content of their novels, a content that she sees as morally deleterious for the public image of Galician women, both outside and within the borders of Galicia. Emphatically, she claimed, ‘a nosa muller non é, nin nunca foi, nin será xamáis, a que retratan alguns libros qu’houbera que queimar o seu autor, dinantes de qu’eles traspuxeran as lindes do terruiro própeo’ (our women are not, never have been and never will be, like the women depicted in those books, which their authors should have burnt before they entered the boundaries of our homeland) (12). Probably with Wenceslao Fernández Flórez in mind (a Galician, as opposed to Rafael López de Haro), Herrera wrote that such demeaning descriptions were all the more condemnable if the author was of Galician origins; thereby she reinforced the deep dialectic nature of Galician nationalist discourse in its early phases, when it was reacting to a, by then, widespread colonial narrative about Galician women. Such is my interpretation of one of the questions she poses in her article, where she establishes that any attempt to disparage Galician women on moral grounds cannot possibly originate from a nationally aware Galician man, who would be, by dint of doing that, condemning the whole nation as if he were condemning his own mother (1921: 11–12). With this configuration Herrera was laying bare the dialectical structure of one of the central metaphors of Galician nationalism, that of Galicia as the revered terra nai (Mother Land), a symbol of a femininely connoted hearth, home and landscape, which stood historically in opposition to the masculine spaces of migration, high-sea fishing and forced displacement from the land of one’s birth. The myth of the terra nai, so integral to Galician cultural history from Otero Pedrayo to Juan Rof Carballo, Alfonso R. Castelao and Manuel Rivas, has lent itself to feminist appraisals of images of the nation in Galician nationalist discourse (Rios Bergantinhos, 2001: 159–61; Blanco, 2006: 205–11). However, I would argue that the history of this trope, its origins and staggering durability in Galicia, cannot be disassociated from turn-of-the-century colonial representations of Galician rural women as indecent and immoral. The force with which the trope of Galician women as pious and self-abnegating, and of Galicia itself as a saintly mother in need of care and protection, erupted in the early programmatic texts of Galician nationalism, and subsequently as a recurrent metaphor of cultural nationalism throughout the twentieth century, is a testament to the perceived magnitude of the attacks, and also, as we shall see in the course of this book, to the extent to which the codes of sexual morality have informed nationalist discourses on women in Galicia.5
The critical reception of Rosalía de Castro is paradigmatic of the above friction between national construction and sexual politics in Galicia. As this book’s five chapters show, the national exegesis of Rosalía de Castro has been so intricately linked with the discourse of Galician sentimentality that any suggestion that she may have been anything less than its absolute embodiment has been met with hostility and uproar until quite recently. As a result, traditional Rosalian scholarship in Galicia has tended to avoid the question of just what it was that made this author the object of such extraordinary levels of discursive control. Large gaps in biographical and documentary data remain either irremediable or inadequately confronted, while some aspects of de Castro’s life and writings, including the fact that she was the daughter of an unmarried woman and a priest, the anti-clerical meanings of her texts and the trace of adulterous desire in her poems, were treated with formulaic, pious evasion for most of the twentieth century. We do know, however, that the uneasy conflation between gender and national politics was a problem for her authorial position and a central concern of her literary project, as a female nationalist writer in both Galician and Castilian who addressed gender and national politics in her texts.6 One of this book’s aims is to offer an explanation for why the study of this aspect of Rosalía de Castro’s legacy has been delayed by a critical establishment more preoccupied with the construction and maintenance of a worthy national symbol, one that would prove resilient against the specific attacks of Spanish centralism but which, paradoxically, ended up having a disabling effect for political nationalism in Galicia. Rosalía de Castro has been, for this reason, an overloaded code in Galician cultural history. Casting her, and keeping custody of her image, as a devoted mother, a loving wife and, above all, as the icon of Galicia has been a central aim of the principal loci of Galician cultural history, from the seminal texts of nationalist literary history to essays on cultural anthropology and the House-Museum of Rosalía de Castro, open to the public since 1971.
Galicia, a Sentimental Nation aims to chart the various stages of this colonial dialectic between Spanish and Galician discourses of the Galician nation, as well as its implications for Galician cultural history and the history of its own nationalist movement. I have come to this study from a disciplinary position midway between literary criticism and cultural history, and this will become evident in the range of historical, literary and extra-literary sources I will draw on for the construction of my argument. Amongst the plethora of textual – and occasionally visual – material to which I will be referring, one type stands out, and that is the texts of Galician literary historiography, in both Spanish and Galician. The reason for this goes beyond the consensus among critics of colonialist discourses that the mechanisms of Orientalism have provided an ‘enunciative capacity’ to travellers, writers and anthropologists, but crucially also to historians (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 23). For the Galician context, close analyses of literary histories as a narrative corpus have been seldom attempted, mainly because literary history has enjoyed a protected high-status position in the nation-building process. Yet it is precisely because of their overloaded status, as both monuments and inventories of a national literary genius that is to be projected against historically specific paradigms of value and authority, that Galician literary historiography provides
