of regional historical practice as a space where homosocial processes of solidarity or rejection were crucial to the circulation of texts. I will then examine the multiple gendered metaphors appearing in González Besada’s texts as fulfilling the double function of tantalizing a male-defined audience, whilst simultaneously affirming the trope of Galician femininity and sentimentality in a colonial political structure. Finally, I will explain how the colonial narrative of Galician femininity and sentimentality is aptly embodied in González Besada’s 1916 biography of Rosalía de Castro, at a time when cultural conflict on her legacy had become a veritable ground for political manoeuvring on Galicia’s national question.
‘Los historiadores modernos de Galicia’: historical method in the periphery
González Besada was a law student in Santiago de Compostela during the heady early years of Galician regionalism. As part of the cultural programme of the Ateneo Gallego de la Juventud Católica de Santiago (Santiago’s Catholic Youth Society), founded by the main representative of traditionalist regionalism, Alfredo Brañas, the young González Besada wrote and published a variety of articles on the theme of the Galician language, which were part of his dissertation Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV (Overview of Galician Literature in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries). This piece was awarded the ‘escribanía de plata’ (silver inkstand) in the Juegos florales of 1885 and was immediately published as a book by the Diputación de Pontevedra (the local government of the Galician province of Pontevedra). In 1887, an expanded version of this first study, entitled Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (Critical History of Galician Literature), was published by Andrés Martínez Salazar’s Biblioteca Gallega (Galician Library), which was fast becoming the main medium for the texts of Galician regionalism.
The Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV comprises eight brief chapters, accompanied by a prologue and an epilogue. The book’s contents in terms of historical narrative can be summarized as follows. The first chapter is a brief account of why in historical – and, as González Besada puts it, ‘logical’ – terms the Galician and Portuguese languages should be considered indistinguishable entities during the periods he will survey. The second chapter is a theoretical digression on the defining characteristics of Galicia, its territory, language and literature. Chapters 3 and 4 itemize the poets and troubadours who used Galician-Portuguese as a literary medium during the thirteenth century, with particular attention to the figure of Alfonso X of Castile, traditionally named Alfonso the Wise. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the Galician-Portuguese texts of the period that have been preserved, including that of Dinis, King of Portugal, portrayed as a literary disciple of his grandfather Alfonso. Chapters 7 and 8 revert back to the digressive mode of the opening sections, as González Besada analyses other texts and genres (including prose and historical compositions) and considers the evidence that Galician-Portuguese popular songs played a central role in the formation of Occitan literature.
The book’s value as literary history is offset by the substantial digressive material it includes. But it is in its lengthy digressions that the metaphorical network I will examine in this chapter comes sharply into view, as the author elaborates profusely on what emerge as the book’s two main sites of anxiety: his own authorial status as a regionalist historian on the one hand, and the legitimacy, that is the ‘defendability’, of his object of study – Galician language and literature – on the other. In this section I will focus on the question of historiographical authority as homosocial enactment, whereby amateur historians such as the young González Besada calibrated their own capacity for access into the increasingly professionalized and prestigious circles of historical practice through the display of new neo-positivist methodologies such as objectivity and source accreditation, combined with the conspicuous adulation of peers. I will be arguing that, because of their subaltern position with regard to state-sanctioned Spanish historians, Galician regionalist historians’ entry into the new homosocial institutions of historical practice was under a particular strain, one that often materialized in the debate over neutrality or patriotic bias in historical method, with the latter usually functioning as a token of inadequacy that was expressed in gendered terms.
An overriding concern in González Besada’s Galician literary histories is, indeed, his awareness that, as a regionalist historian, he was particularly vulnerable to accusations of partiality. From the outset, therefore, he attempts to portray himself and his account as unmotivated by patriotic passion. For example, when affirming that any literary inventory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries needs to include texts written in Galician and Portuguese without distinction, he hastens to add that ‘No me ofusca la pasion, ni la parcialidad mueve mi pluma’ (Passion does not blind me, nor does bias move my pen) (1885: 7). Throughout the text, he is keen to reproduce the views and words of other contemporary historians, normally to substantiate his own and to confer on his study, as we shall see, a sense of erudition, lest he is accused by his peers of ‘temor, ignorancia ú olvido’ (fear, ignorance or forgetfulness) (58). However, uppermost in his methodological design is his drive to distance himself from the acts of patriotic overstatement that other regionalist historians of his time had committed. For example, he criticizes Teodosio Vesteiro Torres and his Galería de Gallegos Ilustres. Poetas de la Edad Media (Catalogue of Illustrious Galicians: The Poets of the Middle Ages) (1874) as follows, carefully differentiating Vesteiro’s historiographical praxis from his own:
Honran, en verdad, á la patria los hijos que la quieren y tienen disculpa también honrosa los errores, que del cariño dimanan, pero sería altamente punible secundar una opinión estraviada, cuando vistas las cosas con un criterio imparcial, se conoce el estravío; por eso formulé mi opinión contraria á la del malogrado joven que consagró su vida á la noble tierra que le vió nacer. (1885: 32)
(Our homeland is indeed honoured by its adoring sons and there are honourable excuses for mistakes motivated by love, but it would be extremely reprehensible to endorse an erroneous opinion if, when things are viewed with an impartial criterion, the error is spotted. This is why my opinion is not that of the prematurely deceased young man, who devoted his life to the noble land of his birth.)
We see, then, that González Besada’s first text of Galician literary history is marked by a methodological aspiration for objectivity. In a variety of self-ironic turns throughout the book, the young historian will reveal his anxiety that any future attack on his historical hypotheses may be justified, or that his lack of expertise in the field of knowledge he is trying to enter will become too evident (57–8). This anxiety becomes a tension running throughout his Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (1887), in which González Besada’s efforts at adjusting to neutrality collapse with the inevitable pull of ideological and political vision. This methodological conflict is, as we will see, a profoundly gendered one. In his prologue to Historia crítica de la literatura gallega, which he sententiously presents as ‘la primera historia de la literatura gallega’ (the first history of Galician literature) (1887: x), anxieties over the legitimacy of his object of study are conveyed in a heavily gendered rhetoric, for example when he advises the reader that, even if his study does not match the ‘simétricas proporciones’ (symmetric proportions) (1887: x) demanded by the new neo-positivist historical methods, it will at least show a womanly kind of honesty:
Es la primera historia de la literatura gallega, y con ello está dicho todo. No será, pues, rica en noticias, ni amena, ni curiosa, ni abundante y acertada en sana crítica, pero desde luego será verdadera; y cualidad es esta en la historia, que á semejanza de la honradez de la mujer, disculpa sus efectos, encubre sus flaquezas y legitima la pobreza que lejos de denigrar, ensalza. (x–xi)
(This is the first history of Galician literature, and that says everything. It will not, then, be rich in new revelations, or entertaining, or intriguing, or full of sound, accurate criticism, but it will certainly be truthful; and this, in history, is a quality which, like decency in a woman, excuses faults, covers up weaknesses and legitimizes poverty which, far from degrading, extols.)
The theme of feminine decency
