accusations of passion, local bigotry and vanity that usually characterized centralist attacks against the practice of regional historiography. But just as important was the practice of adulation of those ‘local’ historians who were gradually becoming the custodians of Galicia’s consolidating national narrative, usually also through the rhetoric of methodological righteousness. González Besada’s literary history is therefore conspicuously careful in its treatment of Manuel Murguía’s work, with the aim of not perpetrating ‘una ofensa al erudito historiador de Galicia’ (an offence against Galicia’s erudite historian) (1887: 171). González Besada’s emphasis on his scientific approach based on pure logic, rational induction and consideration of other methodologically comparable sources needs to be understood as a strategic alignment with Murguía’s project for a national Galician history, at a time when Murguía’s increasing methodological influence and authority in the context of Galician culture was on the increase.2 A new generation of historians of Galicia was therefore consolidating itself through a methodological debate, whereby the values of truth and objectivity, as well as the methods of painstaking archival research and comparison of sources, were being hailed as a token of masculine professionalism, as opposed to practices such as speculation or the expression of patriotic feelings, which were now categorized as amateurish. The early texts of Galician national historiography were, therefore, inscribed in a careful play of power, whereby practitioners aiming to enter the gilded halls of historical practice had to elude the potentially humiliating invective of state-sanctioned historians, whilst at the same time pandering to the emerging figures of local authority. Whether they succeeded in this or not, regional historiography was gradually being sealed as a space of competitive homosociality, where the material prestige of a male coterie of practitioners was negotiated according to codes of methodological respectability or failure that were often expressed in gendered terms.
If we briefly analyse the Spanish writer Jacinto Octavio Picón’s response to González Besada’s acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española in 1916, we see that Besada’s anxiety over methodology at the time of writing his literary histories was not unfounded. Poorly disguising his dim view of González Besada’s ‘pequeñas historias’ (little histories) (1916: 70), Picón concedes that their value lies in the fact that they may inspire a sense of curiosity for the small, which the greater works of the ‘varones meritísimos para los cuales toda gratitud es poca’ (meritorious men to whom we could never be too grateful) tend to overlook purposefully (1916: 69). In his commentary on the methodological failings of González Besada’s literary histories, he criticizes the fact that they reproduced the empirical findings of other ‘meritorious men’, and described them as ‘obras modestas que difunden y propagan lo que aquéllos hicieron’ (modest works, which promulgate and propagate what they did) (70). Interestingly then, on the cusp of his political career and in the ceremony at which he was being accepted into the quintessential institution for Spanish cultural oversight, González Besada was simultaneously denied a part in the ‘señorío de la historia literaria’ (high gentry of literary history), next to the likes of Menéndez y Pelayo (Picón, 1916: 70), for having devoted himself to the writing of regionalist literary histories in his youth, which were categorized from a centralist perspective as derivative and substandard. The masculinist rhetoric used by Picón in his public riposte, with its emphasis on the valiant authority of Spain’s historians and the imitative practices of amateurs in the peripheries, exemplifies the central role that virile dignity played in the early twentieth-century debate on historical method. In the next section, I shall examine the gendered rhetoric in González Besada’s literary histories as also fulfilling a differently formulated function in the context of the power struggle between Spain and Galicia, namely that of consolidating the colonial stereotype of Galician feminine sentimentality at a time when discourses of Galician national identity were becoming increasingly politicized.
Feminine faults in Galician language and literature
Published in 1885 and 1887, the texts of González Besada’s Galician literary history engaged centrally with the discursive construction of Galician sentimentality which, as we saw in our Introduction, motivated many a cultural writing in Galicia in the late nineteenth century. As we are about to see, González Besada’s literary histories rely on a gendered politics of representation of its objects of study (Galician language and literature, and by extension, Galician identity), which cannot be extricated from the formative period that the 1880s and 1890s were in the history of Galician nationalist discourse. A network of dualities lies at the heart of the process towards political articulation of the movement, dualities that materialized during this period in the growing disassociation between liberals and traditionalists (represented in the intellectual leadership of Manuel Murguía and Alfredo Brañas respectively), and in the increasingly apparent problem – particularly after the formation in 1890 of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) – of double militancy, whereby some of the new militants of early Galician nationalism were also active participants in Spanish state politics. Augusto González Besada was one such figure. He had been a founding member of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega in 1890 and had played an active role in the association’s delegation in the city of Pontevedra, all the while also nurturing his ascendancy in Spanish state politics as a member of the Conservative Party. After an episode of open conflict in 1893 between the Asociación Regionalista Gallega and the Spanish government over the latter’s decision to move the Marine headquarters from the city of A Coruña, González Besada decided to abandon the by now openly political ranks of Galician regionalism and concentrate his efforts on Spanish politics.3 Historians such as Ramón Máiz have explained these acts of desertion on the part of ‘distinguished regionalists’ such as González Besada as an example of the structural interferences between Spanish party politics and Galician regionalist structures, interferences that ultimately worked to the detriment of the latter (1984: 152). Yet we may acquire a more nuanced understanding of the duplicity already at work in the founding texts of Galician cultural regionalism if we examine some of their constituting metaphors. González Besada’s Galician literary histories supply us with a prime example of how the undermining of Galician regionalism’s articulation as a political movement was already embedded in the politician’s vision of Galician identity as feminine and sentimental.
Already in his Cuadro de la literatura gallega, and particularly in his discussion of Alfonso the Wise’s Galician compositions, we see a formulation of one of the book’s central gendered tropes, namely that of the undeveloped, ‘infantile’ nature of the Galician language. Whilst these songs, he says, ‘encierran un fondo de muy sana moral, condicion indispensable para que la belleza exista’ (contain a healthy sense of morality, which is an indispensable quality for beauty to exist) (1885: 20), the literary medium in which they are conveyed displays a number of fundamental inadequacies. Despite exuding tenderness and harmony, González Besada adds, those poems still had an air of rusticity, a lack of refinement, which the historian puts down to the medium:
Acaso será escentricidad mia y acuse mal gusto literario, pero en mi entender el dialécto de las Cantigas y el dialécto de nuestra región, no pide mucho arte, no se amolda bien con él; lo encuentro más armonioso, más bello y más sentido, cuando rompe todas las trabas que el arte impone y se presenta, combinado si, pero tan desaliñado, como naturalmente es. (25)
(Maybe it is my own eccentricity and I am revealing poor literary taste, but in my view the dialect of the Cantigas, that is, the dialect spoken in our region, does not demand much art, does not adapt well to it; I find it more harmonious, beautiful and heartfelt when it breaks all the obstacles imposed by art and presents itself in one piece yet in all its natural disarray.)
The above formulation of the Galician language as naturally unkempt is subsequently firmed up through the use of a powerful gender metaphor, that of the Galician peasant girl, which helps to enforce the stereotype of Galician identity as infantile and undeveloped. Drawing on a heavily ideational rhetoric, the historian further elaborates on his theory of Galician language in the following way:
Sugetar la poesía gallega á muchas formas artísticas, es lo mismo que aprisionar en doradas
