Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

12

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2015

First Page

1

Last Page

16

Abstract

Since the emergence of feminist literary criticism over four decades ago, scholars have been posing “new questions about old texts” (Tuttle 184), and in the field of Nineteenth- Century Spanish studies, questions Bridget Aldaraca, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Catherine Jagoe, Susan Kirkpatrick, Jo Labanyi, Linda Materna and Karen Rauch have advanced continue to inform our understanding of gender discourse in nineteenth-century Spain. More specifically, Labanyi, Kirkpatrick, and Materna have elucidated how Spanish Romantic plays “dramatize the contradictions inherent in liberal individualism” (Labanyi 8). In their assessment, the progressive ideological project of the early nineteenth century, while endeavoring to expand forms of self-expression for the male bourgeois subject, also tended to contain and define the female voice “within the limitations of the love plot,” making the Romantic heroine the instrument through which the hero, through possessing her, could simultaneously “enter the phallic order of the father” as well as rebel against it (Materna 145). The love plot, as Labanyi contends, limits the heroine to living out her “frustrated desire for agency” by subjugating her will to an “idealized man of action,” or the Spanish Romantic hero, and this subjugation often portends both the heroine’s and the hero’s deaths (20). As a result, the Spanish Romantic hero’s relationship with the heroine simultaneously underscores the destructiveness of the relations between the sexes while it demonstrates “a subtle awareness of the gendered nature of subject formation” in the liberal Romantic project (Labanyi 23).

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