Del ‘Hernán Cortés del género femenino’: Imperial and Other Conquests in Cartas Marruecas

Abstract

In this essay the metaphorical linkage of femininity with national decay in Cartas marruecas is examined as a reaction to women's unprecedented involvement in contemporary Spanish public life and as a precursor to their consignment in the next century to the private arena as a result of the ideology of separate spheres. The study shows that Cadalso shared the ambivalence of his peers among Spain's reformist elite towards women's public role in Enlightenment Spain. The narrative of Cartas marruecas conveys this sense, on the one hand, by shutting women out of its construction of contemporary Spanish society and, thus, effacing their agency in national life, and, on the other, by representing women and the broader conceptual category of femininity through metaphors that equate women with an uncivilized Other and imply that their public activities imperil national progress. ' All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous' (McClintock 1997: 89) -Anne McClintock's compelling observation provides a fitting entree into an analysis of Jose de Cadalso's Cartas marruecas (1774). The invented nature of this epistolary novel and, by extension, its subject -'el caracter nacional, cual lo es en el dia y cual lo ha sido' (148) -is on display from the very BHS 92.2 (2015)

European Modernity and the Passionate South

“…French) customs. In implicit dialogue with Montesquieu's stereotypical vision of Spain in letters 78 and 136 of his Lettres persanes [Persian letters], Cadalso embodies female and male ideals them in the virtuous characters of his Cartas marruecas (1774), the mirror image of the frivolous protagonists of Los eruditos a la violeta [Men of Superficial Learning] (Ewalt 2015;Andreu 2016, 54-6). Concern about effemination does not, however, seem an especially accentuated feature of the Spanish Enlightenment, nor do I think that the Spanish petimetre caused any greater anxiety in this respect than did the French petit-maître or the British fop or "macaroni" (Haidt, 1998, 111-16).…”