Catherine M. Jaffe - Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839

Eves Enlightenment

Womens Experience in Spain
and Spanish America, 17261839

Edited byCATHERINE M. JAFFE
andELIZABETH FRANKLIN LEWIS

This publication was made possible in part by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spains Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

Published by Louisiana State University Press

Copyright 2009 by Louisiana State University Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

FIRST PRINTING

DESIGNER: Amanda McDonald Scallan

TYPEFACE: Whitman

PRINTER AND BINDER: Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eves Enlightenment : womens experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1839 / edited by Catherine M. Jaffe and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8071-3389-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. WomenSpainHistory18th century. 2. WomenSpainIntellectual life. 3. WomenLatin AmericaHistory18th century. 4. WomenLatin AmericaIntellectual life. 5. EnlightenmentSpain. 6. EnlightenmentLatin America. 7. Spanish literatureWomen authorsHistory and criticism. 8. Latin American literatureWomen authorsHistory and criticism. 9. Women and literatureSpain. 10. Women and literatureLatin America. I. Jaffe, Catherine Marie, 1958- II. Lewis, Elizabeth Franklin, 1964

HQ1693.E84 2009

305.40946dc22

2008029225

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

CATHERINE M. JAFFE AND ELIZABETH FRANKLIN LEWIS

1. Women of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Between Tradition and Modernity

MNICA BOLUFER PERUGA

FRDRIQUE MORAND

3. Reasons for Education
New Echoes of the Polemic

ISABEL MORANT DEUSA

MARA A. SALGADO

5. Illustrating Sainthood
The Construction of Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Hagiography

ELISA SAMPSON VERA TUDELA

PART II. WOMENS LIVES
Material and Social Practices

6. Women in Society in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Models of Sociability

MARA VICTORIA LPEZ-CORDN CORTEZO

REBECCA HAIDT

MARA JOS DE LA PASCUA SNCHEZ

BEATRIZ QUINTANILLA-MADERO

PART III. REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN
Between Rational Equality and Sensibility

LUCY D. HARNEY

11. Doa Leonoras Library
Womens Reading from the Spectator (1711) to El Semanario de Salamanca (1795)

CATHERINE M. JAFFE

12. Virtue in Distress in the Spanish Sentimental Novel
An Unsustainable Model of Rational Sensibility

ANA RUEDA

13. Mothers, Majas, and Marcialidad
Faces of Enlightenment in Spain

JANIS A. TOMLINSON

An undertaking as complex as this collection of essays could not have come about without the help and advice of many colleagues and friends. We would first like to thank our contributors for their hard work, their trust in us, and their patience throughout the long process of editing this book. David Gies helped us to find translators from among his graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. We are grateful for his help and advice and for the translators hard work. We would like to recognize the financial support provided by the Department of Modern Languages at Texas State University-San Marcos and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spains Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. And finally, many thanks go to our families, who supported us in so many ways as we were working on this project.

CATHERINE M. JAFFE AND ELIZABETH FRANKLIN LEWIS

The second example [of why women are the cause of all evil in the world], if it proves that women in general are worse than men, also proves that the Angels in general are worse than women: because since Adam was induced to sin by a woman, woman was induced by an Angel. Until now it has not been determined who sinned most gravely, Adam or Eve; because the Fathers of the Church are divided. And in truth the excuse that Cayetano [St. Cajetan, 14801547] gives Eve, that she was deceived by a creature of superior intelligence and sagacity, a circumstance that did not occur with Adam, makes his sin greater in comparison to the sin of Eve.

BENITO JERNIMO FEIJOO, Defensa de las mujeres

Eve did not resist these temptations; first she persuaded her husband, and he sinned out of condescension what she had begun out of curiosity. Detestable curiosity for certain, but curiosity tends to be an indication of talent.

JOSEFA AMAR Y BORBN, Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres

To write about how Spanish and Spanish American women experienced the Enlightenment is to try to bring into focus a doubly effaced realm of history. Studies of the European Enlightenment have generally shown little concern for even the outstanding exponents of Enlightenment thought in Spain, such as the Benedictine friar and prolific essayist Benito Feijoo (16761764). Even within Hispanic studies the Enlightenment movements in Spain and Spanish America have received little attention and until recently have been considered by most to be of little importance to the overall development of Hispanic culture.

In his incisive critique of the neglect of the Enlightenments legacy in Spain, Eduardo Subirats defends what he describes as Spains insufficient Enlightenment and calls for a more objective study of the limitations and deficiencies of the Ilustracin (24). Such a project can only be attempted with a broad understanding of the Enlightenment as an opening to a modern program of secularization of thought and artistic manifestations, of openness to and development of sciences, arts, and technology and a search for a conscious and controlled agreement between culture and power, according to Jess Prez Magalln, who also reminds us that each culture should be studied in its own context and without imposing unrelated values and paradigms (14, 51). It is precisely through the study of gender, and particularly through new ways of constructing gender relations that developed during the long eighteenth century, that we may more fully understand the significance and legacy of the Enlightenment in Spain and Spanish America to modern Hispanic culture. As Theresa Smith has asserted, [Gender] debates were central to reconfiguring Spain as an enlightened nation. In the eyes of those who witnessed it, redefining gender identities was critical to Spains political, social and economic modernization (7).

During the Enlightenmenta broad process of intellectual and cultural change that propelled Western societies toward modernity between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuriesthe interrogation of the practices, understanding, and ideologies of gender invariably accompanied the periods critique of traditional social, philosophical, political, scientific, and religious systems, as recent debates regarding womens appropriate place in society were no less contentious in Spain and Latin America than in the rest of Europe and North America. Like their sisters across the Atlantic and over the Pyrenees, Spanish and Spanish American women who breathed these supposed winds of change nevertheless continued to confront traditional stereotypes founded on their inherent inferiority. Nowhere was this more evident, especially in the strong Catholic tradition of Hispanic culture, than in the interpretation and application to womens situation of the biblical story of Eve. Eve had had a long and vigorous cultural tradition as a potent symbol of womens moral inferiority, as we see in the