The Other Side of the Canon: Women and Gender in the Popular Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Spain
Session Coordinator: Akiko Tsuchiya
Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures
Campus Box 1077
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130
atsuchiy@artsci.wustl.edu

Adela Ginés y Ortiz, Physiognomy and Popular Literature

Adela Ginés y Ortiz wrote twenty-seven installments for the Madrid newspaper, El liberal, in 1874. In each of the installments she outlined the qualities and particularities of twenty-seven female types, basing her typology on one of the main principles propagated by the prevailing scientific school of Physiognomy. The latter was founded on the notion that external facial expressions, along with character, were manifestations of one’s moral competence. The intention of her writings, therefore, is purely didactic: as her female reader identifies with one of the many types elaborated in her writings, the narrator expects the reader to correct the “negative” elements that define the latter. Ginés y Ortiz’s use of the popular medium of the folletín to propagate notions of popular scientific thought and its relation to women is not a coincidence. My paper will explore the fundamental relationship between language, the press and the reader in her work, arguing that the the diffusion of these fragments in the popular press ultimately undermines the regenerative intentions of the text, since it is precisely in the space provided by the popular medium, where the struggle for female agency takes place.

Alicia G. Andreu
Middlebury College
andreu@middlebury.edu

Text Versus Image: Competing Media Representations of the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction

The nineteenth-century illustration was a major selling point for serial novels in both Victorian England and Romantic France, and the illustrations for such works as Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers or Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris became as recognizable for contemporary readers as the texts themselves. However, there are few cases of the illustration essentially fusing with the identity of the written text in nineteenth-century Spain. Interestingly, there are many cases of illustrations whose very contradiction of the narrative, in many cases through hypersexualized visual representations of female characters, may be seen to add interest, or to lure readers to purchase and/or read lowbrow literary productions. This study will engage in a comparative analysis of the sexual nature of the illustrations of several popular novels, focusing on how the visual representations of femininity present women engaged in transgressive sexual acts that are, at times, not even suggested in the written text. The works to be studied here include Wenceslau Ayguals de Izco’s Pobres y ricos o La bruja de Madrid (1849-1850), Manuel Fernández y González’s Los hambrientos (1867), Ramon Ortega y Frías’s La casa de Tocame-Roque (5 th Edition, 1870), and Armando Palacio Valdés’s Marta y María (1883).

Timothy McGovern
University of California, Santa Barbara
mcgovern@spanport.ucsb.edu

From Virtuous to Vicious: Popular Constructs of Women in the Romancero vulgar

I propose to discuss various iconic representations of women in the nineteenth- century Romancero vulgar as a way into the workings of the popular imagination. On the one hand, the types of females represented respond to the prerogatives of authorship and censorship in the marketing of popular literature; on the other, typified images of women inherited from the Romancerotradicional are already in play in the long-standing oral tradition. By transforming the products of a purely folk tradition into objects of commerce, a different genre of popular literature takes hold as the century progresses: the Romancero vulgar. As with other marketable items, those who manufacture this literature try to take into account the tastes of the consumer, actual or assumed. In so doing, they impose moral and ideological constructs of women, which are not always indigenous to the users of the traditional ballads. Through a comparison of romances tradicionales and vulgares, we can distinguish more clearly between constructs of the female that respond to the conditions of marketing and those that circulate orally, outside the culture of print.

Sandra Robertson
University of San Diego
sandra@sandiego.edu