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  • The Adulteress on the Spanish Stage: Gender and Modernity in 19th Century Romantic Drama by Tracie Amend
  • Jo Labanyi
TRACIE AMEND. The Adulteress on the Spanish Stage: Gender and Modernity in 19th Century Romantic Drama. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. 220 pp.

Spanish theatre of the 19th century is seriously understudied by comparison with the novel; for that reason, this monograph is to be welcomed. It covers what it calls “Romantic drama” from 1801 to 1892, with excursions into the late 18th century and early 20th on the correct assumption that literary tendencies do not have a fixed beginning and end. The book’s main merit is its coverage of a large number of plays, many of which are little known. Welcome attention is give to the early 19th century plays of María Rosa de Gálvez, for example—showing that the better known Romantic drama of the 1830s does not come from nowhere. It is also useful to pair Gálvez’s plays with those of Quintana, to make the point that Romantic drama corresponds more to a sensibility than to formal textual properties -thus writers who formally adhere to neoclassicism can express sentiments that we associate with Romanticism. Similarly, the book ends by noting the revival of a romantic sensibility in early 20th century modernista drama.

While recognizing that Romanticism has no single definition, Amend associates it with a tragic, fractured subject, a rebellious spirit, and the notion of an “unbridled self” (21). However the “fractured subjects” analyzed in the book tend to be male, rather than the female characters accused of adultery. Amend notes the critical polemics that have alternatively associated Spanish Romanticism with liberalism and with a conservative interest in past Spanish history. Like the critics who have advocated the second position, she tends to assume that plays set in the national past are evoking past glories (in many cases one could argue that the past is used to critique the political instabilities of the present, especially given the stress on civil strife in the middle ages, rather than on the later period of imperial expansion).

Amend associates liberalism particularly with the reign of Isabel II (1833-1868); indeed, she tends to see the figure of the adulteress in drama of this period as a reference to the queen, whose contested ascension to the throne raised anxieties about women in power, not to mention her later history as a notorious adulteress. The tendency to assume that all the plays of female adultery analyzed are allegories of the nation, seeking to purge Spanish theatregoers of their anxieties about modernity, also seems too much of a generalization. It is assumed that throughout the 19th century Spaniards yearned for modernity while also wanting a return to “the traditional values of the 18th century or even the Baroque period” (137) -one would like to distinguish here between different groups of Spaniards, and between different historical moments.

The most questionable aspect of the book is its very odd definition of the sublime as any force that overwhelms the tragic subject. Thus, in Amend’s definition, the sublime takes the form of “the immobility caused by Fernando VII’s authoritarian rule” (29) or, with reference to the Restoration, “the vice and corruption of the period” (184). She does not pick up Burke’s association of the sublime with the masculine and of the non-transcendental category of beauty with the feminine—surprisingly since the book is about plays of female adultery.

Female adultery is defined very loosely to include not only women suspected of adultery [End Page 91] (as in Golden Age drama) but also women who are subject to unwelcome sexual attentions; in the analysis of some plays, female adultery disappears from view. An interesting point made about the alta comedia of the 1850s and 60s is that male adultery increasingly comes to be seen as a greater problem than female adultery, with the female adulteress forgiven or subjected to penance rather than death. This perhaps helps us understand the husband’s forgiveness of the adulteress in Clarín’s La Regenta and Galdós’s Realidad; in this sense, the dénouement of Luis de Eguilaz’s...

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