Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin

Long excluded from the established discussion of Cuban and Spanish American literatures, the Comtesse Merlin may well be one of the continent’s most engaging authors of the 19th century. No books devoted exclusively to Merlin have been published since the 1930s, and those few that exist usually shed more light on her seemingly outlandish biography—a Cuban-born aristocrat famed for her animated Paris salon—than on her vast array of writings: a complex travel narrative entitled La Havane (Paris and Brussels, 1844), translated into Spanish in abridged form as Viaje a la Habana (Madrid, 1844); several books of memoirs, including Mes douze premières années (Paris, 1831), which Sylvia Molloy brilliantly analyzes in At Face Value, and Souvenirs et mémoires (Paris, 1836), Merlin’s only book reprinted in French since the 1850s (by Mercure de France’s Le Temps Retrouvé series in 1990); plus a few Romantic novels set in Europe that not many seem to have read.

Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s masterful study fills what can only be described as an embarrassing, if predictable, critical gap. Merlin wrote almost exclusively in French (my own research focuses on her linguistic unhousedness within the systems of Spanish American literature). Merlin was also a woman author, and Méndez Rodenas, solidly grounded on historical sources and writing from the viewpoint of feminist and psychoanalytical theories, cleverly investigates the many ways in which issues of gender have contributed to Merlin’s virtual absence from the canons of literature and from the male-oriented discourse of Cuban nation-building. Méndez Rodenas’s research and scholarship are superb. Her knowledge of 19th-century Cuban history and literary culture, often stemming from little-known sources such as periodicals and pamphlets from the 1830s and 1840s housed at Havana and Miami archives, affords a riveting presentation of the complex ties between women and men in Cuba’s sophisticated colonial milieu. This “traditional” methodology gives the study an uncommon edge, making it of great interest not only to literary scholars, but also to anyone seeking a more profound insight into the formation of Cuba’s “imagined community,” a concept which Méndez Rodenas fruitfully engages in her evaluation of Merlin’s authorship. From this perusal of Merlin’s life and times emerges a portrait of the author as a woman caught in the toils and snares of patriarchal society, yet gracefully and amazingly producing an engrossing œuvre and reaching, ultimately, a sense of pertenencia (Méndez Rodenas’s suggestive term), one which the empirical proclivities of much literary history and criticism have routinely denied her.

Focusing mostly on the double texts of La Havane and Viaje a la Habana, Méndez Rodenas intelligently and sympathetically retraces Merlin’s progress through the labyrinths of patriarchy: the author’s oedipal liaison with her father (Chapter 2, “The Return of the Prodigal Daughter”); the rewriting of the trope of discovery in La Havane, especially as it pertains to Columbus and Humboldt (Chapter 3, “The View from the Harbor: Gender Subversion in the Literature of the Second Discovery”); the attacks on her “Parisian eyes” by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel, and her appropriation of texts by such costumbristas as Ramón de Palma and Cirilo Villaverde, a literary gesture whereby the concept of the nation emerges as a kind of simulacrum (Chapter 4, “A Nation Invented,” and Chapter 5, “(In)Versions and (Re)Writings”); her rhetoric of mediation vis-à-vis such thorny issues as slavery and Cuba’s colonial status (Chapter 6, “Bound to the (Male) Book: Gender, Colonialism and Slavery in La Havane”); the debate about Merlin’s vision of Cuban women, including her letter on the subject to George Sand (Chapter 7, “Creole Women: The Other as Self”); and, finally, Merlin’s fictional resurfacing in recent texts by other Cuban authors, particularly Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante...