Wily Modesty: Argentine Women Writers, 1860-1910 (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 281 Wily Modesty: Argentine Women Writers, 1860-1910 Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies Press, 1998 By Bonnie Frederick Recovery of neglected female authors and texts is a fundamental task of feminist literary scholarship. Efforts to compile a comprehensive feminine literary histoty have had profound implications for critics and historians. Careful re-readings of texts by female authors have focused attention on problems of interpretation, and have helped to forever alter our thinking about the notion of canon. Bonnie Frederick's study of nineteenth -century Argentine women writers represents an important contribution to this ongoing work of recovery and reinterpretation. Frederick's analysis contextualizes the literary production of a group of successful Latin American women writers and also documents their subsequent exclusion from the historical record. Divided into five chapters, the book includes a brief biographical sketch of each author, as well as a chronology of Argentina's cultural scene between 1810 and 1985. The nine authors studied, Elvira Aldao de DÃ-az, Agustina Andrade, Emma de la Barra, MarÃ-a Eugenia Echenique, Silvia Fernández, Lola Larrosa de Ansaldo, Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia, Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta, and Ida Edelvira RodrÃ-guez, belong to the Generation of 1880, and all were published in commonly available sources. Frederick explains that "by focusing on mainstream publications, this study is able to document that many women were not considered marginal writers in their own time; instead, their marginality today was imposed by later historians" (7). The first chapter examines attitudes toward the status of women in Atgentine society as expressed in the mission statements of women's periodicals published between 1830 and 1905. As the principal forum for debate on women's issues, journals with titles like "La Camelia" for the most part championed expanded access to education while defending the traditional female roles of wife and mother. Frederick links the cautious messages of mainstream periodicals to the ideological conservatism of sentimental fiction by and for women, through an analysis of Emma de la Barras best-selling 1905 novel StelL·. Frederick also considers the hostile reception given to more radical publications. Chapter two focuses on the discursive strategies used by women writers to claim textual authority. Frederick posits that the principal roles that served as the basis of authorial power for male authors effectively 282 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies excluded female authors, who labored against the "Delicacy Imperative", the ideal of woman as a domestic angel. Thus, women's resistance took the form of "wily modesty ... a series of ruses that indirectly claim the authority to write that which they appear to deny" (54). Among the strategies Frederick explores are orality, metaphors of domesticity, excessive or feigned modesty, and use of male pseudonym. In chapter three the author explores the relationship between progressive Liberalism and growing pro-emancipation sentiment, as reflected in Argentine writing from 1870-1914. During the period, marked by faith in the perfectibility of society, proponents of women's emancipation were able to equate women's status with national progress. Yet many feared the effects of modernization on the family, as Frederick's analysis of the 1876 print debate between emancipation advocate Maria Eugenia Echenique and anti-emancipationist Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta demonstrates . Frederick concludes that the most significant result of the debate was the introduction of women's issues into the larger discussion of nationhood . The "cliché" of love is the focus of chapter four. Frederick argues that whereas nineteenth-century male authors tended to idealize romantic union as a metaphor for political consolidation, women writers were more likely to express ambivalence. Frederick examines how novels like Lola Larrosa's Los esposos, whose female protagonist lacked the practical education and skills to support her children, questioned traditional family institutions by stressing the inferior legal and economic status of women. Frederick also considers female ambivalence toward the language of love, expressed by some writers through parody of sentimental models . In the final chapter, entitled "Readers: Then and Now", Frederick approaches the question of canon through an analysis of the role of Ricardo Rojas, the first professor of Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires, in the exclusion of...