Veiling Bodies, Revealing Identities: The Mirror and the Construction of the Female Self in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Mas por ver si bien tocada, o algo olvidado me dejo, alcanza, Anita, ese espejo para darme otra mirada.

(Fernández de Moratín, La petimetra 224)¹

Identities are constructed in front of and by mirrors

(La Belle, Herself Beheld 33)

In La petimetra, the 1762 Spanish comedy by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, an idle and conceited female repeatedly urges her servant to bring her a mirror in which to appreciate her pitibú [caul], contemplate her carefully constructed hairstyle, and luxuriate in her beautiful and spotless appearance.² Ramón de la Cruz’s sainete from the same year, “La petimetra en el tocador,” develops entirely in Doña Águeda’s tocador–Spanish word for a vanity, that is, a dresser with a mirror on top, a feminine space whose most noticeable feature is the mirror where the petimetra obsessively fixes her hair.³ In Félix Samaniego’s fable “La hermosa y el espejo” (1781) a beautiful woman often turns to her best friend, the mirror, to consult “todos sus caprichos” [all her trappings]: “colores de moda… plumas, sombrerete, lunares y rizos” [stylish colors…feathers, hat, beauty spots and curls].⁴ Goya’s Capricho 55, “Hasta la muerte” and his painting “Las viejas” feature aging women dressed up in luxurious clothes primping themselves in front of the glass in grand gestures of coquetry. These are only some of the abundant examples in the eighteenth-century Spanish literary and artistic canon that relate women to mirrors via traits traditionally coded as negative such as vanity, narcissism, illusion and frivolity. As part of a long-established tradition of male-dominated art, these female gazers in the mirror cannot escape its traditional emblematic associations.

As much as these men may criticize its use, the mirror serves male purposes. An instrument that introduces the female body as objectified commodity to the male-dominated society, the mirror is a male imposition that makes possible the female cultivation of appearances in accord with male desires and social norms. It is true that there are an increasing number of publications in eighteenth-century Spain that, propelled by a utilitarian conception of education oriented to domestic productivity, advocate for the cultivation of the female mind in order to enable women to be good wives and virtuous mothers. The words of Pedro Rodríguez, Conde de Campomanes, point in this direction when in 1775 he stated that women should be admitted into the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País [the Economic Society of Friends of the Nation] because they were charged with the “interior gobierno de las familias” [internal government of families].⁵ Pensamiento 8 of El Pensador noted in 1762 that a woman should be instructed to “procurar una buena educación a los hijos” [provide a good education for her children], while Josefa Amar y Borbón affirmed in 1786 that the most effective strategy to avoid disorder would be “el interesar a las mugeres en el bien de la patria” [to interest women in the good of the nation].⁶ After all, as Jovellanos would put it in 1801, we cannot forget that “la primera educación del hombre es obra de las madres” [the initial education of men is undertaken by the mother].⁷

However, female identity continued to be perceived in terms of physical appearance—Pensamiento 2 of El Pensador will argue that, deep down, “todas quieren parecer y ser tenidas por hermosas” [all want to appear and be seen as beautiful] while Amar y Borbón herself will resentfully conclude that “se pone mucho cuidado en adornarlas, con lo qual, llegan a adquirir un cierto hábito de pensar siempre en la compostura exterior. De talento, si se les habla, como cosa por demás” [Much care is spent in beautifying them, from which they acquire a certain habit of thinking always of exterior composure composition. Any talk about talent is secondary].⁸ From a male’s perspective, the female’s identity derives from how she looks, not what she is...