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[ 99 ] Chapter 3 Rethinking the Modern in Saavedra’s Don Alvaro —Madrid, 1835. Days of liberal revolution and reform. Several decades have elapsed since Cadalso’s Noches lúgubres first began circulating. Ferdinand VII, the despot, bastion of absolutism, has been dead for almost two years. Political exiles have returned to Spain under a general amnesty, and debate in the capital—moderados versus progresistas—openly dialogues with the tenets of the Constitution of 1812, the touchstone of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism. In the countryside, especially in the north, a dynastic dispute has erupted into civil war. The forces of reaction have rallied around Ferdinand’s brother, Carlos, under the motto of “Dios, Patria, Fueros y Rey” [God, Country, Privileges, and King].1 María Cristina, queen-regent for her three-year-old daughter Isabella, has made a pact with the forces of liberalism in order to counter the threat posed to her reign by Carlism. In the newspapers of the day, columnists regularly refer to the tumultuous uncertainty of the times. As Lukàcs would later observe of the early 1800s, across Europe the Era of Revolution has prompted an acute historical consciousness, the sense of living in decidedly historical times (Historical, 23–24). Among those who have returned to the capital is a prominent liberal aristocrat, Angel de Saavedra, soon to be known as the Duke of Rivas.2 While in exile in France he composed a play, a historical drama originally written in prose. Translated into French by his friend Antonio Alcalá Galiano, the work was originally intended for the Paris stage, but the course of events overtakes such plans, and the play does not debut north of the Pyrenees. In Spain once again, Saavedra revises the original, rewriting substantial portions in verse. The result is a markedly innovative, hybrid text. It is a play set in the late eighteenth century, during the reign of the Enlightenment reformer, Carlos III, and it stages the tale [ 100 ] ProPerties of Modernity of a mestizo of noble Inca and Spanish lineage who aspires to marry Leonor, daughter of a tradition-bound aristocrat, the Marqués de Calatrava. Indifferent to his daughter’s feelings, the marquis disdains the wealthy newcomer from America, and when the young mestizo’s attempt to steal Leonor away is foiled, a freak accident leads to her father’s death: The pretender throws down his revolver in order to submit to the will of the marquis, but upon hitting the ground the gun goes off and his beloved’s father is fatally wounded. Fortune’s die is cast. Over a total of five acts spanning some five years and multiple geographical localities, the young man will be persecuted relentlessly by an adverse fate rooted in this first misfortune. A series of uncanny coincidences , the feeling that a cosmic ill will works to thwart him, and a vendetta sworn against him by Leonor’s brothers, Carlos and Alfonso, slowly close in on the protagonist until his sense of life possibility is undermined. Although he attempts to flee from the world by seeking refuge first in military life and then in religious seclusion, before the play’s end he will witness his beloved’s murder, and he will have killed not only her father but both brothers as well. The hero’s last, desperate act—either a final affirmation of his free will, or the ultimate capitulation to his destiny, or both—is to hurl himself off of a mountainous precipice, cursing humanity before falling to his death. The protagonist’s name is Don Alvaro; the play is Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino [Don Alvaro or the Force of Destiny ], and its radical formal and thematic novelty immediately accord it a shocking, even revolutionary quality in the eyes of Madrid theatergoers.3 Within Spanish literary historiography, the opening of the Duke of Rivas’s Don Alvaro quickly becomes an emblematic moment—for many, the emblematic moment—of romantic rebellion on the Spanish stage.4 —Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, 1560. Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, a mestizo of noble Inca and Spanish lineage, is on a ship bound to Spain. He is the son of a prominent Spanish captain, Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas. The young man’s mother, Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo, is an Inca princess, niece of Inca Huaina Capac, and concubine to Sebastián. Fluent in Quechua and Castilian, the young noble has been educated in the cultural traditions of...

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