Preferred Citation: Gaite, Carmen Martín. Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6x0nb4m5/
 | Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century SpainCarmen Martín Gaite |
To Antonio Martín Cobián,
Director of the Jovellanos Institute
(Gijón, Spain); and in memory of
his sister, Inés Martín Cobián
Preferred Citation: Gaite, Carmen Martín. Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6x0nb4m5/
To Antonio Martín Cobián,
Director of the Jovellanos Institute
(Gijón, Spain); and in memory of
his sister, Inés Martín Cobián
Translator's Preface
To the North American reader interested in the contemporary novel, Carmen Martín Gaite is a well-known figure. Her appointment to Barnard College (New York) as visiting lecturer in the Fall semester of 1980 sparked a keen interest in her fiction. The perceptive introduction of From Fiction to Metafiction: Essays in Honor of Carmen Martín Gaite focuses upon a salient characteristic of this writer's stance toward her readers: her writings are "not so much texts as 'utterances,' for throughout her pages the human voice is heard in rising and falling cadences, telling tales and weaving magic spells."[1] Anyone who has had the good fortune of conversing with Carmen Martín Gaite will recognize in these words a perfect description of the interlocutor and the sympathetic listener that she is.
With this translation of Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España , I introduce Gaite as historian and essayist. In this work she functions as a listener and interpreter of the whispered conversational mode of eighteenth-century Spain, as practiced by upper-class ladies and their escorts. She is historian in that she draws evidence from archival documents to provide the socioeconomic and political background of the eighteenth-century custom known as the cortejo . She is essayist in that she interprets and comments on literary texts in the light of these archival documents.
As historian and essayist, Gaite has other outstanding works to attest to her perceptions of events past and present. No scholar specializing in the Spanish eighteenth century can justifiably omit the reading of her El proceso de Macanaz . This work clarifies the role of a theretofore inadequately researched key figure of the first half of the eighteenth century. In this study, Gaite gives voice and feeling to the Inquisitional, life-draining case of Macanaz, minister to the Bourbon king of Spain, Philip V. She does this through skillful narration and exacting analysis of related documents.[2]El proceso de Macanaz nonetheless is not a work to be appreciated only by schol-
ars. When I first bought it in a bookstore in Madrid more than twenty years ago, the sales clerk remarked: "I enjoy Carmen Martín Gaite's stories, but the one that really kept me in suspense is this history of Macanaz."
Among her essays, the most extensive and original is El cuento de nunca acabar (The Never-Ending Story).[3] This essay is, in a very general sense, her wry answer to often cumbersome and labyrinthine theories of narration. It begins roadblocked by seven prologues abounding in the writer's desire to tell her tale. Despite its witty approach, the essay offers Gaite's views on the existential meaning of narration. She examines what prompts narration and how it springs from and draws upon a cultural substratum peculiar to the language in which it is presented. This "metaessay" would demand linguistic skill and creative ingenuity if it were to be elegantly rendered in English.
As translator of Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España I hope to have conveyed some of the original work's vividness and unique qualities. The main theme itself makes the book unique. This treats the purport of an ambiguous code of companionship and escorting, accompanied by a whispered conversation. To be more specific, the code had to do with noblemen allowing their wives to become friends with a member of the opposite sex. Apparently, the male friend who frequented the lady's house was never to overstep the limits of platonic love; in practice, this may not always have been so. Wife and "friend" were allowed to sit together enjoying a whispered conversation. The substance of their talk was to focus upon such trivial topics as fashions and gossip. Such a mode of conversation might in itself elicit interest in modern readers so steeped in different techniques of communication.
Another unique feature of this work is its extension of the theme. Gaite analyzes the significance of this custom to the eighteenthcentury woman, in terms of her perceptions of herself, her relationships with members of the opposite sex, and her ambiance. Finally, the method employed by Gaite makes the book unique. She presents both an analysis of archival documents and an interpretation of literary texts in the light cast by these documents.
With respect to historical perspective, Gaite has employed a wide range of resources, incorporating more than simply eighteenthcentury sources. The author has searched for the root of this custom involving extramarital companionship and devotion by following
its meanderings from Spain to Italy and France, and back to Spain. The term used to describe it was chichisveo (from the Italian cicisbeo = whisper , but also escort ). Gaite also studies specific political and dynastic events as factors favoring the custom, despite conflicts with traditional religious precepts (confession, above all) relating to the individual's conscience. Chapter 6 deals at length with the bewilderment at aspects of this custom. It deals with the half-flunky, half-escort fashionable abbés, with the silencing measures of the Inquisition, and also with the overall quenching of a social phenomenon that neither its defenders nor its detractors had the courage to face squarely.
Gaite also demonstrates that although this custom of the chichisveo (later known as cortejo ), had from its onset retained an elitist aura, it had significant repercussions on other classes. For the middle class it served as a coveted model to be imitated, as associated as it was with idleness and leisure. In the urban lower classes, it instigated a marked xenophobic reaction: an abhorrence of fashions and trends from abroad. In the Madrilenian lower class, it led to an intriguing reverse phenomenon in the second half of the eighteenth century. The nobility adopted, as the latest fashion, the styles, mannerisms and patterns of speech of the majos and majas , as the young people of the lower-class districts of Madrid were called. Gaite highlights Goya's aristocratic model (supposedly la maja desnuda and la maja vestida ), the Duchess of Alba, as the one who launched these trends. Gaite also delves into the motivation that propelled the nobility's imitation of such fashions.
From the beginning, the custom of the cortejo created a rift between the traditionalists, who had misgivings about the chastity of a companionship enjoyed in the husband's absence, and the moderns, who hailed it as a fashion which helped to cast off the sacralized image of woman as sustaining the family honor. What distressed the traditionalists most was that this custom eroded the image of woman's virtue as the cornerstone of the ancient code of honor.
Neither faction detected in what they called "the new fashion" its Spanish origin. They saw the cortejo as an import, along with luxury items, hedonistic ideas, and other new ways. The moderns saw in such trends evidence of an ever-widening horizon, extending Spain outward toward more progressive countries. In contrast, the traditionalists, and within their midst, the moralists in particular,
perceived these as temptations which undermined morality. Sermons had always linked luxury with sinfulness, but in the age of enlightenment that link grew weak under the pressure of philosophical trends exalting worldly happiness. Prayers and spiritual exercises seemingly inspired by devotion were all a sham.
Appearances were all-important in the dawn of an era emphasizing possession. The urge to expand, to spend, and to impress others with one's good and possibly lavish taste was barely restrained by the lip service the upper class gave to the Church. In this context, Gaite's analysis of the subversion of values taking place in that era is of particular interest. In this analysis, she focuses upon the conflicted position of women, caught between traditional values and new trends. In addition to the impossible task of making religious precepts compatible with luxury, women were confronted with another contradiction, one inherent in the policies of the government itself. Monarchs and ministers praised austerity and economy on the one hand, while on the other they carried out projects to intensify national industry and commerce. For these, naturally enough, they needed private investments and consumers to buy the manufactured items. At the government level, this contradiction among Spanish "enlightened despots" who condemned spending as immoral, had probably much to do with competition from abroad. According to testimonials of the period, the willful members of the upper class, particularly women, preferred imported luxury items to the detriment of nationally manufactured goods. Be that as it may, the financial burden of supporting a wife in the manner that she and her family demanded was enough to discourage many suitors from marrying, especially when the maidens' dowries fell short of men's expectations. At this critical moment for the institution of marriage, the cortejo became for the escort a surrogate for marriage. From the husband's point of view, it may have been considered an expedient method to ease household expenses; articles such as the indispensable fans, ribbons, and lace could be accepted as presents from the escort.
If verbal exchange was the aim of the cortejo, what could a woman and her escort talk about? Gaite lends an attentive ear to the voices of the past by studying the literary texts, tastes, and levels of education attained by women. She shows that the intellectual yield of those conversations was meager. Could it have been other-
wise? Gaite's work in studying this custom adds to the story of the faltering steps of women in their efforts to partake of the Enlightenment. Women followed a dimly-lit path, but one on which they slowly moved ahead.
Gaite's pattern of offering literary discourse interwoven with the content of archival documents serves a considerable range of functions. First of all, it supplies further documentation for this period, adding to that provided by the literature. Excerpts from the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century moralists such as Luis de León, Luis de Granada, Mateo Alemán, and the preacher Pedro de Calatayud provide evidence of writings that enforced certain customs and traditions. Such customs and traditions guided the lives of men and women, especially the latter, not only in those days but also in the eighteenth century. Similarly, excerpts from the dramatic works of Lope de Vega function as genre literature, illustrating the attitudes prevalent in those days. In light of the main theme of her book, Gaite chooses passages from Lope de Vega that show attitudes toward love as emotion and as promoter of the fantasies that moralists were preaching against. Thus, these excerpts also serve as a counterfoil to the distress felt by those grave men, always, it seems, obsessed by women's frailties. Gaite cites one-act plays and farces by Ramón de la Cruz, a quick and witty observer of the fads and foibles of his contemporaries. She also includes letters, memoirs, and travel journals as other valuable testimonials. She uses a foreign traveler's point of view to illustrate the Spanish people's opinions of themselves and their surroundings. By the use of these quotations throughout Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España , Gaite offers the reader a wide historical vision of the period in which the cortejo was practiced.
Finally, Gaite employs literary texts as sources reflecting the dynamics of change through semantic variation. Emphasis on the use of some words at the expense of others falling in disuse, the introduction of neologisms, and different shifts of meaning are easily detectable by the scholar of a given period. But in her work Gaite goes farther. She shows, in her subtle analysis of texts, how language could become a disguise for behavior of a questionable nature. In this analysis, she illustrates the conflict that existed between the cortejo and religious practices, and the tension between the striving for pleasure and the principles of austerity. Gaite finds that
the cunning use of language could protect its users only to a certain point, because the Inquisition silenced and where possible destroyed the slightest evidence pro or con of this worrisome custom.
In this translation I have condensed a few paragraphs of the text and certain footnotes that would, in my opinion, interest only the specialist. I have also omitted the section entitled "Linguistic Conclusions," because, in my view, the Spanish idioms within it cannot be adequately rendered in English. For the sources actually written in English that Gaite translated into Spanish (Joseph Townsend and William Beckford), I have quoted directly from the English originals.
By making Gaite's vivid and penetrating analysis of the "whispering code of love" accessible to the English reader, I hope to make known her significant contribution in shedding light on the social customs of eighteenth-century Spain. Her work is not one, I believe, that should be spoken of only in whispers.
Acknowledgments
One is always indebted to more people than one realizes or can mention in a brief note, especially family and encouraging friends ever ready to listen and advise. Among the latter I wish to express my gratitude to Joan Fox and John Cameron Murchison, who read a first version of this translation more than fifteen years ago; to Ruth El Saffar who kindly brought the manuscript to Scott Mahler's attention; to Susan Kirkpatrick, who assessed it and advised on changes; to Shirley Darcus Sullivan, who made invaluable suggestions for improvements in the last stage of the revision; and to Elizabeth Howarth, who so efficiently typed the manuscript.
MARIA G. TOMSICH
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Introduction
In works of literature, periodicals, travel diaries, pamphlets and sermons of the second half of the eighteenth century, one finds allusions, most of them full of wrathful indignation, to a custom, apparently imported from Italy, which took root in Spain around 1750. This custom had to do with noblemen tacitly allowing their wives to become friends with a member of the opposite sex, a relationship which was graciously accepted within their social and familial circles alike. The male friend who frequented the lady's house, and who was as familiar a sight in it as the husband, apparently did not overstep the limits of platonic love. Perhaps this was so because ambiguity was one of the rules of this game. He limited himself to bestowing upon the lady a series of attentions, gallantries and courtesies so rigid and obligatory that they lost their initial tinge of passion and became fixed in a code as tedious and stiff as marriage was in those times, even if its tenets appeared more attractive.
To satirize this situation, a writer of the time has a lady speak in the following manner, to inform her friend-to-be of the obligations he will have to fulfill in order to become her escort:
First of all, your lordship ought not to speak to any other woman but myself, even when I am not present. Your lordship is to come in the morning to take a cup of chocolate with me and perhaps to do my corset hooks up for me. Likewise in the afternoon, besides escorting me on a walk . . . your lordship ought to ask and receive my gracious leave before accepting another invitation to any gathering or visit. Your lordship must supply me with the most exquisite flowers of the season, as I take great pleasure in fragrances. And as I ought to be informed on the fashions of Madrid in order to dress accordingly, your lordship should employ an agent of good taste to ferret out what is stylish, without ever neglecting to send me immediately any modish fan or bonnet that may have arrived from abroad, so that I may pose as the most fashionable lady, for once these fashions spread, they are despised as common.[1]
Besides the exaggeration in this text, we find a very interesting aspect of the relationship, one which I wish to examine. It seems obvious that these demands entrench the position of the woman as an idol. As such, they are the consequence of a long, gallant tradition going back to the thirteenth century and latent since then in the Spanish soul.
In contrast, with the insignificant and meager pan women actually played in society, they were the objects of a deceptive adoration infrequent in other countries. A French traveler visiting Spain in the year 1800 commented on the surprising phenomenon:
They do not revere women less than they do priests. One can say they actually make idols of them, to whom they burn incense. No matter what complaint men have against them, it is not proper to express it. Those who consider themselves refined kneel in front of the ladies to speak to them; they kiss their hand and do not get up until they are repeatedly asked to. Their respect for pregnant women is such that when the latter fancy a jewel, they feel obliged to buy it, and the women unfortunately are very much given to such whims.[2]
It was the reverence to woman as a deity-like being before whom one piled up merits that characterized most of these liaisons in eighteenth-century Spain. The words merit, submission, sacrifice , and recompense are frequent in writings on this theme. In a playlet by Ramón de la Cruz,[*] for instance, a character, Lorenza, is very proud of what a certain gentleman had to go through to be admitted among her guests. She shows a girlfriend a billet-doux of his, in which he shows his submission to her as follows:
Madam, my bowing to your excellence, the little attention you have paid my walking up and down your street, and the annoyance at seeing the happy ones who achieve the good fortune of frequenting your house and gatherings encourage me to beg of you to be admitted in the circle of your admirers, for which honor I prostrate myself at your feet and offer you my soul, my life, my person and everything God has granted me liberally, without aspiring, in exchange for this sacrifice, to any recompense that one should not demand of great ladies like you, nor should be asked by men like myself.[3]
The very etymology of the word cortejo , with which one designated the friend or the beau of the married lady, points significantly
[*] Ramón de la Cruz (1731–1794). Writer of witty sketches on the manners, foibles, and fads of the Madrilenians of his day.
to the aspect of submission in such liaisons. The transposition to the language of love of such expressions as "to court" (cortejar, hacer la corte ), which initially applied to ceremonies with which noblemen honored kings, is a well-known phenomenon, one which certainly is not restricted to Castilian. It is common to other languages as well, as a residue of certain periods characterized by a man's devotion to a noble woman. The man, by humbly adopting a subservient attitude in relation to the lady whose favors he was seeking—however small they might have been—saw himself as a vassal before his king. In Italy and in France, the expression corteggiare and faire la cour underwent a process parallel to that of the terms cortejar or hacer la corte . The origins of such amorous connotations might be traced to the manifestations of chivalrous love in the various occidental countries. For our purpose, it will suffice to say that though cortejar or hacer la corte were expressions used in the eighteenth century, the derivative, cortejo , with its gallant connotations, is exclusive and characteristic of the eighteenth century.
In the beginning, the word cortejo did not refer to the man courting (or paying court to) the lady, but rather to the homage he paid her. Then the word came to refer to the gentleman who had committed himself to be the lady's escort, not only in her eyes, but in the eyes of the world. This custom, common by the second half of the eighteenth century, had spread to such an extent by the end of the century, that in a play in which the god Mars is mentioned, we read "you know he was, of the Cytherean goddess, escort."[4]
Although literary and popular language preserve the gallant connotation of cortejar , the term cortejo has kept only its original meaning of retinue , or train of attendants . Even Corominas's Critical Dictionary of Etymologies fails to mention the meaning of escort . Therefore, it is not strange that the word, repeatedly uttered by eighteenth-century Spaniards to the point of creating a rift between the ones who did not want to hear about it and the ones who popularized it by their example, does not evoke, nowadays, anything but a "martial cavalcade."
Although the term cortejo was prevalent and generally used by those who left us testimony of this fashion, it was interchanged with two synonyms that also referred to the married lady's male friend: chichisveo and estrecho .[5] The word chichisveo disappeared gradually, and by the end of the century it was considered antiquated.
The fact that it was replaced entirely by cortejo caused some authors to compare and differentiate the two terms. For instance, in a text of 1789, the Devil uttered the following words:
My dear subjects, you know very well the fine progress made by the bygone chichisveo to undermine mortals. Now I have thought out an even more clever device. . . . It will consist of every man choosing a lady to whom he humbly sacrifices his affection, with such devotion as to bind himself to her will and be ever at her side, at home, in the promenade, in bed, at gatherings and finally, everywhere.[6]
But I do not believe that the chichisveo and the cortejo differed, or at least I have not found proof of it. If anything it is more an issue of quantity than quality. In the first years of the eighteenth century when the word chichisveo became popular, the fashions and novelties gradually introduced by the Bourbon dynasty were more severely criticized by the majority than they were later on when the term cortejo became prevalent during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) and Charles IV (1788–1808). Although the phenomenon had from its onset retained its elitist character, many of those who objected to it considered it far more deeply rooted and widespread than they would have wished.
The Devil has taken advantage of the times in which we live [wrote one of them in 1729] to seed in the world the malignant weed called chichisveo and to transplant it to our country. One can easily see by its rapid growth that it is a harmful weed.[7]
The country held responsible for that "malignant weed" was Italy; its ways and fashions had been introduced during the reign of Philip V (1700–1746), who had been successively married to two Italian princesses. The very name chichisveo reveals its origin. It was in Italy where a custom flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with traits analogous to the ones described above, and where it served as a source of inspiration to the theater of Goldoni.[8][*] The word, before being applied to the custom of a married lady having a male friend, meant "in a whisper" (or "under one's breath"), which became cicisbeare .[9] Chichisveo, then, meant a certain conversation from which the lady drew solace and enjoyed the attention of a person of the opposite sex. The peculiar feature
[*] Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793). Foremost Italian playwright whose numerous works in the Venetian dialect and in Italian showed a decisive and innovative trend.
of this conversation was its secretive and whispered tone, an inevitable carryover of the long-practiced confessionary habits.[10] At least this is what one gathers from the information offered about this custom by an Italian contemporary:
The conversation of the cicisbei , then, consists in the choice that a young or mature man makes of a married lady, and sometimes a widow, to while away the time in frequent and familiar chats with her, under the title of honorable escort and respectful devotion. . . . The most pleasing conversation between them is carried on, not rarely, in a solitary room . . . and the most attractive topics are the ones they whisper to each other's ear with a studied affection that pretends to be platonic.[11]
It is interesting to underline a point implied in the etymology of the word chichisveo . The core of the phenomenon lay in the conversation, that is to say, in the novelty of a married woman conversing with a man who was not her husband. From conversation, it was easy to continue on to a certain intimacy; it had always been felt that even confessors—who were men after all—could threaten the chastity of those women, who were far too secluded, and whose only escape was to talk.
The confessionals were, in fact, very suitable places in which a whispered conversation on intimate subjects could become sinful, or at least open the way to certain liberties. In a text of the beginning of the eighteenth century, a moralist availed himself of this argument. If those "sacred buttresses" had to be fortified "with walls against sight and precautions against imprudences" in order to restrain desire, he wondered, how can sin fail to penetrate intimate conversations between a man and a woman?[12]
The idea of impurity attached to a conversation with a person of the opposite sex was so ingrained in Spain that it originated the pithy saying " between a chaste woman and a saintly man, build a wall of lime and stone." Throughout Golden Age literature, we encounter similar statements.
Women should never [writes a moralist of the sixteenth century] obey too slavishly their spiritual advisors. . . . Very often this spiritual friendship turns into another sort of alloy.[13]
The forbidding of all closeness to a man was a refrain long sung to Spanish women. A Spanish woman's dream was to be known as chaste, a dream that she was inescapably compelled to nourish.
A good reputation just did not go with friendship or obedience to a man, except to one's father in the first stage of one's life, then later on, to the man who became lord and husband by laws of convenience or chance. The wonder caused by the scandalous fashion of the close relationship between a man and a woman who were not husband and wife is what doubtlessly caused the other word denoting a male friend to be coined: the word "intimate" (estrecho ).
The term estrecho was probably chosen as more apt to describe the man enjoying those privileges, precisely because they were those of intimacy. A man who was not the husband, nor the father, nor the confessor was allowed to converse privately with a woman, to be her confidant. Moreover, she was allowed to smile at him through the ribbing of her fan, to send him billet-doux, to receive him in the house, to squeeze his hand when he held it out to help her alight from the carriage, and finally, to become entangled in a reciprocal confidence sealed by that most unusual familiarity. It is not difficult, then, to imagine why the beneficiary of a relationship that had vanquished the taboos of friendship between man and woman was called intimate .
This name must have waned quickly, as I found it only in a few writings. It has, nevertheless, left its traces in a game I learned from my mother in childhood, which she herself used to play as a child. It was called "pick out your 'intimate'" (echar los estrechos ). The last day of the year my girlfriends and I put folded pieces of paper in a bag, each with our respective name on it. In another bag we stuffed the names of as many young lads as we knew or wished to know. Then we proceeded to pair off the folded paper scraps. It was a rather insipid affair, which ended by our reading aloud the name of the boy assigned to each of us by chance, as estrecho or friend, for the coming year. In spite of the importance we attached to the game and the expectations with which we did the sorting out, it did not bear any consequence except that we girls nudged each other on the street when we saw one or another of the boys passing by whose names we had used in our wishful play. Now, after so many years, I believe that this game was probably the residue of a similar one played in the eighteenth-century drawing rooms, most likely enlivened by jocose comments, but I have not found references to support my conjecture.
How to explain the presence of such customs, however restricted to a minority, in a country that upheld matrimonial honor so
strictly? To answer such questions (the cause of anxiety to so many contemporaries opposing the new ways), one should remember something they often forgot in their indignation: these ways were not as new as they thought.
If one of the main premises of the cortejo was to consider woman as an object worthy of adoration, eighteenth-century Italy was not bringing anything new to Spain. It is true that the chichisveo, updated and dressed up in eighteenth-century fashion, entered Spain by way of Italy, but it is also true that Italy, as well as France during the sixteenth century, had drawn from the spirit of chivalry found in Spanish customs and literature.[14] A glance, however cursory, at Spanish Golden Age theater will reveal the stereotype of the proud and haughty lady demanding proofs of a burdensome vassalage. Laura, the protagonist of one of these plays, reacts indignantly at the daring of a gentleman who, having no record of his chivalrous pursuits to boast, laments her harshness:
Do I cost you sorrowful years?
Do I owe your desire, any passionate letters and vigil?
Have you burnt any candle at both ends for me?
Have you jousted in my honor in Ferrara, Octavio?
Tell me, what tears have I seen you shedding?
What estate have you lost for me?
What merchant has given you in credit the gowns you offered me?
What rings, what crystals, what paintings, corals, bracelets or necklaces,
the jeweler?
Have you served me on your knees?
What lackeys have you liveried in my colors?
Whom did you duel with in my honor?
In which tournament, in my presence, did you get the palm of victory,
that you are to complain of me?[15]
Spanish women, deserving or not, were traditionally accustomed to "making themselves precious." This tendency to request guarantees, to heighten the value of whatever favor the suitor was granted, is the logical consequence of the insistence with which the girls themselves were lectured on the always vital modesty and reserve. In Philip IV's (1621–1665) court, it was customary for the queen's ladies-in-waiting, even if they were married, to accept homage from the courtiers. The latter had to ask beforehand the ladies' leave to pay them homage, and if permission was granted, the gentlemen acquired the right to call themselves "enraptured" (embebecidoes ),
that is, so absorbed by their respective ladies' presence as to be excused from bowing to the queen in public ceremonies. These same gentlemen used to disguise themselves as lackeys on the journey from Madrid to Aranjuez,[*] to follow the ladies of their hearts, and to thus express to them their constant devotion. It was not rare for some of them to choose as the object of their gallantry a young nun of high birth.[16] The fact that they chose such inaccessible women seems to indicate that it was enough for a gentleman to let his lady know that she was the cause of his pining, and that he expected nothing in return.
And what seems most peculiar is to allow a man, though he may be married, to declare himself the lover of one of the queen's ladies, and to present her with expensive gifts and do all sorts of madness for her, without anybody being scandalized by it all. One can see these gallants in the palace courtyard and the ladies at the windows, whiling away their days in perpetual long-distance chats . . . these flirtations are public, and a gentleman requires much ingenuity to start them and to have a lady go along with it because they are discreet and not very talkative as women are wont to be.[17]
These courtships, then, gave prestige to the lady who accepted them. Moreover, the linking of the concept of love with renunciation of it had become a privilege of distinguished folk. Lope de Vega[**] underlined it explicitly in one of his plays:
Here Don Enrique plays court to Lady Ana de Moncada, and the Count of Ribagorza, to Lady Sol de Peralta; Don Lorenzo de Aragón, to the fair Lady Juana de Toledo and Don Ramiro, though wedded, to Lady Cassandra, and many more likewise with the decorum noblemen observe in these matters.[18]
From the above testimonials, it is obvious that these relationships, conducted outside of wedlock among the nobility in seventeenth-century Spain, were of the most rigorous chastity, or at least a great show was made of it. The fact that the king himself, Philip IV, was adept at this custom may explain why it would have been in bad taste to doubt its propriety. As for the peculiarities of eighteenth-
[*] Aranjuez: One of the "royal sites" situated in a fertile valley crossed by the Tagus, about 30 miles south of Madrid.
[**] Lope de Vega (1562–1635). He is considered the father of the Spanish theater. Endowed with an almost legendary vitality and creativity, he wrote some of the finest lyrical poetry, numerous plays, pastoral novels and other minor works.
century gallantry—which indeed could give rise to doubts about its innocence—neither did there exist any muzzle to keep the evil tongues from wagging. In the seventeenth century the example of the king, flatteringly followed, was a mighty dike against the satires and attacks the cortejo suffered a century later.
One can find even earlier precedents of the cortejo. The French fashion of the chevaliers servants , also called alcovistes ,[*] was thought to be an invention of Louis XIII's court (1610–1643). It was actually a simple deformation of a Spanish custom of the times of Philip II (1556–1598). Adopted in Italy, it was disseminated in France by Maria de Medici. This was the custom of the bracero (the arm-man), known in Italy as the bracciere , and in France, having taken a different tinge, as the alcoviste . The Spanish arm-man was a servant without whose help a lady of high nobility could not get along. His function was almost exclusively limited to offering the lady his arm and to accompanying her when her husband was absent. The nobler the family to which this arm-man belonged, the more highly honored by his service were husband and wife.[19]
Few in the eighteenth century linked those old customs with the cortejo, which was seen by some as a fashion brought from abroad to tarnish Spain's purest traditions, or, in the opinion of others, to demolish antiquated prejudices. However, there were some who remembered the amorous style of yore, with its aura of attractiveness and prestige, with which the cortejo could be associated. In a text from the end of the century which defended the presumed innocence of the cortejo, whose task is to be an arm-man, a dialogue between a lady and her confessor is heard. She defended the new ways, stressing their similarity to the traditional ones:
According to this, your Reverence considers it improper to give a lady one's arm. Thus, from now on we shall have to do without the help of a servant who, in the absence of the gentleman of the house, acts as the lady's escort . . . to offer one's arm to a lady is not a new custom, on the contrary, a very courteous gesture as old, in my opinion, as the very nobility.[20]
Those who rejected the cortejo, as well as those who took pride in accepting it, considered it something that came from outside, whence also came materialism, ambition for luxury, forbidden
[*] Alcovistes : the fashionable wits who frequented the bluestocking gatherings in eighteenth-century France.
books and the waves of criticism. The "traditionalists" raised their protest before the "modern," regarding them as contaminated by the new ways. Sometimes they accused them, not without reason, of slavishly accepting everything foreign. Nevertheless, for divergent reasons, both the former and the latter refused to look for the roots of that gallant fashion. They saw it as detached from tradition, and as part of the numerous fashions which had been entering the country since the beginning of the century, slowly undermining long established beliefs. The majority saw the cortejo as a challenge to the traditional image of the Spanish woman, and to the belief that such an image was untouchable. In the view of the modern, the cortejo opened the way toward disputing the presumed eternal values that the traditional image implied, values attributed to conventions already abandoned in other European countries, those which Spain had to overcome to keep up with the times. Latent in the national tradition, that revolutionary innovation reappeared as a foreign borrowing sanctioned by the prestige it had gained in more advanced countries, like all novelties in that century of enlightenment and reason. Few Spaniards were able to see that they were being given back, somewhat adorned, something that was genuinely theirs and that they had propagated abroad.
(Later the same thing occurred with some aspects of Romanticism, another example of that "belated imitation" so characteristically Spanish: that is, to ignore what was piled up in the attic, so to speak, was the same thing that was hailed as new when coming from abroad. Novelties thus bedazzled Spaniards and awakened in them the desire to copy the fashions when they returned much later, clothed somewhat differently and surrounded by an exotic aura which was already fading abroad.)
Neither the origin of the chichisveo nor the changes it underwent when it was later called cortejo are well defined in the contemporary texts pertinent to this subject. Likewise, one very seldom finds an exact reference to the birthplace of this custom, although Italy and France, generally considered the culprits in introducing immoral thoughts and ways into Spain, were most often accused.
The actual origin of the chichisveo is unclear, to say the least; it is curious to find that among Spain, Italy and France, there ran a stream of reciprocal accusations. If they were interpreted literally, they would lead one to a maze of divergent versions as far as responsibility for the phenomenon is concerned. For instance, Antonio
Muratori,[*] in his Annals of 1700, referred to the Italian chichisveo as the most pernicious inheritance left by the recent French domination of Northern Italy.[21] In contrast with this version, Father Mayans, in the second part of the century, spoke of "the plague brought to Spain by those who fought in Italy . . . in the past wars."[22] He was referring to the troops of Louis XIV, sent to aid his nephew, Philip of Anjou, recently ascended to the Spanish throne. The military aid strengthened and increased Spain's possessions in Italy while Philip was fighting in Spain to secure his throne against the Austrian pretender. Because the French and the Spaniards invaded Italy at the same time, other authors confused the issue even further by spreading the word in some widely read books that the chichisveo passed from Italy to Spain.
Actually the chichisveo, regardless of its origin, was already rooted in Italy, especially in Genoa and Venice, with the name and the features Spain was going to inherit; in fact, a cultured minority in Spain was already aware of it. Mariano Nipho,[**] for instance, had read Goldoni, whose realism he attacked on the ground that a play should not limit itself to depicting the vices of one's contemporaries with verisimilitude and humor. He sympathized with Venetian gentlemen irked by the brazen casting of the chichisveo in The Gentleman and the Lady[23] The abbé Cenicero unhesitatingly declared, as early as 1737, that the chichisveo was born in Italy, and he was shocked because nobody attacked or reproved it, while it was being opposed in the very country of its origin.[24]
Attaching the blame for the cortejo to Italy had almost been forgotten by the second half of the eighteenth century, especially during the years of the French revolution, when the tendency was to roundly impute France for all immortality, infiltrated mainly through "devilish books liable to instigate son against father and to pervert the purest maiden and the most judicious married woman."[25]
Although France and Italy were as a rule considered responsible for the upheaval in the amatory code, xenophobia led some traditionalists to combine distant geographic places as originators of the evil. One of them commented:
[*] Lodovico Muratori (1672–1750). Famous Italian philosopher of history and aesthetics, whose poetical precepts influenced Spanish eighteenth-century critics.
[**] M. F. Nipho (1719–1803). Minor writer, but successful journalist, founder and editor of several widely read periodicals.
As you know, England, Holland and the Northern countries are the ones that dictate the laws in fashion and manners. In these regions there reigns heresy. . . . And is it not rash, to take up in our country as good and decent, what, in fact, a loose conscience has fostered in such countries?[26]
Having underlined the point that hardly anyone believed the cortejo to be a custom linked to an old gallant Spanish tradition, it would be worthwhile to take a brief glance at its closest intermediary, the chichisveo, before entering into the broader topic. What made the life of married women and widows so pleasant, first in Genoa, then in Venice, and finally all over Italy, seems to have stemmed from the fact that Genoese men had to travel constantly because of their businesses. The husbands welcomed with a sigh of relief the institution of the chichisveo, that is, of an attentive escort to a bored wife. It was this acceptance on the husband's part that spread and perfected the custom among the Genoese to the point that often the choice of the chichisveo was a family matter. The name of the gentleman designated to fulfill this charge was agreed upon by husband and wife, and was included in the marriage papers.
Giuseppe Baretti suspected that half of these relationships might have been chaste, and the other half not. Nevertheless, the proper thing to do was to consider the doubtful ones platonic, and to behave as if indeed they were. Jealous husbands cut a ridiculous figure.[27]
Other authors tell us that it was a fashion followed zestfully by some worldly abbés, who adopted the same frivolous attitudes as the secular escorts, by frequenting theaters and feasts with complete nonchalance.[28] The duties of the chichisveo were enslaving and baroque. He had to show up at his lady's house every day at nine on the dot, to serve her chocolate or coffee in bed, making sure to open the windows and to wake her gently. If the lady, for instance, asked him to fetch her a pin, to demurely close her nightgown around the neck, he had to look for it around the room, and feign he did not see the one she had at her hand's reach. The chichisveo did not have to leave the room if the chambermaid was not present; on the contrary, he was to help the lady to get up. He was to assist her at her dresser, standing behind her like a servant, to be ready to hand her all of her cosmetics and to give her an opinion on the effect they produced on her face. After the dressing up, he would
take her to her litter and accompany her to church on foot, keeping step with the bearers. He would rush to the door to offer the lady holy water from his fingers. In the afternoon, he would accompany her to the theater and sit by her.
In the same text that described in great detail the guidelines for the Spanish cortejo there follows a cynical but revealing comment uttered by a husband complying with the fashion:
We Genoese husbands are too busy, while our wives are not busy enough, to be satisfied to get along unaccompanied. They need a gallant, a dog, or a monkey.[29]
The Genoese gentleman who solved the problem in such a contemptuous way had nonetheless put his finger on the right spot. It was a matter of idleness. The ladies all over Europe were bored. They were not any more bored than they had been in other eras, but—and this is a feature of the eighteenth century—they started to become aware of it. They began to feel restless and to rebel; they had to fill their idle hours somehow.
1—
Of Idleness and Amusement
I fully realize [noted an eighteenth-century author] that woman, fated, according to our customs, to keep to her home the greatest part of the day, has to have somebody to talk to in the moments when she is not taken up by her domestic duties.[1]
This recognition, unusual in Spain, had already occurred in the rest of Europe, where along with the tendency to disregard spiritual values while stressing the worldly, women were encouraged to enjoy life freely. They had a function in that hedonistic society; they were its indispensable adornment, and they had to learn how to perform the new role, discarding the old coyness and reserve. To express it with a phrase of the Goncourt brothers, they had the obligation to "introduce in society the image of pleasure, offer it and give it to the whole world." The same authors commented on how modesty was thought to be in bad taste:
A gentleman finds you pretty. Don't blush, open your eyes wide. Here, women never blush unless they have just scrubbed their faces.[2]
One should analyze the motivation underlying the zest with which Spanish women took to these new styles because, I believe, it was this enthusiastic reception which gave the cortejo its peculiar traits, which were far less opposed and discussed in other countries than in Spain.
No one will be surprised to hear that Spanish women had been starving for blameless amusement. The guiding models from literature and sermons which they had been constantly asked to follow were of an exasperating monotony, and did not offer any alternatives but boredom or sin. For centuries, maidens and married women had been persistently indoctrinated to curb their inclinations, and to reduce them to a minimal expression. The maidens had to do so in order not to lose the chance to marry; only by living in seclusion did one gain the good name that was all-essential for candidacy to marriage. Once married, no one would have dared to argue that anything more was to be desired, and one's tastes automatically changed into the husband's. Needless to say, many girls
would repress the yearnings for freedom and enjoyment during girlhood, hoping to reach a certain emancipation with marriage. But let's hear how Mateo Alemán[*] adamantly closed the door on all feminine illusions:
Maidens think they will be free to go here and there, when they leave the house of their parents and enter their husband's . . . they cannot endure submission; they think that once married, instantly they will be undisputed mistresses. Why don't they look at their friend, married to a jealous and harsh man that never spoke to her kindly, that never let her go out of the house without grumbling, not even to mass, not even clad in a plain cloth dress and wrapped in a cape as a servant? . . . Let neither the maiden nor the widow [he concludes] aim at freedom.[3]
Throughout the Golden Age period, it seems as if married women did not exist. In the plays of the time, hardly any references were made to the problems of matrimony once contracted; on the contrary, much emphasis was placed on the preparation for it and the homages men offered a lady to gain her favor. Spanish women, once bedazzled by the flames of courtship, passed from being queens to whom one dedicated verse and duels, to recluses in a world which no stranger penetrated. They became unassuming, virtuous matrons who had ahead of them—given the early age at which they contracted matrimony—more than half of their lives to ruminate in solitude the memories of those compliments to their beauty, and to prove the fickleness of those homages. While married women in France had started to preside over literary salons, Spanish husbands took pains, each within his means, to furnish a cushioned and silent precinct worthy of his spouse. Inside this carefully adorned room was a place where she might be seated: the estrado . The estrado was raised by means of a platform of cork or wood and separated from the rest of the room by a delicate railing. It was furnished with cushions, stools, pillows and low chairs; to introduce a gentleman to this precinct was an exceptional proof of trust.[4] For those women, seated in the midst of velvet, surrounded by their maiden servants busy with their needlework, there flowed, from the day of their marriage, a lifeless time that aged them, that detached them inexorably from all pursuits of an active existence.
[*] Mateo Alemán (1547–1614?). Author of a lengthy picaresque and rogue novel, Guzmán de Alfarache, Watchtower of Humanity , which reveals Alemán's moralizing view on the life, customs, and vices of his age.
The estrado did not become altogether obsolete in the eighteenth century; it persisted like a bastion of the separation of the sexes.
Their refrescos [refreshments] . . . contribute no less than the tertulias[*] to facilitate the conversation of the two sexes . . . and in proportion as the guests arrive, the men separate from the women. The latter take their seats in a particular chamber, and etiquette requires they should remain alone until all the company be assembled, or at least until the men stand up. The lady of the house waits for them under a canopy in a place set apart in the hall. This special area, which in the past was called the estrado and over which is hung an image of the Virgin, is still used. The appearance of the refresco at length enlivens every countenance and infuses joy into every heart; conversation becomes lively as the sexes mix.[5]
Throughout the Enlightenment, the estrado was mentioned nostalgically by many authors who objected to the dawning freedom women were gaining for themselves.
Happy times were those in Spain when modesty had ruled fairly and prudently in the estrado. . . . One would observe beauty at a distance, and from a distance reserve would control the dangerous hosts of the emotions.[6]
But long before this system of reclusion and isolation began to crumble, some moralists—with the fathers and husbands, joint custodians of feminine behavior—had an uneasy suspicion that those secluded women were bored, and that this boredom, incubating and souring day after day, might lead to some unforeseen evil. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries abounded in diatribes against women's idleness and against the evil thoughts that might arise in their minds. These moralists did not understand, or did not want to understand, that all well-intentioned considerations of women's idleness and passivity clashed with the imposition of women's reclusion. The compromise these authors had to rely on to justify their attack on feminine idleness without ceasing to uphold reclusion had its greatest exponent in Fray Luis de León.[**] In his The Perfect
[*] Tertulia : An informal gathering of a group of friends in a private home or a café.
[**] Fr. Luis de León (1527–1591). Foremost prose writer and poet. His life was overshadowed by a long and intricate investigation during the Inquisition; among other reasons, he was investigated for his defense of writings on the Bible and translations of passages from it in Castilian.
Married Woman , he was fully aware of women's discouragement and of the support they needed to fulfill their unrewarding task.
As women are prone to be pusillanimous and little inclined to brave things, they are to be encouraged; when their husbands treat them badly and hold them in no esteem, they become downhearted and crestfallen . . . a state of mind that kindles base desires.[7]
This is precisely what he wanted to avoid by all means: idleness and its subtle poison. In his famous book, a masterpiece of diplomacy and of small concessions to encourage the weak and uninspired, Luis de León emphasized the satisfaction a married woman must feel in being a good homemaker, modest in her personal care, and a virtuous mother. The undefined wishes she might have harbored in her youth and kept latent, her frustrated yearnings for domain and influence, were preferably channeled towards the education of the children, especially—and this is essential—of the daughters. In this way, married women collaborated with men in the formation of new obedient and submissive women, feeding a cycle in which the patterns of behavior were transmitted from one generation to the next with the aridity and lack of vitality characteristic of norms inculcated without any inspired touch, albeit with the efficiency of experience of a well-trodden and inevitable path. Later on we shall see the persistence of this ideal woman, fashioner of daughters in her image.
Another essential aspect ascribed by Luis de León to the perfect married woman was modesty in dress and adornment. It was well known that women, since time immemorial, liked to vie with each other in the acquisition of new clothes:
When a woman [says a writer of the sixteenth century] sees her neighbor with something new on, it gets into her head that she is worthier of it than her neighbor . . . and she talks about it, and praises it, and asks where she could get it, and sighs until she gets what she wants.[8]
Luis de León himself referred to this feminine quirk of enhancing one's image by wearing something different or new:
They make it a case of honor . . . to show off the unusual . . . and the fabric has to have come from I don't know where, and the mantle has to be more richly embroidered than the skirt, and everything new, recent, yesterday's, to be worn today and be discarded tomorrow.[9]
In Spanish classical literature, it is common to find the type of the wedded woman who falls for money, from having been far too harshly curbed in her most basic whims. Seducers knew of this all too well and took advantage of it by offering presents through procurers. Antonio de Guevara[*] said it bluntly:
The husband who does not give his wife enough to buy a gown, or a mantle, or a shift, or a pair of slippers, or a headdress, or a cape, nor gives her enough to clothe the children, or to pay the servants, and on the other hand sees her supplied with all these things, improved in her appearance and respected, had better think she has earned it by wandering about, rather than by weaving. Alas, how many women are bad, not because they want to be bad, but rather because their husbands don't give them what they need.[10]
Here was the core of the question: what a woman needed could not be clearly settled; each would interpret it personally, according to her more or less ardent desires, according to her smaller or greater capacity to conform with those stern canons. There were many women, of course, who preferred to overlook those canons, but society never let them forget that they had swerved from the straight way. Only the character of each woman determined how she would face up, cheerfully or with regret, to the consequences of disobeying the sermons that linked luxury with dishonesty. Luxury and ostentation were attributes of sin.
In this respect, it is interesting to point out the clear-cut difference that was accepted until the eighteenth century as existing between ladies and courtesans: at first glance, by their attire, one could distinguish the former from the latter. To avoid all possible confusion laws were passed like the ones of 1639, to the effect that:
No woman was to wear the bodices called décolleté (escotados) except the women who publicly earn their living with their bodies, and have a license for it, who are allowed to wear the above mentioned bodices.[11]
That does not mean they succeeded in banishing luxury through such laws, promulgated throughout the years by successive monarchs. What they did achieve was to discredit luxury as immoral.
[*] Antonio de Guevara (148o?–1545). Though officially a royal preacher, chronicler at the court of Charles V, and author of moralizing sermons, he wrote for the sheer pleasure of inventing stories and situations, which he wittily disguised with sham erudition.
Luxury was coveted secretly, avoiding any show of it, because luxury and money were immoderate desires, typical of courtesans who, though they enticed men with their bizarre clothes, also paid for it with indelible disgrace.
In regard to this, a remarkable subversion of values took place throughout the eighteenth century, to reach its peak during the reign of Charles IV. The right to enjoy a luxurious life was being achieved and recognized gradually in Spain, although still lagging in comparison to the rest of Europe. Almost all foreigners coming to Madrid complained of it being an inhospitable, spread-out town, lacking in comforts, in public services, and far too sober in its mode of life. The aristocrats were thought of, in general, as close-fisted and provincial in their manners as well as in their homes and attire:
The simplicity of their manner, their little taste for ostentation and repugnance to ruinous arts which, in other kingdoms, are found so seducing conspire to preserve the estates of the Spanish nobility . . . Instead of that motley appearance of attires and hair styles which in other public places of Europe afford a variety, without which there would be no pleasure, there is nothing like it in the Prado[*] except women plainly dressed, covered with great black or white veils which conceal a part of their features; and men enveloped in their great cloaks, mostly of a dark color, so that the Prado, with all its beauty, seems to be the theater of Castilian gravity.[12]
Another foreign author informed us that the noblemen's life was meager, their servants clumsy and uncouth, and the rooms in their mansions, with the exception of the hallway, stairway and the reception room, neglected and tastelessly furnished. Ambassadors from abroad pointed to another way of life, spurring Spanish noblemen to get out of that rut.[13]
If, instead of taking for comparison life abroad, one takes the life led a century before in Spain, the description is quite different. According to Spaniards themselves, life, since the beginning of the century, had altered considerably; there had been a tendency toward spending and magnificence. Above all, women began to know how to dress up and entertain in their homes, how to behave out of them, and how to supervise the renovation of their rooms. The elegance with which parties were given was unheard of before this time.
[*] Fashionable boulevard of the Prado.
In the times of Philip V, Josefa de Zuñiga y Castro, Countess of Lemos, sent messages to the duke of Saint Simon inviting him to converse with her in the absence of her husband.[14] This same lady, young, accomplished, rich and well-educated, opened, shortly after becoming widowed, a famous literary salon in her palace on Turco Street. This salon was attended by the marquis of Valdeflores, the dukes of Bejar, Medinasidonia, and Arcos, and other noblemen and literati of the time. The famous Academy of Good Taste—which lasted from January 1749 to September 1751—flourished there, when lady Josefa remarried and became the Countess of Sarria. The ecstatic description, made by a contemporary, of the rooms of that mansion makes one think of the difference in standards between the Spanish noblemen—unaccustomed to luxuries—and the travelers from beyond the Pyrenees, when they dealt with the same topic.
I was astonished at the spacious and regal gallery, with gilt railings giving onto the gardens. Its high walls were hung with enchanting paintings; some with mythological subjects, others symbolizing literary genres; at intervals, statues of the Muses with their respective symbols; in front, Apollo, crowned by the sun's rays and plucking the lyre. From this hall one could make out an equally majestic salon hosting the library, which included the complete works of all Spanish authors, the most valuable of them being the manuscripts and the unpublished works.[15]
There are many more testimonials—especially among women— of the widespread desire to shake off rusticity and inhibitions and lead a life of luxury. The new philosophical trends, with their stress on worldly happiness, had, in part, pushed aside mystical preoccupations; consequently, women not only aspired to gracious living, exhibiting at the same time their inclination toward it, but also felt they were gaining prestige by such a display. One can detect an almost resentful attitude toward austerity, a definite reaction against the idea of the thrifty wife. A contemporary remarked that the majority of women came to consider economy with distaste, and that as soon as this word was mentioned
they felt resentful thinking one wanted to induce them to chores unworthy of their position and class. . . . How many among the many that reject thrifriness do squander their estate, do finish off a noble house, disregarding the pains it cost to establish it! There are as many of them as consider it tedious not only to economize, but even to hear the word economy.[16]
Oddly, this tendency toward lavish spending in private homes was opposed by the policies of the enlightened government, whose monarchs and ministers praised economy repeatedly, so loathsome to women. The innovations of the Enlightenment were based on intensifying national industry and commerce to heal the economy of the country; that is to say, they needed private investments. This is one of the main contradictions of the period. If, with their Christian mentality, the Spanish "enlightened despots" condemned superfluous spending on luxury items as immoral, they could not overlook the fact that the money immobilized for so long in private coffers, by being splurged, was contributing very efficiently to the development of national enterprises. This is the way a contemporary sized it up:
If men were content with the bare necessities there would be hardly any trade; consequently the national income would diminish to the point where there would not be sufficient money for the defense of the country and other government enterprises. Let us assume that everybody stopped using tobacco, one of the lesser necessities. The Department of Finance would lose at a stroke more than ninety-six million reales[*] which would have to be made up by increasing the prices of other articles.
He added that vanity, fostered by luxury, should be considered a minor evil to avoid a major one:
which would be unemployment and the closing of all factories, with the result of ruining the country.[17]
Likewise, the Basque Economic Society, in its amendment of the previous year's report, in which luxury had been praised as a sign of progress in 1777, made its point thus:
If one interprets 'luxury' in its absolute terms—unrestrained squandering of one's means—it is obvious that one cannot speak in favor of it, lest one be considered rash and scandalous.
But the addendum pointed to another meaning:
purely political; by which well-to-do and wealthy people spend part of their capital in the purchase of costly items for their decor, comfort and pleasure, thus stimulating the arts, and fostering the honest work of those who are employed in them.[18]
[*] Real: 1/25 of a peseta; there are about 90 pesetas in $ I.
Evidently moral reasoning was in conflict with monetary and economic matters. Women were taking advantage of the truce—in which the good and bad sides of spending were elucidated—by laying the foundations of the consumer era. They were the ones who contributed the most to the creation of new demands and needs, implanting them in society by eagerly receiving the fashions from abroad.
Hardly have the marriage papers been signed . . . when it becomes necessary to remodel the house, paint fresh friezes, smooth the ceilings, gild even the most out-of-the-way corners, fashionable dinnerware, and fill superfluous cabinets with half of China; for all this frippery, they clutter up the barn, sell antique furniture to second-hand dealers for next to nothing, and discard anything having the slightest tinge of age. Ornate clothes for the upstairs servants, and gold and silver trimmed liveries for men who would be better employed in the fields. Carriages in the French style . . . mules and horses bedecked with tassels, silk and silver, with buckles of false metals, more valuable for chemical processing than the substance; and when foolishness goes overboard, even the stables and kitchens are remodeled.[19]
This text points out two circumstances that changed family life in the eighteenth century: entertaining friends in one's home— whence sprang the desire to embellish it—and the daily fashionable walk women took along the Prado. These walks, needless to say, gave the opportunity to show off, and what mattered was the good appearance of clothes and carriages, rather than their quality. The custom of promenading in an open carriage was quite widespread in the second half of the century, and had passed from being an exclusive habit of the nobility to a device by which the bourgeoisie could aspire to prestige as well. The competitive character of these parades was obvious, as revealed in the description made by an English traveler.
When they rise from the siesta , they get into their carriages to parade up and down the prado [sic.], never going faster than a walk. As they move slowly on in one direction, they look into the coaches which are returning in the other, and bow to their acquaintances every time they pass. On some high days, I have counted four hundred coaches, and on such occasions it requires more than two hours to proceed one mile.[20]
After the walk, it was customary to invite one's friends home for tertulia , called sarao if enlivened by a dance. This was indeed
a novelty in Spanish domestic life. During the whole of the seventeenth century—as has already been pointed out in reference to the estrado—the home and the family were the sanctum sanctorum . In Vossler's words:
the family had not acquired yet its middle-class trait; it had not become 'secularized.' It was something like a sacred place, hidden and defended by convent-like walls or feudal bastions. . . . Family was considered somewhat a spiritual good, not belonging to this world, and if it were to be had here, it had to be secluded and defended.[21]
To open one's home to visitors, to summon up a warm atmosphere for people who did not belong to the family, was an important step in the life of society. New friendships gave prestige to those who knew how to cultivate them; so it was not only a matter of wanting to meet more people, but rather of exhibiting in front of them one's own way of life. Even so, gaining ground in this direction was a slow process for one basic reason: Spanish ladies, products of a secular rigidity, did not know how to receive graciously; it took them a long time to grasp those ways with ease.
They entered and saw in the estrado more than a dozen women, each more extravagant and dolled up than the other. Don Jacinto noticed that those women did not sit anywhere for long, as they kept changing places and looking for each other; hand in hand, they were going to the balcony chattering incessantly.[22]
During the first half of the century, the ladies did not succeed, as a rule, in ridding themselves of the stiffness and gravity habitual to them. Consequently, the gatherings they frequented—where they did nothing but fan themselves in a corner, serious and pathetic, while the men, in another, played cards—were an obvious residue of the estrado.[23] The Princess of the Ursins, upon arriving in Spain, noticed with surprise the lack of sociability of these ladies. She herself on many occasions had acted as intermediary between their seriousness and the spontaneity and openness of the young Queen María Luisa of Savoy, who was bored stiff with her ladies-inwaiting.[24] But by the second half of the century, things were evolving as the aristocracy, with its copied foreign innovations, began to set a different pattern of behavior.
One entertained on set days, and to make the gathering more pleasant, refreshments, sweets, and hot chocolate were served.
The company are first presented with tall glasses of water in which are dissolved little spongy sugar loaves called Azucar esponjado or rosado; these are followed by chocolate, the favorite refreshment of Spaniards who take it twice a day, as it is considered nourishing or at least digestible; it is not even denied to moribunds. After the chocolate came all sorts of confectionery.[25]
These gatherings—often made merrier by games and charades— changed into saraos when music and dancing enlivened them. The reason the ladies gave such importance to these saraos was an economic one; being more costly and difficult to organize than the usual tertulia, they were out of reach for many who would have liked to offer them. Sometimes the expenses were shared by the participants, but that was not thought to be in good taste.
There is, nevertheless, another reason for the incentive and fascination those parties had for women. Giving a dance in one's home not only displayed the flourishing financial state of the family, but also gave one the opportunity to exhibit a certain ability and mastery of a number of rather complicated dance steps imported from abroad. For some time now, the folkish fandango and seguidilla had been pushed aside to make room in the salons for other styles of dancing, affected and unfamiliar in Spain. Some foreign travelers in Spain at the end of the century remarked on the difficulty Spanish women had in learning the correct way to do them.[26] Much earlier, during the reign of Philip V, two foreigners invited to a sarao in Valladolid were surprised and overwhelmed by the spectacle of those people, laboriously persisting in an activity that seemed to torment rather than amuse them.
At the sound of some violins and oboes, there began a dance that shook the whole house, especially the contredance , which, according to Don Jacinto, was more like a 'running around' than a dance. Neither he nor his companion knew anything about French dance steps, but they were very amused to see how those ladies and gentlemen were exhausting themselves, instead of having fun.[27]
The most talked about foreign dances were the allemande , the minuet and above all, the contredance . Although it is beyond the scope of this book to give an even approximate description of the figures and the subtleties that differentiated one dance from the other, it is interesting to mention that in the contredance there was such a gamut of subdivisions, that the study of them inspired
someone to write a well-circulated and well-sold satire, in which the subtle variations were specified.[28] There were innovations in steps and figures, always intended to give a new and more enticing chance to the amorous game of the cortejo. In fact, no handier device could have been found to initiate the cortejo than the pell-mell of one of those dances, as Cadalso, the satirist, aptly commented.[29]
In this satire, the male dancer is referred to as the currataco or pirraca (fop, coxcomb, jackanape), terms which, as a rule, ridiculed gentlemen of leisure who were somewhat lacking in imagination, who therefore had to rely on the conventional variations of the contredance to make some advances to their partners. Such was the purpose, for instance, of a figure of the dance called "the snail":
The lady will take with her left hand, the fop's right, she will turn around toward the inside, without letting his hand go; they will then take each other's hands; in this fashion they go around the room . . . they return to their place in the dance and conclude it by separating themselves with the above mentioned twirl. This is one of the favorite figures in the contredance, because it allows the partners to chat; thus all the dandies who wish to be considered expert in this art should learn by heart some verses to recite to their partners while the dance lasts.[30]
The idea of making flirtation easier is even more explicit in the description of the finale of "the little mill":
After the final circular figure, the dancers return to their place; if it happens that the young lady's head gets dizzy with the many turns, as it does happen to most of them, the gentelman will have her lean her head on his chest until her dizziness disappears.[31]
The fatigue of the dancers and the passing of the night became tacit allies, adding an erotic touch to the atmosphere created by those complicated movements. The sketch of one of these situations is drawn efficiently in the directions for the "cake dance":
One can see that at this dance, taking place in the small hours of the morning—with the damsels inclined here and there on the chairs of the hall: some tired out, some yawning, and all falling asleep—one must resort to some enticing tidbits to warm up and enliven the contredance, lest the host's good name be tarnished by rumors that at Mr. So and So's the guests were falling asleep.[32]
The tasty tidbits referred to in the above description must have been increasingly enlivening, to the point when, in the 1790s, a
contredance called "the fainting"—very popular in those private gatherings—had to be forbidden because it had provoked a scandal with its daring gestures and movements.[33]
From the above one can surmise, and I myself wish to point out, that these balls spawned the majority of the extramarital relations of the day. In the so-called "contredance of the husbands," there is an allusion to its purpose as a cover-up of illicit love:
In the second part, an arena is represented; the men enter charging all at once, while the women hold each other's hand from behind.[34]
Further on, in the same text—contrasting the elegance and the grace of the ladies brought up to show off their accomplishments with the lack of polish of "those women that could do nothing else but keep house and nurse children"—one finds:
They . . . never knew how to dance according to the rules, like you, nor did they ever enjoy the sweet moments of love, except with their old husbands.[35]
Besides the time spent in the laborious apprenticeship of these contortions, women were proud of the prestige they gained by knowing how to play an instrument, or how to sing. Singing was a new device for showing off that added to the financial splurge stimulated by eighteenth-century high living: paying for the damsel's music lessons.
The music teacher, who had to instruct the lady in the fashionable melodies of the day, became a must in the education of the accomplished lady. An old-fashioned author argued of the potential harm of the male music teacher—sometimes a mundane abbé—and complained that the lesson was often given with no one else present.
You know full well that when the teacher gives them the lesson, he is almost cheek to jowl with them, and this closeness cannot but be risky . . . Why should they study music? Since none of our forefathers had taken pride in being a musician, let's follow their footsteps, rather than the example of those few who, in the name of fashion, want to introduce such license and moral laxity.[36]
Neither that sermon nor similar ones were enough to restrain the growing popularity of those fashions in the last quarter of the century. All the opposition did not succeed in discrediting the opinion that skill in singing, dancing or playing an instrument—unproduc-
tive skills to be sure—were essential attributes to a lady, and worthy of replacing the traditional merits of economy and dedication to the family, praised by Luis de León as virtues of wholesome womanhood. There are some contemporary verses contrasting very expressively those two ideals of womanhood: the modern and the traditional:
The well-bred lady (worthy citizen), useful to the State and talented, must, according to fashion's tenets, know how to sing and play an instrument. The one who does not know how to dance with pixie movements a minuet or a contredance, or a decent allemande with its appropriate grimaces, will be considered rustic.
Diverted by more important things, she must ignore what is linen or wool. It does not befall her to have a life of meanness and drudgery. The abnegated woman is by all considered strong, but the modern lady can in other ways, with talent, be stronger.
Once married, she can avoid the useless daily care of administering the servants with wisdom and economy.[37]
It was just that: wisdom and economy had become obsolete. One had constantly to buy new things, and pile up the old ones. Because fashions were changing so rapidly, the editor of The Censor , a popular periodical of the time, planned to add a supplementary gazette, to be issued twice a week, with information on the fashionable things and the ones that were falling out of style.
Up-to-date news will be given on the variations taking place in each of the fashions; of the different degrees of popularity or falling out that one will be noticing; and, above all, pains will be taken in advising on the day in which they are completely out.[38]
There was a definite tendency to glorify the new, the instant, the appearance; there was a yearning to show off, to "make believe." One did not value friendships in themselves as much as the fact that others knew one had them. Nor was much importance given to the quality and durability of adornments, furniture and clothes, in order to save on further expenses; the important thing was that they were different from the previous ones, modern, admired by others. To sum it up, it amounted to people and objects being used to create an aura of modernity. In the case of objects, one might even say that the manufacture of all those new articles was infused with an ideal of the ephemeral.
If the furniture was more expensive in the past it also lasted longer, and after having served for many years, the material of which it was made could be salvaged; that does not happen with the painted wallpaper, stools, sofas and other furniture they are making nowadays.[39]
Heirlooms were not the things to have among people dazzled by foreign styles, who gave themselves airs of elegance. An abbé, recently arrived from Paris, praised to the seventh heavens—in a short contemporary play—the excellence of the new decorations.
Spaniards can see for themselves that wallpaper and cretonne to drape the walls are by far more decorative than paintings by Velázquez, Cano, Ribera, called the "Spagnoletto" and other such painters.[40]
The traditional meals, up to then thought wholesome and sufficient, were sacrificed on the same altar, and the condiments of French cuisine implanted. The same abbé commented:
People are as progressive as you can expect. Yesterday I had dinner in a home and it was not too bad: although the extravagance of decorated soup was lacking, and so was the pigeon.[41]
The idle show of offering unusual dinners and suppers had reached such a point of extravagance that it provoked criticism and caricatures:
— Which dish could be used as centerpiece?
— Why, the one invented by his excellency, which is very fashionable.
— What is it?—It's a breaded elephant. . . . Order it on the spot, and tell the chef that a specialist says the pastiche should have handles to pick it up; ask him to leave out, on one side, the trunk, on the other, the tail.[42]
Gourmet foods had become, in some cases, a matter of competition among the ladies who wanted to be thought of as refined. The whim for some difficult-to-find food that other ladies might have served at their tables resulted in resentment and a diligent search by the cortejo, who was frequently asked to look for the desired delicacy.
You ladies have such an active school of caprice, that it suffices for you to find out that something special was served at another lady's table, to be green with envy and ail with melancholy, until the most faithful of your circle lay it at your feet, though it might have cost him a pound
of flesh to get it. I remember having seen in the market an artichoke out of season, being sold for an exorbitant price, as a result of two gentlemen's bidding; and the worst was that the poor devil that got caught did not get anything out of it, except having proven himself courteous with his capricious lady.[43]
As far as attire was concerned, the two articles that revolutionized feminine fashion had to do with headgear and footwear. The complicated hairdos introduced by French fashion made it necessary to employ a daily coiffeur as an indispensable prestige symbol. All the ladies were dying to have a private hairdresser, and if he were French, and private, so much the better. The ceremony of the lady's coiffure had much importance in the amorous code of the cortejo, because the escort was also assisting—further proof of his interest in the beloved—the hairdresser in his work, by advising and suggesting suitable and novel ways to position his lady's curls. Let's hear the description given to us by Clavijo y Fajardo,[*] of one of these morning scenes of the lady's awakening:
The lady gets dressed (I don't know whether the cortejo serves her as a chambermaid) and goes to the dressing room. There, his presence is a requisite, otherwise my lady would not have her hair dressed. Bewail the coiffeur who, by ignorance or negligence, lets one hair out of place; or does not make a thick and luxuriant braid to come down her neck, although her hair be thin; or powders her hair too much or too little; or does not fasten gracefully the head ornament; or does not give the flowers an elegant and novel symmetry! The cortejo, whose duty is to show in all these things a refined and exquisite taste, is the implacable judge of the smallest slip. He knows very well how the coiffeur set the curls of a more important lady, the day before . . . and on these worthy data a dressing room council is set up, in which the cortejo is always in favor of his lady, and in her honor, he insults the coiffeur and his helper likewise.[44]
The ladies' coiffures were made far more expensive than one can imagine by some extra details imposed by fashion; sometimes the coiffures disguised a gallant language and there existed a nomenclature that classified them, according to the passions that ordinarily agitated the light hearts of the cortejos. Thus one could dis-
[*] Clavijo y Fajardo (1730–1806). One of the upholders of the neoclassic precepts in the theater: author of El pensador (The Thinker) , inspired by Addison's and Steele's The Spectator and The Tatler .
tinguish "the adorable," "the jealous," "the impatient," and so on, which pretended to inform on the amorous temperature of the lady.[45]
As far as footwear is concerned, it too acquired a greater importance than in bygone eras, when women wearing "much longer skirts that covered their feet completely, did not need to splurge on stockings and shoes."[46] In the engravings and paintings of the time, one can indeed see the fine details on women's shoes, invariably dainty. Likewise, we can find literary references indicating that a well-dressed foot constituted an erotic element. Talking about a lady, Torres Villarroel[*] said:
. . . she carried all the beautiful machine of her body on a pair of blue velvet slippers, which were the North and South poles that attracted the most lethargic glances and swayed the most rebellious desires.[47]
Although it may seem trivial, winning the right to show one's foot had been hard enough. At the beginning of the century, Queen María Luisa of Savoy—assisted in her decision by the Princess of the Ursins—refused to wear the customary tontillo , an adornment the ladies wore on top of the gown to keep it down, lest the feet and legs show when they were sitting down on cushions. The queen's rejection of a fashion she found uncomfortable was interpreted as a blow to tradition, and resulted in a series of letters between the Spanish and the French courts, which revealed the unpopularity the queen had earned herself by her negative attitude. The traditionalists held that the preservation of the tontillo protected women from the risk of showing their feet and a bit of their ankles.
There exist husbands so extreme [wrote the attaché Blecourt to the minister Torcy, in June 1702] that they say they would rather see their wives dead than to have them show their feet.[48]
On the contrary, this novelty of showing one's feet delighted Spanish ladies, proud as they always had been of the daintiness of their feet. A German traveler of the second half of the century, Modenhawer, wrote that the women of Cadiz took great pride in their footwear, which they ordered from Madrid. He also told us that
[*] Torres Villarroel (1693—1770). Author of an interesting autobiography, written in a style akin to that of the great baroque writer, Quevedo (1580–1645).
the famous Duchess of Alba—of whom more will be said later— wore a new pair every day.[49] Without touching upon this lady's supposed wastefulness, it is true that the fashion experts advised against wearing the same pair of shoes to successive parties.
The shoes must be very tastefully embroidered in gold, silver or silk, making sure they have not been worn twice to successive, special occasions, lest the lady might be discredited as not very original and quite ordinary.[50]
Another extremely important addition to the lady's attire during the eighteenth century was the fan, an indispensable accessory in any gallant situation. Handled expertly, it carried a kind of message, though puerile and conventional, as was all the amorous language of the eighteenth century.
In no other article have fashion's whims penetrated more—to the consequent advantage of foreign countries, which are causing endless spending in our own—spending well employed, in the opinion of the ladies who have to fan themselves even in December.[51]
It was, in fact, one of the most popular luxury items; no lady had just a few fans, and it was considered indecorous not to have a new one at any ceremony at which one wanted to be noticed. These showy objects, more than any other feminine accessory, embodied that urge of "showing off" I have been referring to; a desire which concealed, under fluctuating surfaces and changing decor, the actual emptiness and spiritual penury of the people concerned. No better final touch for the fashionable ladies than a fan to accompany their half-daring, half-coy maneuvers; in a word, a requisite object, for the preliminaries of a relationship with a cortejo or with a gallant aspiring to become one. The way of opening and closing the fan, of whispering while waving it, of letting it fall to be picked up by an obliging gentleman, were all part of a complex ceremony of nonsense and triviality, bordering on bold gestures and movements.
Perhaps the fan was the go-between of woman's modesty.[52]
Behind the shade of a fan, confidences and advances were suggested, peals of laughter heard, blushes feigned, promising glances passed, and faces drew near.
In a graphic description of the fan as an insulator between the lovers and the rest of the people in a gathering, one reads:
Even when taking a cup of chocolate and paying each other compliments, everything was harmony between them, so absorbed were they in each other. . . . This lasted for more than an hour with many such asides behind the fan.[53]
The fan had become so inseparable from the lady that a writer, complaining about the ignorance of the ladies, proposed this mocking remedy:
I wish in every fan were painted a book with excerpts from the current ones being published. The ladies who don't have time to read, and who love so much to talk about sciences and literature would have found a way to cut a good figure and instruct themselves by refreshing their pretty heads.[54]
Considering the frequency with which they changed fans for every occasion and the array they owned, by applying this author's suggestion they would have compiled quite a library. Though most did not have the exorbitant number of 1626 fans collected by the Queen Isabel de Farnesio,[55] the constant purchase of this accessory had become a superfluous must for the lady, one much feared by the husbands. In a family squabble of the time, the wife, who had just bought a fan for sixty doubloons to use in "informal visits," answered her husband's complaint with a new demand: now she needs another one for "formal occasions."
And it is for this reason I have not visited Lady Ana María, after her wedding . . . because I don't want them to notice me, nor do I want to feel embarrassed, nor that they consider you a miser; but I have been told they are expecting some new models from Cochin China any day, and then I'll get a supply of them.[56]
The complaints of husbands reluctant to satisfy the demands of their wives, and overwhelmed by the squandering that threatened the entire family's finances were very common in the literature of the period. I'll return to this subject in my comments on the economic aspects of the cortejo. It was impossible for a man to remain solvent with all of his wife's expenses; this might have been one of the reasons a husband tolerated the gifts and compliments with which another person was entertaining his wife: in the sense of helping him to support her, and to amuse her and keep her content.
According to testimonials, the stress on the family budget was indeed unbearable. The creation of new needs was not limited to
articles of clothing and house decor. What was bleeding the family income—and what differentiated the eighteenth century from the previous eras—was public entertainments.
At the beginning of the Bourbon dynasty, the tendency to make oneself less rustic—as they were wont to say in those days—and more refined in manners, had not gone beyond the court circle. To that circle, one owes the introduction of the Italian Opera in Madrid. In 1734, after the enormous fire that destroyed the Royal Palace, Philip V and all of his court moved to the Palace del Buen Retiro; therein someone thought of organizing a beautiful and serene spectacle to soothe and lift the spirits of the ailing king. This was to be achieved by inviting the famous singer Farinelli, who had reaped so much glory in his native Italy, in Germany, and in England. The Opera in the Buen Retiro was inaugurated in May 1738. Farinelli, its much acclaimed director, invited other famous Italian singers who, in their prolonged stay in Spain, corroborated by their example some gallant ways quite popular in their country. Ferdinand VI, Philip V's son, kept up the habit of listening to the Opera, and had the whole company follow the court to the various royal residences.[57] Nevertheless, one would have to wait for his brother's reign—Charles III, who ascended to the throne in 1759— to notice the symptoms of a government concerned with the well-being and enjoyment of its subjects, and to see the capital of the country awakening and shedding the appearance of a spread-out, inhospitable town. These efforts at urbanization and increases in public entertainments mainly coincided with the ministry of the Count of Aranda.[*]
When the Marquis of Villahermosa returned to Madrid in 1773 from abroad, where he had spent some time in diplomatic missions, he found the city almost unrecognizable. Streets, walks and gardens had been embellished, parties were frequent in well-to-do private homes, coffee houses and refreshment stands had been installed, and it was not unusual to see the ladies stopping their carriages at the doors of such establishments to have some refreshments. This same aristocrat, shortly before his arrival, received an enthusiastic letter from the Duke of Medinasidonia.
[*] Aranda (1718–1799). Enlightened minister of Charles III, and then of Charles IV in his later years. A friend of Voltaire, he was one of the main agents in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767.
The promenade in the Retiro Park is very lively. Near the lions' cage there is an establishment where they serve three kinds of drinks, sweets and chocolate; and one can sit down nearby in comfortable straw chairs. In a straight line from that place, by the corner of the pond, there is another such establishment, with chairs. Yet another of the same kind is situated at the entrance of the Mayo walk, and there also, one finds tables to play cards and to drink . . . I can assure you I had never thought to see our country like this. Aranda deserves our applause and is an honor to our class.[58]
But what made Aranda most popular, especially with the ladies, was the inauguration of masked balls in the theaters of the Príncipe (Prince) and the Caños del Peral (Pear Grove Fountain) in 1775. The Princess María Luisa of Parma, who had been married ten years to the future Charles IV, was much given to frivolities, and asked Aranda to plead with her father-in-law to let her go to those balls that had turned all the ladies' heads. But the austere Charles III refused; he probably detected in her—with a certain uneasiness—that bent towards wantonness and caprice that she was to display later on, becoming one of the most shameless and unpopular queens. Here is a description of one of these much-frequented feasts the queen was missing.
They serve soup, roast, some seasoned meats, all kinds of pastry and some ragouts ; the lack of space and the kind of food served doesn't permit as elegant a service as with the desserts, but good enough, considering that there are two hundred people having dinner from eleven p.m. until four in the morning. . . . The ladies, in particular, stand out with their elaborate hairdos; the dominoes and the gowns worn to a previous dance are discarded, and find new owners in the sedate people, who go there just to look around.
At the first ball there were only a few over six hundred people, because the bigots did not dare to go and many did not even allow their wives to go. Among them were those who, as a rule, let their wives go to dances organized by women who had been their maids and whose houses are not much better than brothels, but seeing how well and orderly things turned out, and seeing that everybody behaved well, including those who did not have the obligation to do so, everybody was allowed to enter, so that the number of guests soared to eighteen hundred. . . . The number of people in costume increases by the day; the theater hardly holds the ones who are supposed to dance, and so they barely move at the sound of the instruments. There are usually two
thousand masks, and the costumes change at every ball; at these feasts the quadrilles from Medinaceli, Huescar, Osuna, Benavente, Santiago, etc., had much success.[59]
The Princess María Luisa, then, by not being given permission to participate in these masked balls, lost the opportunity to outshine the ladies of the high aristocracy, who in their quadrilles set the tone for the fashions of the time. They were models to be imitated, observed and envied by the ladies of lesser quality, who were always ready to copy their gestures, their language and their manners with men.
The attendance at the theaters increased, also, by including all social classes. Few women would let themselves be excluded from any spectacle that any other woman could attend. All this weighed heavily on the family budget.
Public entertainment, theaters, bullfights, etc., did not cost five million reales as they do now. . . . Add to these, the Lenten concerts, the opera season, the acrobatics, the magic lantern, the birth of Punchinello and other trickery of the sort. . . . Without taking into account the teas and the balls with shared expenses and other popular diversions of this type, without mentioning private parties, because who is going to calculate the cost of just those?[60]
In many commentaries on this phenomenon of generalized striving for social recognition in all strata of society, the reason invoked for its censure was the leveling power of money. People were being judged more on their appearance than on birth.
Nothing easier than to be mistaken on the merits of the ones who have acquired something or whose families have been somebody . . . but an elegant dress removes all discussion on the spot, and the one who wears a more modest one . . . keeps quiet and withdraws. Thus it seems that embroidery, jewels and laces fix and determine the degree of glory each has to enjoy in the world.[61]
A Letter on the Harmful Excesses of Luxury by Manuel Romero del Alamo revealed the apprehension some felt, towards the end of the century, at the subversion of traditional values, brought about by the spreading of this phenomenon.
It has gradually grown in wastefulness and squander, especially lately. It has spread as a fire, devastating the summer crops . . . because the
children of luxury, all confused, cannot be distinguished for birth and position; the artists and the laborers of this new class earn incomparably more than both the great among the first, and the artisans of the second.
He regretted this confusion of hierarchies and the
rejection of the respect and attention one deserves for his merits and his birth. The spread of luxury in the capital, cities and towns has caused the confusion of common folk with the distinguished, the artist with the gentleman, the latter with the nobleman and the nobleman with the grandee. . . . Does it not often happen that a common woman, by the adornment of her person and her fashionable dress (illicitly earned), when seen in public, putting on airs, ensnares the unwary and gains their respect while the decent woman is despised by everybody?[62]
From these testimonials, one can deduce a point essential to this study; given the growing prestige money was bringing, women no longer gave importance to the nobility or the social position of their future husbands, as long as they could afford to keep them at the social level they strove for and demanded.
All that women demand at present, as a rule, is a husband who can satisfy their insatiable appetite for luxuries: consequently they judge men by the expensiveness of their attire; a wider trimming embellishing one's casaque makes them prefer one to the other, and one can see them agreeably receiving a well-dressed errand-boy.[63]
The compulsion, even more common, of showing off the symbols that money conferred, was a coercion women started to use on men—as we have seen in the example of the wife asking for another fan, hinging her case on the argument that she did not want people to consider him stingy. The general rule was that the husband who did not wish to stand out as old fashioned, rustic or poorly off— very common epithets in that time—resigned himself to his wife's reckless spending. Some verses of the time jeered the husbands who did not want their wives to shine at the balls given at the Príncipe and the Caños del Peral:
Three types of men don't go to the ball: the bigots, the jealous and the misers.[64]
This pressure seemed to succeed, as not only the wife, but also her family—with their demands—intensified the striving:
If the bride is not bedecked beyond the financial means of the husband, or if she does not satisfy the pretentiousness of her relations, it becomes a matter of honor; one has to spend more than one can afford, as it is base to live according to one's means.[65]
As the century unfolded, one could perceive in the marital complaints about wives' squandering, a certain getting used to it, a gradual resignation before the new evil, as if it were an inevitable calamity of the times one had to put up with.
Do you think that I married the jewels and that frippery you women fancy, or you yourself?
But he confesses the motives of his hesitation, adding:
That vanity of yours was so overpowering that I had to thank heaven for controlling my displeasure, lest everybody insinuate I didn't care for you.[66]
Thus, not caring for a person was confused with not doing the utmost in raising her to an economic level far superior to the one she might have been born in. In previous centuries, the fear of being reputed as an ostentatious spendthrift had restrained matrons; but now the needle of being thought miserly, uncivilized, and not up with the times tormented husbands, whose authority was being questioned for the first time.
And where shall we end if we continue in this way? I have an income of only two thousand ducats; five hundred go on the carriage, three hundred on the house, that makes eight hundred already; two hundred are taken up by my lady's coiffeur; here you have a thousand gone already. Now let's get into the daily expense of meals and servants, that does not certainly stop at the thousand; refreshments more than four hundred, theater tickets, not lower than two hundred; I am already spending far more than I can afford. And whence shall I get the money for the gowns, the fans, the déshabillées, the bonnets, ribbons, flowers . . . and all the frippery that only the devil could have invented?
The wife turned on him in a way quite unknown in writings of the previous centuries.
If your Lordship did not have enough means to support a lady of my status, why did you ask for my hand? Your lordship should have married a water carrier and you would have got away with buying four yards of ribbon, a silver hairpin and a cotton underskirt.[67]
In the arrogant tone of the speaker, there appears another aspect of the change in mentality; the repugnance of women to be taken for unrefined simpletons. Few women were content to keep their place in a given social circle; the urge to imitate the upper classes was compelling.
Do you expect me to bear seeing other women wearing a foot of lace on their gowns, while I see myself shrouded in a flannelette dress?
— My child, you have to resign yourself to the ways of your class.
— You are lying, I know of many dressed in silk and silver.[68]
People had discovered that it was possible to feign gentility. One could escape one's sphere by following the fashion; everything depended on cleverly giving the right impression, on appearing genteel. An author, in a text directed to the fashionable ladies, mocked those at the opposite pole of the thrifty homemakers of bygone days.
It is to you one owes the elimination of that gross abuse by which a married man earning twelve reales a day, had his wife clean, cook and bring up the children, letting them know that nowadays this wage is hardly enough to pay for your trinkets and that you were born to be ladies.
Further on in the text, he scoffed again at the idea that housework is not proper for ladies, but for maids:
You have been relieved of those ordinary domestic chores assigned to maids who are organized for this type of work . . . for if the uncivilized custom of ironing, sweeping, cooking, washing, doing the dishes and sewing still existed in your midst, you would see yourselves in the state of those miserable women, rustic, with a homely body and complexion, tougher than a Basque, lacking in manners, conversation or civility.[69]
The contemptuous comparison with Basque women is very meaningful. Rusticity, as opposed to civility, was a trait of the provincial. It has to be emphasized that the desirable styles were characteristically urban; gentility did not agree with the image of the woman brought up in the country or in the provinces, unable to elegantly fit into the ways of the city; therefore, this image was rejected. What mattered, then, was not a noble surname or irreproachable conduct, but rather the prestige given by the ability to conform to fashion
and new life styles, the latter being accessible to any smart woman who took pains to assimilate them and who had enough money to pay for them. The dichotomy of nobleman-plebian was shifting towards a different scale of values, found in the opposition between provincial and city styles. Around these two poles were grouped, respectively, the traditionalists and the moderns. The former tended to believe that the purest and most valuable essence of womanhood was to be found only in the recesses of towns and villages not overrun by immorality. They felt certain that the provinces were the fountainhead of honest women of marriageable age. In the comedy of Moratín,[*] set in Illescas,[**] one of the characters, Don Pedro, praised the location:
In this place the girls marry according to their means. . . . One will not find here specimens of that frail youth, corrupt and doused in perfume, noisy, petulant, idle, gabbing and fatuous, like the ones I saw contredancing in the Puerta del Sol.[***]
He added that the Illescan young men:
neither adore nor insult women; they respect them.
Women, for their part, ignored:
the extravagances spawned by luxury; they dress according to modesty's rule.[70]
Women who wished to marry "in the old style" had better remain in their native town; but many of the provincial ladies, and sometimes their parents, were tempted to escape this obscure life and try a more glittering one. The capital's high life, of which echoes began to spread by word of mouth and publications to the remotest corners of Spain, had aroused the imagination of the wealthy among the country dwellers. Many did move to Madrid, and what most surprised them at first was the luxuriousness of women's attire. One of these provincial gentlemen, bewildered and shocked, commented:
[*] Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760–1828). One of the foremost eighteenth-century dramatists and writers; a forceful reformer of the theater, according to neoclassic tenets.
[**] Illescas: A small town in the province of Toledo. Among the remains of a better past, it hosts a hospital designed by El Greco, and in it, two of his paintings.
[***] Puerta del Sol: bustling square, still the core of urban life in Madrid.
Look at those women! I wonder whether a beneficial society has been formed, where they are distributing shoes, exclusive skirts, velvet and lace mantillas .[71]
Madrid implacably set the pattern for all the others to follow, and many of the country folk who visited the capital felt out of place, complaining of being forever reminded of their rusticity.
Since we cannot enjoy all the advantages of the capital, why don't they leave us alone, satisfied with what we are and what we have, instead of flinging our rusticity in our faces.[72]
Others bore with these jeers, determined to settle in Madrid, even if it were temporary. The reason for this persistence was not only to apply for a position or to study, as in the past, but also, and sometimes only, to rid oneself and one's children of the note of rusticity; to put on easy and genteel airs.
Nonetheless, luck did not always strike the country damsel, who came to the city accompanied by her rich father, to look for a suitable husband. We find a caricature of one of these instances in a comedy by Ramón de la Cruz, Las preciosas ridículas .[73] Callejo, a wealthy man from Segovia, does not mind spending money or time to see his daughter accepted in the upper echelon of Madrid society, though he has to invest all the money kept in the family coffer since his grandparents' time. But no definite results were to be seen. The apprenticeship in fashionable life was not to be mastered in a few days, and nobody was willing to help or to direct. The city ladies they wished to imitate were precisely the main obstacle. An apprenticeship that had cost them so much effort was not to be made accessible to the provincial young ladies, no matter how dearly they were prepared to pay for it.
The ladies from the provinces—who aspire to be fashionable—when they come to the capital, stay inside for three days, as a rule, without showing their noses, while they bring themselves up to date with the fashions, lest they provoke the laughter and sneers of the onlookers. Even Madrilenians must be cautious after a long absence from the capital.[74]
Thus the wealthy folk from the provinces, who in spite of it all persisted in their efforts to integrate themselves into the city, were at a disadvantage, until they fulfilled a series of rules most confus-
ing to beginners. Even when they were successful in opening a salon more or less frequented—that was the first step forward—it was to no avail, if the very same guests, experts in that sort of thing, mocked the beginners. The socialites, especially women— not necessarily noblewomen, as long as they were well-to-do city ladies—were the strictest judges of those who dared to vie with them. The styles the provincials were trying to imitate, more or less successfully, belong to an area presided over and dominated by women.
In an anonymous satire of the time, Don Lucas, the cortejo of the Madrilenian milady Juanita, probably to flatter her vanity, criticized some newcomers he had the obligation to visit. He is astonished at their daring in giving receptions in Madrid, without first realizing the difficulty of such a task. Note that he uses the word subject as if it were—and it must have been so for many—a course one had to work hard at, in order to pass. In this case the exam did not go well:
My dear friend, those people should deal only with their town's squires; and if they move to a town with different customs, they should inquire, because it is a great mistake—without knowing the first thing about how to entertain—to get into the extensive field of this arduous subject, in which even the lynx is blind.[75]
Further on he gave us a clue about the difficulty of the subject: he was offered cold chocolate and sour syrup; they did not know how to play a hand of malilla ,[*] but above all, they did not know how to converse. That is to say, they were not up to date with the inevitable topics of an eighteenth century salon presided over by women. What were the topics Don Lucas missed?
All they could talk about was the great deal of weaving done in their town in winter; that their uncle, the canon, has many ewes, that their grandfather's house is as big as a palace; finally, there was no way to make them talk about fans, flowers or lace cuffs.[76]
Thus the difficulty of the subject was in not being up to date and in not being able to talk about frivolities.
[*] Card game in which the nine of each suit is the main card.
2—
Conversation and Its Participants
As I said at the beginning, the cortejo was tied to the idea of conversation, and this was the main argument wielded by its defenders against the suspicion of immorality. Women had the right to some enjoyment, to an exchange of ideas. But did it actually serve these ends? Or better said, were Spanish women in the eighteenth century prepared to converse and exchange ideas? Did they have any, on any subject? It soon became obvious that they did not, and this lack caused the new relationship between the sexes to deteriorate and grow increasingly absurd. The fashion of the cortejo, instead of helping women widen their horizons through that new mode of conversing, instead of easing their way into the cultural world, contributed to the dulling of men's wits.
There are many indications that the conversations presided over by women—and this type of gathering was predominant—were characterized, in general, by total inconsistency. The main theme was fashion, and its main derivatives—gossip and maids—did not do much for the mind. A contemporary told us:
To talk about fashion was not enough to fill the day. . . . So what was to be done? You know it full well: talebearing and maligning. The fashion itself opens the way to it. One talks about gowns. Right away there pops out the one worn by Dorina in the promenade. Whether it was in good taste or not, whether the fabric came from France or Valencia, whether the design of the appliqué was suitable, the quality of the lace and symmetry of the knots in the ribbon, everything becomes a matter of discussion. But this is nothing. What is given more thought is from whence came such a gown. . . . No mystery here: everybody knows it. The cortejo supplies her with gowns, fans, laces and all she needs; that's why she looks so stylish. . . . In conclusion, everybody present adds his brush stroke to the picture, and the gown becomes just a pretext for the guests to sparkle with malice (as it has become customary).[1]
The same author confessed in another passage:
I tremble when I have to pay the first or second visit to a lady . . . because she starts a conversation about her acquaintances and visits, and for lack of subject matter she picks up the inexhaustible one of her servants: a completely alien subject to me, which compels me to be silent for an hour. And then my lady keeps on saying: 'My Lord, what an elusive and sullen man! He did not have a word to say. If he had not greeted me on entering, we would not know the tone of his voice.' . . . and other such impertinences, as if there were a law to compel me to know something about her frivolous subject, or to join in on something I don't understand.[2]
If all men had been as critical and spiteful in judging women's conversation as Clavijo y Fajardo was, the cortejo would probably not have flourished with as many fatuous aspects, for the simple reason that the ladies would not have found a sympathetic ear for their banalities. But an important aspect of the phenomenon—the one that most scandalized the censors of frivolity—was that indulgence in those frivolities, to which women gave as much attention as they might have to a more suggestive topic, spread also to some men.
A lady who is conversant on hats, cabriolets, harnesses, and horseshoes thinks she has reached the peak of wisdom and thinks she can set the tone of a conversation. The gentleman, following in your footsteps to please you, learn the same dictionary, avail themselves of the same sentences, weave a conversation on the same frivolous, worthless topics, and in this way, you and they make yourselves ridiculous. . . . Men have always been what you wanted them to be. In the far past, it got into your head to be Dulcineas, and we all became Don Quixotes. You fell in love with braveness, and we all became obnoxious bullies. You wished to be followed, and we became pillars in your houses; we hardly missed any snow, rain or dew. You took to appreciating verse, and, good or bad, there was to be found a poet at every street corner. You took a liking for effeminate men, and we exchanged the sword and the shield for ribbons, curls and toothpicks.[3]
Though this unilateral and simplified way of seeing things could certainly be debated—after all, those customs were not invented by the women who adopted them, but rather were instilled in them—it is an interesting comment; it flatters feminine vanity, stressing the capacity to influence men that eighteenth-century women had ac-
quired. While reminding them of it, the author persuaded them to make a more intelligent use of that power.
All over Europe, women were not very ambitious; this indolence was reflected in their satisfaction with the least display of ingenuity in their suitors and with the banality of their amorous games. It appears that the practice of the cortejo—and I shall analyze this aspect in more depth later—had little substance to it, at least not in its mid-century modality. But the fault did not lie so much in the game as in the lack of imagination and talent of the players, and in the mannerisms which the men had adopted. Some authors blamed them rather than the ladies:
These individuals, plagued by fashion and folly, take pains in copying each other in their giddiness. . . . They are the ones who have brought in the habit of gallantry . . . an inflated talk of amorous witticism and witty nonsense.[4]
Such were the conversationalists who started off with the name of chichisveo, and who were, according to their defenders, to widen women's restricted horizons. Those effeminate and fatuous individuals—known in the writings of the time as petimetres (from the French petit maitre ), target of many diatribes—were poorly equipped in that sense.
During the reign of Charles III, the traveling abroad of talented young men from good families was encouraged. Very soon other young men, not so well endowed or not at all, felt competitive pangs, and the habit of traveling became common among the well-to-do. Richard Herr told us about the young men who were going abroad just for the sake of following the fashion:
Other aristocratic youth indulged in gadding about foreign lands, but all they apparently gained were a few silly fashions and the scorn of their more tradition-minded countrymen who, mimicking their gallicisms, termed them petimetres .[5]
They were the sons of well-to-do though not necessarily aristocratic families. Before dazzling their countrymen and introducing the latest fashions, they had run about in different countries, "making a round of the capitals," as they called it in those days; they came back punctuating their language with newly acquired gallicisms.
The great majority of the Spaniards who make a round of the capitals . . . leave their country without the slightest notion of how to take
advantage of their travels. . . . Our 'capitals-runners' don't learn anything but banalities.[6]
Iriarte's[*] criticism resounded in an almost identical tone:
To talk big, never to depth, to impose one's opinion and mangle the Spanish tongue is all that is achieved by these individuals who travel for the mere sake of saying they have traveled.[7]
The jargon resulting from this mangling of the Spanish tongue was predominantly French—Paris was the capital these well-to-do young men visited most—and it affected the terminology of cultural life as well as that of fashion. For those lads—in whom the idle habits that were to characterize the nineteenth-century señoritos were already breeding—both words and objects from abroad were much appreciated novelties. They mentioned
Fenelon, Moine, Voltaire, Bossuet, and were able to say antithesis, epopeya, epic, synderesis , and other similar terms
with the corresponding gallicism; and frequently, once home, they paraded
a numberless quantity of ammunitions, fabrics, watches, rings, buckles, swords, boxes, perfumes; a heap of other objects the cost of which are borne by their country.[8]
It seems that watches and pendants were of the utmost importance in the outfit of a dandy.
In order to adopt the distinguished air of a dandy, one must start by wearing two watches, and chained to them, all sorts of pendants. There you can find in miniature, watering cans, almanacs, lampposts, acorns, violins, harps, diaries, hooks, keys, guitars, seals, clarinets, cages, drums, fishes, and all sorts of odds and ends, the number of which would be difficult to give.[9]
Besides that frippery, the dandies were introducing in the market:
A corollary of fashion recipes mixed up with extravagant phrases, such as 'bon ton,' 'belle compagnie,' 'dove-wing curls,' 'candied wig,' 'pompadour color,' 'soupe à la reine,' 'ragout,' 'cabriolet,' 'disobliging,' and all the dandies' 'babble or jargon.,[10]
[*] Tomás de Iriarte (1750–1791). Neoclassical humanist, playwright and poet.
This enumeration of terms selected by a traditionalist to ridicule the dandies is very impressive. From it we can guess that the list of conversational topics was not varied, limited to gastronomy, hairdos, carriages, and the refined manners one had to adopt in order to shine in the spotlight. The majority of men were superlatively fastidious, shielding themselves from criticism with refinement and a trim attire, but when spurned they resorted to words, the meaning of which had been shifted. One such word was decency .
They will answer that one must dress decently, and that to object to this is to be rustic . . . because nowadays, decency does not mean only the way of dressing that corresponds to each one's status or age, condition or sex, but rather to as many whims and extravagancies as they invent and practice; the idle then demand that under cover of this honest word be made current all sorts of folly.[11]
Rusticity , as a concept opposed to decency , referred, above all, to an inelegant and untidy appearance. In this sense, few eras upheld as strongly as did the eighteenth century, the adage that clothes make the man, as if refinement in dress automatically eliminated grossness and a dull wit. Pains were taken to affirm that the new fashions, called to revolutionize outer appearances as well as the traditional codes in human relations, averted all discomposure or brusqueness. Zolio, an elegant abbé in a work by Ramón de la Cruz, welcomed the happy tidings.
The uncouth appearance of hair and beard that made our country so awesome to other nations is finally polished, thanks to soap and pomades; wherever we go, our looks tell we are peaceful folk.[12]
In my opinion, this text reveals a fundamental point: the new mentality found acceptable a masculine attitude that contradicted the image of the valiant swordsman, always ready to pick a fight and kill in the name of faith and honor. Inherent in this traditional image was a trait thought to be essential to Spaniards, and its detractors were considered little less than revolutionaries in their daring to challenge it and to reveal its barbaric side. If we overlook the provocation and insult this novelty meant to the conservativeminded, we would never understand their rage against the petimetres, their sworn enemies, representatives of the intolerable opposite of the much-praised Spanish valor. Nor would we be able to understand the rise of a phenomenon—mentioned by various authors—
that was incubating in the lower strata of the society as a reaction to the effeminacy of the aristocrats and their bourgeois imitators: I am referring to anti-dandyism.
The populace assumed an attitude of complete hostility toward everything foreign. As if in vengeance of their deprived state, men in poor districts entrenched themselves in their xenophobia, showing utter contempt for the wealthy dandies. They adopted a pose of superiority, in the belief that they were the true heirs of the Castilian spirit in its purest essence. They particularly scorned the still-undefined middle class which, carried away by its presumptuous aping of the aristocracy, was the main target of the ridicule in which the new fashion had fallen.[13] The bourgeois dandies were the preferred targets of the defiance, insolence and bravado of the majos, especially if they were caught in the lower-class districts of Lavapies, the Rastro, Embajadores, Sol and Maravillas, and if they dared to enter their taverns and dances, or if they meddled with their women. Ramón de la Cruz's plays supply us with plentiful examples of these tricky situations. One would see the majos idling away the mornings in the Puerta del Sol; the foreigners who visited Madrid observed as typical:
The men . . . motionless, always line the same spot, withdrawn in their pride, especially when they come in contact with strangers.[14]
This xenophobic view among the lower class of all "novelties" from abroad is easily intuited in the above comment. These lurking majos unconsciously bred the exasperation that would provoke the rise of their descendants against the French invasion in 1808 in that very same square. They stressed the theme of machismo and bravado, in their contempt of the dandies' refinement. As they put on airs of what they thought to be genuine "Hispanicity," they were creating a very definite mode of deportment made up of a mixture of aggressiveness, vulgarity, and insolence: the reverse of the image they rejected, but just as exaggerated.
A contemporary traveler made the following description of the majos, which corresponds to the many images of them painted by Goya:
Their countenance, half concealed under a brown stuff bonnet called montera , shows an expression of threatening severity or of wrath which seems to defy persons most proper to awe them into respect, and which
is not softened even in the presence of their mistresses. The officers of justice scarcely dare to approach them. The women, intimidated by their hostile look, seem to resignedly await a touch of tenderness from these petty sultans.[15]
We shall soon see the reasons for the esteem enjoyed by this antidandyism, reinforced in a parallel fashion by their female counterparts. For the moment, it should be pointed out that the virulence of the attacks against the petimetres was provoked by the latter's apparent lack of virility.
An author wrote about
that species of men, epidemy and locusts of the state . . . so effeminate that they have come to be confused with women, and to be so completely, they need only to bear children.[16]
The effeminacy prompted by the Italian gallant ways had been an argument wielded against the chichisveo from the very start. Talking about those gallant predecessors of the petimetres, an author said:
They spend the whole day looking at themselves in the mirror, applying pomades on themselves. Perhaps they act as men, but I rather doubt it. . . . One tells that when Queen Isabella of Castile was in Santa Fe, she saw a captain, trimly dressed and scented, coming towards her, followed by his men, to ask Her Majesty for a mission. The very prudent queen said: 'I would rather entrust missions to men who smell of garlic and wear armor.'[17]
If we consider that the first version of this text is from 1729, we realize how discourteous it was to Philip V to lavishly praise his remote predecessor on the throne, when echoes of the battle of Brihuega and Villaviciosa still resounded. This battle, decisive for the establishment of the Bourbons on the Spanish throne, had been directed by the French general Louis de Vendoôe, whose appearance was far from virile. But that apparently harmless anecdote could very well disguise a deliberate contrast, intended to denounce the Bourbon dynasty for fostering the advent of politicians, abbés, travelers, court ladies, artists, Italian and French cooks, all of whom arrogated to themselves the right to accuse Spain of backwardness and to undermine the national spirit, the roots of which were assumed to be found in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, the
Catholic Monarchs. Those very ties, on the contrary, were considered barbarous by progressive Spaniards. An author sarcastically commented:
Nature, tired of bringing forth those giants of whom history sings with hate, has limited itself to produce, especially in the capitals and cities, a breed of men who, abhorring the battles, wars and other intolerable labors suffered by men in those barbaric days, devote themselves to pleasure, diversions and escorting.[18]
The word barbarity is frequently found in opposition with civility .
In the centuries we call 'barbarian', men have been openly evil without trying to obviate vices and flaws with fine words and civility. But in our era of enlightenment and culture, one gilds the evil, one covers it up, and what is worse, one sees sprouting a type of rash individual, the esprit fort , who, undermining the firmest base of morality, does not only condone vices making them less ugly and repellent, but what is more, in his rashness canonizes and elevates them to the position that only virtue deserves.[19]
Another peculiarity of the dandies who made the round of the capitals was their tendency to consider passé or arguable the religious principles of their elders. Strong in their daring, they criticized the elders and called themselves espíritus fuertes , another gallicism directly translated from the term esprit fort , so common in the French Enlightenment.
For some time now [commented a writer at the end of the century] it has been fashionable to taunt a man who abstains from eating meat on Fridays, who kneels in front of God and who goes to Mass for more reasons that just to be blessed; who crosses himself with holy water, and who does not look around to register the presence of some lady whom he may compliment and converse with in order to kill boredom; or to find a pretty one of his acquaintance to greet; and to boast that religions are just a form of politics, that they are the moth of the state, the ruin of empires, and that it is one and the same to be a Turk or a Christian, as long as one is a decent man.[20]
Under the weight of criticism by these esprits forts, even the concept of honor was questioned, and was shaking in its hitherto solid foundations. The propagation of the cortejo, as we shall see, helped to undermine these foundations. The old rigmarole about honor
was considered antiquated, and had ceased to elicit an immediate response in the conscience; the very concept of honor was becoming devoid of meaning.
There is hardly any other word, the meaning of which is less known than the word honor. The children of evil consider honor a fantastic invention, the use of which is limited to elders in order to intimidate and inhibit the youngster; they talk of shadows instead of realities. . . . The skeptics dispatch all things that do not fit their ends and interests as fables and humbug, and call visionaries . . . those who search for truth and defend it in the name of honor.[21]
Where had honor's reign ended up? The times in which honor and matters of honor were upheld had receded into a past inaccessible to both sides. To designate their adherence to times of your they frequently availed themselves of the gentleman's garb that characterized those times, as if the garb embodied the essence of what some called virility and virtue, and others, rubbish. It seems strange that anyone could say, "in those days when Spain was closed to all foreign trade, in the days of the ruff,"[22] forgetting completely that the ruff was an adornment of Flemish origin, worn by men as well as women. But it had been consecrated enough by custom as to become rife with the attributes of honor and manliness inherent in the gentlemen who used it.
The very young as well as the most garrulous old gentlemen . . . have come to mock and execrate the memory of the times of honor, treating it as a soothing drug, and as ignominious the times when less vain and worthier men wore stockings and the ruff.[23]
The attitudes and attire of gentlemen of yore were not only ridiculed or praised—according to different views—for being indicative of a more or less marked virility, but also because they reflected stern and grave bearing.
In the past we struck the attitude of a Goth, like carved statues, similar to the imposing ones we see in the portals of old cathedrals, but now we behave like gesticulating and merry puppets, affecting a credulous pose, winking and rushing blindly about, perfumed and alienated.[24]
In the general opinion, then, the style of clothing revealed much about the individual. To put on old-fashioned, dark clothes was a sign of old age, restraint and seriousness, of a tendency toward
sober ideas and conservative disciplines; these the dandies, in their zest for life, rejected.
It is not good to be serious or melancholy: one must enjoy life and let the old meditate on dense ideas. . . . The "fine spirit" (beau esprit ) choked with stifling studies is the one that upsets reason, persuades to join the madmen's flag, dulls common sense, and mocks everything by wearing an elegant outfit, by preparing a deliciously refined meal . . . gaining merit by letting his little fingernail grow, by articulating with a warble, by looking in a certain way, moving his head in another, by shrugging his shoulders, by smiling, by casually uttering a word, by coughing softly, by exclaiming out of place or by using a gratuitous superlative.[25]
It seems that the concept of any kind of studiousness was completely absent from the minds of those who saw themselves as real dandies. It sufficed for the dandies to
make a list of fashionable books, to make a show of presence at the bookstore, albeit their negligence in checking the catalog or reading them regularly, unless they be on the lookout for an obscene novel.
On the contrary, they took great pains in
having a well-varnished and modish carriage, in not employing lackeys unless they be tall and stately, in being awful to them, in abusing them harshly to make them more respectful, in calling them with a gesture, and the most arrogant at that, in having a fiery coachman ready to run over everybody, in courting an actress.[26]
These were behavior patterns obviously cast from the higher strata of society, the moneyed, those accustomed to travel, blasé and confident in the luster of their family names. It might not be amiss to mention the Marquis José de Mora—a young widower, son-in-law of the Count of Aranda and indefatigable traveler after the premature death of his wife—as one of those aristocrats who, in the reign of Charles III, was most influential in implanting those canons of behavior. In Paris he had been a friend of d'Alembert and a lover of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. He was fated to die in good romantic fashion, at the peak of his youth, of tuberculosis. On his return to Madrid in 1766, he was
received with the enthusiasm and homages offered at that time to those who had 'spat in France' whence they returned boasting of the vices
and impieties of French society, just as much as of the stiff-bottomed casaques and of the wigs à la Panurge .[27]
He fascinated his countrymen with his ways and poses suggestive of the ennui and disillusion smoldering under his ardent love for pleasure and life, thus anticipating the emotional climate of Romanticism. The bourgeois dandies looked with envy upon the marquis of Mora and other noblemen like him, famous in their day for their successes with women. The same intensity applied by the majos in rejecting that show of exquisiteness was applied by the young bourgeois in imitating it in order to stand out in that vanity fair.
The wealthy young men who came from the provinces to the capital to study very soon lost their good intentions. They were bedazzled by the ways of those aristocrats who had "spat in France," who laughed at traditions, who dressed and talked in a manner shocking to most, and they were dying to meet them. They did their best to be introduced in one of those elegant salons—their first opportunity to polish their manners a bit. This situation, resulting in the loss of money, of faith and of application to studies, is summarized in a fictitious dialogue between a lady of the high society and a cleric who rebukes her, informing her of these evils:
'A gentleman, a family man, decides to send one of his sons—the most talented one (I wish to God he'd sent the dullest) to study in the city. . . . Before being introduced to these circles, you could see him diligently applied to his studies, decent in his habits, full of piety in his observance of the church rites, and never exceeding his means in his garb. . . . Introduced into those cursed circles: Goodbye books, and if he keeps any, it will be one of Moreto's plays, to aid him in paying you a far-fetched compliment (God knows which and how!).[28] Regarding the Sacraments, it will be a lot if he gets near them once a year, and even this because he is afraid of being excommunicated. Or perhaps he deceives the parish priest also, as he is wont to deceive his family about the money they send him from home, half of which goes in gambling and in frivolities of his attire, as he feels he has to appear dressed to kill in front of you, who disdain the modestly dressed.' Then he adds that the father, ' . . . unable to support him any longer, has to recall the lad, whose only progress has been that of having learned to groom his hair, polish his shoes, take some special steps to bow in an extravagant and ceremonious fashion, and such.'[29]
Another favorite occupation of these young men was to keep up to date with the variations of the contredance and the minuets. In
the preceding chapter we have seen that this apprenticeship, when earnestly undertaken, was fastidious and complicated, and could distract the young from serious work. The idleness of the dandies, also called currutacos (coxcombs) in some texts, was a plague, spreading from Madrid to the provinces with alarming results.
We know that in Cadiz the coxcombs have abandoned their shops, leaving them to their foppish cashiers, in order to apply themselves to the apprenticeship of the contredance. . . . It is common knowledge that in Valencia a thousand fops have neglected the rice, pepper and alfalfa harvests to sow their talents in the contredancing science from which they hope to reap better crops. We hear that in Barcelona, the fops abandoned their well-established and flourishing shoe-shops to channel their expertise into the manufacture of stylish pumps with an aim to perfecting the contredancing art. We know that in Galicia they are studying the possibility of cultivating fop turnips. In Asturias we hear they are determined to make of their natives expert coachmen and lackeys for the dandies in the capital.[30]
These were the participants in those much-talked-about conversations. These were the ones who officiated at the gatherings presided over by women. To what extent these uniformly patterned men pleased or amused the ladies would be difficult to assess, however approximately. One imagines they soon began to bore, and their mannerisms entirely ceased to thrill. The reaction in some writing of the time, especially in Ramón de la Cruz's plays, is that the women of the lower class, the majas—more sincere and outspoken in their opinions than the ladies of the salons—found them obnoxious and grotesque. From what I see, the fascination the dandies exercised on the women of those days hardly ever depended on a real attraction. What they liked in them was not the person, but rather the show they made of themselves, very much like a pedigreed dog or monkey; it was a matter of exhibitionism.
There is a satirical description of a lady going to the theater accompanied by her escort, a sketch that illustrates the point so well as to justify the long transcriptions.
Don't you see there a lady seated close to a gentleman who is trying to amuse her with his harlequinades and monkeyshines, talking to her incessantly, either behind the fan or at her ear? Now just listen to the burst of laughter, followed by another. Anybody might think the escort has been facetious, or had told her some funny joke; but this is unlikely. A gentleman, in order to be a smooth and constant escort, need not
prove he is discreet, witty or judicious. On the contrary, one a bit crazy, with the touch of a playboy, ignorant and presumptuous, is the type most in demand for an escort. Nor is the lady obliged to be amused by the wit and sharpness of her escort, in case he has them. All this leaves her cold. What does make her happy are the people in the theater, in front of whom she will appear important and respected because she has a cortejo. That's what cheers her up, expands her spirit and frees her of all concerns. Her escort is young, wealthy, of a good family, good-looking, a dandy, and quite a fellow if one concentrates on his appearance, so much so as to provoke feuds among the ladies. The one who has him at her side knows there are other women who envy her . . . observe her gestures: she unfolds her fan, waves it quickly, she talks, she laughs, looks around; in every balcony she finds somebody to nod to; she takes out her handkerchief and covers her mouth with it, as if to restrain uncontrollable laughter. Then she plays with her fan, takes out three snuffboxes, places them on the balustrade to freshen up the snuff; she sends them to her girlfriends and asks for theirs in exchange. And all these puerilities and gestures have no other purpose than to attract attention and be the focus of all glances.[31]
The good looks of a dandy were important for prestige. A lady was considered important and deserving by her lady friends if she could show off a handsome escort. Only good appearance counted. In a contemporary text, love is likened to any other consumer item, more or less worthy of its appearance:
How outdated! Nowadays love is chosen like a fabric. It does not matter if it lasts not too long, as long as it looks good.[32]
The glorification of appearance which I alluded to when discussing luxury affected love as well, and made of it a sheer pretext for a show. That's the way an author of the time saw it when asked what initial proof of owning a cortejo a lady may offer; the ironic answer was:
To insert his miniature in her rings, in her watches, on her snuffbox and pendants, on her necklaces, on her brushes; in sum, everywhere but in her heart.[33]
The main goal of the cortejo game, then, was for the dandies to show off in front of those ladies they hoped to please, and for the ladies to show off in front of their escorts and others. It had become a mutual ostentation of adornments and gestures with which they wanted to exalt themselves.
The phenomenon was even more pronounced in women. The name of petimetras , derived from the masculine, came to be used as an adjective, sometimes denoting the degree of reification women had reached in the pursuit of heightening their beauty. For instance, an author reproaches a mother for her repugnance towards nursing her children for the sake of conserving her petimetra air.[34] In another text, a daughter rebukes her mother for not being made up when the guests are almost at the door.
I thought you were at your dresser; our guests are coming from the theatre and must find us petimetras.[35]
The petimetra air had to do with the mania of attracting attention, of extravagance, of whim.
To become a lady of fashion, she made an oath to be deceitful, frail, difficult to please and unbearable. To be included in the list of the shocking and haughty ladies à la mode , she threw her modesty out the window.[36]
"To throw one's modesty out the window" meant the undoing of the images cast by Fray Luis de León in his The Perfect Married Woman . It meant, as we have already seen, to throw oneself into the arms of luxury. Petimetra , lady à la mode, became synonymous with spendthrift; above all, it meant a woman whose only object in life was to obtain an escort ready to flatter her, to whom she might devote all those hours spent in front of the mirror. In another short play by Ramón de la Cruz, a woman confessed opportunely:
. . . And have you been a good girl?—I have, up to date, but from now on, I want to be lady à la mode . I must get myself an escort and squander my estate.[37]
The petimetra who centered all her attention on her appearance in order to stand out and attract a dandy, who, for his part, might be proud of being seen with her, was commonplace in the second half of the century. At the beginning of the era, when the compliments of a gentleman to a lady were referred to as the chichisveo, the gentlemen still preserved some of the features of the seventeenth century's "enraptured courtiers."[38] It was an exclusively aristocratic custom. A rather widely accepted opinion—on which leaned those who wanted to defend the custom from the taint of immorality— was that the subtle filigree of sentiments could be appreciated only
by an individual of high birth. The less refined could either not grasp it, or would spoil it. It was considered a fact that the reputation of a lady of high birth could not be tarnished by a gallant's love. A writer of 1717 wondered:
Is there anybody who will say the chichisveo is illicit and unseemly in a lady of quality, in whom gracefulness, elegance, wit, fun, and ease are the finest ornaments other elevated position? Why should one forbid this grace to the ladies? . . . The chichisveo does not mean anything but the use the ladies make of that superior attraction that distinguishes them, of that pedestal on which men's devotion places them . . . to sum up, it is the privilege of the gods. She who censors this refinement obviously is lacking it. Unwise and inhibited, she is left behind in the common sphere of womanhood and never reaches that of a lady.[39]
The cortejo did not entirely lose this aristocratic touch; many writers insisted on the fact that it was not something anyone could do, or copy successfully, however easy it looked.
The sublime touch of the cortejo consists in carrying out amiable and frivolous tasks with a dignified and effortless air that shows a spirit exercised in these delicate maneuvers.[40]
But the leveling power of money in the eighteenth century imparted a serious blow to the exclusiveness of that gallant fashion which could, after all, be bought like any other article. In this vulgarization resided the cortejo's greatest harm, in that it became a source of bad example. As long as those elaborate amours remained within the higher levels of society, and the lower classes had not felt the urge to imitate them, it had been relatively easy to ignore them and even to view them with a silent and distant respect.
This does not mean the nobility did not preserve, to a great extent in the middle of the century, considerable prestige, nor that it had lost entirely that aura of a sanctuary for traditional ways. Closer to the people and the bourgeoisie than the royal family, at least as regards the tangibility of the relation, it continued, in the imagination of the people, as the representative of the monarchy, its right arm, its ancillary, so to speak. But precisely because of that, along with the process of deterioration and growing license in their way of life, there was another noticeable process of decline, one that had incubated for a while, becoming apparent toward the end of the century—that is, the loss of the prestige and exemplarity enjoyed by the nobility.
A very revealing incident in this respect occurred in 1798. It was an accepted norm that the basquiña —a cloak-like garment the ladies wore when they were going out—had to be of a dark color, generally black or purple. We have already seen some comments on this sober street attire, made by a traveler.[41] Over the basquiña they wore the mantilla, white in summer and black in winter; introducing other colors was not proper, and to give way to them was considered a sign of indecency. But lo and behold: on Good Friday, some ladies of the high society dared to break this custom by promenading in the streets of Madrid cloaked in red and other lively hues. Popular reaction was almost immediate: a group of young majos, indignant at that transgression—which moreover seemed sacrilegious during Holy Week—started to insult those ladies, and tried to tear off the offensive garments; they would have done it, if the pages who escorted the ladies had not drawn their swords. A royal order of March 1799 forbade the use of basquiñas of any other color but black, redeeming the incident in favor of the populace, and recognizing the populace indirectly as a worthier guardian of public morality than the aristocracy, in spite of the exemplary role it had always had.[42]
The religious sermons of the day, attempting to curb the waxing disintegration of traditions, were especially directed to the ladies of the aristocracy. If a noblewoman of the second half of the century, for instance, obtained a cortejo, it was not interpreted, as it had been in the past, as a personal frivolity, a court habit, more or less limited to a lofty sphere. It was censored as a social sin, in that the lady was betraying her exemplary function and fogging up the mirror on which the other classes had to reflect themselves. In an endeavor to remind them of this responsibility, a contemporary text read:
Do you not know that the common run of women are like ivy, in that they go where they are led, and that the ladies are the tree or the wall that sustains that ivy? Now judge for yourselves if your position obliges you or not to distinguish yourselves in moderation and virtue.[43]
There was, then, an attempt to rekindle the waning importance of distinctiveness as a goal inherent in the nobility, by persuading the upper-crust ladies to think that by going against the common stream of fashion they would distinguish themselves, thus fulfilling a traditional duty, not less essential than that of giving a good example.
Patterns of behavior, nevertheless, were still established by the upper classes. At the same time—as a consequence of the weakening of nobiliary privileges, characteristic of the age—the lower classes also tended to be less respectful of the whims of the nobility and had no qualms about judging as vice, sin or caprice what they thought to be so. A lady who shielded herself with her high birth against all doubts about her virtue is reprimanded by her priest in the following terms:
In the name of God, milady, do not talk to me any more about your noble birth, nor the merit thereof, for it upsets me no end. I have said to you already, and I repeat it, you are women like the rest, and the gentlemen of your conversations and gatherings, men like the rest. I don't know, and fail to see, how the images of your ancestors, for the mere reason that they abandoned the hoe and the plow a bit before the rest, exempt you from sexual appetite. Nor do I believe that the money or the income you enjoy from some public fund or mortgage has this exemptory virtue. Nor can I find a reason to convince me that the aristocracy has a bypass to avoid the devil's temptations and pitfalls.[44]
The author echoed a general opinion.[45] Never before had the lower classes been as acutely conscious of their rights and values, theretofore despised. The idleness of the majority of those aristocractic ladies led to frequent changes of humor—motivated by the slightest displeasure with the cortejo, or by details related to their hair or dress—resulting in the ill treatment of the servants. But the latter were no longer so easily intimidated, and, on the contrary, were prone to answer back. Clavijo y Fajardo left the following sketch of a lady who gets up on the wrong side of the bed:
The lady makes a round of the house under the pretext of seeing that everything is in order, but actually to take a bit of exercise and digest her chocolate; and so she starts by going after the servants. Nothing is in order, nothing pleases her. The chambermaid has got up late; the coachman has not come for the itinerary; the lackey has left a window open; the page has forgotten to write a note for her, and the one she sent to the market is not back yet. . . . The lady looks upon her servants as her 'declared enemies'; she does not consider them human beings and treats them like slaves. . . . All these serious tasks conclude with the lady sending a dozen messages and useless notes to her girlfriends, to advise them that she will be in, or out, or that they will see each other at somebody else's house; to find out if there is any news about the marquis, or if the count has arrived, and ask each other reciprocally about their health, although they had seen each other the night before.[46]
The fact that the ladies treated their servants as "declared enemies" proves that they were enemies to them. The discreet and patient maid—a model of fidelity, and an intimate confidante of the lady—was becoming scarce and was being replaced by a new type: rebellious and not easy to agree with, endowed with a personal opinion and conscience. Little by little, the servant abandoned the tendency of attuning her interests to those of that superior world—to which she did not belong except as a subordinate individual—to become integrated in her own class and to form a guild with other working women: the seamstresses, milliners, embroiderers, and the ones employed in the factories of an incipient Spanish industry.
Because these occupations were closely related to luxury items, the consumers of which were for the most part women, it happened that these artisans were in constant contact with the realm of the petimetras. These consumers of elegant articles considered the artisans—precisely because they detected their animosity—also as "declared enemies." In fact, the maids, given their continuous presence in the homes of the wealthy, as well as the other artisans who had access to the ladies because of their work, often were the preferred victims of the ladies' moodiness. At the same time, they became alert and spiteful witnesses of the not always irreproachable conduct of the ladies. Their meticulous observations—a mixture of envy and gusto—of the ladies' liaisons, wantonness, and excesses, sharpened their critical attitudes and made them feel as if they had the upper hand.
'Antonia,' says one of them, 'leave the needlework and open that door to see what milady is doing.' She gets up, calls at the door, looks through the keyhole and answers: 'María, I can't, it is locked from inside!' Answers Alphonsine: 'We can go, don't you know that Don Pedro comes at this hour?' The house may burn, but the conversation has to conclude first. . . . It is not kindness nor care that makes her keep us inside; it is her astuteness; she wants to keep us away from what she does or says.' Adds the second: 'I have noticed many things, but I have to keep quiet since she was born a lady and can do anything she pleases.' The third one continues: 'On cleaning her desk, I found such indecent billets-doux that they sickened me. Alas, if they were ours and she found them, we would not have any place to hide.'[47]
This was exactly what seemed so serious to preachers and moralists: in those scathing comments made by plebeian women about the
ladies, the inequality of rights was brought to the fore; the chastity and industriousness of the former, compared with the laziness and dissipation of the latter. The aristocracy was gradually becoming less untouchable, and its role more dubious. This was revolutionary, but inevitable. Quijano, in consternation, pointed out that
the ladies' concoctions feed the populace. Very often we see how a humble woman, on stepping out of the house of one of these noblewomen, meets with her friends on the street to gossip: 'I went to Lady Such and Such's house to deliver some things I made for her, and when I entered her parlor, I found her alone with Mr. N. I assure you I felt embarrassed when I saw them. God help me, I don't know what to say, except that they are both young, and the worst is that, every time I go there I find him well ensconced in a chair.' Answers another woman: 'Can't you see that she does not take a step without him and that he follows her everywhere?" And another one adds. 'Have you not noticed her poor husband, wasting away in sorrow?'[48]
The main target of the scandalmongering of the maids, seamstresses and other artisans of luxury items was, of course, the cortejo, but such gossip did not exclude the tantalizing appeal those ways had for them. It could not be otherwise. Living as those working women did, in the orbit of luxury, in its antechamber, its refinements had to be a constant topic of conversation; luxury was the object of their work. They became contaminated by their contact with it. The desire to someday attain a higher status, to partake of those fashions over which they labored, was the leaven that made their murmuring more insidious.
In this respect, the maids continued to be morally less free than the other workers, because of their direct tie with the house and the lady. They could not, point-blank, reject all of their bonds with the latter; thus they gradually became favorite beauty advisors and helpers for their wisdom in the complex area of cosmetics and fashions. They cultivated this métier to perfection, to widen the prospects of their work; but in so doing, they became addicted to the same fashions. The ladies had never before talked so freely in front of their maids
about fashions and frivolities. That lady has a maid that dresses her mistress's hair exquisitely. The other was lucky enough to find a milliner who makes her bonnets better than the ones from Paris. Another found a girl who knows how to apply makeup most subtly. Moreover, the
ladies have come to choose a maid among their servants, and make of her their confidante, their secretary, somebody to whom they may reveal their thoughts and feelings and who may give them an opinion on such and such a gentleman.[49]
It is not surprising, then, that in such direct and constant contact with the world of fashion, the maids tended to imitate their mistresses. The phenomenon of the inferior class mimicry which I referred to in the discussion of the subject of luxury becomes particularly marked in this mistress-maid relationship. In a sainete (short play) of the time, Beltrán, a country boy whose girlfriend has gone to serve a wealthy family in the capital, finds her so changed in her ways and style when he goes to visit her, that he does not recognize her. He is asked:
'Don't you know your sweetheart Pascuala?' 'I know her, but not this girl, who certainly has never lived on the mountains, carding wool in the sun, barefoot, and living on rye bread and goat's milk.'[50]
The protagonist of another of these short plays, Mariquita Estropajo, once a maid, is now married to a wealthy man and is quite a lady. She characterizes with her behavior the urge to taunt those "declared enemies" and the itch to imitate, to try out someday on some other victim those same tyrannical practices to which she had been subjected.[51]
What was most bewailed by those who worried about the propagation of putting on airs was that they weakened the piety of common folk, on whose blind faith the Spanish Church had always leaned heavily.
I used to have in my parish young girls [complains a priest] who were outstanding examples of innocence and chastity, but who, after having served these frivolous ladies, had returned home to introduce her scandalous ways to the neighborhood, so much so that it has become proverbial to say: she has been a maid in town, and that says it all.[52]
As an antidote to this threat, it is worthwhile to point out the very efficient role of their male counterparts: the majos. They inculcated in their sisters and girlfriends a hatred towards anything foreign, affirmed the traditional styles, and in general despotically forbade the cortejo. In a contemporary sainete, Pepa, wife of the tailor Antonio, tries to wheedle her husband into buying her a new gown
trimmed with double lace cuffs and folds in the French style, like the one a neighbor has bought, by threatening him with the acquisition of a cortejo. In view of her husband's denial, she has a wealthy girlfriend come to her home accompanied by two dandies, one of whom feigns to be Pepa's escort, with the purpose of irritating Antonio. The latter's reaction is cutting, and the curt expressions he throws in the pretended escort's face are revealing.
Sir, let's not mince words. This lady is my better half, and to me alone she has been entrusted by the Church. If you wish to amuse yourself, go to the Alcaicería [silk market] and for a few bits, they will give you a doll.[53]
The most interesting point in this reaction is the use of the word muñeca (doll) to emphasize and define by it the protagonist's distaste for a certain kind of woman. For an eighteenth-century majo, the ideal woman was at the opposite extreme of a "doll": a passionate, down-to-earth being. The majas were, in their attitudes and lovemaking, in their fiery temperaments and quick answers, warm and real.[54] The fashionable ladies, on the contrary, were all affectation, flimsiness and sham.
"Tio Paquete," a blind folk singer immortalized by Goya, used to sing on the steps of the Church of St. Philip Neri. He popularized among the common folk, as well as in some aristocratic parlors, some lines which went like this:
A slap from a maja is better than all the sweet flattery of the ladies; the first is a proof of love and the second, sham.[55]
This "sweet flattery" of the ladies seems to refer to the elaborate styles of the cortejo that men of the lower classes rejected altogether as senseless complications of the wealthy, who were considered unable to call things by their right names. In contrast with the make-believe world of the dandies and their ladies à la mode, the majos and their women exhibited a more direct, spicy, erotic and less civilized type of relationship. Thus, those seamstresses, maids, laundresses and embroiderers—though they might have secretly envied the luxury of their mistresses—in their leisure hours danced, ate and promenaded with the men of their own class, the influence of whom rectified the women's attitudes and molded them to the taste of those men to whom, after all, they belonged.
The warmth of that influence melted considerably the envy the
women felt for the ladies of the salons, while at the same time, the traits of what is called majismo were becoming more marked: some specific ways of listening to one's companion, of exchanging endearing words, of moving, dancing, reciting and dressing. Defiant, arrogant ways they were, full of pride and brusqueness, ingrained in the assuredness of their caste toward the avalanche of foreign influence. The common people's styles would probably not have become so well-known, and incorporated into Spanish culture, had they been limited to the popular sphere. But in the last part of the eighteenth century, the gentry imitated plebeian manners, making a game of dressing and behaving like the common people. Bourgoing commented:
There are, among both sexes, persons of distinguished rank who seek their models among the heroes of the populace, who imitate their dress, manners and accent, and are flattered when it is said of them, 'he is very like a majo.' Or one would take her for a maja.[56]
A contemporary Spanish writer lamented that
the ladies, even the ones of the noblest birth, have converted themselves into as many majas , so much so as to become in their garb, talk and manners almost indistinguishable from the lowly folk . . . and the degradation of the respective "graces," "lordships" and "excellencies" has hit bottom, when we consider that they could look even more scandalous with a cigar in their mouths.[57]
Samaniego,[*] in an article in The Censor , spoke about "this vice from which even the most illustrious suffer," and blamed the influence of the popular comedies and short plays (sainetes) for seducing the public with realistic portrayals of the pursuits of majos and majas. Though this could very well be one reason, a more instrumental reason for the fixation with the prestige ascribed to folkish ways is to be looked for in the fascination and interest they aroused in foreign travelers. Many of these were diplomats and men of letters, accustomed to the refinement and progress of the Age of Reason. They certainly would not have found amusing the Spanish mimicry of fashions—fostered by a zeal for life and lack of prejudices—that were to be observed throughout Europe. On the contrary, they arrived with the idea of forgoing balls, garb and manners reflecting the outside, in order to focus their attention on
[*] Félix María Samaniego (1745–1801). Neoclassical satirist.
everything that differed from themselves. Thus, by observing those ways which seemed to them typical of the country they visited, they doubtlessly had a part in uncovering them and pointing them out to the Spanish elite—who were always ready to applaud what foreigners might underscore as novelty, even when it was something autochthonous.[58]
Needless to say, those foreigners did not pay heed to the minuets and contredances, to which apprenticeship cost wealthy damsels so much time and effort, but rather to another kind of dance, accompanied not by violins, but by guitars, bandores and castanets : the fandangos, boleros and seguidillas of Ramón de la Cruz's plays and Goya's pictures; dances performed in the open air on festive occasions, on the popular stage, and in taverns.
A French traveler commented enthusiastically on how, at the sound of those instruments, faces lit up, and hands, eyes and feet moved almost irresistibly. He called attention to the "variety of movements, of figures and positions" which the dance provoked, the pattern of which "cannot be described, though it leaves in the soul the most vivid impression, while it changes the homeliest woman into a seductive being." He adds that the women of the lower classes vied with each other in the
slenderness of their figures, the lightness of their bodies, the elegance of their costumes, variety of movements, the expression on their faces which made them attractive as much as enticing.[59]
Leaving aside my hypothesis that it was the foreigners who first appreciated and pushed to the fore what later on became known as majismo, we can say with certainty that by the second half of the century, the national dandies shared these preferences. The plebeian ways and styles were the vogue. They were felt to be more original than the imported ones, and many a gentleman was as delighted as Laborde at the nimbleness of the majas who in the dance moved in such a seductive way. The tonadilla —a short song accompanying popular short plays—was becoming popular by the middle of the eighteenth century, and went on to completely supersede the songs from abroad, and above all the Italian opera, which had saturated the country during the days of the singer Farinelli, the famous protégé of Isabel of Farnese, and later, of Barbara de Braganza. The secret of the tonadilla lay precisely in the total ab-
sence of academicism; its success depended on the personal charm and style of the actress interpreting it.
One must not forget that the singer-actresses—among whom María Antonia la Caramba, la Tirana, Catalina Pacheco la Cartuja, and, surpassing them all, María Ladvenant stood in the spotlight— belonged by birth and upbringing to the lower classes, whose feelings they interpreted. In spite of the fervent admiration of some ladies and gentlemen—whose protection had raised the singer-actresses in status and brought them within the circle of writers and noblemen—they were always taken to the theater in open litters, paid for by the City of Madrid. This was so the people—even when they could not afford the tickets—might not miss the opportunity of seeing them on the street and greeting them with the warmth and frankness with which one greets one's equals.[60]
These theater performers, majas after all, were instrumental in bending the nobility's taste towards popular models. It seems that in their spontaneity and vivacity, in their lack of academicism, there lay the charm of that intuitive and blossoming art. The Marquis of Mora, completely enchanted by María Ladvenant's art, confessed it explicitly when at her death he wrote:
Her untutored genius, superior—let's put it this way—to what she might have learned anywhere, has never been fettered by that sterile study, in which one learns to express oneself through somebody else's head, without allowing one's own to think. She valued nothing but the art of pleasing on the stage and her tender and sensitive soul needed few precepts to reach the ineffable in this enchanting art.[61]
It may seem rare for an enlightened young man, who knew Voltaire and D'Alembert, and who was an enthusiast of progress, study, and reason, to break into such passionate praise—a harbinger in Spain of Romantic reactions—of spontaneity "superior to learning" and the unwillingness to be subjected to any "sterile study." In spite of having shone so briefly on the stage—or, perhaps, just because of it—the personal charm of María Ladvenant, her way of saying things and her facial expressions, must have been such as to arouse the public, to judge from the many ardent references found in contemporary writings. At her death, when she was twenty-five, she was converted into an idol by all those who had seen and heard her. In their memories, "there remained imprinted
her enthralling performances of tragic as well as festive characters." Long after her death, the excitement she awakened in her listeners when reciting the verse that follows was remembered with enthusiasm:
To past glories runs one's thoughts, cruel at times and at others a comfort.[62]
According to Jovellanos,[*] fourteen years after her death, any nobleman who wanted to show his popular bent
with tears in his eyes will remember the wit, the grace, the air, the fun and fame, and the illustrious upsets of the divine Ladvenant, who wanders in the starry fields.[63]
She died on 1 April 1767, the very same day of the Jesuits' expulsion, and her death made a greater impact than that other event on the people of Madrid. A crowd rushed to the district of Atocha; in the nearby street there lay in state the one who had been the protégée of the Countess-Duchess of Benavente, the one who used to have among her guests writers like Moratín and Clavijo y Fajardo; noblemen like the Marquis of Mora and the Count of Fuentes, and in whose wardrobe hung more than ninety luxurious gowns.
Great ladies in their carriages went up and down the street from four o'clock in the afternoon until the bell tolled to see the famous funeral. Such was the crowd that the generous width of that beautiful street seemed narrow.[64]
While she was still alive there circulated an anonymous allegory of her—alluding to the various lovers she had among the nobility— which placed her in a triumphal chariot in the shape of a rock
having at the bottom of it a cavernous opening, inside which María Ladvenant was sitting, richly dressed and sparkling with diamonds and other jewels. On the summit of the rock, a statue representing grandeur—misshapen and clad like a madman—on the point of tumbling down as some old men try to support it.[65]
Without always reaching this degree of idealization, actresses in the second half of the century were not considered ordinary, as one
[*] Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811). Foremost writer on many subjects vital to the Spanish Enlightenment.
might expect, given their family backgrounds. Their company and friendship was thought not only proper, but prestigious. An actress could awaken vehement passions, like María Ignacia Ibañez, also prematurely dead, and passionately loved by a man as skeptical and disdainful as Cadalso.[66][*] In general, those dandies eager to try out the fad of majismo, of frequenting the Pradera of San Isidro,[**] of learning from their lackeys the" jota , the guaracha , the bolero , and all sorts of tunes and dances"[67] were proud to court an actress.
It is an honor to be favored by an actress, especially a prima donna. A gentleman to whom she might wave from the stage, feels greatly honored.[68]
It was easy, then, for an actress to find a lover among the nobility; besides, these women exhibited less affected mannerisms than the ones imposed by the complex code of the cortejo.
The first consequence was that the gentlemen started to enjoy the ways of these women, whom they found more amusing and sincere in their love affairs, and less of a bother than the women of the elegant world. Thence, the gentlemen passed into circulation the amorous language learned from the actresses. The ladies à la mode would now hear themselves being called guapas (literally, handsome, beautiful), a compliment they soon accepted—even with a certain tickle of pleasure—in spite of the ordinary overtones of the word, which in those days had an element of coarseness.
A writer of the time chided the ladies who allowed these dubious compliments, thus contributing to the spreading of an undignified language.
You ladies are in the habit of admitting to your circle, and even favor, a breed of men whose efforts are directed to degrade themselves. Individuals who try to form a separate guild, and the lowest at that, in society . . . who, maladjusted in their high status, try to besmirch it by wearing the garb of the majos, and posing and acting like them . . . finding it delightful to frequent and imitate the scum of society. But you, ladies, instead of despising these men whose gross manners ought to offend you, and whose indecorous words and actions are the scandal
[*] José Cadalso (1741–1782). Soldier and writer: his Moroccan Letters is one of the most representative works of eighteenth-century Spain.
[**] Pradera de San Isidro: popular hermitage of the patron saint of Madrid, on the western banks of the Manzanares river.
and the shame of their families . . . you yourselves exhibit the ways of the majas. . . . The sites of their instruction . . . are to be found in the bull ring, in the gambling houses and in the miserable huts of the slums. In such schools they learn how to talk and behave . . . and they move to the inner circle of mansions, there to divulge a licentious conduct and a coarse and indecent way of talking . . . and the most contemptible vices pass for charm. They treat the ladies in the same way they do the women of Barquillo and Lavapies. Not to spare sarcasm and insults against spotless reputations is their only ability. . . . Well, well, you look swanky! You look grand! What an air! Those eyes! What eyes! etc., are marks of the facetiousness and wit of this bunch of ignorant individuals.[69]
The assimilation of plebeian ways went on with the ladies wanting to be sexy and swanky, that is to say, making themselves up according to the popular modes; in short, acting like majas. How? By copying their clothes, their manners and even their language, because that was what the men liked. In the face of the eighteenth-century refinement of wigs, fans and sighs, there burst out in a strong and unexpected wind, a diametrically opposed semblance: aire de taco (an air of effrontery). This expression was widely used in the second part of the century. The talents a lady needed "to degrade her high birth, to which she could not adjust," are summed up in these lines:
She should put on an air of effrontery, make her gestures pretty. She should walk seductively, moving her hips. Finally, she ought to know how to say a couple of risqué remarks at the right time, with ease and wit.[70]
Apparently this "air of effrontery" was related in particular to language, the acceptance of which meant the inclusion of vulgar expressions, unheard of in the vocabulary of distinguished folk.
A young lady of society, confessing that she had tried, from her debut on, to imitate the women of the lower class, left us her testimony on the subject:
All I cared for was to copy in my actions that arrogance, insolence, vanity and boldness I saw and admired in them. They used to say about a girlfriend of mine that she had quite an air of effrontery because two out of three words spoken to a man were: 'the heck with you!' And I was determined to acquire that air at any price. I was not satisfied with my girlfriend's simple expression. I added quite a few to become fairly
deft at saying: 'the heck with you, you are a nuisance!' The epithets 'brute,' 'bum,' 'fool,' and others, just as resounding and unfit in a lady's mouth, did not go unused. To sum up, I made a collection of some dozen or so of them, which I used all the time and everywhere, to the great satisfaction and enrichment of my soul.[71]
Parallel to the courtly styles, then, new modes were being imposed. The crux of the matter was that the courtly styles which had originated in the aristocrats' desire for distinctiveness had become worn out and vulgarized, because of the appropriation of them by the middle class. A group of ladies of the aristocracy, perhaps fed up with this state of affairs, turned their eyes to the majos, to models which they observed and tried out with secret fascination. Indeed, with the very same secret attraction with which the maids listened behind closed doors to find out something about the essence and rules of the cortejo.
The cortejo, in conclusion, had progressively lost, during the second half of the century, that special touch, that mark of distinction it had when it was called chichisveo . The ladies of the aristocracy still felt the need to elevate themselves above the ladies of the bourgeoisie, and to be different from them, at all costs. The woman who perhaps best knew how to exploit a vein when she struck it—in this case that of folklore—was the Duchess of Alba, Teresa Cayetana, immortalized in so many of Goya's paintings and sketches. Doubtlessly she was the one who, with great audacity, grafted the popular styles on the aristocracy.
She was eight years old in 1770 when her mother, Lady María de Huéscar, became the widow of her first husband, the Duke of Huéscar. This mother of thirty, coquettish, intelligent, accomplished, appreciative of painting, music and poetry—who alternated her philanthropic and literary tasks with social activities—fascinated the little girl, too often left alone in the care of servants. The two dwellings of the Duchess of Alba, one on Juanelo Street, the other on Barquillo, were situated in popular districts. On walking through these streets and being, day in and day out, with the servants, little Cayetana picked up the ways and speech of those people, in whose company she found refuge. She married very young, almost as a child—on the very same day on which her mother was remarrying—to the Marquis of Villafranca, a frail and indecisive man who easily gave in to his wife's wanton inclinations. The Duchess soon realized that her faulty education would
not allow her to shine in the world of letters, where her mother was well known as a translator, and was even a member of the Academy. Nor could she compete in this area with another important lady, ten years her senior, famous for the refinement of her taste and culture, for the protection she gave to writers and artists, and for her avant-garde acceptance of French and English fashions: Lady María Josefa Alonso Pimentel, Countess of Benavente, and Duchess of Osuna through her marriage with the ninth Duke of that title. It did not even occur to Cayetana to follow in her mother's footsteps or her friend's. She could not stand the idea of playing a secondary role to other women. But she wanted to stand out, to draw attention, and the only ground on which she stepped more firmly than the other ladies was in those popular ways, sayings and attitudes familiar to her from her childhood days. It was a matter, then, of circulating these styles, of personalizing them, of launching them, of stressing the note to its finest vibrations. That she did. No lady had done it before her. Daring and violent in her whims, she made a banner of her beauty. Dressed according to the people's styles, she paraded them about in broad daylight, for everyone to see.
There is not one hair on the Duchess of Alba's head that does not inspire desire. There is nothing more beautiful than her in the world. If she had been imagined she could not be better. When she passes by on the street, everybody leans out of the windows, and even the children stop their playing to look at her.[72]
Another traveler picks up the rumor that ran through Madrid about her licentious behavior:
For quite a few years now—they say—she abandoned all appearances of dignity to such an extent that she wanders in search of adventures in public places, so scarcely scrupulous in her whims that she counted even bullfighters among her lovers. During the summer, at midnight, she used to have a tertulia, enlivened by music, in the Prado.[73]
The Countess-Duchess of Benavente never lost sight of her friend's exotic behavior—she was, in fact, so interested in it that on one occasion when Cayetana made a journey to Barcelona, the Countess asked somebody to inform her on the daring lady's pursuits.[74] However, María Josefa represented the opposite role, that
of launcher and fosterer of cultural endeavors. In her Madrid mansion and in the famous estate of El Capricho, she discussed art, bullfighting, painting, theater, and even social reforms with Moratín, Iriarte, Ramón de la Cruz and the Marquis of Bondad Real, her cortejo.
These two prestigious ladies, who shone during the reign of Charles IV, were proving the veracity of those preachers who insisted on the exemplary role of the nobility. Bound in their rivalry with the queen María Luisa of Parma, they easily proved to themselves that in starting a new style, they were far more influential than the queen. The ladies of lower rank were literally dependent on the two ladies of Osuna and Alba—far more than they were on the queen, who was disliked by many—for balls, gowns and the more or less shocking manners they were introducing, each in their respective style. These ladies, by singling out for their preferences given actors, writers or bullfighters on whom they bestowed their protection, spread their tastes to the public; opinion split into two rival groups, which declared themselves followers of one or the other lady.
It is essential to underscore one point: these two women, and all the others who enjoyed setting styles and proving to themselves their influence on the public by channeling it to their own taste, carried out their power games leaning upon the names of their husbands, regardless of how much or how little they respected them. That was a personal matter. What I wish to stress is that under no circumstances were unmarried maidens the ones who stepped forward to take hold of the reins of that doubtful freedom the ladies of the eighteenth century were seizing all over Europe. It was always the married ones.
3—
Maidens and Married Ladies
Maidens have to aspire to two things (advises a writer of the sixteenth century]: as virgins, to be without eyes or feet, and you must interpret this to mean 'reserve' and unimpeachable habits . . . thus they will easily find a husband.[1]
To look up, to look someone straight in the eye was what girls had to avoid if they wished to give guarantee of their chastity. The proper attitude was summed up in a concept inseparable from that of maidenhood, crystallized in the recato (reserve). This word, very common in classical Spanish literature, has much to do with covering up. Recatar , according to the Dictionary of the Royal Academy , means to cover up, or to hide something one does not wish to have seen or known. It is understandable that Spaniards—accustomed to love what they did not know, but could imagine—came to idealize that reserve. A glance from a completely unknown woman, through a veil or a barred window, excited them. Nor is it strange that they equated the light in those eyes—which had dared to look at them at the risk of sinning—with a trite gamut of perfections, frequently nonexistent. The reiterated preaching of maidens' reserve stressed far more the exterior appearance of reticence than the causes leading to an unvirtuous action; what really harmed a woman's reputation was not being reserved enough. What was not seen did not exist.
The chaste woman does not achieve a good name only by being chaste, but also by appearing so, for openness and public show of pertness are far more injurious to a woman's honor than secret failings.[2]
Following such bizarre advice, the maidens earnestly applied themselves to appearing virtuous and reserved. The withdrawn and chaste attitude they exhibited on the rare occasions they went out became second nature to them. One of Cervantes's heroines tells us she has spent her life
in a seclusion comparable to that of a convent, without ever being seen by anyone except the house servants, because the days on which I would
go to early mass—accompanied by my mother and our maids—I was covered up with a veil and so reserved that my eyes hardly saw the ground on which I was walking.[3]
Unrewarding as that role was, maidens accepted it, more or less willingly, because they knew it was an efficient vehicle to marriage, the unanimous aspiration of those who had not taken the only other possible way acceptable to society: the nunnery. It was the general opinion that the good name of a lady of marriageable age lay in her seclusion; thus the earnestness of the parents in sheltering their daughters.
Every time a maiden crosses the threshold of her home, she places her beauty, her upbringing, her personality and her purity on other people's tongues . . . there is nothing in the world so tender, so delicate or so fragile as a woman's honor and reputation, so much so that it seems to be hanging from a hair.[4]
The maiden, in fact, was fragile merchandise and her parents' care was prompted by the worry of potential spoilage, up to the yearned-for day in which that burden was entrusted to another master. It seems that this situation had not changed essentially in the eighteenth century, as regards to the exercise of will and the choices a single girl could make regarding her future, or her passing to another master's hands.
A writing of 1790 informs us that
a maiden is a nonentity, who, as a rule, is a nuisance in her own home. It is a miserable situation, for even when she is of an age at which she can prudently avail herself of her freedom without any harm to her virtuous habits, public opinion—the most powerful obstacle—considers her always an individual for whom it is not fit to do what widows and married women do. . . . The majority of women, not to say all of them, marry without knowing the first thing about marriage, except that such and such a suitor has asked for her hand, and that he has such and such a title, position and connections.[5]
It seems that among the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie the parents invariably arranged their daughters' marriages; the engagement was a formal affair which lasted a few months. During this period the betrothed had a chance to exchange but a few words during some stiff visits, always supervised by the parents.[6] If, by chance, through these brief encounters, there sprouted a bit of af-
fection between the future husband and wife, it was dismissed as accidental, and irrelevant to the success of the union.
when the couple had already developed an affection for each other and were dreaming of their not too distant marriage, it was derided suddenly to interrupt that sweet engagement, because the parents could not agree on the dowry.[7]
The same author, in another passage, explicitly declared that love marriages did not occur: they were always contracted on the basis of parity of class and wealth. Supporting free choice as the only possible way to happier unions, he waged a protest against the classism of the hermetic circles which limited "the choice of one's companion to the restricted members of our class." He went on to say that the one who breaks this rule:
by escaping his class and contracting such a marriage (based on his own choice) is looked upon as if he had married a beast.
In another passage of The Censor , he expressed with a certain naiveté and Rousseauian ardor—characteristically Romantic—that:
Nature, as it is apparent to all, must bring forth for each man a woman, and for each woman a man, whose company is the only one his or her character can adapt to. If things were as they should be, doubtless everybody would instinctively find the suitable mate; just as in a mixture of different substances, those the chemists call 'in affinity' are mutually attracted and bind themselves together.[8]
Leandro Fernández de Moratín was one of the authors who attacked the injustice done to a woman by not allowing her to choose the man she was going to marry. He deplored the inevitable hypocrisy incubating in those young girls, traditionally inbued with the concept of reserve; obedient and submissive to the paternal will, even in such fundamental matters as the choice of the man by whose side they would have to spend the rest of their lives.
They obstinately persist in saying that character, age or temper have no influence on the girl's inclinations; that her will can be twisted at the whim of the one that governs her. She is allowed everything except sincerity. As long as she does not show what she feels; as long as she feigns to hate what she most desires; as long as she is prepared to utter— when she is ordered so—a perjurious and sacrilegious yes, root of all scandals, she is considered well brought up. And an excellent upbringing is that which breeds in her the fear, cunning and silence of a slave.[9]
With the new ways introduced by married women, the concept of "reserve" lost some ground. Since the beginning of the century it had been losing prestige, and its validity had been disputed. A writer in 1717, aware of the need to strengthen its validity, said that to the paradise of marriage
the tree of knowledge is useless, since the only thing a married woman has to know is to be reserved. . . . That's what our mother the Church teaches us at the time of the 'veiling' . . . ruling that the man wear around his neck a ribbon, symbolizing the conjugal link, and the woman cover her head with the veil—symbolic of that 'reserve' appropriate and essential to women of all conditions. But more so to the married one, who has to lead a perilous life and has to give a good example to her family. The treasure that is 'reserve' has been upheld—justly so, in all times, as the one that most elevates a woman . . . and it is the one which the relaxed tendency of our day wishes to deprecate by calling it 'brusqueness' and 'gross incivility.'[10]
The last paragraph of this text is revealing. From the beginning of the eighteenth century on, one can observe a rapid process of substitution of some terms for others, an exchange seen by the moralists as a demonic plan. The introduction of words of pleasing and attractive connotation to designate reproachable tendencies was considered the first step in the acceptance of evil, working like an anesthesia. This was interpreted in a monotonously long list:
In order to gild the rot, you invent this game. You openly term forwardness 'sincerity'; frivolity 'wit'; insolence 'respect'; familiarity 'discretion'; sin 'seriousness'; failings 'scrupulosity'; scandal 'modesty'; shameless 'joke'; disavowal 'lack of attention'; openness 'courtesy'; caresses 'compliments'; old age 'disdain'; vice 'retirement'; licentiousness 'jocosity'; kisses 'pastime.'[11]
The words in bad taste, and the ones one could object to, were omitted. The insinuating and stealthy way of the Devil was becoming prevalent, according to a writer of the beginning of the century.
The Devil wants to pervert all stations in life, not openly with the roaring scandal of violations, sacrilege and adultery—because it would be easier to fight these—but rather, cautiously.[12]
Along with these diabolical tendencies to disguise, the word reserve came to mean rejection, brusqueness, and gross incivility. At the other extreme, another concept was making its way, undermining
reserve and relegating it to the rag heap. This new concept was pertness (despejo ).
Pertness meant frankness, lack of inhibition, the direct glance, boldness. The word despejo , perhaps of Portuguese origin, contradicted in its very etymology the word reserve , as an apprehensive moralist explained.
One of the worst things in women is unseemly deportment. Though not all can be graceful, serious they can be. Great harm is brought upon them by something they call 'despejo' in which many take pride, and, to be sure, in Portuguese it means discomposure. . . . Pertness is an unfit trait just as pejo [which means impediment] is a proper one.[13]
If a young woman did not feel shy or constrained in a man's presence, and could speak to him frankly with a serene expression in her eyes, that was pertness. The obstacles were being cleared away from women's paths, but that gradual opening up of new possibilities for married women, though barely tolerated, was seen as totally unfit for girls aspiring to marriage.
If you just want to court a lady, find one that is, and has the fame of being, forward, and a virtuous one for a wife.[14]
This viewpoint, though still prevalent, was not unanimous any more: pertness started to make an impression on the maidens' strategies. Chastity was to be valued for its own sake, and not to be confused with rejection and discourtesy. Even discretion, which was generally linked with reserve and restraint, leaned toward a frankness of manners. Damian, the protagonist of a comedy by Moratín, tells us how he came to meet on the boulevard of the Prado—seated at the foot of a tree to get a bit of fresh air—the fair Jerónima.
I spoke to her; she answered, affable and discreet; it is not surprising she did answer thus, being a judicious girl, quite opposite those who want to mask their silliness with rude manners.[15]
A phrase which was circulated, along with pertness , was martial spirit , expressing those very same frank and open ways which were impinging upon the relationship between the sexes. This sonorous phrase had been chosen and earnestly accepted by many women, who saw reflected in it the new conduct to be followed. In an anonymous verse, a doctor dialogues with Truth:
D: Of today's trends which is the one that worsens your condition?
T: Effrontery in the girls, being called martial spirit.[16]
A text revealing the meaning given to this phrase is critical of the old ways with which it is contrasted.
Spanish ladies of olden times believed in the existence of the illusory specter, the 'people,' and feared the 'what they will say.' They lived secluded and confined. They mortified the vivacity of their spirit with silence. They chose a solitary and sad life, thinking by it to avoid gossip. They enslaved their ardor and liveliness of youth by putting on a mature pose, to gain fame as judicious. They wore plain gowns to scare off their suitors. They shunned company and conversation to show the men their pride, and finally, devoid of all martial spirit, they lived isolated, without freedom or joy, in retirement and pusillanimity, so that men might appreciate them as sensible and revere them as prudent.[17]
Martial spirit is even more clearly defined in the following passage by the same author.
Martial spirit is to talk with ease, to use with everyone a frank tone, discarding once and for all the coyness of chastity, for skirts to the ground, covered faces, words uttered blushingly, a retinue of four or five suitors—these are antiquated things, very much in fashion at the time when Spain did not communicate with other countries (in the time of the ruff). Then the girls engaged to be married were granted the great privilege of wearing a camel hair basquiña [sleeveless coat], tooled goatleather shoes, and sleeves to the wrists. They were ghostly ladies who could hardly spare a word to wish someone good day, and who denied themselves all thought or effort, except the exercise of inventing tricks to deliver their billet-doux. In those days the gentleman who wished to see his lady paraded the bulls he was going to fight on the street in order to give her a chance to come to the window, whence her beauty could be dimly discerned behind the glass.[18]
The final sentence of this paragraph points to the dividing line between the two mentalities: the window had lost its symbolic value as an exclusive opening to the world. The gentleman who had to seek pretexts that might cajole a lady to the window, through which he might barely discern her beauty, was a ghost of the past. What this writer—himself an unwary precursor of Romantic styles—did not suspect was that soon the modes of courting which Spain, spurred by foreign influences, was trying to cast aside would be
revived by Romanticism, a movement inspired in many ways by Spanish models: the fascination of the hard to get, the mysterious, the furtive. He could not guess that it was hardly worthwhile to ban the custom of "barely discerning through the window" the charms of one's lady, because it was going to be adopted once more, some ten years later.
The lack of inhibition was a must in the movements and poses of the new dances and contredances; this apprenticeship could not be even dreamt of by a reserved girl.
So that the fop may not be tempted to feel apathetic in the contredance, he will first give one hand, then the other, to his partner until the turn is complete, in eight chords. Then the damsel is to raise her right arm, then the left, so as to get in and out of the arms of her partner, until she completes a full turn sustained by the arms of her cavalier. . . . To perform this figure, the gentleman will grab the lady by the waist. Then he will let her go gently and will give her a hand; she will run; he will make a turn and return to the previous spot to embrace her, and that is the way the sieve figure ends. . . . To do it properly, the young ladies must display a natural vivacity, what in olden times was termed shamelessness or insolence.[19]
This uninhibited and "natural vivacity" referred to in the text, that is to say, the martial spirit and pertness, demanded wideranging freedom of action and expression, opposed to what previously was considered acceptable deportment. As the new patterns were taking hold without eliminating the old ones, the damsels were in conflict as to which path to take.
It was obvious that the traditional way continued as the safest and most reputable path to matrimony; but of course, the other way was more attractive, and the young ladies who chose it—often shielded by their mothers' examples and by the aggressiveness typical of the minority—continued to taunt and slight the old way. One of the arguments frequently wielded by the women who challenged the traditional relationships was the lack of sincerity of the women who sustained traditions; a mere show of adherence to the old styles, prompted by cowardice; a way of escaping the thrall of the new ways. The words prude and bigot (mojigata ), applied to ladies of marriageable age who behaved in that squeamishly proper way, are frequent in the literature of the time. In a comedy, Laura, talking about her sister, as young as herself but of the old school, commented:
Let God keep us from the kind of woman who hardly opens her mouth and knits a sock during a visit, and also from bigots, the very essence of the proverbial dangers of 'still water,.[20]
Moratín, the most benevolent and impartial among the writers who dealt with the maidens' problems, gave the following sketch of a prude.
She prays her novena , recites the rosary, meditates, withdraws to her room and opens the balcony at night to escape her father's vigil. The damsel whiles away the cool summer nights chatting with the standard-bearer on the other side of the street.
Further on, he addressed the maiden's parent, whom he deems responsible for his daughter's hypocrisy.
When she was a child, she was frank and of a good disposition; but you, wishing her to be even better than she was, started to be hard and intransigent. You corrected the slightest mistake; you shouted at her for not doing anything right. . . . Your rigor produced insincerity and caution; your oppression, a greater desire for freedom; your frequent punishment, cowardice. Lacking those virtues you failed to foster in her, she feigned them.[21]
Just as this girl's behavior was molded more or less honestly to the traditional patterns under heavy-handed paternal authority, the spirited girl of marriageable age modeled her behavior, as a rule, on her mother's. The carefree lady, by accepting the fashion of the cortejo, spawned among the fifteen-year-olds a host of anxious imitators.
In the past [wrote Torres Villarroel] during a visit, one almost doubted the voices of maidens, but nowadays they preside at a gathering and gibber away. Before, even when answering a question, they blushed, silent in their reserve; conversation about weddings or betrothals was denied their lips and ears . . . now they talk about them in a brassy manner, as if they were veterans of marriage.[22]
The girls tended to imitate their mothers, just as in The Perfect Married Woman , where the virtuous mother was emulated by her daughters. A writer deplored the fact that many mothers
are more worldly than worldliness itself, gadding about, and wanting to be in everything and be seen everywhere without worrying about the bad example they set for their daughters. Well, what are the latter to
do? . . . If the mother is so fond of visiting, of promenading, and such things, how is the daughter to appreciate quietness? If the mother is uninhibited and open, what can one expect of the daughter? If the mother spends hours on end at the mirror before she goes out to sweep the streets and squares with her skirts, what will the girls do in the meantime? Exactly what their mothers do.[23]
Maidens were keen observers of their mothers' ways when they accompanied them to the theater or to dances. They knew maidenhood to be a provisional state of affairs, and everything they did in it was something like a rehearsal of their future.
They reach the marrying age, and according to the customary practice they learn all sorts of tricks . . . they go to the comedy; they learn to sing tonadillas; catch amorous expressions; impress in their minds some ruses to put into practice on suitable occasions when they finally perform the comedy of Love and Psyche. . . . They must be taken to dances, where they try out their ardor by the touching of hands, rubbing of knees, and put-on careless glances. At the critical time of marriage, they are well instructed in these fashions, and completely spoiled by these bad habits; and what happens? They take an escort and relegate the husband to the backs of their minds. . . . The lady goes to one gathering, and the husband to another. The home? It has become like an inn; a place where one eats, sleeps and changes clothes.[24]
On some rare occasions, the parents themselves thought a girl had a better chance to marry if she was lively and outgoing, rather than reserved, and they brought her up accordingly.
Composure and adornment are what make women more desirable. My daughters have to achieve this. They have to sing a seguidilla and dance a fandango, as an actress would. How many young ladies would have been left unwed if they had not bewitched a man with a tonadilla, with an opportune sigh, with a seductive step! It does not matter if the husbands abhor them afterwards. We men of small means must wish our daughters to marry, happen what may.[25]
In men's company, a father might possibly have said something like this, but it is hard to imagine he would actually give such advice to his daughters. After all, they followed their mothers' examples. That was the decisive factor, and it was futile to admonish them one way or the other. It was enough for a mother to have a cortejo to spur in the daughter the desire to have one when she married. It was not unusual to hear girls refer to their suitors as cortejos.
There is a fine satirical description of this mimicry of the young maidens:
I am young, rich and pretty. I have what they call 'spark.' I play an instrument, sing and dance, even the bolero. I step lightly with my skirts off the ground. I go to parties and I am the life of them, more so if there is a man in uniform present, or a foreigner. I go to a gathering and I find a riot; to the promenade, and I am the belle. I am spirited; I talk openly. I keep the beaux exercised. I drop and pick up cortejos at my whim. I wear my clothes and dress my hair with grace and art.[26]
The younger set imitated the modes and poses of their mothers, and the cortejo, in the person, perhaps, of one's mother's friend— who entered the house in a natural way and was treated with familiarity by the servants—was the most enviable novelty and one that enthralled them from childhood. In a playlet by Ramón de la Cruz, we see two children who find themselves at a grown-up gathering. A guest asks them:
'Why don't you play, children?'
'We are playing!'—'But I saw you whispering!'
'We are playing cortejo.'
'That's a good one, my sweethearts, and who taught you this game?'
'How nosy this man is! Nobody, we saw it ourselves!'[27]
Often this example was given unconsciously by a scatterbrained mother, but sometimes it was intentional and even well-intentioned. Some women probably liked to have well-frequented parties, so that their daughters might get used to people and behave with ease and elegance. One of these ladies complained about her husband's jealousy, that kept her from inviting male acquaintances.
I would not mind it for myself, but for the girl I do, because if she never gets a chance to talk to other people, she will not know how, and they will think she is a fool.[28]
Needless to say, contemporary moralists disparaged the mothers for giving such a bad example.
Our maidens fare in such liberty that the much praised modesty of yore is not to be found any longer. To blush at a man's glance is seen as a discourtesy, and reserve and prudence are seen as pusillanimous. It is thought proper to have a haughty expression, a forwardness, an almost shameless way of walking and acting up.
Further on, he condemned the familiarity those fashionable visits bred, in which young men would flit from one home to another to amuse the married ladies and the unmarried alike, to have tea and play cards.
Are we to think that the men who frequent our homes to enamor our daughters are coming with the intention of marrying them? They come to deceive them or to have something to tell their friends about the girls' liberties. . . . Perhaps some suitors have their eyes on a girl, with the idea of marrying her, but as they see that the house is open so frequently and so cordially to others, they are taken aback by it, suspecting there is something more than meets the eyes. They withdraw in order to court another maiden, whose modesty and reserve dispel the anguish and doubts they had about the other. That's what so many mothers get when they look for an easy way out for their daughters, at the expense of modesty and a good name.[29]
This indeed was often true, because the prestige of "reserve" had not died out yet. So it happened that when a bachelor had to make up his mind about a wife, he found himself in the dilemma of choosing between fashion—an uninhibited, spirited girl, welltrained socially—and the distrust of this product of foreign influence, by keeping faithful to the Spanish motto of "a pert lady to escort, a modest one to marry." The pious, modest look was nevertheless viewed with mockery and contempt by many. But sometimes this unprejudiced air, these ways of "civilized" and "modern" man, were a mere pose. Like the father quoted above, the fop, when boasting to his friends, pretended to despise:
the bigots who are afraid of shaking hands with a man on account of their reserve; who think it is a sin to lean out of a window instead of looking through the blinds. Visits? When mother is out? What daring![30]
In spite of all these thrusts and parries, the men were not prepared to put up with a refined and demanding petimetra, bent on spending and wanting to be in the limelight.
No matter how crazy a man is, he will always want his wife to be judicious and religious. Nobody wants to be burdened with one of those scatterbrains whose only thoughts are frivolities and who are convinced that marriage is freedom.[31]
That's where the secret was. Girls had caught on to the idea—in spite of the seclusion in which they were often brought up—that
marriage was not only a move to another permanent state of affairs, but was also an opening up of other possibilities. Though those possibilities might have seemed more enticing at that time than in preceding eras, the tendency to consider marriage a springboard to liberation was not at all new. Parental authority had always been more arduous to evade than the marital one; moreover, marriage lent a certain prestige. Everybody had a father, but not all damsels acquired a husband; married women took on an aura and an attractiveness spinsters could never aspire to. Married women were certainly more respected and desirable. An eighteenth-century playwright had this to say:
There are ladies whose husbands are on some mission or other in the New World or in Italy. But not all are truthful in what they say, for there are thousands of crafty ones who feign they are married in order to live more freely.[32]
Even earlier, moralists in the sixteenth century had observed that many women chose marriage because it gave them more prestige. Though their expectations very seldom materialized, they thought the new status would afford them occasions to indulge in the delectable side of life, precluded to them during girlhood.
There are some married women whose only excuse for their vanity is, 'It is for my husband's sake!' And it is a lie, because throughout the week . . . they wear a headdress like a sieve, and a ragged skirt. While on holidays, when they are to be seen, they go about dressed up so you cannot recognize them . . . nor would their husbands, if they were to go out early in the morning and find them by chance on the street.[33]
It was a weighty argument—one women had always relied on—of adorning themselves to be attractive to their husbands. With this rationalization, women attempted to gain some privileges and freedom though not with the success obtained in the eighteenth century. But it was a false and deceptive motive. In a moral tract disguised as a dialogue between two sisters, one told the other: "We have to be pleasing and engaging to our husbands." The other, interrupting, said what she thought the real reason was for all that pampering.
Tell me, is it not true we dress up and adorn ourselves more carefully when we go out on a visit, and where we know there will be people to see us, and hardly ever our husbands? . . . What do we do when we get home, even if our husbands are present? Do we not take off our jewels, rich skirts and silk gowns, making ourselves very much at home?[34]
This, of course, was no secret to anyone in the period we are studying. Women wanted to get married to be better off in every way. Very often, this was the only reason they accepted a suitor. In a contemporary comedy, a young girl, Jeronima, cynically revealed her motives to her maid just before getting married.
He is rich and gallant and madly in love with me. As soon as the wedding takes place, you will be my chambermaid. All day long and even evenings, we shall go around in a carriage; you in the back and I in front. Whenever I shall have a gown made for myself, I'll get another one for you, and a chain watch with its snuffbox. Looking so pretty, we shall be courted everywhere, noticed in the promenade, and we shall be the center of attention during visits.[35]
But it was not befitting to reveal these motives, even when the atmosphere was less rarified. It was safer to adopt the demure and modest air recommended by tradition, if one wished to acquire a husband.
Marriage . . . as a rule seem to promise the peaceful life one might enjoy in a place surrounded by beautiful and luxuriant plains, sheltered all around by mountains, graced by deceivingly easy mountain passes. But one has to penetrate those lands to know them really, rather than to be enchanted by them at first sight.[36]
Of course, there was nothing new in this tendency to feign, during the first encounters with the future mate, a sweetness of manners time would often disprove. What was new in it was the complication the girls' urge to marry had undergone, and the fact that this impatience in the gentler sex was inversely proportional in men. The latter felt less and less attracted to matrimony. Many of these young men—potential husbands—had been formed in the society of married women. They had a first-hand knowledge of the complexities, expenses and bother they would have to go through if they married. They tended to avoid that stumbling block by acceding to that other relationship, so akin to wedlock: becoming the escort of a noblewoman.
With the introduction and acceptance of the cortejo, married women became feared rivals of single girls, who not only had to cope with an inferior position, but also had to witness the impudent exploitation of that most enviable state. In other words, the girls had to suffer an encroachment on their prerogatives and to compete
not only with their habitual rivals—the other young women aspiring to marriage—but also and especially with the married ones. The dandies, at least the ones who had their hearts set on a married lady, had little time—as one can gather from the exacting rules of the cortejo—to dedicate to any young lady. The disproportion in condition lay mainly in the fact that no fashion had been expressly invented to favor the maidens, nor did any vogue sanctioned abroad corroborate their strivings.
I am, dear sir, [complained one of them] twenty-eight and unmarried to boot. . . . I was tempted a thousand times to post a sign offering my hand to any man. What keeps me from doing it is the thought that this is not the custom. I am sure that if one of the many women who find themselves in the same uncomfortable state that I am in would invent such a fashion, there would not be one bulletin board in the capital that would not exhibit twelve such signs. But while it is not taken up in France, it would be madness to try it out here.[37]
The Italian and French behavior patterns of the time did not relate at all to maidenhood and its privileges, or did so only so far as the girls copied the married ladies. In all the texts I have consulted, the unmarried were at a disadvantage, not only because their immaturity made the striving for a cortejo seem ridiculous and affected, but also because they could not have their own gatherings and have the freedom to invite their favorite beaux. In fact, when one spoke of the cortejo in reference to an unmarried girl, it was the forced fitting of the word to what should actually be termed a "fiancé." Possibly the maidens themselves, in the imitative games of childhood, extended the usage of that term to refer to their sweethearts. Under this bias it is easy to detect the yearning to get married and obtain a cortejo. This earnestness is more understandable if one considers that trying out the cortejo in early youth was upbraided as an extravagance.
Young ladies should reflect [exclaimed a character of Ramón de la Cruz] that expensive accessories and extravagances, instead of attracting worthy men, frighten them away.[38]
Thus this imitation could only give unsatisfactory results for those who tried it, given the inequality of conditions and the risk of tarnishing one's good name. A writer informed us that when maidens
wanted to be thought of as advanced in their ideas, they imitated married ladies, with the consequence of being chided
as the followers of the cortejo; while the latter discredit the maidens' good names with the improprieties they are supposed to commit, plus some liberties, they astutely take on the unwary young girls. They take them for liberated women without character or decent upbringing. In conclusion, with their hideous imposture, they make it impossible for the maidens to marry according to their class, merits and qualities.[39]
A single woman had much more to lose in adopting that martial spirit than a married one—though in the opinion of many, their good name suffered whether they were wedded or single. The loss of reputation, needless to say, was more prejudicial to single than to married women. Of course, the whole situation kindled in the girls the desire to marry.
It is quite risky here to start a relation with a young girl. Before you realize it, you find yourself trapped.[40]
Some of these women, as they became older and desperate about the usual methods of competition, relied on persuasion as a weapon.
Beware of the aging spinsters [warned an author] because as they reach their thirties without having been proposed to, they will attack even a skullcapped, balding bigot. These women have an abundant reserve of arguments; to persuade you to marriage, they will besiege you with 'It is better to marry than to burn.'[41]
But the argument this text refers to—and it is a document from the first half of the century—convinced no one by the end of the century. During the reign of Charles IV, it was unlikely that a spinster would have availed herself of it. No one married any longer in order not to burn, or at least, very few people believed in this. The original goals of marriage were distorted, plunging the institution into an acute crisis.
4—
Crisis in the Institution of Matrimony
In a comedy from the end of the century, a young woman rejected a suitor on account of personal repugnance; to this he answered:
And what has repugnance to do with the bagatelle that marriage is? . . . We are not going to see much of each other after the ceremony. . . . We marry, but that does not matter at all. You will do as you please and so shall I. As long as you dress according to my instructions, and behave according to what I learned in my travels abroad—by the way, be so kind as to learn French, to save me from hearing Spanish spoken in my home—we shall be the best of friends in the world.[1]
Aside from the exaggeration of this text, which magnifies and ridicules this situation, it seems obvious that such situations actually existed. Women, after getting married, sought some enjoyment and company at the margin of marriage, and felt cheated when they failed to obtain them. A saying went: "A lady who finds no swain/ looks always to be in pain."[2] The failure to get an escort, and the consequent bad humor, gave way to a series of incidents that reflected negatively on the marriage.
Whether they hold conversation at home or not. . . . If they do . . . you will see the house upside down for the two following reasons: one due to the constant absence of the husband, the second due to the wife's constant presence; what with dressing formally or informally for the various receptions, what with charades, chocolate and refreshment hours, card game sessions, and other eccentricities, the income vanishes in no time. If she does not have a cortejo to converse with, for being graceless or homely . . . another misfortune befalls the husband, who because of his extended absence, becomes the object of her resentment, jealousy, hard feelings and obstinacy.[3]
The cortejo, it seems, spawned a host of spurious activities that filled the woman's empty hours, while gradually distorting the traditional ends of matrimony: procreation and continuation of the species.
An Italian author, attacking the chichisveo, bewailed the tepidity and tedium this custom put into matrimony. Referring to young men practicing this custom, he commented:
Entertained, moreover occupied in the service and homage to another man's wife, they don't plan to contract matrimony; this innocent love does not satisfy them. Their excuse is that marriage would curtail the freedom they now enjoy.[4]
In saying that marriage's innocent love would not be enough for them, he assumed that those extramarital relations were enough. Most of the contemporary commentators on this custom either suspected or felt certain that those ties were not chaste. The observers of the novel modes uttered their suspicions, sometimes reticently:
I have heard many saying that this relationship does not have anything sensual in it, since it springs from mere courteous obligations.
Sometimes boldly, to express their disbelief, as if a simple glance could induce one to sin:
What would the defenders of this new epidemic, of this lethal plague, of this most toxic poison alluringly gilt, say of a couple sharing a sweet from the same plate? Or exchanging unwittingly a cup of chocolate?[5]
The new epidemic—especially when it was still quite new, while it was still referred to as the chichisveo—was viewed as a provocation, regardless of the pains taken to disguise it.
In the very delicate respect one owes a woman who by her birth may command it, but who by her unfit behavior and granting of favor tacitly persuades one not to pay it.[6]
The defenders of the chastity of the cortejo had always played on the fact that it was just a conversation. But who could not perceive the danger lurking in a whispered dialogue between a man and a woman?
With no partition in between, nor distance, but the ear of the lady and the lips of the escort, so that cheeks are almost touching, though not
quite, are they to behave properly? Are they to be so cautious as to not even let their thoughts go free?[7]
The physical nearness ensuing from that plague of whispered conversation is attacked as a proof of its harm.
Most of the time the lady and the gentleman are seated in two different chairs, but so contiguous one to the other that the skirts of the lady and the coat of the escort cover the chairs in such a way that they seem to be seated on the same chair.[8]
In that bodily proximity, the faintest smile, gesture, sigh, or banal phrase could become erotically charged; this did not go unnoticed by the confessors, so sensitive on that point.
I have noticed that sometimes they are silent, though eloquent in their sighs and glances. . . .The snuffbox is opened; they snuff the tobacco and while one of them is on the point of inserting it into the nostril, the other very delicately takes it away, saying with a little laugh: 'Oh, how much sweeter is this one!'[9]
It was also contended that what in other countries might have been perfectly innocent because of the reserved nature of its inhabitants would not likely be the same in Spain.
The temperament of the Northerners is cold and not as prone to vices as ours. Spanish temperaments are by nature fiery and lascivious; though these fashions introduced by permissiveness in the North are not provocative there, they are so here, with dire consequences, given our complexion and temper.[10]
Some observers of the phenomenon went even further, in saying that a consummated adultery was better than those "loose habits in words and actions, very often suggesting much more than there actually was." Because, after all, were those women made of stone?
They must be, so to speak, fire resistant, to be able to walk on live coals and pass through flames without suffering any burns. To speak literally, they must be insensitive to the difference of the sexes. They must be able to familiarize themselves with a man from the first visit, receive him in deshabillée and though the lady may be in bed, converse with him cheek to cheek; or else walk with him for three hours in the moonlight, hand in hand . . . and all this in cold blood, without exposing her chastity to the least temptation. But, there is no man who would not
prefer to have an adulterous wife who knew how to hide her infidelity, rather than a woman who, without being disloyal to him, has all the appearance of being so.[11]
Whether the cortejo implied platonic or sensual love seems to have been a problem that fretted the conscience of many a contemporary moralist. From the tone of their arguing one detects their enervating and fruitless search and the lack of any conclusive proof of guilt. The essence of the cortejo was its vagueness, formulated in the following terms by a contemporary:
An ethereal goblin that comes and goes, runs, froths, jumps, leaps, and sways in the minds of idlers, without harming or benefiting anybody, without being good or bad: finally, without letting on whether it is fish or fowl.[12]
There are manifold testimonials of the anxiety of those who wanted at all costs to catalog that elusive phenomenon. It was quite complex; if the cortejo dampened conjugal relations, the women adopted such a dignified and serious demeanor in their extramarital relations that it precluded all discussion, especially because those norms emanated from a powerful class that protected its members from grave suspicions. But it is also true that at the close of the century, parallel to the waning prestige of the nobility (to which we alluded earlier) this protecting buttress against criticism was falling into ruin. Toward the end of Charles IV's reign, the ladies of the aristocracy, influenced by the efforts to keep up with the rules of propriety characterizing the cortejo styles, relaxed and let themselves be caught up in the general stream of corruption of that age.
The stages of this process are not easy to delineate, nor have I been able to give it the attention it demands. Doubtlessly, the transition from the escort mode to actual adultery was accelerated between the close of Charles III's reign and the beginning of his son's, Charles IV. Cadalso, in his Memorias , left us an expressive testimony of this situation. Towards 1768, during the reign of Charles III, Cadalso had two young men as friends: Oquendo and Cornell, successful protégés of the Count of Aranda. They introduced Cadalso to that vanity fair of the high aristocracy; they frequented these circles under the protection of Aranda. A few months were enough for the author to grasp the intrigues seething in that elite—besides, according to his own confession, he himself
had a love affair with the Marchioness of Escalona—who, influenced by French thinkers, was gradually getting rid of moral and religious prejudices, displaying, however timidly, her contempt for them, or playing at being contemptuous. Shortly after, a libel was circulated in Madrid under the title of Guide for Foreigners in Cyprus during the Carnival of 1769 and After , which alluded to some gossip and amorous liaisons, and where "one describes the love affairs generally known in Madrid and disguised under the cortejo." The libel was anonymous, but
the public did me the honor of attributing it to me [said Cadalso, without confirming or denying the attribution]. A number of suspicions point to me. Juno went to Eolus and commanded him to persecute the Troyans. Eolus, to please her, let loose the winds against Eneas. And I, obeying Villadarias, incited by the Countess-Duchess of Benavente and other ladies, went into exile, burdened with debts, poor and ailing, the last night of October 1768.[13]
It seems odd that such a vague libel could insult the ladies who had an escort. Today's reader finds it indecipherable: its profusion of suspended dots and coded words makes it like a hieroglyphic. One cannot fathom that such a pamphlet would cast aspersions on anyone. Only a very narrow circle of initiated persons would have been able to decipher those hermetic conventions, not the reader at large. Thus Cadalso's exile to Zaragoza—disproportionate as it may seem as a punishment—shows how touchy those noblewomen were about anything smudging their reputations, and the importance they gave to being thought unimpeachable. Hence the secrecy and cover-ups of failings; the public mention of these were intolerable to them, even on the part of those who knew about them already.
Charles III, the puritanical widowed king, curbed with his austere example all display of immorality, and kept the ladies of the aristocracy at a ceremonious distance. He encouraged and favored their activities with a mixture of paternalism and respect; this attitude vanished after his death. At the end of the century, the familiarity with which Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa's lover, received the ladies of the court, who swarmed without ceremony or disguise around his antechamber, was quite different than it might have been in Charles III's day.
The rushing of the ladies to his office is really scandalous. They have become the general agents of theirs and other families' matters. One never saw a husband, a brother or any other male member of the family apply or ask for recommendations. . . . Ladies and 'women' were the ones who had any voice in the favorite minister's cabinet and its antechamber. The major harem was subdivided into several smaller ones, to look after individual affairs.[14]
An English traveler who visited Aranjuez in 1795 remarked on the difference in conduct between Charles III and his son:
I was told that in a few weeks a total change would take place, for the court was expected on the 6th of January to remain six months, and that every pleasure followed in its train: shoals of gamblers, and ladies of easy virtue of all ranks, ages and descriptions. Every barrier which Charles III, of chaste and pious memory, upheld in the attempt to oppose the wanton inclinations of his subjects has been broken down in the present reign. Boundless freedom of conduct prevails, and the most disgusting debauchery riots in these lovely groves.[15]
The effects of Maria Luisa of Parma's example on the ladies in waiting were obvious, even during her father-in-law's life. In the last years of his reign, for instance, the Countess-Duchess of Benavente was noticeably freer in her conduct than she had been fifteen years before. It is likely she would not have felt so insulted at that time as she had been at the time of Cadalso's pamphlet, in which she read an allusion to herself.
This lady, who according to Cadalso, provoked his exile to Zaragoza, appeared in 1784 at a reception given by the Portuguese ambassador. She was accompanied by her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Osuna, and their respective escorts, high ranking army officers. Military protocol would have precluded them from acting as cortejos, but given the importance of the ladies in question, their role as escorts was tolerated, "as an essential and indispensable asset." At a certain point, Lady Maria Josefa sent her husband, who was engaged elsewhere in the hall, a dish of sweets. When the Dutch Ambassador, Rechteren, maliciously asked her if she had anything else to add to it, like a pair of horns, for instance, she gleefully laughed at the joke.[16]
During the last third of the century, the ladies' conduct exhibited a greater cynicism and disrespect for propriety. Thirty years after the publication of that libel, the enticing and lighthearted Mar-
chioness of Santa Cruz had no qualms about permitting Lucian Bonaparte to conspicuously wear a collar woven with locks of her hair. While leading a foreign traveler, Schubart, around her gardens, she pointed out a small gate laden with myrtles and roses as her favorite spot; it was there she met her cortejo in the evenings when her husband was in the capital.[17] The earlier, more or less conscious, attempts by the ladies to disguise their extramarital relations had given way to a certain frankness. This let transpire the amorous game of the cortejo without the vague and elusive tone that had driven the moralists out of their minds, making it so hard for them to decide whether it was "fish or fowl." It was by now quite obvious to everyone that the cortejo leaned more toward the flesh than the spirit. Even if we were to admit that in the majority of cases the relationship did not overstep the bounds of platonic love, it is certain it had progressively undermined the institution of marriage. Further, to reap the more or less tangible favors of a married lady was a surrogate of marriage for a bachelor escort; who, besides, found it attractive and honorable to be the cortejo of a lady. It seems that the detractors who held the propagation of this custom responsible for the distaste towards marriage felt by men were on the right path.
Moreover, one has to take into account the financial factor. The upkeep of a house, as we noted earlier, was a complex and awkward business. But to contribute to the accessory expenses of a lady who one escorted was an intermediate expenditure many might take upon themselves, at least for a while. Don Frutos, in a comedy by Ramón de la Cruz, confessed:
I could not afford the expense of a whole household, but I could manage the minor expenses of fans, pins, carriage rental, refreshments and theater tickets.[18]
No lady, however exquisite she might have been, felt it was indelicate to allow her beau, or the gentleman who aspired to that condition, to get her those trifles her husband begrudged her. One such lady informed her cortejo:
Though I am not one of those vulgar women who stipulate a monthly stipend for pins . . . permanent hairdresser, carriage and credit in a haberdasher's for ribbons, laces and other indispensable accessories for my adornment, I find it unnecessary to advise you of it, because this is a rule everybody knows.[19]
This custom did have its variations: some escorts presented their ladies with a personal gift, to prove their good taste and up-to-date knowledge of fashions, while others found it easier to grace them with a "stipend." Florencio, in a contemporary comedy, answered a friend who boasted of being the first one to find out about new styles.
I am not good at that: instead I give the lady I escort my doubloons and she gets what she wants.[20]
The bachelor who is glib about single girls and boasts about not being caught by one, while proud of showing his devotion to a married lady, is a common figure of the epoch. We have the testimony of an enlightened young man, José García de León y Pizarro, born in 1770, who wrote his memoirs in his mature years. He lived in Madrid from 1786 to 1790, and his remembrances of that period are centered on his parents' circle: his father's friendship with Jovellanos; his mother, as an enlightened lady "very well received at Court, for her remarkable acumen and politeness, as well as for her personal charm and singing ability."[21] This widely traveled man had a diplomatic post in Vienna in 1792, and was determined to live within his own means "to reach a yearned-for independence and avoid all solicitations of posts which I feared by instinct, and later hated and despised with good reason."[22] To arrive at this desired state of freedom, he eschewed all love ties that might have endangered it. "Anything but marriage was my motto," he confessed.[23]
Another who skirted matrimony was the Marquis of Mora, the young widower mentioned earlier in reference to the actress Maria Ladvenant. He was determined not to remarry, and successfully escaped all the nets thrown toward him. He even eluded a famous and cultured noblewoman, herself a young widow, Mariana del Pilar de Silva y Sarmiento, Duchess of Huéscar. She, just around that time, had been elected an honorary academician of San Fernando, and was madly in love with him. The frequency of her visits to the home of the marquis' father—who was favorable to that marriage—resulted in the young marquis's flight from Madrid, and in a less appealing union for the duchess, who married the marquis's father. In passing, we may add that on those habitual calls that the duchess paid, with matrimonial plans in mind, she was accompanied by her teenage daughter, the future Cayetana of Alba.
From Cadalso's "biographical notes," one gathers that he also preferred relations with married women, and when he showed interest in a maiden, as in the case of the daughter of a counselor he met in Alcala in 1764, he seemed to consider it an exception. Men's aversion to matrimony was a rather common phenomenon; signs of this are in many publications of the second half of the century. Cañuelo, one of the editors of The Censor , had one of these young men who exalted the delights of bachelorhood saying:
Without the slightest thought about marriage and after reiterating to my acquaintances that I would not contract it because I am fully aware of all the hindrances, subjections and cares it brings in its wake.[24]
Isolated cases—when they occurred among the upper echelon of society—did increase the strictures on the institution of matrimony, and raised doubts about its merits; a tendency which at times degenerated into mockery.
Holy matrimony has become a target of ridicule and scorn on the part of some individuals who go out of their way to reject all legitimate births. Even in the theater, which should be the school of propriety, foolish and vulgar railleries are admitted and applauded. . . . One does not see anything but divorces. The home becomes a place of torment for the majority of couples. Misunderstandings are the thing of the day, and discord releases her furies in the ill-suited marriages.
Cañuelo added to this list of evils the question: "Are these thorns intrinsic to the nature of matrimony?"[25]
According to Cabarrus's[*] testimony, adultery reigned with impunity, and separation or discord were the evils which followed in its wake. Cabarrus advocated divorce, about which one talked in private without ever daring to defend it openly as a solution. It seems that nobody wanted to clearly connect causes and effects. Cabarrus's opinion is very striking for its courage.
All this immorality, a consequence of the indissolubility of matrimony, will cease to be immorality when we deal with it legislatively. What everybody says and repeats in public and private conversations is denied point-blank when the time comes to make of it a government matter. In short, the decadence of morals becomes an insignificant and futile
[*] Cabarrus (1752–1810). Economist, founder of the Bank of San Carlos, and of the Philippines Trading Company.
topic of private talks. Divorce scares us. Yet I ask all sincere men to answer me if they are so sure of themselves as to keep the promise of loving forever the same woman, and never another.
He concluded by adding that divorce would give "a new stimulus to the ones fortunate enough to admit the tedium of an indissoluble union."[26]
In March 1793 in Salamanca, some manuscript copies of an article attributed to the university professor Ramón Salas were distributed, in which divorce was upheld as a measure against immorality.
The indissolubility of matrimony is a state of affairs that terrifies even the most inclined to it. To meet a corrupted woman, who wastes in luxuries all the money her husband gives her to bring up and educate the children, to know the bad habits of one's spouse, to be convinced of her infidelities, detest her, be detested by her, and to have to live with her for the rest of one's life . . . is a tyranny of the law.[27]
This paper, qualified as seditious, was ascribed to Salas, and called by the Inquisition to investigate his scandalous opinions and corrupted morals. Even at the waning of the century, neither the government nor the majority of the enlightened writers agreed wholeheartedly with these ideas carried to the extreme. For instance, on 16 February 1800, Eulalio de Guzmán Palafox, Count of Teba, and his legitimate wife, Maria Ignacia Idiáquez y Carvajal, decided to extend in writing their decision
to separate and live each in the house and town they liked, with full personal independence . . . convinced that their union could not continue, because they could not agree on anything, and because they could not expect of this marriage anything but displeasure, discord and resentment.
Family and government alike became alarmed, and to obviate the break between the parties concerned—in spite of their mutual agreement—brought pressure to bear so urgently and efficiently that in the following month they had succeeded in enclosing Maria Ignacia in a Malaga convent. In a letter of March 29, she complained bitterly of having given freedom to her husband "who had the right to demand quite a different solution" while she had to suffer
the grievous punishment of seeing her youth fade away in the austerity and desolation of a convent, insufferable to some temperaments, and which will put an end to my life with anguish and despair.[28]
From the complicated measures and investigations carried out by the government to verify this very interesting case, one can gather that neither public opinion nor the state were inclined to endorse such innovations.[29] Nonetheless, obvious facts could not be ignored. The disparagement of matrimony was so evident that even foreign travelers in Spain remarked on it. It had been waxing throughout the century, as the decrease in number of marriages attested. Sempere y Guarinos, in his History of Luxury , verified with great concern that in the quarter century from 1750 to 1776, the number of marriages had declined from 1825 to 1548 per year.
To acknowledge that this institution was tottering on its foundations was beyond the reformists' comprehension. The Age of Reason was characterized by its faith in decisive measures and by its optimism. Marriage had become a state matter, insofar as it contributed to the increment of population; thus it could not fail. It had to be fostered. It had to regain prestige, regardless of the means. The majority of the enlightened writers of that era tackled the financial aspects by linking the phenomenon with the wasteful excesses of women. The obligation to clothe one's wife was "the most intolerable and detestable thing in these times."[30] Someone went to the extent of proposing a national uniform for all women, to cut down on the spending. The proposal appeared in an anonymous essay, which I believe was written by Josefa Amar Borbón.
Once the ladies are freed from fashion and luxury, the men will not flee from wedlock, as seems to happen nowadays when they see the caprices of fashion in women, which exceed the income of the best of men.[31]
What was also often brought to task was the deceitfulness of the girls engaged to be married and their families, on a fundamentally controversial point: the dowry. A man tended to feel discouraged, upon realizing that his new wife's dowry—in the majority of cases overestimated to entice the suitors—was hardly sufficient to take care of the wants the bride invented and claimed. The attempts that were made to reform the institution were not directed to marriage as a financial contract, but rather to its being a dishonest deal. The jurist Matheu y Borja, for instance, pointed out that
the increase in property and income goes hand in hand with ambition and greed, to the detriment of trust, which is superseded by malice, fraud and trickery in all contracts. Its special [matrimonial] circumstances demand another, quite different clause in favor of the husbands, who are the only ones to suffer the damages caused by the excessive taxation on dowries.
He added that if men were aware of the net value of dowries
there would be no marriages anymore, and the towns would be full of common-law unions; there would be hardly anyone willing to submit to a perpetual encumbrance without interest; or else matrimony would be contracted only with beautiful women.[32]
The same opinion, expressed in an idiom quite removed from the judicial, was heard in the towns in some popular verses of the time.
A penniless wife is a nuisance that hinders and does not render; for in the public sale of likings, there is no liking without sale. The weather is too dry to take refuge in a liquidless marriage.[33]
The moral aspect could not be overlooked either. From this point of view, the decline of matrimony was connected almost invariably with the breakdown of traditional customs and the loss of the concept of honor. Ironically, many of the authors who lamented this loss were not aware of the contradictions inherent in the lament for the Spanish husbands' honor. They failed to see that this change in mentality was a consequence of the opening up to foreign influences and of the love of progress that these very same enlightened writers fostered and praised so highly. The simplistic and regressive analysis of the problem, made by Sempere y Guarinos, is revealing:
There is hardly a trace of the respect, reserve and restraint with which children used to be brought up, nor of women's fidelity to their husbands; hence the depravity of our century. . . . According to the ancient laws, the husband could take upon himself the revenge of his wife's disloyalty [to him]; when he did not, his family did it. The faintest smudge on this frail matter that is honor was cleansed with blood or the absolute loss of freedom. Bridling feminine licentiousness made the bond firmer; lack of freedom in women was compensated by a greater appreciation of them. Nowadays if a husband wants to be respected and have his say in his home, he is laughed at; and if he looks for satisfaction in court, he finds a thousand stumbling blocks that make him desist, and eventually he will disregard these fatal disorders which should be remedied.[34]
Sempere y Guarinos did not consider that the Bourbons—whose politics he generally exalted and defended—had contributed to the obsolescence of the old code of honor.
As early as 1716, Philip V had promulgated an edict, repeated to the letter by his son Ferdinand VI in 1757, in which duels and provocations were severely forbidden, because they were
contrary to natural rights and offensive to royal dignity, when the subjects who consider themselves insulted take upon themselves the right of avenging their honor, instead of referring to my royal person or my ministers. They act prompted by a false concept of honor that interprets as lack of courage the appeal to law; as if Spain needed to gain credit in such brutal, criminal and abominable ways, after so many conquests, spilling of blood and lives for the propagation of the faith.[35]
This measure manifests on one hand the paternalistic attitude of the Bourbons and their tendency to intervene in their subjects' private lives, but on the other, it shows clearly that a war was being waged against the traditional methods of vengeance, summed up in what has been called "Calderonian honor." Evidently Philip V felt repelled by those personal vengeances justified in Spain by the tenets of the honor code, the brutality of which he was determined to eradicate. A French traveler at the beginning of the century related that a Madrilenian teacher detected in his wife what to him were signs of infidelity, which he proceeded to punish by stabbing her cold-bloodedly one morning. He then promptly took refuge in a monastery where he confessed his crime, doubtlessly thinking that the protection of a sacred place and the suspicion of a stain on his honor would exempt him from the law. But Philip V ordered his arrest and execution without hesitation.[36]
We do not know the repercussions this act by the king had on public opinion. It would not be surprising if they found it shocking and quite revolutionary. Nevertheless, during the reign of his son Charles III, the public was better prepared to approve of it and second it, and the majority would have condemned the "Calderonian vengeance." A German traveler of this period told us that the beautiful Marchioness of Rivas had been caught by her husband writing a letter in all secrecy. Her immediate reaction was to hide it, refusing to show it to him, in spite of his commanding insistence. But on seeing that he was drawing a knife, she handed it to him, still refusing to confess to whom it was going. After that turbulent scene she
ran to the house of an aunt of hers, but this lady persuaded her niece to go back to her husband, who repaid her return by keeping her under lock and key for three days and acting as her jailer. Finally, in exasperation, she went back to her mother's, and "now she is filing an application for legal separation and return of property." The traveler concluded the retelling of this case by saying that all the people he heard commenting on it were indignant at the husband, whom they termed a barbarian, an individual who should be locked up in a mental institution, at least.[37]
The code of honor was still valid among the masses, who saw themselves as the custodians of the traditional ways, as I remarked in reference to majismo. But among the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, scenes provoked by jealousy were old-fashioned antics, ridiculous and in bad taste, quite gratuitous indeed among people who aspired to be "civilized." In some texts, the word civility , very much in vogue in this period, had a connotation of tameness, of turning off the passions. In others, for instance in some popular anonymous verse, this tameness acquired by Spanish husbands is jeered at:
The world is drunk and off kilter; it confuses virtues and vices. . . . When a gentleman is chaste only with his wife, they all say, you can tell he is civilized.[38]
In a play written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there appeared a marquis
who has spent two months in Paris; who has studied there the way to excel in high society; who has all the air of a foreigner; who knows things and scorns our ignorance.
Upon returning to Madrid, he addressed thus the young girl he wanted to marry.
It does not matter if you detest me: what matters is not to show it. One has to be somewhat civilized.[39]
Under the cover of civility, all the novelties became harmless. There was a tacit complicity to ridicule as uncivil those who feared the danger of immorality for a woman, even in flagrant cases. For instance, a lady argued with her confessor about her escort's morning visits while she is still in bed. He warned her about the spiritual
harm of conversations held in the intimacy of one's bedroom. She replied:
But as all this is mere civility, I do not see how it can lead to sin. What malice is there in visiting a person who is still in bed?[40]
The young men who followed an austere, old-fashioned pattern of deportment were feared as future husbands. Their jealousy and stolidity were taken for granted. They were teased with a word that corresponds to the present day "bore" (pesado ) or "dull" (pelma ): "martinet" (machaca ). Pascuala, a character we have already met, expressed the following opinion:
The bachelor who courts only his fiancée, who dances only minuets, who wears naught but Spanish garments, who exhibits only one watch, who likes to read and talks little and then with priests, who does not frequent La Fontana,[*] who does not dress his hair in a high forelock, plays cards moderately, and, only when a partner is missing, goes to bed at ten o'clock and gets up at five . . . if he gets married he will be a most strict husband, most exacting and a martinet, and his better half, a most unhappy woman.[41]
Jealous husbands were caustically lampooned, especially to caricature their lack of refinement. This method was probably aimed at influencing their future behavior. Here we have a range of adjectives in a text of the time, contrasted with a list of the ideally modern husband's traits:
True enough, there are many civilized, docile, discreet, uninquisitive and affable husbands who don't hear or see evil. But on the other hand there are many brutish, indiscreet, boring, hard to please and fretful individuals who would not allow their wives the most secretive and reserved escort.[42]
In this text one can detect a new touch in the desired husband's attitude: the lack of inquisitiveness into the life of one's wife as a norm of good manners. It was not infrequent in the previous centuries to find husbands who connived in their wives' immoralities, but the contempt and the insulting terms applied to them were also common knowledge. The trust in one's wife, the taking for granted—even if deep down one thought otherwise—the innocence
[*] La Fontana (de Oro), a popular coffee-house.
of the visits she was receiving and the conversations she was having, made up the fundamental novelty in some minority sectors of public opinion. There are, nonetheless, texts of the eighteenth century which bear the traditional censure of the trusting or deliberately indifferent husband, and also the usual jeering. For instance, Torres Villarroel did not mince words:
The trustful husband who was half cuckold . . . was aware only of the bloodletting made in his purse . . . he became a member of the cuckold's guild, which is termed 'chichisveo" in the vocabulary of disillusion and truth.[43]
But it was precisely this "vocabulary of disillusion and truth" that was changing its meanings in matters of conjugal infidelity, aside from the fact that these cases might have been more or less frequent than in the past. What is evident is that good taste and civility forbade crude references to the subject.
In step with this change in vocabulary, there started to dawn in the modern husband's consciousness a pattern of behavior quite opposed to the traditional one. One husband, for instance, desired his wife
to behave so as not to make him cut a ludicrous figure in public. Seeing him in her company in some circles is enough to acquire the fame of being jealous and enamored of his wife, which are the most detestable things of the day.[44]
No doubt in some cases, not asking a wife's account of her doings could very well indicate a self-interest and cynical purpose: that is, to expect from her the same lack of curiosity. Let us not forget, such indifference served the husband well, whose absence—to play the role of a "charming companion in somebody else's home"—was often the cause that triggered the woman "to invite on her hand other such charmers to keep her company." One must take into consideration that she
lacks the licit outlets that her daily tasks would require when her spirits are weakened by the constant cares.[45]
For both, living as they did in a glass house, it was convenient not to throw stones at each other. But in some other cases the husband did sincerely believe that to give some freedom to his wife was more beneficial than harmful; and he could do it, convinced of sharing
in a rewarding conjugal understanding. To keep a woman happy seemed fair and indispensable. Said one husband to the other:
There are two things that make a good woman bad: not to have the frills other women have, and to keep her under lock and key when others have the freedom to move around. . . . Thus if I let my wife enjoy herself; if I don't restrain her too much; if I dress her with a certain decorum and a bit more, I have eliminated three enemies.[46]
When husbands advised their wives to be freer, and even to take an escort, they preferred the latter to be fixed rather than variable. The changing of escorts, was considered juvenile.
It looks as if she is afraid of worrying me [complained a husband about a too old-fashioned wife] she is determined to dance all the contredances with a different man. She persists in it, in spite of my telling her that once a partner is chosen, good manners require her to dance with him all night; converse with him in between; laugh at what he says, though it may be the most banal and insignificant thing . . . let the fan fall down often, to give him a chance to pick it up and present it to her on his knees. . . . I have mentioned to her several ladies older than herself who have a way of keeping very wise men fascinated, while their daughters, on their part, with their playing around and joking about, keep busy half a dozen coxcombs.[47]
Due to cynicism or generosity, the condemning phrases we have heard in Torres Villarroel's passage evoking an obsolete honor code were out. They were so scarce as to stand out when they occurred. A French traveler informs us that at the end of the century a gradual waning of jealousy could be noticed.
Times have changed; husbands are less suspicious, more reasonable and indulgent, and women easier to talk to. Jealousy has disappeared and the duenas exist only in novels. The veils have become, under the name of mantillas, an ornament which enhances women's beauty. The homes are hospitable and the men, passionate and gallant as ever, have also become more confident. Women are enjoying a freedom which they perhaps abuse less than when their virtue was entrusted to barred windows and to an often untrustworthy and corruptible surveillance.[48]
The doubts about whether women abused their freedom more or less than in the days of the iron bars and grates gave rise to many polemics; it was delicate and tricky to prove the matter. But virtuous deportment and propriety tended to be disregarded just
as much as they had been stressed in the past. That is why some authors—set on reinforcing the facade of the institution of matrimony—deplored the loss of "reserve" and the honor code; practices based on terroristic methods, to be sure, but ones that had succeeded in aborting many a scandal and outrage.
It is also true that in the seventeenth century there began a tendency to grant women more independence and less custody. This feeling made its timid way to the theater in the theme of marital trust conducive to a more harmonious union, and coexisted with the always popular theme of vengeance in the name of honor. Some authors suspected that rigorous mistrust helped to increase adulteries. The playwright, Tirso de Molina,[*] advised:
Don't burden her with jealousy. No woman can be virtuous if she is suspected of being dishonest.[49]
Yet this was something that had been proven long before. The persistence of the "unfaithful wife" had made moralists understand—though this understanding is not often found in literature— the futility of keeping a watch on her, of guarding her against her will:
If a woman is determined to set her eyes on another man, that man will have her in spite of her husband.[50]
Examples of this will of liberation are far from rare in Spanish Golden Age literature. Another approach was essayed in an effort to restore the prestige of matrimony, that of presenting it in an idealized form:
For some women—deaf to the voice of decency and devoid of chastity— marriage is not what it used to be, and what it still is, for the virtuous Christian woman; that is, a pleasant and enchanting retirement in which two people, weary of the ebullient pleasure of the world, dedicate themselves to each other, apparently oblivious to the whole universe. In these most precious instants of solitude that a well-suited couple enjoy, they mutually refer to each other with endearing terms, expressing in few words the warmest love.[51]
[*] Tirso de Molina (1583–1648). Famous Golden Age author of important plays dealing with free will and predestination. To him we owe the first play on the myth of Don Juan.
But the reappraisals were anachronistic. By 1788, things had gone too far. On September 25th of that year, pleasure was openly exalted—as opposed to the "extravagant inventions" and "endless rules" imposed by matrimony—in an anonymous satire titled The Dream , the circulation of which was forbidden by the Council of Castile
because it contained perniciously equivocal and dangerous propositions which could influence social, state, and religious institutions, and the decent habits of the population.[52]
It was the usual procedure of being caught by surprise, and taking severe measures to cover up an evil which one had not known how to curb, or had not wished to foresee. Nobody had inquired in due time into the difficulties which generations of married women had in conciliating that idea of exalted love, promised them by books and plays, with that waning existence based on obedience, on secure and inert possession, on reclusion. Nobody had inquired about their conflicts or their loneliness. To exalt the essence of matrimony, now that things were getting out of hand, seemed in every way puerile, false and meager.
I expect you to be wise enough [Clavijo y Fajardo advised a lady] as not to even dream of securing your husband's esteem by dint of those amorous excesses and manias which marriage had and always will put an end to.[53]
If marriage put an end to those amorous obsessions, it could start another kind of companionship, more difficult to secure. It was a matter of facing up to the problems of that risky and confusing undertaking that was marriage, with precipitous rocks one always chose to ignore. Mirabeau admitted:
Truly a soul needs much strength to keep alive that friendship and make a relationship meaningful after a habit of so many years. . . . Men and women alike adorn themselves and dress up meticulously in the most trivial details before they get married. But all the care and abundance of attention last only a short time. When the girl sees herself desirable, she becomes untidy and negligent; she forgets about the love-provoking care she had taken of herself. The lover, once a husband, forgets about that prodigality of devotion exhibited as a bachelor; the delicate feelings disappear from his heart and he treats his wife with disavowal.[54]
That's where the heart of the question lay: the difficulty—on which one seldom pondered—of making that relationship meaningful after the habit of so many years. One had to find a way to fight the routine, not to deny it.
5—
Love Opposed to Virtue
The prospect of diversion and pleasure—"of doing as one pleased"—through extramarital outlets was so openly admitted in the second half of the century that any propaganda intended to extol the delights of marriage had little probability of success. This was an epoch when the word "taste" triumphed in all the salons, gave title to academies, was repeated in poems, and was mouthed by everyone; when food, dress, and entertainment all endeavored to stimulate new tastes and satisfy them. To present matrimony as a source of tasty experiences in this epoch was to start off on the wrong foot, as an incompetent competitor. There was no room for this sort of evaluation of marriage. The only possible value was the one opposed to pleasure: the return to the traditional aspects of asceticism and the road to perfection. Matrimony had never been praised as a source of enjoyment, but rather as one of vexation. The desperate attack against pleasure had to continue on this flank, whatever the outcome.
Not all that shines is gold, nor is all in matrimony a pleasure. In my opinion, the distaste, suffering and vexations are comparatively greater than the enjoyment with which passion and appetite deceive us.[1]
This voice joined with those of Luis Vives,[*] Antonio de Guevara and Luis de León of the preceding centuries. Why deceive oneself? To get married was a sacrifice, and the choice of a husband did not have to be such an essential matter as some contemporary thinkers wanted it to be. What difference did it make? With any spouse, a woman could serve the Lord! Luis Vives, whose teaching still had some effect among the Spanish "enlightened,"[2] clearly
[*] Luis Vives (1491–1540). One of the great humanists and one of Erasmus's friends. Vives is the author of philosphical, moral, religious and political/social works.
expressed this concept of conjugal love as something totally opposed to pleasure.
While her parents discuss her wedding, the maiden should help them with her prayers and pledges, supplicating God, with tears in her eyes, to inspire their hearts according to His divine will.[3]
The concept of marriage as a vale of tears was the only sound column still supporting some marriages of the time, which were used as examples of solid and harmonious wedlock, and shining examples of Christian virtue. When a woman dared to brave the overruling opinion and resist it—something that was considered more antiquated and ridiculous than admirable—she could rightfully have considered herself a heroine. Perhaps there was a touch of this inner satisfaction in the defiance that conditioned the rigidity of some of these isolated cases of virtue.
Such was the exemplary character of María Manuela de Pignatelli, married to the Marquis of Villahermosa, a woman constantly tempered by sacrifice in the name of God. She was the sister of the Marquis of Mora, the libertine lover of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and of María Ladvenant. María Manuela had been brought up in the convent of the Royal Salesians; there she remained from the age of four to fourteen, while her parents traveled from embassy to embassy. She left the convent in 1769 to marry, by proxy, a man twenty years her senior, chosen by her parents, whom she did not even know by sight. Her husband turned out to be a totally fashionable man: unprejudiced, pleasure-loving, withal a dandy, imbued with the philosophical doctrines predominant in Paris and London. He was one of those men who bewailed Spain's backwardness. He was a good friend of the young Marquis of Mora, with whom he corresponded confidentially after his marriage to María Manuela, often exchanging with him news about their respective love affairs, on which the two men encouraged each other. In 1761, they simultaneously courted María Ladvenant. Such was the husband which the Duke and Duchess of Fuentes destined for their daughter, the innocent convent girl of the Salesians.
The narration of the life of this young girl, converted overnight into the Marchioness of Villahermosa, is based on a detailed investigation of her family archives by an author of the nineteenth century.[4] Her persevering loyalty to her husband, who was non-
chalantly going from one love affair to another while they lived in Paris, Madrid, London, and Turin, shows us that in the high society of those days, her rejection of even the slightest retaliation of the usual kind, advised by the fashion of the "pleasurable," was exceptional and anachronistic. After years of silent tolerance of all of her husband's provocations and disavowals, after years of constant forgiveness and prayer, the "little nun Pignatelli"—as she was called by her contemporaries—succeeded in bringing her aging husband back into the fold of religion, and to elicit in him a feeling akin to conjugal gratitude. This was a poor reward, indeed, but more than sufficient for a woman who had not expected to find any reward in marriage.
The conduct of this lady, and of others who took up the idea of marriage as a sacrifice with an almost messianic ardor, was doubtlessly inspired by intense preaching intended to bolster the ascetic aspect of conjugal love. In the last quarter of the century there were many writers motivated by this goal.
Nowadays the illusion of gallantry overpowers the imagination, so as to make some women believe they are the dispensers of happiness and torment. It would be better if they meditated on the fact that the harder it is to fulfill one's duty, the greater is the glory, which ought to be sufficient to remind them of their obligations.[5]
Another touchy point was the acceptance of the plebeian styles— which I mentioned in reference to majismo—which undermined the respectability of marriage by introducing into the language of love certain variations, which caused the ghost of modesty to evaporate. This tendency—which seemed scandalous to many—of incorporating into matrimony a gamut of carnal pleasures that had nothing to do with respect, was well within the eighteenth-century current of thought. Many husbands treated their wives as concubines, tried to convince them of how ridiculous modesty was, and made them accept crude and obscene language. The ones who blushed at jokes of doubtful taste were considered old-fashioned.
Some men are convinced that modesty is not a virtue in a married woman, according to the freedom with which they speak in her presence, and the mockery they subject her to, when she shows disapproval of their scurrilous expressions and jokes.
Further on, a married woman argued that
there is no catechism that mentions the loss of modesty as an effect of marriage.
She is all for upholding that feeling of respectability, and defended it with the argument that
the ones among us who harbor this feeling should be spared from hearing such things just as much as single women . . . besides, this kind of facetiousness, far from improving the man's wit, shows his lack of talent and education, which makes him quite incapable of behaving politely in the midst of a group of people.
The same lady added that when her husband sees her shocked by these jokes, he reminded her of her matrimonial satisfaction, and even of the begetting of their children, subjects one would never have mentioned among well-mannered and decent people.
Go on, you will have to be honored as a saint. I'll bet you Benny was not conceived by the grace of God. You certainly were not so modest last night.[6]
The moralists found this a touchy matter on which to express themselves. On one hand, it was not judicious to encourage coldness and restraint in conjugal relations, because of the deplorable results. Nor, on the other hand, was it proper that a libertine husband should accustom his spouse to ardent pleasures. For instance, in a moral tract, the husband was advised to:
Avoid that perfunctoriness in love, so common in marriages, and revitalize opportunely those signs of friendship which he lavished on his wife during courtship.
But such advice is moderated by making it clear that this "matrimonial friendship" one had to enliven did not mean an intensification of eroticism.
We cannot deny that modesty is virtue's steadiest support in women. Marriage causes them to lose some of it; and of course there are indiscreet husbands who make their wives lose whatever modesty they have left, be it with licentious words, conversations or habits. A decent man . . . enjoys his marriage without abusing it. The Persians used to take their wives to banquets, but on seeing that the wine perturbed their reason, giving free rein to indecencies, they sent them home, calling in
their place harlots or slave girls. They did it in the belief that the nuptial bed abhors dissolute habits. Let's imitate their conduct, then. Let's demand of a wife only what is licit.[7]
The tenderness and delights of marriage had to be installed in a temperate zone, and even when they were praised in order to attract the recalcitrant, it is not infrequent to find attached to these attributes moral and social considerations, in which there appear once more the "misfortunes" and "duties" inherent in marriage.
Nature invites to marriage by means as sweet as pleasurable . . . because the satisfaction of the most tender and most urgent desires, the warmth of companionship, loyal advice, help in one's work, joy of prosperity, support and comfort in misfortunes are the attributes of matrimony. . . . Man finds in his spouse another self, from whom he cannot be severed by anything in this life. He has to pay her tribute and keep her memory alive and respected after her death.[8]
As one can see, the second part of the program was stressed more than the first—this particular text even tops it off with a funeral— which, nevertheless, was the sugar that coated the medicine. We have seen the strings this author attached to that part of the program that was to satisfy the "most tender and urgent desires." One was to think of the pleasures of marriage not as vivid and passionate, but rather as temperate. In the first half of the century, the clergy and the government had noticed with alarm this dangerous tendency in married women: the desire to continue enjoying the delights of amorous passion. In 1724, the archbishop of Granada informed the president of the Council of Castile about a couple of passionate and jealous ladies who had been entrusted to him to persuade them to moderation. One of them, Josefa Hoces de Castril, was at the time in a convent, crying away in solitude over her husband's coldness. The archbishop cynically commented on how opportune that cure was.
Until her bad humor drowns in tears, and the nostalgia for the comforts of her home, feasts and visits prevail over her obsessive passion, making her content with a husband who, without idolizing her, knows how to respect her.[9]
But few were the women at the end of the century who would have become resigned forever—without aspiring to other things—to that temperate satisfaction of respect without idolatry.
When repeated enjoyment has dulled the ordinary pleasures, one tries to awaken the languorous soul with something spicy and hot. Tenderness adds more life to pleasure, making it very attractive to women. Their hearts find a renewed courage in a gallantry to which they unfortunately are far too inclined. Dangerous bewitching which accustoms the soul to lively emotions, and makes them discontent with anything temperate![10]
Marriage, then, had to be placed in the realm of moderation, but the latter was admitted with displeasure, as its very essence was opposed to that of enjoyment. This feeling had been taking shape for a while. For instance, the rebellious young wife of a Golden Age comedy left us an apt description of this nebulous atmosphere created by temperance in conjugal relations.
Perhaps he is a good husband, though I don't believe there are any good ones. Just see how they make themselves awesome in minor matters, and the way they lord it over their perpetual wives, with that strange temperance and that cold life where one never hears a fond endearment in an existence without love, cares or worries. At best a love without jealousy, a jealousy without disdain, and the dour security and the lukewarm wastes, where a 'dear' sounds ardent.[11]
That, in fact, was where love was dying: in that dour security, in that lording over one's "perpetual wife." Love was, according to a tradition which went back to the troubadours, synonymous with doubt, torment, risk. Trust killed the incentive. As I see it, the jealousy Spanish men felt was dictated by an inner persuasion that love was an essentially fragile feeling, forever threatened by death. It had nothing to do with the wife's virtue. The husband that did not realize the perennial risk in which he found himself was looked upon with compassion and contempt in the Spanish Golden Age plays.
Having married yesterday, my Lord, you leave your young, pretty and merry wife? A lonely woman alone? From your daring, one can see she is virtuous. But the young wife in her husband's absence, more so if it is long and not a secret, is like a free bird, an unfenced orchard and keyless lock. . . . She is surrounded by temptations, and on her way to mass, she walks on a slippery road.[12]
Only the risk of loss could alert the awareness of what one possessed, and kindle the remembrance of passion. Through jealousy—
though it was an inept guard—one tried to prolong the excitement. Later on, in the romantic era, one found out that the essence of love was its evanescence. But in Spain this had been suspected for a long time: love meant risk, insecurity, and walking on that slippery ground. In this sense, the urge to elude the vigilance was what had given the most passionate note to the Spanish classical theater. Perhaps the observation made by that French traveler about women abusing less of their freedom in the eighteenth century than in the time of jealousy and shutters was accurate, since the search for freedom had always been more earnest and perilous than the possession of it.
The desire for freedom was waxing in the women of the sixteenth century, enclosed and sheltered as they were, spending hours on end in idleness with their eyes fixed on the window. Love and the window—the main point of reference from which to dream about the world seething outside—were so intimately bound as to originate the word "window watcher" (ventanera ), applied to one with wanton tendencies.
Try not to be frivolous, a window watcher, a chatterer and a contemptible person, because ladies thus marked are talked about by men in the palace, but not asked in marriage.[13]
The common usage of the word "window watcher" in the eighteenth century is indicative of the leaning out of the window, manifesting a desire to go out, seeing and being seen; these were the preliminaries of love, just as it had been perceived in classical Spanish literature. The preachers had the gnawing suspicion they had not altogether succeeded in extirpating the yearning for freedom incubating in women's forced idleness and seclusion.
What may a healthy, attractive, lively young woman do when she is idling away her hours leaning on a cushion? What she does is to ponder how she will free herself, and therefore lose herself.[14]
In freedom, then, lay a woman's perdition. The same criterion was sustained in the sermons of the famous preacher, Pedro Calatayud, who attacked as immoral the models of gallant love represented in the "cloak and sword" comedies. He blamed them for immorality in general. In his opinion, the most deplorable consequence of that type of play was that it aroused the taste for gadding about in young women:
whose understanding, innocently asleep, ignorant of turbid emotions, awakens and turns to what it should avoid. . . . Now she sighs for visits and courting and resents the reclusion and isolation from young men, the obedience due to her mother. All her desires are centered on going out: to church, to the theater, on visits and promenades, and the restless task of running back and forth to the balcony or the window to observe the passersby. She has become intolerant of her mother's discipline that imposes on her such a retiring existence.[15]
Father Calatayud's opinion seems striking when we realize that these comedies he was warning against had been written in the previous century. This indicated that the gallantry of the eighteenth century, though influenced by foreign customs, was also feeding on a native tradition which, by means of the theater, was still imposing its styles even after the time lapse of a century.
There one learns by observation the way to attract the attention of a maiden, of tempting and winning over the one who resists, of conversing furtively at unusual hours and in secret places with those who don't find peace in their homes, or those who want to marry. There they find the inspiration to avail themselves of a servant or of a go-between who may bring back and forth messages of love. There one learns the ways to start a certain kind of familiar relationship, the chichisveo, or secret friendship. There one gets ideas on how to elude the well-founded suspicions of a husband, the way to write billet-doux full of caressing words, sweet and amorous expressions, all intended to subdue and enslave one's heart.[16]
Further on, he clearly addressed himself to the theater of the seventeenth century, which exalted that fugitive, risky and secret love that was to become the fountainhead of Romanticism.
The holding of hands, the embracing, the actor enacting the lover carrying his mistress in his arms, their being alone, his impetuousness and his suggestions . . . the artifices of a profane love, the serenading, the music, gifts, promenades, secret visits, begging, courtesies, frustrated attempts and undertakings, the go-between's advice, the key, the negligence on the part of the parents, the absence of the husband . . . the deliberate exchange of intimate letters, the means suggested for subduing the maiden, and the way the latter should reciprocate in order to be idolized, and then those sayings and maxims proclaiming blasphemy: 'Love gives wisdom,' 'love makes miracles,' 'constancy wins love' . . . the concoctions of a conceptual speech which by and by ends in a bedroom scene . . . how do you expect all these tantalizing condiments not to sharpen the appetite?[17]
The father's detailed analyses, with the accuracy only a confessor could achieve, of the stages of gallant love and the weak points in human nature that fed on it, seem fundamental. Love was an "artifice," a "condiment," a "concoction" which undermined virtue and secluded the heart. Women knew it, but the serenading and gallantry stole their souls because they delighted in being idolized, and because that concoction whetted their appetite. To be sure, this exaltation of love, conceived as an ornamentation, nay as a preparation for something else, was the main theme of the "cloak and sword" plays. The public relished these plays, and this theme was the secret of their success. A French traveler, J. Bourgoing, had this to say about it:
The sacrifices and ardor of hopeful love, and the anguish and arts of a disappointed passion are traced in the most lively colors. All the combats of the passion of love, all its resources, all the disorders it produces—in a word, all the intrigues now in use—were never publicly represented by any nation with greater variety than by the Spaniards at the period when jealousy, the difficulty of approaching women, and a thousand other obstacles arising from the circumstances of the times rendered lovers more impatient, desires stronger, and temptations more violent. Such is the description given by the comedies of which the Spaniards are as fond as they were at the time they first appeared.[18]
This commentary on the persistent predilection for amorous obstacles, inherent in Spanish literature, is meaningful, especially because it was made by a foreigner at the time when Romanticism was taking shape in other countries. The "type" of exalted love—the more exalted when it overcame every obstacle, real or fancied—was enjoyed more than any truth in the world. It was admitted expressly in one such play, where we hear a woman exclaim:
Praise the lover who claims he adores his lady, though he may not even love her . . . it is better to feign the fiction and gestures of an artful wooer than a loving husband.[19]
The amorous love lies, the courting, the conceits, all created an atmosphere of desire that enthused the audiences of those comedies which Father Calatayud deemed dangerous. In them, everything led toward the final union of the lovers, while marriage and its problems were disregarded altogether. The plays lasted the time necessary to remove the obstacles in the way of that love union.
With slight variations, they presented the duration of that passion fed by impediments; once the latter were out of the way, the passion died out and disappeared.
Ardor in a married man, my lord, is not a good word; ardor is for the wooer who has not achieved the possession of the beloved. . . . He who is the master in his house and has a goodly wife says contentedly that he enjoys her, and not that he burns for her. To bum is to feign, and feigning is for the lover who nimbly courts and feigns.[20]
Very seldom does one find in a Spanish text a more frank avowal of love and intrigue as invention, as a game that one has to make last. This game had to do with the furtive and the forbidden, with sin, in a word. To lie and to rob were the mainstays of the oldest and newest game in the world. A husband, in another comedy by Lope de Vega, answered thus to his wife who wanted to be hugged:
I am not a wooer who has to steal these caresses from you. A thousand nights come and go for firmer bonds than this. He who is hungry steals what he can, he who is not wanting chooses the time that fits him best. Let the lover steal joy when he can, not the husband who has his hours of pleasure.[21]
Possession, coupled with temperance, implied a routine: a reasonable meting out of the hours which subtracted all the spice from love. The very word "gallant," as "one who feasts a lady, loves her, or feigns to love her, and cares for her,"[22] is opposed to the figure of the husband in several texts of the eighteenth century. Even in this century, it is commonly accepted that the safest way to quench desire is possession.
It is a strange thing, that of possession extinguishing desire. One yearns for happiness. And just as much as it gives joy while it is desired, it bores and vexes when it is achieved. To persist in the desire of something is to wish for it to cloy.[23]
Women wanted to discover formulas that would perpetuate the illusion, that would prolong that fiction of which one had always dreamed in solitude, to reject the notion of possession and the feeling of security.
A woman used to the pleasurable illusions of passion would want to perpetuate that lustful inebriety, and would find it hard to adjust herself to quietness, accustomed as she is to stormy emotions.[24]
This text, with a romantic touch, offers in the word "stormy," a well-defined line of demarcation between love and marriage. On one side, passion, lies and stormy feelings; on the other, temperance and virtue. Matrimony could be presented to a woman as a saintly and fruitful vocation, and she could accept it without hesitation. But what one could not do was to confuse the two sides. They were irreconcilable. Love was a desire for freedom, for the ineffable flight, for the consuming of oneself. Marriage was submission, measure, virtue. Love was opposed to virtue. The yearning to make that "lustful inebriety" of the illusions last was kindled in eighteenth-century women by their awareness that once marriage, the traditional goal in those illusions, had been reached, passion was quenched, and tended to evaporate.
In a playlet by Ramón de la Cruz, two maidens discussed the traditional point of view of their father, who argued that marriage is a great thing and that only its ultimate value justifies the risk of a drawn-out engagement. The young women retorted:
B: Heavens! If everyone shared your opinion, books and pictures would be short of subjects.
G: What could fame tell us about Aeneas and Dido if they had married on the spot?
B: Why, all the rejoicing, the adornments, and the adorning and everything that makes men's hopes bright would be futile.
Later, one of them earnestly elaborated her speech, giving us a detailed account of the techniques and artifices she thought necessary to make the pleasing illusions last. In no text of the eighteenth century have I found enunciated so clearly the concept of passionate love, which would later flow so amply in the Romantic movement.
Father, there you have my cousin, who knows as I do that marriage is the last adventure for respectable people. An idolizing lover must climb the stairs of merit by stepping on the sweet, the tender, the doubtful, the hopeful, and the homage that reveals the docility of his soul. He must look everywhere for the one who bewitches him: in the temple and in the crowds. Then he must be introduced to his beloved by a relation or a friend, kindle his passion with her presence, and withdraw in melancholy to suffer in silence until the fire of passion becomes unbearable. He will make his first declaration of love with a perturbed voice under an arbor in some garden, or between the acts of a play, or in a theater box standing behind the chair of his lady, or at a Carnival
ball, or at the bullfight. When he perceives a certain agitation in his lady, he has to be well supplied with courtly conceits. From that day on, without remiss, he has to accustom his lady to his speeches and his gallant ideas, until the moment comes when, having conquered her disdain, he finds himself in her good graces.
The lover's adventures begin by his pacing up and down the street in front of his beloved's house, her parents' impediments, the signs misunderstood, the long wait, the fear of some dire happening, the false alarms, the crying, the despair, the irritation, the complaints and rage. That's all for the best and that's how these things should be. These rules one must always follow. But to have it done with right away, with a 'here is my hand, give me yours,' and to say 'husband' at the first word, why, how very dull! It would be to start romance where others end.[25]
This reaction against the short and prearranged engagements did not, nonetheless, result in anything except a momentary outlet, because as we have already seen in our discussion of the maidens of that age, the circumstances were such as to not allow the carrying on of so pleasant a ceremony. The love stories in books and illustrations, referred to by the above character, started precisely after the bans. The gallant code, on which she lingered so relishingly, had much to do with the extramarital liaisons of the time; her lengthy paragraph comes close to the essence and goals of the cortejo, heir of the courtly love traditions, and father of the Romantic styles.
The greatest incentive the cortejo offered Spanish women was choice. Those women, who had never been free to choose their husbands, made up for it by exercising their will in the choice of an escort. Several of the texts I have consulted denote the pride in this prerogative. Besides the more or less stable escort, the ladies had a reserve of other followers who frequented their homes, and who were always on the lookout for new developments in that relationship.
As soon as any lady marries, she is teased by numerous competitors for her distinguished favor, until she is fixed in her choice. The unsuccessful candidates either retire, or submit to become, in the future, what may be called 'cortejos of the brazier,' without any pretensions beyond that of sitting around the embers to warm themselves in winter.[26]
The homelike character of these gallant relationships was noteworthy. Love was incubating, like boredom, next to the warmth
of the brazier. Those "reserve escorts," attentive visitors, regular onlookers of other people's contentment may have appeared satisfied with their inert contemplation. They probably ruminated their rejection in the comfort of the brazier, while feeding their hopes with dreams of a break in that liaison. They seem like fictional characters invented to illustrate the apathy and resignation which had characterized Spaniards from the time of the crumbling of the imperial dream. The term "brazier escort," makes one think about the effects of the torpidity instilled by that very Spanish method of heating.
The use of the brazier is another stimulant to laziness. Hands folded on one's knees, feet placed on the brazier's support, the idler sits for hours and hours dreaming away. The increasing warmth gets him into a torpor, very close to drunkenness and quite conducive to the weaving of the imagination.[27]
During the winter, by the brazier, surrounded by her friends, of whom one was her particular escort seated beside her, the familiar conversation of the aristocratic Spanish matron flowed. This conversation fostered the loyalty of her escort; she became accustomed to his whisperings and his constant presence, accepting the bonds and obligations of that relationship. If the gathering was enlivened by music and dancing, the lady would dance the first minuet with her beau, and the second with one of these "brazier escorts." But she had to mark, in attitude and expression, the rapture with which she danced the first time, and the disdain and distance with which she did the second dance. There was a variation of the contredance called the "figure of the deceit." Its description implies the "cold shoulder" treatment of the secondary beau.
In this figure, the lady must put on an adroit air, with her hands back or on her waist, the body slightly forward, and with a pen step . . . her eyes on her partner. . . . If he be her own beau, she will wink at him, or make him understand her attachment to him, by curtsying sweetly to him at the end of the figure. But if he is someone else's escort at the last beat, she will quickly turn her back on him, and will go to look for her beau.[28]
The silent presence of the aspiring beaux—referred to as "escorts to be," as if they had any chance of becoming one—was not irrelevant to the relationship of the lady and her cortejo. On the contrary,
it stimulated them. Neither forgot the existence of those challengers, who were always on the lookout; this was useful to the lady and dangerous for the escort.
In a text satirizing the assiduity of the escort for his lady, one finds the reason for his obstinate and unremitting siege.
But the cortejo will not abandon the field. He knows that among those aspiring to the position, there are some with expectations, and this keeps him on his toes.[29]
Further on in the same text, we find a narration of the suffering that might have beset an escort at one of those social gatherings, when his lady, annoyed with him for one reason or another, got it into her head to make him jealous with one of the reserve escorts, always ready to play the part. Faced with this situation, the rejected cortejo becomes so restless he can hardly control himself.
He says he had a headache, but it is not true. The two sexes both have their respective useful indispositions. . . . He sits down only to get up right away. He wants to say something, but his voice fails him. He can be a veritable wet blanket. Nonetheless, his pretended ailment is a pretext for his spleen. Far from being laughed at because of the ridiculous figure he is cutting, he deserves to be pitied. When he entered her home, the greatest harmony reigned between them, but he failed in his attention to her briefly. An unforeseen eclipse was to be noticed in the lady's sunny expression. She struck up a conversation, in the shadow of her fan, with that young officer who is playing a hand now. This gentleman aspires to substitute for the cortejo, and there you have the enigma deciphered.[30]
Spanish women, who had had to repress their will for so long, and probably because of having had to do so, were turning away from greater achievements and asserting their will by a proud show of power in the choice of a cortejo. This was a poor and puerile exercise of free will. With friends and relatives, they tirelessly discussed the pros and cons of that choice, as if it were really a fundamental question. Frequently in these decisions, financial motives had much weight. In another playlet by Ramón de la Cruz, Elvira, a woman of the world, advises a young matron in the following terms.
My dear, you have to be very careful in this delicate matter of the choice of a cortejo. Do not be contented with good looks. You have to think of what is more convenient first. The rest is easy to come by.
She convinces her that, given her precarious economic state, she had better think of an extramarital relationship in terms of an escort
who would pad the husband's scarce income. An escort inclined to buy her ribbons, flowers, tulle and everything else in that line; someone who would keep her company in the house and out, without being too overpowering, and yet well off.[31]
We are far from passionate love. The search for the tension and obstacles of the amorous relationship had given way to the meddling coercion of friends and relatives and the concern with the financial aspect, so typical of that age. Finance and the laws of society were quickly removing from the love play the lure and the enchantment it held initially. By enforcing the rules of the game, they placed it within the limits of the humdrum and of propriety. But in Spain, besides the economic reasons, there were other specific conditions that helped to give the cortejo that particular rigidity, that show of sanctioned formality which attracted the attention of many a traveler at the end of the century.
6—
The Escort and Religion
If love, institutionalized and curbed, tended to evaporate, it is evident that eighteenth-century gallantry, in spite of its initial idea of interrupting the routine and widening the matrimonial scope, never reached such objectives. One has just to look at the rigid code—as routine as the matrimonial equivalent—which shaped such relationships to realize how it suffocated love and deprived it of all depth. Such codes, though common to love manifestations all over eighteenth-century Europe, adopted in Spain some national touches of conventionality.
I believe that the main determinant of these peculiarities was the concept Spanish women had of religion. Some travelers were surprised that the tenets of the cortejo had not impeded women from carrying on their religious duties, and that they succeeded in reconciling the ostentation of virtue—so precarious in these circumstances—with those extramarital relations. One of these travelers told us that Spanish women
reconcile their inconsistency in morals with the strict observance of religious duties. In many countries these excesses succeed one another alternately. In Spain they are inseparable among men as well as women. In this association of the most incomprehensible things, the object seems to be not to prevent scandal or to change their conduct, but to make a kind of compensation for their faults. . . . I have known many women, abandoned to an attachment which their duty should forbid, surrounded by relics and scapulars, who bind themselves by the most insignificant vows, and fulfill them scrupulously.[1]
This is a very sharp commentary, especially its closing sentence. Spanish women felt the need to be protected by some sort of "formality," and it did not matter which. They did not want to lose contact with widely accepted customs and principles; they would have found themselves on slippery ground. The more their behavior
deviated from the norm, the more they tended to establish—in an intuitive and superstitious way—that "kind of compromise between errors and merits" which consisted of combining the acceptance of any novelty with the observance of some basic traditions. From this unstable union there sprang a rather peculiar interpretation of the love customs of that era. For instance, what is often mentioned is the seriousness with which women played that game. It seems that their incapacity for independence and their submissiveness made them redouble—as in expiation for launching themselves onto new ground—the ties of matrimony by making the bonds of the cortejo even more sacred and exclusive than those of marriage. This attitude reverberated in the opinions people had about relationships which they approved, seeing them endowed by gravely traditional modes. Laborde informed us that:
Liaisons in Spain last a long time, and they assume right away a tone of authenticity and seriousness. When two lovers quarrel, relatives and friends try to reconcile them. Everybody is interested in the outcome. It seems that this new bond they have seen forming is a contract in which they have acted as witnesses, and they want to maintain it more than the marriage, in which they had no say. Thus, if a man does not behave properly with his lady friend, if he is unfaithful to her, or makes her unhappy, he will not very easily be accepted by another. The same happens to the ladies.[2]
Bourgoing also remarked on how constant Spanish women were in their passions; attachments tended to last beyond a normal period of time. He added that he had seen many a love die of old age among Spaniards. He ascribed it to a wrongly interpreted religious scruple.
The conscience of a Spanish woman, though complacent enough to permit one choice (at which her duty murmurs), would it not be alarmed at a succession of infidelities? Does she find for the first an excuse in her frailty, and in the irresistible vow of her heart that draws her to the only object which nature designed for her? Or does she conceive in succeeding attachments so that the sin appears again in all its deformity?[3]
The same writer, in another paragraph, observed the grave, taciturn and even sinister tone of these amours in Spain, in comparison with the frivolous and banal qualities they had in other countries. This
is what he had to say about the Spanish woman who waits for her turn in the choice of an escort.
But if the coldness of her behavior does not prevent you from paying your addresses to her, she is as decided and mortifying in her disdain as she is seducing when she permits you to hope. In this last case she does not suffer you to be long in suspense, and perseverance is followed by happiness.
Perseverance is, without doubt, pleasure for a Spanish woman, but it is at the same time a rigorous and slavish duty. Love, even when crowned with success, requires that you belong to her alone. The man who is enlisted under her banners must sacrifice to her all his affections, all his desires, and all his time. He is condemned not to languor, but to idleness. Those happy mortals whom Spanish women deign to subdue, and are named cortejos, are less disinterested, but not less assiduous than the Italian cicisbeo. They must be ready to prove their devotion every hour of the day, to accompany their fair one to the promenade, to the theater, and even to the confessional. Tempests, however, disturb the serenity of such a union; the slightest incident produces alarm, and a transient wavering is punished like infidelity. It may be said that in Spain jealousy has fled from Hymen to take refuge in the bosom of love, and that it belongs more particularly to that sex which seems rather to inspire than to experience it.
In short, the bonds of a handsome Spanish woman are less pleasant to support than difficult to avoid.[4]
Aside from the fact that this text shows a certain romantic perception of love as a fatal, tragic and irreversible feeling, it also reveals, in my opinion, the inability of Spanish women to let themselves go. Pleasure, though exalted in some currents of eighteenth-century thought, was still considered something intrinsically sinful in Spain, something one had to hide and disguise with merit, sacrifice and duty. This concept was reflected in women's deportment for a long time, and even added a certain attraction. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an illustrious lady traveler commented with fascination:
there can be noticed a certain voluptuousness, if I may say so, in Spanish ladies of good taste, and one has to renounce to imitate them, as this grace is a gift of nature which defies imitation.[5]
The women cloistered in this voluptuous decency had not accustomed themselves openly to pleasure nor to the acquiescence that
a certain minority group in the society was showing towards it. It was a particular sort of acquiescence: what was considered benignly was not so much the pleasure as the faithfulness, the sacrifice, the renunciation of other pleasures—in short, what the pleasure could carry in it of expiation. For instance, the sadness caused by the absence of the cortejo, and the delving into this feeling of emptiness, was thought of as dignified. Even such independent ladies as the Duchess of Alba, quite emancipated for the time and place in which she lived, ostensibly renounced all social events in the absence of the escort she had at a given time. This lady secluded herself during the long absence of a cortejo who had been exiled for having taken part in a duel: nobody saw her in the promenades or gatherings, or the theater. The writer who gave us this news added that she was praised for such meritorious fidelity.[6]
It was considered bad taste to allude to the pleasurable aspects of those love affairs. Nevertheless, once in a while an anonymous blow was dealt to such hypocrisy, in an attempt to tear the veil of mystery.
Talking in plain language, your love as I see it is nothing but 'doing as you please.' What inclines human passion to beauty is carnal appetite. It is desire we know so well. And thus, love is nothing but an expressed desire for possession.[7]
But to mention "urge," "appetite," or "desire" meant to trespass upon some conventions. They were allusions in bad taste, vulgarities, risqué phrases, quite shocking to the ear. Pleasure and desire were still considered sinful, and the compromises one had to resort to silence them gave those love affairs that peculiar, ambivalent tone that constituted their essence.
Even among the elite, who must have been aware of what the cortejo was disguising, the dominant tone was that of keeping the appearance of modesty. Townsend remarked that even when Spanish husbands had ceased to be jealous, albeit aware of their wives' amorous inclinations in social gatherings,
in the conduct of many ladies, whether it proceeded from the remnants of delicacy, from a sense of propriety, or from fear, you may observe caution, circumspection, and reserve when their husbands are in sight.[8]
There were definitely residues of the "forbidden" in pleasure. Independence from such repressions and fears was being achieved, but
in a tortuous and subterranean way, which was not transforming the surface. That is why the conventional manifestations of the love affairs took so long to lose that mark of severity and reserve. The fear of pleasure and the tendency to consider it forbidden, were deeply rooted in Spanish women, coloring with a virtuous appearance even the most advanced fads.
For centuries, the female desire to please had created a particularly aggressive struggle between two irreconcilable poles: the desire to be considered virtuous on one hand and, on the other, attractive. A sixteenth-century writer observed:
Regardless of how sensible and patient a woman can be, there are two things she will not tolerate patiently, and that is to be thought bad or homely.[9]
Beauty incited love; virtue, respect. Men elevated beautiful women and made them the objects of their love. They desired and idolized them, metaphorically identifying them with stars, flowers and jewels, according to the rhetoric of the times. Love sprang forth in the gallant at the first fleeting vision of the fair lady, even before any word had been exchanged, even before he had the opportunity of testing her virtue and finding out if she were also worthy of his respect. Lope de Vega had one of this gallants say:
Let it not be said that much time is needed to love. Love that strikes has to be sudden. Love that starts tepidly and gains value by getting to know the person can hardly be called love. It is rather the habit of being with a certain person.[10]
There was the root of the contradiction: passionate love, sung of so alluringly by the poets, that sudden flame at the mere sight of a beauty, simply did not go with what was being preached as meritorious and virtuous, that is, with getting accustomed to someone, a taste acquired through tension, discipline and sacrifice. Those simultaneous beacons of virtue and beauty which traditionally had beckoned to Spanish women had not yet harmonized in the mind of the eighteenth-century woman. They were still vitally opposed; if a woman was guided by one, she betrayed the other. The desire to make them converge was leading women down a dead-end street. It is absurd to think it was possible to shed a tradition which, since the time of the Song of Songs , had insisted on beauty as the essence of womanhood, while stressing the perdition to which that beauty
led. For those misguided and exasperated women there was no logical way out but to compromise with hypocrisy by feigning modesty. For centuries, they had retreated to the church, feeling protected from all suspicion in the shadow of its naves, or lost in the crowds congregated in the splendor of the liturgical solemnities. In that area—the only one they had access to—they concentrated all their astuteness and yearning for freedom, nourished by years and years of enclosure. Very soon, though, it was noticed that frequent churchgoing was a pretext for getting out of the house more often, a fact that alerted the preachers against too great a devotion. A sixteenth-century preacher warned:
When you start noticing that your wife frequently repeats the Stations of the Cross, becomes very devout and adopts a saintly air, lock the door on her, and if this is not enough, break her leg if she is young, because from her house she will go straight to Heaven without looking for a dubious saintliness.[11]
But on no woman's face, or on very few, was the church door shut, regardless of how far it went in sheltering complicities and dangers to the soul.
The connection between gallantry and religious festivities, quite profuse in Spain, was so obvious in the eighteenth century as to be shameful on some occasions.
Holy week is a real carnival for the women. Under the guise of religion, emotions and coquetry have free play. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are the days in which everybody goes out on foot, on horseback, or in litters . . . old liaisons are broken and new ones formed. A woman bored with her lover does not need any pretext but to say she has been touched by confession. She can dismiss him without his feeling insulted. Others temporarily interrupt the flirtation during this period of penitence and absolution, to pick it up shortly after. Occasions to form a new liaison abound on the streets, in the processions, and above all, by following or accompanying a woman from church to church.[12]
This same author informed us that the most intimate tête-à-tête between a lady and her escort was automatically interrupted for a few instants, when in the street the tinkle of a bell indicated that the viaticum was being taken to a dying person. Nobody was exempted from the obligation of going to the balcony with a lit candle. The author told of how surprised he was when during a theater performance, actors and public all knelt together upon hear-
ing the mournful bell. Even the actor who played the part of the devil knelt, he being the first one to do so in all devotion.[13]
As for the churches, they had become something like theaters; the services there functioned like any social event. A contemporary Spanish writer commented:
What I cannot help being surprised at is the prodigious memories women have. When returning from church, they give detailed accounts of the accessories of about two hundred people. Considering the variety of clothes, I cannot fathom how it is possible in that half-hour spent in the church to imprint on one's mind all those images, besides noticing all the persons who come in, who accompanies who, if they talked to each other, if they looked at each other, and so forth.[14]
The rites and devotions for which they had come were performed absentmindedly, missing the meaning altogether.
These prayers and spiritual exercises which seem inspired by devotion do not edify or discipline the spirit, as they are mere parroting. This is the way many a woman prays—paying lip service . . . can it be said that a woman who has her cortejo by her side prays with humility and devotion?[15]
Many old-fashioned moralists and preachers were appalled at the mixing of the gallant and religious duties, and they harshly chided the women who could light a candle to God and the devil at the same time.
They give themselves half to God and half to the world . . . these perpetual churchgoers. What would you say if you saw them humble and serious in the confessional, gaining credits with their confessors, going from altar to altar, kissing the saints' feet, sighing all morning and shedding big tears in the temple of God, and then at home when they shut themselves in front of the mirror and while their time away until dinner in the hands of a coiffeur?[16]
The general tone of this type of commentary, to be found in countless texts, is the mere exposition of reproved actions. They never made an honest attempt to investigate the reasons for that shallowness. When we find an attempt to explain it, it is limited to considering the devil's influence on woman's frailty. Thus, for some of these preachers of morality—always inclined to find a scapegoat to exempt them from delving deeper into the matter—the cortejo
became identified with the essence of the diabolic. It also served as a target for their diatribes. The cortejo's early morning presence in the lady's house even impeded her from reciting her prayers.
I wish to God that after a night's sleep you ladies at least had the time to make the sign of the Cross, but the trouble is, your escort makes it impossible for you to do that. Seated there, he starts talking with familiarity about the dreams you had, asking you if he had the good fortune of being among those dream images. . . . If you slept well or not, what was the cause, what was wrong, did you have any fever? He begs you for your arm to take your pulse, as if he knew anything about it. Though, since he is Satan's emissary, one can believe he does.[17]
But the curious thing is that these ladies not only kept up with their superficial religious duties—kneeling when the viaticum was being taken to a moribund person, wearing a scapular, doing novenas—but they went to confession frequently. This should have made it impossible for them to carry on those gallant ways with a clear conscience.
We all know that the majority of the ladies of the high, middle, and low aristocracy that practice the custom have spiritual directors and very learned confessors to guide them. How is it, then, that they permit them to carry on with it, rather than discourage them from it?[18]
It was very strange. Townsend concluded that the majority of those "platonic" relationships were adulterous, according to what he had observed. He was very intrigued at the thought of the problems of conscience that that state of affairs would create in women at the time of confession.[19] But he later offered information which reveals that religiosity was not incompatible with adherence to fashionable trends, nor with the responsibility of directing the ladies' consciences. Moreover, the cortejos, especially in some provincial towns, were the canons of the cathedrals.[20]
This must have been known by the old straitlaced confessors and preachers, whose horizons were widening a bit. After all, it must have been obvious to them that the breakdown of traditional mores—which had been progressing since the beginning of the century—was also affecting a sector of the clergy, ready not only to permit the cortejo, but also to contribute with their example to its propagation. The most illustrious and austere preacher of the
period, Father Pedro de Calatayud, was fully aware of the doubleedged knife entailed in
conversing frequently with the repentant, virtuous women, even with the idea of advising them.
His opinion was that:
Regardless of how virtuous the intentions were, they usually degenerated into sensual love and physical attraction.[21]
To this we may add that not always were those women virtuous, and if they asked for advice and absolution it had to do with rather shady affairs. Things became very complicated indeed when we consider that an honest-minded confessor was not at all that common any more, nor was the husband's moral collaboration.
I do not wish to analyze here the gradual influence of the Enlightenment on the Spanish clergy, but it seems evident that from the beginning of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain, the introduction of foreign elements in the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy brought about some revolutionary changes. The habitual attendance of priests, confessors and abbés at the ladies' gatherings and social events had been documented since 1730.[22] It is likely that this practice made its way from Italy, where it was quite common. The Italian abbé, worldly, gossipy, lively, and somewhat intriguing, was a familiar figure in the second half of the century. The appearance of this type in Spain probably coincides with the arrival of the abbé Julio Alberoni[23] on the political scene. Torres Villarroel, a contemporary writer who had few qualms about calling things by their right name, criticized those abbés who
talk about Genoa, Milan, Naples and Leghorn, gather listeners around in the Puerta del Sol, and along with other individuals of their kind, govern the world, and enjoy among the credulous the fame of being the Terences and Ciceros of our day.
But he also explained why it is not advisable to contradict them.
There are other reasons for which it is better to cover up, and it is that the monarchs of our times are foreigners. The number of French and Italian courtiers has been such . . . as to induce the Spanish clergy to imitate them.[24]
In many writings of the time, the behavior of these frivolous abbés is ridiculed. They are sketched as indispensable ornaments of social gatherings, customary dinner guests at the nobility's table, talebearers of all sorts of gossip and news, always on the move, always rushing somewhere, so much so as to seem ubiquitous.
Each of them pays some fifteen visits every morning without fail, without counting the extra eight or so he usually adds to the regular ones. Moreover, they make the rounds of Madrid at least three times a day. If you are going to the boulevard of the Prado, there they are; if from there you go to the Puerta del Sol, there you have them again. Are you going by the new Palace? You'll find them again. You go for a walk and return at the umpteenth hour? They will be there without fail. Are you going to the Retiro Park? There you will also find them. To the arena? To the theater after, or to a café? The very first thing you will see will be them.[25]
It seems that the overwhelming interest of these individuals, considered by many as calamitous to society as the dandies, was to enter into the good graces of ladies of importance, who were considered efficient social intermediaries. There was no new item of fashion that escaped them, nor witticism unspoken, in their striving to reach those ends. Extroverted, presumptuous and boastful,
they go breezily by, as neat and as spruced up as a swain might be. They chatter away in your presence, and when walking on the street, they always carry their heads high, looking to one side and the other like weather vanes.[26]
As for their task of guiding the consciences of the ladies whose social affairs they were longing to frequent—one can deduce, given the circumstances, that not much could be expected, either from their authority or their sense of honor. What had priority in their minds was how to thrive socially. Their social success was conditioned, as we have said, by the degree of success with the repentant ladies, and by becoming
theologians who, having sessions with your Graces, prove themselves to have a conscience more ample than their cassocks, so much so that they seem to serve the devil more than God.[27]
They were prepared to carry out errands so undignified that no dandy, however enslaved by his lady, would have consented to do
the same. Service to the ladies was such an absorbing task, that it gradually superseded their religious duties.
What service do they render God in their ministry? None at all, while they do render you innumerable ones: they visit you and amuse you according to your whims. If you decide to go for a coach ride, they accompany you. If you go for a walk, they give you their arm. If you are melancholy they console you. If in doubt, they advise you, but their giddy brains are not suitable for that. Finally, they serve you as walking sticks, servants, chambermaids, and everything else that may occur to you.
As for what God requires of them, there would be much to say, but I will say it in few words: their only way of revering God in church, if they enter it at all, is to kneel on one knee, while the honors they pay you are performed gravely. The bowing they do in your presence is so deep and agile that they seem to have hinges in their spines. Their fingertips are worn out from so much hand kissing. They can be confused with the most passionate swains. The hall floors are worn out from their continuous shuffling in your presence. The frankincense they owe God is transformed into scented waters and into exquisite tobaccos which they, with the utmost elegance and submission, offer you in silver and gold snuffboxes, on the brim of their hats.[28]
Apparently these clergymen paid willing homage to the ladies. Needless to say, quite a few of those ladies readily took advantage of that kind of accommodating servant. The priests' behavior verged on the gallant—and some did not make any bones about it—yet, they imparted a certain prestige and a kind of guarantee as mediators with the divinity, whose vows they had not openly abjured. Both aspects were amenable to make of them the favorite and irreplaceable elements in the salons. Often they entered the family circle in the role of music, grammar or Latin teachers for the children. This contributed to the ladies' emphasizing the class difference, and to the abuse of their superior position, to make the clergymen something close to footmen.
Many such ladies host poor priests in their homes, either as tutors to their children or as stewards. They have no qualms about employing them in the lowliest services. But this is nothing, if, for the meager salary they pay them, they would not also demand of them to be footmen. I know of some who are obliged to help their ladies in getting dressed and doing the work of a chambermaid.[29]
Other contemporary witnesses told us that many ladies were accompanied to church by a permanent page, a student in theology.
The ladies are in the habit of going to church every day, preceded by their page, who accompanies them everywhere. This page is a cleric who has not yet taken the sacred orders. In the meantime, he lends his services in private homes as a faithful servant. It is in very good taste for a lady to have one, and there is no lady of importance who would be seen without her theology student.[30]
The modest family background of the majority of the clergy was often the reason for their corruptibility. The predominant penchant for luxury—a phenomenon that dealt a fatal blow to many a fortune and to the traditional values of Spanish society—had also contaminated many priests-to-be. Very often these clergymen in the making came from poor provincial families, and embarked on an ecclesiastical career to escape the drudgery of a mediocre background.
In a text from the beginning of the century, two types of clergymen are defined. The ones from well-to-do families were
sons of wealthy men and noblemen, who had means of their own; if they had wanted to ascend ecclesiastical hierarchy, they could have inherited long-standing chaplaincies because of their lineage. They could have entered the noblemen's colleges . . . instead they came to serve God and honor religion.
The members of the other group
did not want to have a trade or be workers like their fathers. They wanted to thrive on something better. Not to serve religion but to use it for their own good. . . . Some of these are, chichisveos, which they never could have been in secular life . . . they pay visits to ladies who they never could have visited without the clerical robes.[31]
What made the mission of clerics in the homes of important ladies untrustworthy was that, far from being older men, they were young and good-looking. The ladies who they attended, advised and consoled were not decrepit either.
The white haired, learned and eloquent clergymen are not admitted, never mind, to their parlors, not even to the kitchen.[32]
The corruption of the clergy and their unruly yearnings for material well-being were not phenomena exclusive to Madrid. The practices were at times more marked in provincial capitals. There are extant verses attributed to an unknown lady from Granada, in which the luxury and wastefulness of the clergy, with the connivance of the archbishop of that city, were harshly upbraided.
It is all right for the clergy in this town to play cards and frequent the theater and the bullfights with the greatest ease, devoid of decorum and qualms of conscience. His Excellency keeps silent.
It is all right for the cleric, with no means but what he gets from the masses, to be dressed like a monkey, in taffeta and other such fabric, and enter the church for public shame and irreverence. His Excellency keeps silent.
It is all right for the cleric to curl his hair and to attract attention, and wear pointed patent leather pumps 'à la mode,' and to appear thus in front of the incarnation, provoking divine wrath. His Excellency keeps silent.
It is all right for clergymen to go out at night and promenade side by side with their sheep, bubbling over with giddiness. It is quite all right for them to preach incontinence in actions and desires. His Excellency keeps silent.
It is all right for the dandied clergy to live in connubial harmony—as everyone knows—with wantons, and to spend the offerings in licentiousness. To all this His Excellency says nothing.
But let a woman wear a bodice or a shift; let her wear tassels on her dress; let her dress her hair and sway her body with nonchalance. His Excellency will grumble.[33]
The circulation of this manuscript, now in the National Archive, was forbidden, and the extant copies were seized in the Inquisition and deemed outrageous to the Archbishop and the clergy of Granada. To detract from the importance of its content, it was qualified as
verse of which one could not make head nor tail of, some edict about suitable clothes to wear in church.[34]
The seizure of these verses, which had more to them than the Holy Office wanted to admit, brings to mind the question of the attitude of the Inquisition toward the cortejo.
Often, in the process of this study, I was mystified by the hidden motives that hampered a thorough investigation of this apparently insignificant affair of the cortejo. The obstacle that impeded my investigations of the matter spurred me on, in an attempt to find out what was behind that vagueness and those disguises.
The cortejo appears, in the eyes of the researcher, to have an ambivalent character; this might have been detected by the reader. The numerous texts and sermons that contain reference to it may make us suspect that it was an open topic of conversation. But the reticence noticeable in many of them—along with other facts I have mentioned—seem to denote that they were commentaries uttered "under cover," for and by a few, and that the theme was absolutely forbidden. In some anonymous verse of the time, one finds this comment on the cortejo:
The doctrine to which everyone must submit is understanding the trick of amorous abandon. If one does not make a fuss about it, one can do whatever one wants.[35]
Not to make a fuss, to talk about it lip to ear, secretly, regardless of how doubtful its secrecy could be, was the rule. The words were whispered, in asides, in a subdued tone, in the shadow of the fans. This is how a friend advised a man, whose madrigal has just been rejected by a lady.
She sent you to . . . the devil? Don't for a minute think she did not like what you said. . . . But rather the way you said it. You spelled out your verse clearly, for everyone to hear. What you needed was the secrecy and mystery which are the soul and essence of these things.[36]
Though this seems to contradict the consent and approval that some sectors of the society granted the cortejo, we must look beyond this contradiction. It was a consent granted secrecy, within what would never come to light. It is this ambiguous attitude which makes the practice a slippery and trying subject for study. The tergiversations embarked on in the attempt to make plausible such contradictions resulted in something hybrid and disconcerting, projected in the acceptance of the cortejo. Even among the high nobility elite group where everyone must have known what the cortejo covered up, appearances were kept up almost without exception. When I discussed Cadalso's confinement to Saragossa in 1768, I
stressed that the very noblemen who were participants in the secret wanted to keep it thus.[37]
The cortejo was, after all, a decent-sounding term which, handled with care and ability, could appear inoffensive. But one also knew the painful consequences of reading between the lines from which emerged, as from a deep well, the terrible word polygamia , which was severely punished. Let's hear how the Inquisition humiliated the women who did not protect themselves with ambiguous words. In January 1748,
Antonia García, born and residing in Madrid, was brought to trial by the Inquisition with the infamous insignia of 'polygamia.' She was read the sentence. She confessed her guilt and recanted her error (auto de fe). She was absolved on cautionary terms and condemned to be paraded in shame through the most frequented streets. She was to be exiled from Madrid, site of the court of his Majesty, and from the Royal site of Saint Ildephonse, for eight years, and at a distance of eight leagues around.[38]
Of course, the word polygamia would never had been uttered by a dandy or his lady; they would have been shocked by it. The Marquis of Valdeflores has a dandy say the following words:
Our only obligation is to behave as if we were pleased when we see that the war waged against the passion which we enjoy in secret, and discredit in public, is victorious.[39]
But the crux of the matter was that the dandies and the ladies were not the only ones who wanted to cloud the issue: the majority of the pamphlets in which the cortejo was mentioned did not circulate freely, or were seized almost immediately. I have been able to verify this fully, because of the difficulties I had to overcome to find some of these testimonials. It was not in the least fitting for the Inquisition to stir up the question of the cortejo, to condemn it or to condone it. It went to the opposite extreme: smothering any sort of commentary on it.
From the beginning of the mode, that is to say, when it was still referred to as the chichisveo, one mentioned and passed judgment on it very cautiously. In a censure of 1738 of the book Catholic Protest Against the Custom of the Chichisveo , one can read the following:
Though someone may object that this pamphlet is directed to prove the malice of this kind of relationship, it is not all that well laid out as to
assure us of its good effects. It will be safer for our theologians and preachers to take the matter in their own hands as it may arise.[40]
The theologians and preachers' diligence in this matter was, as it has been said, to smother all comment on it, favorable or otherwise. It was a subject one had better not talk about, but rather leave to the theologians' higher conventicles, where they would hold their secret vote on it.
This intention appears explicit in the censure of an anonymous short work forbidden in Granada in 1787. Though I have not been able to lay my hands on it, I know its title, included in the prohibition: True and useful doctrine to be carefully observed by the ladies and the gentlemen who have acquired the very honorable title of 'cortejo .' Apparently it was a satire in verse attacking the fashion of the escort. In spite of this, the censors were of the opinion that
though in the whole work nothing censurable is to be found, it has to be considered that this little book may get into the hands of the ignorant populace who, carried away by the pleasant reading and the poetry, will pay attention only to its literal meaning . . . they will put into practice what the book says about the true and fine ways to be a cortejo.[41]
The pamphlet Elements of the cortejo for lady beginners , published in Madrid in 1763 by Cayetano Sixto García, was subjected to even greater tribulation. In spite of its having been licensed for publication, it was withdrawn almost immediately; but in 1764 clandestine copies without the name of the author were circulating.
The nobleman José Luis Velázquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, assiduous attendant of the "Gathering of Good Taste" organized by the Countess of Lemos,[42] included this writing, which was rare and difficult to come by, in his Collection of papers on the cortejo . He was daring enough to publish it, probably at his own expense, under the pseudonym of Liberio Veranio. In this slight volume, which I had the good fortune to find after a long search,[43] there does not appear the usual license of the Council of Castile. What appears in its stead is a defiant self-permit
with the license the author has granted himself to express with unthought-of elegance the truths of the day.[44]
The whole tone of this interesting pamphlet, which has provided me with much information (including Sixto García's substantial
chapter, which had just been withdrawn from circulation at that time), was an open defiance of censorship.
I am writing about the escort because everybody is escorting. I am writing on it because I am over thirty and I have not escorted yet. I am writing about it because I live in an age in which there is nothing worthier to write about. I am writing to be read by the distinguished majority of the country. . . . and to exercise the fastidiousness of hypocrisy. . . . I am writing because I want to write.[45]
I do not know whether it was for this reason or another that this daring eighteenth-century gentleman was apprehended two years later, in 1776, in the house of the Marchioness of the Vega de Santa Maria, where he was staying. He was taken to Alhucema,[*] from which he was released six years later, in his fifties, to die immediately after.[46]
As for Cayetano Sixto García, he was living in Paris in utter poverty in 1817.[47] It is not unlikely that this wretched end was connected to his authorship of a satirical pamphlet on the cortejo that he had allowed to circulate anonymously, even in Spanish America. In 1770, the Mexican Inquisition sent a copy to the Holy Office of Madrid, which issued a definitive prohibition. From it one gathers that the censors did not understand, or did not wish to understand, that the work ridiculed the banality and silliness of the gallant customs of the time, as anyone reading the Collection of Various Writings of the Cortejo of Valdeflores can see. Sixto García's purpose is so obvious and unequivocal that one cannot help but wonder at the obtuseness, or deliberate malice, of the censors Larrea and Vergara in 1777 when they held the book to be
directed to spur on the diabolical invention of the scandalous, pernicious and harmful cortejo . . . so abundant in evil effects, as daily experience suggests. Its maxims do no more than to show the way to a burning fire in which somebody is bound to perish.
They added that
one cannot decry enough the ravages of a permissiveness which, spreading like fire through Christendom, has in a short time undone, ruined, and obliterated shyness, modesty and reserve. . . . Is not the mode, its practice and libertine ways which create such a disorder in so many,
[*] Alhucema: the penitentiary situated on one of the Alhucemas islands.
enough? No, it must also have printed on paper, for greater success, its licentious rules . . . an impure fire kindling fires . . . and a heinous vice, depicted as a simple ceremony and entertainment for noblemen.[48]
By taunting, however awkwardly, the nonsense and trivialities with which the cortejos were busying themselves, by talking of their language, games, and fashions and the puerile motives of their fights and peacemaking, Sixto García was trying to undermine such flimsy foundations. He was attempting to clarify the phenomenon, and to detract from it the importance with which the condemning rhetorics of the censors invested it, in their blind urgency to bury that thorny subject. It was the usual technique: in order to avoid any logical analysis of the evil, the censors ranted and raved when confronted by it, and at the same time refused to find the roots of the problem, thus allowing it to grow in the dark and in secrecy, in the shadows cast by such an attitude.
A moralist of the old school, talking about those games and pastimes of the gatherings and visits, said:
What happens is what happens to pots; the more they are covered, the more they boil.[49]
That's what was happening to the covered-up pot of the cortejo: it was boiling over. The seizure of these few books, which might have brought to the fore the inconsistencies and banality of that phenomenon made of it an intricate issue. One did not really know what it was, so it was blown up through insipid games, word play, and parlor verse, whispered in the ear privately among a few.
As the Marquis of Valdeflores clamored, rebelling against that pernicious censure:
Cannot what is done secretly in verse by some ten or twelve people in the presence of a certain number of idlers be done in prose by a decent man in front of everybody?[50]
No, it could not.
7—
The Conventional Language of the Cortejo
The chichisveo, as mentioned before,[1] revealed by its very etymology a conversational origin. This connotation was inherited by the cortejo; it was attacked by moralists precisely for its character of improper conversation; it gave occasion for reprehensible confidentiality. For instance, the complete title of a book from which I have quoted in this work is a case in point. It is the work of the clergyman Gabriel Quijano, The Evil of Social Gatherings and Events: Excesses and Harm of Conversation, Otherwise Called Cortejo . The main argument wielded by one of the interlocutors of this dialogue, Proba, against the accusation of immorality, consists of reminding the other, Gil, that nothing reproachable was to be found in the behavior of a lady conversing with her escort; Gil tries to prove to her the fickleness and vapidity of such conversations.
A glance at the Dictionary of the Escort , included in the Marquis de Valdeflores's booklet, gives us an idea of such superficiality. It is easy to understand how the rigid conventionality of the cortejo froze all avenues to invenriveness, be it by means of new words or unusual situations, even if limited to the erotic.
One cannot help noticing an echo of military, hunting or gambling terms in this dictionary, expressions like "cut out," "fortress besieged," "hunting expedition," "to review troops," and "to be on guard." In none of them can one detect a bit of attention toward the woman as an object worthy of love and homage. Rather, she is an object of barter, money won in gambling, or prey in a hunt: a fortress to be won, a trophy, a pretext to boast of one's manly skill.
The amorous language trickling through the monotonous incidences of this code was just as conventional and routine. The ladies did not even have to learn its vocabulary. It was enough to use a
sign language, certain facial expressions, a certain way of dressing one's hair, to express a state of mind; to wave the fan in one way or the other, to learn to perfection the variations of the contredance, to pencil on some beauty spots which could appear on any part of those expressionless faces, like tamed fleas.
The beauty spots on the left temple may signify that the fortress is occupied; on the right temple, that she is on the point of breaking up with the current escort and ready to choose another; and the absence of the beauty spots on either temple may mean that the place is vacant. The tiny patches, skillfully distributed throughout the face, may denote a momentary state of mind of the lady. For instance, placed near the right eye, they command the cortejo not to look so attentively at someone; placed in the vicinity of the left eye, that he can look at whomever he wishes. A spot near the right-hand corner of the mouth should signal to him not to talk to such and such a person; near the left-hand corner will tell the escort that he had been very amusing and cute.[2]
This text shows the emptiness of the individuals participating in those rites, which were to be equally adequate for any amorous situation. With that rigidity, love lost all possibilities for playfulness, freedom and fancy. The preestablished conventions not only substituted for amorous language, but also for love situations and states of mind. The language which could have vivified those relationships and added something new to them became atrophied, losing its purpose of communication and understanding. The shallowness and triteness was not limited to the speech of the ladies. The men also relied on exterior objects to communicate for them, just as the women relied on their hairdos. The watch charms and other trinkets attached to the gentlemen's watch chains enclosed coded messages, as if the lack of imagination had to disguise itself behind this external code of conventions, which pretended to settle everything.
There is hardly any charm that does not enclose its mystery; but to understand it, one has to be initiated into it. . . . Your Lordship, who is not up to it, will not see in the amulets which hang from the watch chain anything but a string of trinkets, more apt to entertain an infant or attract the attention of a young lad at a fair than to add a finishing touch to a gentleman's attire. But others, endowed with a keener eye, will see in those miniature watering cans, seals, keys, hooks, bird cages, etc.—though you see only the objects—a wide horizon; perhaps the whole life story of a dandy.[3]
This gives rise to a question insinuated in various points of this work. Is it possible that these relationships, initiated under such meager auspices, succeeded in enriching, however slightly, the spirit of those women, compensating them for the long seclusion and boredom they had been suffering? Did these liaisons actually offset matrimonial duties, affording the women some pleasure? The answer seems to be negative. Once the cortejo had correctly interpreted those coded signals, once he had gained a place by her side and satisfied his pride, there began a relentless and overwhelming duty: that of making conversation with his lady. But what could they converse about? If we look back to what we said about the vanity of the dandies who aspired to become cortejos, and the monotony of their functions, we shall understand that such chatter helped only the exceptional woman to escape the dullness, triviality and ignorance in which she was swamped.
An escort [commented the editor of the Pensador ] has to make conversation with you for some ten or twelve hours every day. He is, as a rule, an ignorant and unpolished man, and therefore he cannot talk to you about anything else except about your coiffure or the black of your beauty spots matching your eyelashes . . . or some such nonsense with which you pass the time, thus managing not to utter a single sensible word in an endless conversation.[4]
Needless to say, the amorous language of the previous centuries had no meatier content. Women had always been considered indistinct objects, identified with their beauty. Beyond their capabilities to make themselves desirable, women revealed very undefined personalities, reduced to differences in features and to proportions of the figure. They did demand proofs of appreciation and of love at face value, but as they were identified with their beauty or their virtue—the latter, of course, was not an erotic element—they could not tolerate any doubt about their charms. Few periods in history have sung such praise of feminine charms as did the Spanish Golden Age, to the point of provoking a sudden infatuation at the mere sight of beauty. The erotic dream of those women consisted of someone comparing their lips to coral, their complexion to alabaster, and their eyes to stars. They did not require any other guarantee of appreciation from the furtive lover who, obedient to the customary love rhetoric, was always ready to express stereotyped comparisons in prose and verse.
In Mateo Alemán we find a very apt description of the repressed state of excitement in which the maidens lived, yearning for someone to speak to them in that gallant language; its resonance awakened in them a perturbing sensuality.
The lustful ones try to get married for love. They make a show of themselves in church. They window watch in their homes, and at night they toss and turn in their beds waiting for someone who might pluck the guitar under their windows. They hear some couplets composed by Gerineldo for Urraca,[*] and they think they are for them. They may be as ugly as a crow, as graceless as a bear, sillier than a goose, homelier than a mole, but as they hear the song praising one more beauteous than Venus, on whom someone is piling up alabasters, carmine, turquoise, pearls, snow . . . they are like tinderboxes, which, when struck, kindle the fire that burns them.[5]
In what way had things changed? Their yearning for verbal homage to their beauty was being satisfied with a surfeit of praise during all hours of the day. The ladies thus were spurred on to invent new demands, and to intensify their beauty in order to be deserving of even more praise, unable to admit to themselves the fraud and emptiness of the entire game. The purchasing power which the times had offered individuals of some classes enabled the women to increase the acquisition of adornments to enhance their appearance. In no other epoch did fastidiousness reach such a degree as to identify women no longer even by their beauty, but rather by the luxurious accessories they wore. This phenomenon was common all over eighteenth-century Europe. Women had become their apparel and coiffures. One could hardly speak of human beauty. The value and splendor of the objects created to heighten that beauty obscured it, and finally supplanted it.
The quantity of necklaces, earrings, chokers and other preposterous trappings of this kind have confused the grace of the traits and features. The slender and elegant figure disappear under the enormous circumference of the gowns, back-buttoned coats and similar frippery. We can say that woman has disappeared and what we see in her place is the shocking extravagance of her adornments.[6]
Women, identified with their accessories, became objects. In fact, in some texts they are compared to mere objects, to paintings and furniture.
[*] Legendary characters in old Spanish ballads.
To reduce women to the fallible and short-lived condition of being beautiful is degrading, in that it deprives them of another more solid glory, by placing them at the level of paintings . . . of ornamental figures in a carriage or litter, or as decorative motifs in a parlor.[7]
Another had this to say.
A woman must have a very low idea of her worth if she sees herself as a simple object apt to satisfy our eyes, as a painted figure might, and deprives herself of her power.[8]
These comparisons are not exaggerated. The few data which these fashionable ladies left us of their identities, through the literary texts of the time, do not go beyond short-lived tantrums denoting their impatience and irateness—always provoked by questions related to their charm, and to their outrage when questioned. Individual traits, peculiar to one or another, were neutralized by those frenetic and futile efforts to achieve such an identity, by vying with one another with the same uniform weapon of physical beauty.
The eighteenth-century texts I have consulted in reference to this topic reveal, through the criticism of feminine satisfaction, that the latter justified itself only by the ostentation it made of itself. If there had not been so many promenades, theaters and social gatherings in which to show off the appearance so laboriously achieved, women would have felt empty, useless and relegated to the
sad and drab retirement chosen by those who cannot afford to rely on the beauty aids and the adornments that would enable them to appear in public.[9]
In other words, the business of being seen had entirely substituted for the interest in seeing, in participating in something.
Many a pleasing woman would rather appear like a beautiful robot, a marionette of mechanical movements, than to make use of her common sense.[10]
The desire to be seen, to exhibit oneself, to invest, somehow, the many hours spent in front of the dresser arranging curls, was what launched them on to the public places as "beautiful robots," and made them sit in open carriages like so many dolls.
Linked one to the other, like a row of shop windows (I mean the carriages), they make no movement other than slightly waving a fan,
or smiling faintly in answer to a courtesy. They are not prompted by anything except the desire to be seen and to form a pleasing garden scene. . . . This desire takes them from street to street, from visit to visit, from gathering to gathering like butterflies in a frenzy.[11]
That immoderate yearning to show off and to dress up to please others implied a fickleness which was seen as untypical of the Spanish race, a tendency that started to be termed "coquetry," a gallicism which the Terreros-Pando Dictionary of 1786 referred to as "quite common," and defined as follows:
A woman who enjoys conquering everybody's heart without ever reciprocating with her own. Thus she loves to be seen, followed, and courted more than anything else.[12]
But the term was not willingly accepted.
Fashion has imposed on us other words, such as 'coquette'. . . which Cervantes,[*] Argensola,[*] Saavedra,[*] León, Mariana[*] or Solis[*] would not understand.[13]
The word was not accepted as legitimate by some Spaniards.
You ladies are in the habit of putting on a certain air of capridousness, flippancy and giddiness; in short, of something the French call 'coquetry,' and which we, so far, have not named.[14]
The rejection of the word implies above all the rejection of those airs of fickleness which the acceptance of the word would have condoned.
The Marquis of Valdeflores, upon saying that his work seems to him worthy to be read by all the coquettes and fashionable ladies, corrected himself in an earnest note:
What's this in Spanish? Does the cortejo have to corrupt the language as well, as if it were not enough to corrupt customs?[15]
In a note by Nipho, there is a definition of the term which seems to be more exact.
[*] 'Cervantes (1547–1616); B. Argensola (1561–1631); L. Argensola (15591613); Saavedra y Fajardo (1584–1648); Mariana (? 1536–1624); Solís (1610–1686). These writers, with the author of Don Quixote towering among them, represent what some eighteenth-century writers considered to be the truly classical style of Spanish language, notwithstanding the great differences among these authors' styles.
Coquetry means the affectation of love, an immoderate desire to please, an amorous flattery and a fishing for compliments.[16]
Possibly in France, whence the word came, those efforts to please, to turn the heads of several men at once, were subtler. They perhaps had deeper roots and a longer tradition. In Spain they were truly very meager, and the means which a woman, unskilled in verbal debates, had at her disposal to attract attention and awaken interest, were rudimentary indeed.
They constantly tried out new outfits, movements, grimaces by which they aspired to become lovable. But that word "lovable," quite common in those days, seems to allude in some cases to the obligation men had to love a woman because she was elegant and expertly made up, rather than for any real qualities that would make her worthy of being loved. The show which they made of themselves situated women at the level of splendid but inanimate things, while at the same time it stifled their goal of eliciting love, of opening up ways of communication with another person, of making themselves "amiable." They felt assured that all that muchtalked-about "amiability" could come to them via the mirror, by the gestures rehearsed in front of it.
They all consult with the mirror for ways of giving their figure an amiable and jovial air. They will make good use of the fan by opening it and closing it incessantly, rubbing their lips with it, tickling it against the fingers according to the situation . . . letting it fall down to test the attention and responsiveness of the ones who serve them. One of their objects will be to paint themselves like the wheels of a carriage, to be so full of whims as not to be in the same humor tor more than fifteen minutes. . . . They will strive to drive their chambermaids out of their minds, not to pay visits or frequent the gatherings of people of a lesser status than their own, showing thus their pride and vanity, to adore their pets, to eat hardly at all, to faint easily and to have handy a list of ailments as one might an array of ribbons. . . . They will also make sure to lose their temper to test the love professed to them.[17]
This shows us clearly how women learned to wield the weapon of their frailty to tyrannize those who had always referred to them as the gentler sex, subjected to a dubious tutorship and a false idolatry. It is also true that just a few common, run-of-the-mill flatteries sufficed to win the favor of those "butterflies in a frenzy." But they, almost spitefully, enslaved the arrogant conquerors to their quick changes of temper, their demands, and their migraines.
Nowadays the gentler sex's favors are less dear. . . . Some trivial attentions, some insignificant details, and a servile imitation of their tastes on the pan of the beaux achieve the favor and appreciation of women. The latter, driven by us to a constant, continuous dissipation . . . have picked up a silly, childish and even depraved taste which grows with the intensity of the homage paid to them . . . they have become something like animated idols whose worshippers have copied all their gestures. One profusely burns the incense they themselves dispense.[18]
But to what point was it true that they themselves dispensed it? Would it not also be given out by men, by that generation of elegant idlers who mortgaged their freedom and abandoned their studies to serve the ladies who admitted them as cortejos, and bring themselves to the level of conversation those ladies liked?
What good does it do a man to pore over books all day long if in the evening he has to talk about fashionable hairdos, fans and laces?[19]
Those same young men who thought they had escaped the obligations of marriage and had enlisted under the banner of pleasure by gaining the favors of a married lady, did not always make a good deal; not many of them, at least. Let's hear the protest of one of these escorts, who started to realize how costly the privileges he begged for were.
For the love of you I let myself be skinned by the barber, day in and day out. For you I have given the lie to my own sex, either in front of the dresser—in order that my wig be perfect—or embroidering by your side, or making a fool of myself. For you I gave up a brilliant career. For the love of you I have become an animal who does not study or read, but just talks about fashions and gossips; praiseworthy talents in a man, indeed![20]
Still, no lady praised for her beauty would have given up the tyranny she exercised over her suitors.
This business of letting themselves be pampered or spoiled for being beautiful imparts a certain power, and the wretch who lowers himself to its decrees for a bit of glory enslaves his free will forever.[21]
To celebrate and praise feminine beauty had become a trap for men who had started this practice considering it innocuous. Among the words of warning that arose to counteract the danger of pride in women, we hear the Portuguese Melo:
To be graceful during visits, in the carriage, in church, in the palace, brings with it some serious consequences, difficult to put a stop to because no one gives up things which are praised—regardless of whether they deserve to be lauded or not.[22]
It surely was not deserved praise, or at best it was obtained by a very slight effort. The ones who thought that women, no matter how silly they might have been, felt fully gratified by it, were completely wrong.
The ladies feel satisfied to prevail over men's hearts. Their ambition is reduced to this, and they believe that, having once reached the state of being considered amiable, they do not have anything to wish for.[23]
But it was not true. They were not satisfied by that. The proof is that they reigned over the men's hearts in a dissatisfied, arbitrary and false manner, which in turn prompted cruelty in the lovers, regardless of the pretended vassalage. The cortejo relationships were, as a rule, of a tormenting nature, disharmonious and lovekilling, as one would expect from their weak foundations. A traveler of the end of the century commented that Spanish ladies
are made to suffer by their cortejos. These are strange liaisons, if the escort behaves, at least apparently, in so harsh a manner toward his lady. He maltreats her and she is compelled to tolerate all sorts of cruelty.[24]
Under the apparent show of vassalage there seethed, and sometimes broke out to the surface, the lie of those relationships:
subjection of the beau to the lady's whims, without her taking into account how miserable it is to make him incomunicado with everyone else. He is not to speak to anyone or go anywhere, but must always be at her side and always patient with all her frivolous demands, and always a Job in his tribulations.[25]
It was a tension that was to turn into hate and contempt. By stressing their dedication in exchange for homage and devotion, women tautened the affair to a breaking point. They experienced a constant dissatisfaction, wasting their energies on envy and competition with each other, testing their ephemeral merits and the weakness of their weapons:
There is not a more insatiable yearning than that of apparel and poses. The very same thing one raves about today is discarded tomorrow.
Women torment each other, as there are many among them who try to excel in this. They invent all sorts of adornments, and when they get together and see that one exceeds in the richness of the dress, the taste in the hairdo, or in the jewels, they feel they are losing ground and the merit they might have achieved in the same line on some other occasion.[26]
In the last years of the century, Queen Maria Luisa exemplified these styles motivated by envy and imitation. During a visit paid to her by a Parisian lady, it was evident
that what most worried her was to find out if the Empress Josephine wore roses on her hairdress, if she had a preference for white or red. . . . One of the most comical conversations I ever heard in my life.[27]
But the imitation was not limited only to the accessories and apparel.
It happens very often that a distinguished personage enjoying a certain influence and important connections chooses a lady to converse with a bit, after his business; from his acquaintance the lady may draw some advantages. But no sooner do the others notice it than they start envying her and thinking of a way by which they might steal from her the personage in question and entice him to their homes. To achieve it, they avail themselves of the usual feminine expedient of gossip and talebearing.[28]
Friends, as well as accessories and gowns, had to be exclusive possessions. That overwhelming desire to have a "gathering superior to any other"[29] was not related to the intrinsic value a social affair might have as an occasion to exchange ideas and opinions. We have a testimony from the first half of the century that gives us a taunting picture of the emptiness of those feminine gatherings.
Then they hug each other and say: 'How are you getting along, my dear?' Though she may be well, she will always complain about something. . . . They make an awful racket, all talking at the same time about a thousand different things. One talks about her maid, another of her escort, that one of the coiffure, the other about a habit she made to offer to Saint Elias. One says to the one next to her: 'Look at so-and-so, dressed like a monkey, with an ugly hairdo to boot.' . . . Then you can hear another one saying that she cannot sleep and that she is pale. Still another that complains of a constant shortness of breath.[30]
Actually, those get-togethers presided over by women did not have any intellectual content. In contrast to the brilliant gatherings which added fame to the French culture of the seventeenth century, these precarious and tardy imitations were a pretext to boost the ego.[31] The fewer the women present, the better. The reason, of course, was not to profit more from masculine conversations; it was not a yearning to know and talk to men directly. The absence of other women simply lessened the always-feared rivalry. In the absence of other women, one could shine all the more. That isolated and sterile sheen of a precious stone seemed to be something much sought after by the ladies.
Bourgoing wondered at the incapacity of Spanish women for friendship.
The women in general seek not many occasions to assemble; each aspires to be the center of a tertulia; and exclusive pretennons undoubtedly contribute to banish from Spanish societies what we call 'French gallantry.' Women are admired, and even adored as well as elsewhere, but when they do not inspire any lively sentiment, the men seldom pay them those attentions which our politeness prodigally and indiscriminately bestows upon every individual of the amiable sex. . . . The language of mere politeness is too cold for love; that impetuous passion commands and exacts sacrifices, but despises simple respect. On the contrary, it is in the disinterested association of the two sexes that the necessity and mutual desire of pleasing arises, which forms the charm and cement of society. This is, perhaps, the only means wanting to the Spaniard to accomplish the polishing of their manners.[32]
A Spanish author, more brutal, scorned the mimicry and silliness of those women who pretended to shine in the salons.
They will embark on some sort of study according to gallantry, and will follow the system of reading novels with the hope of finding in their gatherings the living examples of the lovers in the novels. . . . They will make up a language full of superlatives; seldom will they express themselves adequately. They will always talk in a shrill voice, just as when they hear thunder or see a spider. . . . Finally, they will shape for themselves a religion that will allow them to take the Sacraments in their own way. That will allow them to be haughty and frivolous no matter what. . . to mock and joke about those of their sex who are not wallowing in corruption, and to top it off, they will make sure not to have a girlfriend.[33]
To sum up, it was very difficult in Spain to find a woman like the Marchioness of Lambert, praised for her refinement and learning by Mirabeau, as we can read in a text adapted by Nipho. Gallantry had not enervated or weakened her character. To heighten the delights of friendship, she wrote a short and fine treatise on this theme.
Talented, learned and beautiful, she always had friends and never lovers, and she can be cited as a model for our century.[34]
But who had ever encouraged in Spain "the disinterested association of the sexes" to which Bourgoing referred? This habit of exchange was a must for experiencing the delights of friendship, praised by the Marchioness of Lambert in her treatise, and practiced in her life. Was it their fault that they could see another woman only as a rival, and a man only as a potential suitor or adorer? No indeed, it was not their fault. Tyranny and exclusivism were the simple and most logical attitudes, though they did not solve anything and though it gave them a false sense of independence. But they shut themselves in it, and felt proud of the only achievement they had been encouraged in: the right to say "this man belongs to me." As the Marchioness of Santiago at the beginning of the century explained to a foreign acquaintance, who showed surprise at the ostentation of passion for the escort—so obvious among Spanish ladies—love affairs always took that bend in Spain. "When we love," she said, "we live only for it and because of it."[35] But we have already seen what they termed "love." Perhaps those injudicious words covered up melancholy, the nostalgia for friendship, for not being able to treat and talk to men naturally. But what could they converse about? What did they know? What had they been taught?
8—
Women's Education
If the cortejo, according to the etymology of its earlier term chichisveo, had derived from an engaging conversation carried on in a whisper, I think I have proven the meager and vapid nature of the topics whispered.
The likely ways of breaking the rigid codes which were separating the sexes, making it impossible for them to communicate and widen their horizons, were being wasted as long as the education of women was neglected. Women either tried to disguise their ignorance, talking without rhyme or reason, stringing together nonsense after nonsense, or unable to act against their natural inhibition, did not open their mouths. Clavijo y Fajardo remarked that a woman
hardly opens her mouth unless it is to say some childishness. They ask stupid questions: it is not unusual to hear a pretty and haughty lady ask if Caesar was a Christian, since he lived in Rome. . . . All extremes are bad. These ignorant ladies defeat their purpose and cast themselves in a bad light by talking endlessly. Nor do the ones who look like they have lost their tongues make it any better for themselves.[1]
In many texts of the second half of the eighteenth century, wherein the growing problem of feminine frivolity is stressed, a possible panacea is mentioned, to reconcile the two extremes of silly chatter or dumb silence. This was "discretion": a term drawn from traditional Spanish models, often found in texts of the Golden Age. But discretion—in the now-forgotten sense of wit and talent—was applied generally to the female sex as if it were a gift from Heaven, inherent in a "nature" which no one took the trouble to analyze or explore.
Thus, while it was revived as a cliché, some writers were quick to expose the fallacy of applying the term generally to women. If no efforts were to be made for such feminine discretion to be meaningful, it was useless to exhume the concept.
What's this talk about discretion? To achieve it, one must cultivate one's intellect. Where shall we look for this education? Be it through ambition, envy or injustice, you gentlemen consider us less capable than yourselves; you have severed us from any kind of study, so that nowadays any woman who tries to be less ignorant is termed a bluestocking. Are we to attend universities? Will they let us enter the colleges?[2]
For the first time we are encountering the word bachillera (bluestocking), applied derogatorily to those women who, reacting against the inertia and vanity of the fashionable people, had the urge to learn. No sooner did a woman manifest her contempt for the vogues and fads which enslaved her sisters, than she saw herself branded with that insulting epithet. In an apocryphal letter, a young lady complained about her education, rebelling against it in these terms:
Fashions, which used to be all my preoccupation and all my study, sicken me now, though I must follow them if I do not want to be ridiculed by everyone. I abhor the flatterers who used to make me happy. . . . I just celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday, and I can call it my first one. . . . I have two sisters younger than myself and brought up in the same way. They have already started to laugh at me at home. My attempt to rid myself of this vanity, pride and other defects I have contracted is called imbecility, stupidity and hypocrisy. I am on the point of becoming a joke in my family and an object of ridicule among my friends. I can bear all this, but what I find intolerable is to see my sisters walking the same slippery path I did. If I correct them, I am called a bluestocking. If I do not behave as giddily as they do, I am considered haughty.[3]
The adjective bachiller(a) and the noun bachillería sometimes had another meaning: the words were applied to babblers and tellers of tall tales.
With flourishes and resounding words, which to the ignorant is the proper way—unintelligible as they are—to express difficult, quintessential concepts.[4]
This second acceptation was frequently linked with amorous situations. Nipho, alluding to a liaison based on empty words, called it pedantry when he recommended
the conversation and company of cultured persons, apt to teach amusingly and amuse with profit, two things one always ought to find to-
gether. One can never recommend enough to the ladies that they choose the conversation and commerce of such people rather than the pedantry of gallants or giddy lovers.[5]
This acceptation appears as frequently in literary texts of previous centuries. It was thought that the education women did not obtain from the sermons, pious books and the domestic teaching imparted by their mothers, they would receive through the only other possible channel—considered tortuous, always—of writing on love, of gallant propositions, that is, from all the amorous babble. Books of chivalry had always been thought pernicious in this respect. Those fantastic and unrealizable pursuits, so opposed to the habitual sermons and prayers, were seen as a great temptation when imagined by women leading a dreary existence. One of those venomous books could be hidden anywhere, in spite of the warning sermons.
What will a young girl do who carried in her satchel a Diana ?[*] . . . How can a maiden meditate on God for even a short while, when she has spent hours on Garcilaso?[**] . . . That's where they learn to be free in their ways and to blab away. It fosters in them a desire to be served and courted . . . whence they live on perturbing fantasies.[6]
The word bachiller had undergone a curious deviation. From a "bachelor's" diploma, to denote that an individual had completed a certain number of courses at any given university, the word came to adopt a gallant connotation, where learning was put to the service of love. A love, moreover, expressed with too profuse a rhetoric signified danger, because it showed "signs of carnal appetite." Literarily it was enunciated in such terms, in a text of the seventeenth century. Isobel is shocked at the rebellious ideas of Andrea, who complains about the dullness of marriage. She has been told that a man is not to treat his wife as he would a lady he is courting. For herself, Isobel wishes a temperate conjugal love, quite different from the one made up of fiery words and babbling. She summed it up thus:
I do not yearn for those flaming words, because a garrulous love (amor bachiller ) has all the look of carnal appetite.[7]
[*] Diana : a pastoral novel by Jorge de Montemayor (? 1510–1561).
[**] Garcilaso de la Vega (1500–1536). Exquisite poet in the Petrarchan style.
Loquacity and rhetoric were tied to love. In the name of love, some women wanted to be more articulate, to reach the level of their lovers, to understand their endearments, and to be able to answer them. Finea, in a comedy by Lope, does not have any qualms about confessing to her lover the reasons for which she had undertaken her studies.
To speak to you, I learned to express myself, won over by your love words. To read your billet-doux, I read difficult books. To answer you, I write. I have had no other tutor but love. Love has taught me.[8]
But another path could be ascertained, one quite different from the path trodden to and from church, and the gallant way. Could not a woman simply learn for the sake of learning? Already by 1637, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, precursor in Spain of feminine rebellion, clamored against the injustice done to women by fostering their ignorance; the only difference, indeed, between men and women:
As to this matter of which men and women are made, be it a bond of mud and fire or a mass of spirit and earth, there is no more nobility in men than in us. If we have the same blood, senses, faculties and organs which function in the same way, the same soul as they do, since souls cannot be termed either masculine or feminine, what reason, then, is there for them to consider themselves wise and us incapable of wisdom? There is only one answer to this as far as I can see it: their impiety and tyranny in keeping us shut up and untutored. Thus the only cause of women's ignorance is not the lack of capability and brains, but rather of application. If they would give us preceptors and books when we grow up instead of lace work and patterns to embroider, we would be just as capable of occupying positions and chairs in the university as men.[9]
In the Golden Age theater, there are various indications of this third way in the education of women.
Well, a woman has to busy herself with something. They will answer that needlework is the thing. But it is not much of an occupation for the mind which tries to expand. To make pillowcases in fine holland and cambric muslin is no deep philosophy. Nor are the cushions on which they make lace Plato's or Porphyrius' propositions. Nor are the light or heavy laces the clauses of law articles.[10]
But these rare demonstrations of feminine intolerance of their passive role were smothered quickly by a society leery of women's education.
The proper woman has to be of a humble and average intellect, neither arrogant nor too knowledgeable, which is an unbearable trait. . . . If a woman is to dedicate herself to the well-being of a man, it is enough for her to know proper Spanish.[11]
Women, then, were destined to the "well-being of men" and their diversions were to be needlework and children.
What makes a woman meddle with Petrarch or Garcilaso when her Virgil and Tasso should be to weave, embroider and sew?. . . Marry her off and you will see her happily occupied in bearing and rearing children.[12]
Women who were not taken in by this monotonous propaganda had no other recourse but to embark on university studies and other adventures, disguised as men. The theme of the maiden disguised as a man, who flees from her home, is common in Golden Age theater; it is also true that the majority of these cases of intrepidity were prompted by love. These maidens were setting out to look for their lovers, and the motive behind their courage was looked upon with more benevolence than running away for the purpose of feminine vindication.[13] Unfortunately, things had not substantially changed by the eighteenth century. This text of 1739 does not differ in its point of view from those of the Golden Age.
I want her silly, because it is much better to have a wife ignorant in everything she may talk about, than a bluestocking.[14]
Nonetheless, along with this point of view, a contrary one was making its feeble way, which presaged the right of women to partake in the Enlightenment. Though the opinion which inclined toward domestic and church apprenticeship was under attack, we shall see that education for women was being demanded not for the sake of their minds. Its aim was to be as follows:
Each of us has to be educated according to our calling in life; consequently, those who are to be dedicated to society, those who are to lead a social life, have to be educated not only to be useful to society, but also to be capable of directing the other components of it. Will a girl achieve this, shut in a room in the company of her mother,
who was brought up with narrow ideas, without any occupation but needlework, without any lesson but the one she might get from the Cries from Purgatory and Hell , or at most the ones she might draw from The Light of Faith and the Divine Law ? . . . What good will this girl be to society? How will she be able to discern the character of men? How will she be able to detect and know the worthiest of her suitors?[15]
It was the usual thing. Knowledge at the service of a wise husband selection. Women had to be discreet in order to imitate the wise women of the past, who had had the ability to hold the reins, to subjugate men, to make good husbands out of them. Eighteenth-century women had been losing this wisdom. The advice they were given had a regressive character. An author offered a recipe, in which virtue should be mixed with an equal dose of discretion, as the only means to achieve
solid foundations on which to build the edifice of your good fortune and the infallible means of subduing men's inconstant nature.[16]
Opinions such as the above did not contribute to the stabilizing of the problem, which oscillated in the old dichotomy of who is dominating who. It was forgotten that studies could have an intrinsic value in themselves, for enlightening oneself and understanding things better, and not for the purpose of domineering anyone. Women had to fight, above all, against the fear of being mocked as bluestockings, the most scathing epithet they could be taunted with. Iriarte left us the following conversation between a sincere feminist and a young maiden.
I wish you saw how tyrannical the system is of those who, like the Muslims, consider women to exist just to be dumb slaves of men, depriving them almost altogether of their faculties. Put to good use your own intelligence and you will see how much enjoyment you will get from studying. 'Yes' [answers the damsel] 'and then be called a bluestocking'.[17]
Studying for the sake of studying was still considered something not suited and even improper for women, as the case of Hortensia de Castro showed.
Eager to learn, she went to Coimbra disguised as a male student, in the company of her two brothers. Succeeding in keeping her sex a secret, she studied, besides Latin and rhetoric, philosophy and theology, in which subjects she often read papers (defended propositions).[18]
Along with these symptoms of stagnation, one could notice, from the middle of the century, a ray of hope for those women who did not wish to dedicate their lives entirely to the family, church, or social life, for those rebellious and naive "Miss know-it-alls," objects of so much ridicule.
Many, within and outside the country, joined their still feeble voices together to make known the need to tackle the long-neglected problem of women's education, and the revision of the faults and defects they had been accused of.
The desire to please, so natural in women, makes them behave according to the ideas men impart to them. . . . Men have all the interest in fostering in them a puerile vanity. . . . they do all they can to sidetrack women's minds from all worthy thoughts.[19]
What sort of help had men, who could study and attend universities without having to disguise themselves, given to women?
Our fathers have neglected our education in childhood. Our mothers have contributed in making us vain and coquettish in our youth, and our husbands and escorts have perfected the work. The former treat us as pieces of furniture, good only for a room's perspective, and they hardly see us or hear us. The latter fill our heads with hot air, flattering us. They serve us humbly and look up to us with devotion until they rob us of our hearts.[20]
To recognize the faulty education women had had since time immemorial was the first step in remedying the situation, as was a shift of responsibility to the mentor's misguidance. Many writers of this period insisted that men should ponder their responsibility; this is proof of another important step forward.
What kind of upbringing did a girl from a good family get in the eighteenth century? What did her parents and tutors teach her? I cannot help but copy almost entirely a "Letter" on the theme, as it appeared in El pensador . In spite of the reservations one might have about its authenticity and rigor, it does clarify some points and offer some data on the matter.
I, my dear sir, am the daughter of wealthy and noble parents, and according to what people say, I am pretty. With these qualities, and especially wealth, you can guess that I have no education except that which is usually imposed on us by those who think that ignorance is
the patrimony of wealth. They think that a good name and beauty are the essence of talent and wisdom. Don't think, though, for a minute that they have not taken much care in bringing me up. I had hardly started to walk when they put around my neck an iron collar to accustom me to keep my head straight. Then they began to put me in a whalebone press to develop a good figure. 'The girl should not eat that because it is bad for her complexion; she should not eat the other because it is bad for her color, not the other because it would thicken her waist.' I was not allowed to look at the sun because it was bad for my eyes and only on some special occasion could I eat a sweet, lest my teeth get spoiled. Up to just a short time ago I did not even know my name. When they talked about me, they referred to me as the 'little girl' or the 'young mistress.' They were hovering over my dreams, and the day I slept two or three minutes less than usual, I could see worry painted on the faces of the whole household. Sometimes I ate little for lack of appetite, or more often than not, because, having been denied some caprice, I wanted to avenge myself by worrying my parents. Doctors were called right away, novenas and prayers undertaken, and I felt quite flattered for causing such an uproar. The time came when I was given tutors. One had to teach me how to carry my body gracefully in the dance; another was to impart to me the first notions. I had also a teacher of French and music, and the governess to whom I was entrusted taught me good habits and to fear God. But all these teachers were useless, and my education was far from improving, as it did not follow any rules but my whims, nor any directions but my laziness, my stubbornness and my tantrums. I do not know exactly of what this confusion consisted, but according to what I have lately surmised, the trouble was that my parents did not give me teachers as they should have, to impart solid knowledge—more worthy and durable than riches, birth, and beauty—rather, they followed the fashion and showed off their opulence. . . . With such fine principles I set out in life. The dance teacher taught me to put on a ridiculously serious air, to carry my head slightly bent toward the shoulder, to walk as if my body were made all of a piece and turn my arms back to give my bosom fullness. The music teacher used to tell me I should modulate my voice; in order to achieve this, he made me sing tiresome songs and made me affect, in my gestures, passions which would have been better ignored. The language teacher did not neglect to bring me love stories. Each of them said that this was the fashion and the convenient tone for a young lady who had to frequent the world and play a brilliant role in society. They remarked on my gracefulness with enthusiasm, and without knowing how or why, I was becoming livelier, prettier and cleverer by the day.[21]
This text may exaggerate the reality of the situation somewhat, but the education of young girls of good families did not differ a great deal from the above description, if we think about the results such chrysalides gave when they transformed themselves into "butterflies in a frenzy." That shallowness must have derived from a faulty upbringing.
Men make fun of ladies' gatherings because almost all of them talk at the same time about nothing, and repeat it. With the painting of a fan or the adornment on a hairdo, they have enough subject matter for hours. . . . If one does not teach them but to fix themselves up and spend the whole day in visits and diversions, they will perforce talk about fashions and those things which occur daily in the family circle.[22]
Women had to be encouraged to take up other interests, broader than the ones that dealt with clothes and accessories. Even beauty could profit by it because
it is necessary to adorn it, but not with trappings. One has to complement it, but not with puerilities and vain gestures.[23]
There are extant many writings protesting the richness and profusion of feminine adornments. It was an urgent measure, the most earnest advice one could inculcate in those empty heads in order that they might not be so hollow. One had to uproot the fixed idea of pampering one's person.
Little girls' dresses should not be elaborate: first of all because of the harmful effects on the morals, teaching them from an early age to appreciate clothes unduly. In the second place, because they are not as free to play, which is so healthy for them. Being afraid to be scolded or punished for dirtying or tearing their clothes compels children to stay seated and think about nothing else but dresses.[24]
Such an attitude, inculcated in women since childhood, could engender only passivity. The preoccupation with one's beauty was as habitual as it was demanding. These petty, self-centered cares became more and more stifling, branching off into numberless needs which swamped women's lives.
Women brought up to give so much importance to adornments and a good appearance maintain the one and the other at a sacrifice. What worries and cares to conserve beauty, if one is endowed with it, and to put on an appearance of it, if nature had denied this benefit, as so often happens![25]
They had to explode this myth of feminine beauty. This was attempted by resorting to moral arguments, the main one of which— thoroughly traditional—was to remind women of the very same thing the sermon on Ash Wednesday did: the ephemeral quality of all physical splendor.
What different times will a beautiful woman experience when she ceases to be so after a certain number of years! Those who have experienced both could describe aptly the misfortune of the second. I say misfortune in case she has not acquired other merits that will survive beauty.[26]
The theme of the woman who has lost her charms and insists on behaving as if she still had them is very common, and is sometimes caricatured. Cortejos, for instance, were not exclusive to youth, but rather
they are suitable for all ages. . . . True enough, that lady has reached the age in which she would look perfect with a rosary and a prayer book. But will she admit it? Of course not. No sooner do white hairs, wrinkles and all the other accompaniments of old age that could persuade her of it appear . . . than she makes up her face to hide the ravages of the years. She rigidly follows all the fashions, and in order to give the ultimate touch to this make-believe, she chooses an escort to make people understand she still preserves that grace and charm which make youth lovable.[27]
We can read some considerations of the same moral order which questioned the essence of beauty itself, for which women of all ages strove so mightily.
What is the definition of beauty? What is its character? In what does it lie? . . . We can see that a beauty in Ethiopia is considered a monster among us. There she is an idol, and here she is the devil. Likewise, our fair ladies would not do too well in Ethiopia. . . . But we do not have to go so far. Even among ourselves, a face considered enchanting and exquisite by some is indifferent or even boring to others. There was a time in which a pair of blue eyes was worth a treasure; nowadays nobody thinks much of them. Sleepy eyes, aquiline noses, big mouths, and thick lips had their heyday. That age passed; new standards of beauty were erected. The beauties of yesterday are worth nothing today. The ones of today can expect the same fate tomorrow. . . . Nonetheless, I do not wish to cavil so. Let beauty be. . . . But what I wish for you ladies is to disregard an inheritance which is always fought over and on which there are so many diverging opinions.[28]
The plaudits offered to women for their gender and charm were indeed questionable. It was useless to be proud of wanton nature's gifts; they said nothing about one's personal merits.
By the way, don't forget to tell the complacent and proud ladies . . . with their gowns and riches, their nobility and beauty, that if they do not have a better title by which to demand the respect and homage of men, they will lose their case. . . . In conclusion, let them give up the constant refrain of the garb, a poor resource that denotes the scarcity of their merits; the appearance to which we want to attribute a magic quality is nothing but a bit of material fashioned in one way or the other.[29]
Feminine frailty was another commonplace which had to be dealt with. The political thought of enlightened despotism stressed the need of incorporating into the work force all individuals who had been idle until then, in the name of ancestral privileges. Of course there was no reason to exclude women, just as there was no reason to exclude the clergy, or the nobility. The collaboration of all the citizens was needed for the good of society, and the prosperity of the monarchy. Jovellanos, though admitting that women "were endowed with less vigor and fortitude," did not think the Creator had made them less apt for work. He concluded:
It was we, against the designs of Divine Providence, who made them weak and puny. Accustomed as we have been to look on them as born for our comfort, we have taken them away from the active professions. We have kept them cloistered. We have made them idle, and finally we have always bound to their existence an idea of weakness, which education and tradition have rooted in us all along.[30]
It is true that this tendency to puniness and the awareness of it was inculcated in girls from a tender age.
The way our women are brought up is not conducive to fortitude. From childhood on they are taught to be scared of everything without even discerning the real from the imaginary dangers. They cry from habit, and all this brings about a frailty and pusillanimity which makes them useless for any other thing.[31]
Women like this could neither be good mothers nor good citizens in an enlightened government. Charles III, from the beginning of his reign, tried to lay the foundations for a more reasonable education for women. Around 1773, during the ministry of the Count of Aranda, the Duke of Medinasidonia made known this concern
of the government in a letter to the Marquis of Villahermosa, who was residing abroad. "One talks a great deal about starting a new system of education for women."[32] But even before, in the first half of the century, polemics about women were frequent. Some defended their virtues and potentialities; others detracted them. An author wrote that on a certain occasion in a salon, a controversy developed between two gentlemen. One of them had composed some verses in defense of women, and the other, some disparaging ones.
The men present took sides and there ensued a dispute in which everybody was quarreling.[33]
It was indeed a hot potato. One had to take efficient measures to awaken in women the desires to learn useful things, and in the majority of cases, to create this interest. The touchiest part of the problem was the abulia and indifference of the women themselves, who in general felt comfortable in that situation.
The education of women [complained Josefa Amar Borbón] is considered, as a rule, as something of no importance. Society, their parents and, what is worse, women themselves look with indifference upon learning this, that, or nothing at all.[34]
This same lady suggested a starting measure: incentives, prizes to shake women from that agelong apathy towards learning, a justified attitude if one takes into account the secondary position and the insignificant role women always had in cultural pursuits. One could not suppose, except in unusual cases, that they would take to learning for itself, just like that, from morning to night.
To persuade women to take up more useful subjects, there remains another impediment greater than the already mentioned ones; it is the lack of incentives. Rewards are the most universal and mighty stimuli that will prompt all our actions. As women cannot count on them, they have to be convinced of the advantages of studying.[35]
The government was in agreement with the ideas of the Aragonese lady. When the Economic Society of Madrid was founded, the government of Charles III considered the possibility of admitting ladies. Polemics on the matter, quite advanced for the times, lasted for two years. Finally the opinions of the feminists prevailed. By a royal decree of 27 August 1787, fourteen distinguished ladies
were nominated as meritorious members of the Society. But the victory was more symbolic than anything else. According to the Russian ambassador, Zinoviev, the women had intrigued and insisted on being admitted in that honorable and prestigious site of culture.
People are making fun of the ladies. They say it is a frivolity, a sheer bagatelle.[36]
Many had opposed their entrance during those two years, wielding the banner of "frivolity and bagatelle," under which all feminine activities were categorized. The opinions of the anti-feminists are interesting, because they reveal the desire that things continue as always. They reveal their preference for the frivolous woman, even when they mocked her. The cutting veto formulated by Francisco Cabarrus is striking in its virulence.
How can we overlook the petulance, the whims, the vanity and the pettiness characteristic of the sex? Shall we admit them just in that time of their lives, on the threshold of adolescence, when an irresistible and dominant interest absorbs them so fully? Shall we make of the Society the stage where their beauty, though timid, shines its first rays, tries out its weapons and gets used to victory?
He added that if married women were admitted, it would be even worse; he referred to the adulteries covered under the name of cortejo:
I am aware, sirs, of the ridicule vice heaps on the morals that condemn it. I am aware of the cultured and pleasant terms under which they attempt to cover up adultery, corruption, rudeness and indecency. But shall we let fashion prevail against the voice of nature which subjected women to modesty, or against the immutable relationships of all societies which imposed them, such as civil obligations, fidelity to one's husband, the care of the children and a domestic life? . . . We cannot expect to have among us judicious and respectable ladies. The ones we shall have to do with are quite the opposite. You can see them everywhere setting a trend, being the object of gossip. They will come to the Society to waste some of their abundant free time.[37]
The old refrain of modesty and reserve was still going strong. The eighteenth-century anti-feminists wielded it as an undebatable argument.
Modesty and shyness [wrote Nipho in 1763] are a woman's natural endowments. With this virtual essence of their being in mind, men have regulated the type of life women should lead. For this reason they have been exempted from positions and occupations incompatible with their spiritual makeup. Well, if in all this time they have been sheltered from all the works that require strength and effort, if the spindle, distaff and needle have always been their inheritance and patrimony, I believe that this has been so, not so much because of the frailty of their constitutions, as for the protection of their modesty, which must be the motivation of all their actions.[38]
The curious point is that the argument of modesty had such power in public opinion that it was wielded not only by the anti-feminists, but also by the defenders of women's rights. Neither side wanted to renounce such a comfortable support. Let's hear what Jovellanos, an upholder of the ladies' admission in the Economic Society of Madrid, "with all the formalities and rights as the other members," had to say in regard to it:
You can see for yourselves the general tendency to corruption. You can see domestic obligations forsaken everywhere, decorum despised, modesty forgotten, luxury given free rein, and good habits completely rotting away. We who call ourselves friends of the country, we who pride ourselves on working for its good, shall we not arrest this disorder with the only restraint which we have at our hands? Let's call to this dwelling of patriotism those souls that have known how to keep themselves free of that contagion. . . . Let's make them an example of exemplary conduct for other members of their sex. Let's open our doors to the ones who come to imitate them. Let's inculcate in all of them the love for civil virtues, the love for family obligations, and let's tell them there is no real pleasure or glory except in virtue.[39]
The question of women's education was focused not so much on opening to them the world of knowledge, as on correcting—from a point of view not dissimilar from that of Father Luis de León—the vitiated mores. In their goal, there converged political, religious, public, private, economic and moral issues. This convergence is clearly shown in the decree which finally admitted fourteen women to the meetings of the Society.
His Majesty is aware that the admittance of respectable ladies in the regular and special meetings of the Society, where virtue and industriousness are promoted, would be very useful in Madrid. Let there be
chosen, then, some ladies deserving of this honorable distinction; they may proceed to practice some means to foster good education and improvement of mores with their example and in their writings. Let them try to inculcate the love for work, to abolish the luxuries which cause the ruin of many a patrimony, which discourage so many men from matrimony to the great detriment of the country. Let them try to induce the purchase of national articles instead of the imported luxury items. His Majesty trusts that in view of the wisdom that distinguished so many Spanish ladies in the past, they will follow their example and will give the Society meetings as many, if not greater, advantages that other such societies in the country, with the greatest satisfaction on the pan of His Majesty's paternal heart.[40]
It is obvious that, more than instructing women in any particular theoretical question, the idea was to politicize them, to win them over to the cause of enlightened despotism, a policy based on economy and administration. It was an obvious call for women's collaboration with the government in a matter that was preoccupying the monarchy: the prestige of marriage. One had to enjoin the efforts of men and women to tackle such a task. Women were granted the power of intervention in this matter; but they were deprived of all possible independent opinion on other questions that concerned them just as much as men. They were not consulted at all on them. They were simply imbued with a sense of responsibility to follow the example of virtuous women of the past, whose intelligence was praised in passing and in a gratuitous way. The mention of the intelligence of these wise women of the past was a naive decoy; it is evident that what they were after was the revival of the traditional virtues, pillars that had to be reinforced. Women were to educate themselves to correct the defects of their sisters, their love for luxury and splurging; but always on behalf of men, that is to say, to stimulate the tendency to marriage in men, whose resistance to it was harmful to the State. We have seen how much the decadence of matrimony preoccupied the government,[41] and how the problem was tied to the gallant fashions and the obligations husbands had to pay for their wives' extravagances.
The image of the industrious and maternal woman, rather than that of the woman anxious to learn, was employed in exemplary contrast with the fashionable spendthrift. A woman close to nature, lover of animals and plants, nursing her children and tending the flocks, was the beloved image of eighteenth-century Europe, in-
spired by the writings of Rousseau. Spain could not escape the charm of this propaganda, which fit so neatly with the ideals of peace and order of The Perfect Wife and Mother . Woman's capacity for rural life was to be heightened. She was to be encouraged to take this path, and it was to be smoothed for her in every way. She was to be enticed to such manual work as was compatible with her sex. An author said that women
are able and should care for and direct the silk harvest and weaving, as the empresses of China do. They can and should tend birds, prepare the seeds to make them fecund, and they should perform many other agrarian tasks which could be better done by them than by men.[42]
Responsive to such incentives and advice, some notable ladies applied themselves by introducing new types of cultivation, more or less useful, to their summer residences. These activities were reviewed and praised in the journals of the time.
The Duchess of Arcos, now deceased, promoted in the thicket of Migas Calientes near Madrid, the planting of vineyards, of fruit trees unknown in this region, transforming some arid and barren hillocks into delightful gardens. The actual Duchess of Alba, worthy heiress of her illustrious mother's wisdom, still conserves and fosters the gardens of a summer villa worthy of such a mistress.[43] The Marchioness of Peñafiel is responsible for another summer residence in Alameda, also in the vicinity of Madrid. She spends lavishly to beautify it with trees of the best stock. She is in the process of building a perfectly equipped farm there, which will be a conservatory of good taste, as far as agrarian experiments are concerned. It will be a school of agriculture, more useful than some we know about; these others are only good for breeding disputes, without an advantages for the republic.
As far as the Marchioness of Estepa is concerned,
everyone knows the tower and the adjacent garden she set up on the road to Torrero. While other ladies of the aristocracy, less spirited and knowledgeable, are spending what they have on fashions, jewels and gallantries, this lady has applied herself to the above mentioned buildings, where flowers, vegetables and fruits grown with an expert hand flourish. There nature takes pride in paying tribute to a lady who fosters her so. To add industry to soil science, she raises silk worms. With this exemplary activity, she assails the inertia and indolence of some men, who neither build nor improve what they have nor take care of the country residences they have inherited from their industrious forefathers.[44]
As occupations adequate for women, they suggested the making of frogs and trimmings, wool and silk weaving, dressmaking, confectionery, hairdressing, "to which men have taken to with great dishonor to their sex,"[45] embroidery, lacemaking, bonnets, and fashions in general. All of the suggested activities were connected with the world of luxury, which the government, contradictorily, wanted to discourage in every way. As for the nursing of one's children—a habit somewhat out of favor in the eighteenth century— such importance was given to it that the enlightened government's idea of women's education was bound to maternity.
What irks me is to see so many strong, well-rounded mothers, healthy enough for abundant meals, robust enough to stand the heat in summer and the cold in winter, when it is a matter of going to the theater, staying in the balcony or promenade, or spending the whole night dancing. Well, these ladies want us to believe they are not strong enough to rear their children. They are lying! It is not the lack of health; it is . . . the fear of spoiling their line, by having to renounce for a while the corset. It is the annoyance of having to quiet down a child at night and wake up to breast feed it. To sum up, it is the fashion. . . . For fashion's sake she suffers to have her hair curled with hot tongs, causing everlasting headaches. For its sake she suffers to be tightly hooked in a corset that hardly allows her to move, or a choker that martyrizes her and cuts off her circulation. . . . Fashion does not want women to love their children. The latter are looked upon as foundlings . . . women obey fashions, sacrificing to the idol of a fugitive beauty which they fear, to spoil the most sacred laws of humanity.[46]
Without entering into the discussion of whether mothers ought or ought not to have nursed their infants, or whether it was an important contribution to the government, the fact that a group of ladies embellished their summer residences with new plants obviously had nothing to do with that desire to vindicate their rights, paternalistically denied to them. The learned woman was just as much of a bother then as in the previous century.
Clavijo y Fajardo seemed to be sincere when he lamented the neglect of women's education.
The schools, such as they may be, are closed to you, and the few useful, well-written books never come to your hands or to your ears. As for foreign languages, it is very rare to hear a lady speaking one. . . . Some mothers are upset that their daughters may learn a foreign language, as
if in each syllable of it they would fear an implicit pact with the Devil, and in every letter an apostasy.[47]
But he betrayed himself in another passage.
No, my ladies: the hair ornament and the bonnet, the crinoline and the gown just will not do. Each level requires a certain experience. The one I wish for you is not to be found in the classrooms.[48]
The ways men encouraged women were somewhat erratic. The first woman to point out the contradictions in their ambivalent behavior was Josefa Amar Borbón.
Men look for women's approval, and pay them homages that they never use among themselves. They do not allow them any say in public matters and yet grant it to them entirely, in secret. They deny them any instr uction and then they complain of their ignorance. . . . Women are born and brought up in complete ignorance and men despise them for it, with the consequence that they become convinced of women's incapability for anything else except needlework; women do nothing but what can be done with their hands, so overpowering is public opinion on these matters. If men would exalt wisdom instead of beauty and gracefulness as the trait to be most valued in women, we would soon see them eager to acquire it, just as they are eager now to be charming and amiable. . . . Civil, educated men do not dare to oppress too openly the other half of humanity, because they cannot find such laws of slavery written anywhere in creation. But, because being master is a pleasant position, they have found the way to arrogate to themselves a certain superiority of talent, or, I should say, of education, which, lacking in women, make the latter appear inferior. . . . Women know they cannot expect any public position or recognition. They know that their ideas do not go beyond the walls of their home or convent. If this is not enough to choke the greatest talent, I do not know of any worse impediment.[49]
Though the study of feminist debates is beyond the limits of this book, it is worthwhile to mention that the ideas of Josefa Amar Borbón had doubtlessly been nourished by a long polemic which started in 1726 with the essay on the "Defense of women" by Fr. Feijoo, in the first volume of his Universal Theatre of Criticism .[50] But in this writing, at the end of the century, the Aragonese lady put her finger on the right spot, more precisely than anyone had dared to do before her. In spite of the limitations and condition-
ing to which she was subjected, she did see that the most arduous ground for a woman was the question of love; no one, up to then, had bothered to talk about it in a healthy and straightforward way.
A well-born and otherwise judicious young lady, carried away by passion, will overlook all the respect she owes her parents and her own good; this she would not do for anything else. . . . Women tend to stumble over this danger because they are praised and elevated in high-sounding language by their suitors. . . . It would be a good idea to let maidens know beforehand that a discourse made up of lies must resemble the truth, simply because the object of that discourse is to imitate truth.[51]
Nonetheless, it was expedient to count on the good will of men, hoping they would help those befuddled beginners in the field of knowledge. It was a matter of clearing the ground to help women discern the conversations from which they could get some benefit, rather than wasting their time on inane chatter, cover-ups for flirtations. However risky men's company was as far as that deceitful language of gallantry was concerned, one had to recognize that it was somewhat more beneficial than the gossipy chatting that went on when women were by themselves.
I think it will be rather difficult for you to find women friends who will not foster in you frivolity, affectation, vanity and rashness . . . you will have to do the opposite of what your girlfriends advise you . . . in the directions and hints they give you to win in any unreasonable complaint or quarrel with your husband, in the wiles they will insinuate to you. . . . A hen party is a school of error and gossip.[52]
The emphasis was on disparaging the residue of the estrado, on trying to encourage a dialogue between the two sexes, still essentially separated in spite of the apparent ease of the tertulias.
I often felt sorry seeing the lady of the house get up soon after dinner to form a group apart, as if women, because of their sex, were not rational beings, and as if there existed a law that deemed them incapable of making conversation. In a salon where women and men are gathered, if the men start to discuss a general topic, for pastime and exchange of opinions, women prefer to form a group to themselves, telling each other the prices and purchases of fabrics and trimmings, and which gowns they thought suitable or improper for church or the theater. If you find yourselves in the company of learned men talking about arts and sciences which are beyond your comprehension, you will profit much
more by listening to them . . . than by isolating yourselves in a corner to consult with your closest friends on the new supply of fans from abroad.[53]
Something would be amiss in this chapter if a certain event was not reviewed. In spite of its aristocratic and exclusive character, it shows an effort by the government to integrate women into university studies. In 1785 Charles III decreed, for the first time in Spanish history, that a woman be granted the Doctorate in Humanities. The young lady was María Isidora Quintina Guzmán, who had just been admitted as a member of the Royal Academy of the Language in her seventeenth year. Though her entrance speech did not show a brilliant mind, the king thought it was excellent; because he wished to reward the young academician, he granted her access to the University of Alcalá[*] in June of the same year. Officially, Quintina's exams were highly praised and were considered outstanding proof of her ability; but the strange thing is that in the review of her merits, the usual reserve and modesty of the candidate are also mentioned.
The rigorous way in which she was examined . . . in the subjects she chose and defended; the wise examiners she had, the serenity, modesty, composure and integrity that everybody admired, the general recognition of her intelligence and knowledge, the many people present and the enjoyment they showed in listening to her make this event outstanding and without precedent. It places this lady among the heroines of letters, not only of this age, but also of times gone by, and of all universities in the country.[54]
In all these accolades one can perceive the pride the government had in the grandeur of that occasion, which was quite a high society event. If one reviews the details of these exams and the festivities, praises and receptions following them, one is fully convinced of it. To begin with, the king promulgated an order of 7 May that:
The graduation ceremony of Lady María Quintina Guzmán y de la Cerda, daughter of the Marquis of Montealegre, will be performed
[*] University of Alcalá de Henares: founded by Cardinal Cisneros in 1498. It was here that a group of famous scholars researched and brought to completion (1517) the polyglot Bible (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the first volume also in Chaldean). In 1836, its library and activities were transferred to Madrid; its main university bears the name Universidad Complutense , from Complutum , the old Latin name of Alcalá de Henares.
with all the decorum and honor corresponding to such a special circumstance. His Majesty wishes the Faculty of Arts to arrange the ceremony for the granting of the degree in Humanities, which the above lady is to receive; both the public exercises which she is to perform, the choice of the points of debate, and the examiners, as they might consider it convenient.[55]
On 3 June the candidate arrived in Alcala de Henares, escorted by her parents and a brother.
They were received by many people, prompted by affection and rejoicing at the arrival of such illustrious guests at the Archbishop's palace. The same evening, the Rectors, Counselors, the Deans of all the faculties, and the secretaries and staff representing the University went to the Palace. The Counselor Don Juan de Valle López de Salazar delivered a speech.[56]
From the content of the latter, in which it is mentioned that María Isidora Quintina would fulfill the "Royal intentions," one gathers that whatever the actual results of the exam were, it was taken for granted that they were going to be satisfactory. In fact, the day after the speech quoted above, she was given the themes on which she had to expound. That same afternoon, she went out with her parents
to choose the site for the exercises, one of the two they had prepared and decorated magnificently: one in the aula magna (main hall) and the other in the church. Having taken into consideration the crowd that had gathered, even from other towns, to witness this act, they decided the ceremony should take place in the church of the university.
Finally on the fifth,
the young lady went to the aforementioned site accompanied by her parents, the Chancellor, the Rector, and the staff, all in carriages. As soon as they entered, a harmonious orchestra composed of many instruments started to play, and continued until she ascended the chair; from it she proceeded with her academic exercises in the presence of all the faculty, her illustrious parents, and a distinguished gathering of about six hundred people.
After that,
she was hailed by the entire university; it was obvious that everyone was rejoicing in the satisfaction experienced at the completeness of such
an act. Everyone felt moved from the depth of their hearts, and the solemn ceremony was concluded with the full orchestra playing.
The day after, on the sixth, the Chancellor placed on her head the Doctor's bonnet, which had been brought on a tray, offered to him by the parents and the brother of the young lady. Thus María Isidora Quintina was named
honorable professor of Contemporary Philosophy and perpetual Counselor of it . . . and the University presented their excellencies with silver medals, coined to commemorate the happy event.
During the following days, the Marquis and the Marchioness of Montealegre gave receptions and refreshments to the entire faculty in the Palace of the Archbishop. In the meantime,
a splendid illumination of the frontispiece of the University had been disposed, alternating the orchestra and the peal of bells.
The visits paid to them
by all levels of distinguished people were reciprocated with all those proofs of attention and propriety to be expected from such an illustrious family . . . and the last day they offered bountiful refreshments to all the students in gratitude for the music and the enthusiasm with which they had applauded the distinguished lady doctor.[57]
If I have been somewhat lengthy in transcribing fragments of this review, it is because I believe that reading them is more revealing than any commentary I could make on them. One can see that, deep down, the ceremony did not mean much more than what a wealthy father would do for his daughter's debut in society. It is a celebration organized under the auspices of important men; the themes of the exercises were considered so secondary as not to be mentioned at all. The homages and honors were enough to encourage any inclination to vanity the young lady might have had. I doubt very much that the granting of such a doctorate stimulated in her any desire to learn for the sake of learning. I am afraid that it did not.
As Josefa Amar Borbón said, study served above all
to spend one's time usefully, to help individuals of all ages to overcome problems in life, to acquire new ideas, and be contented to be away from the madding crowd.
She added that
when one looks for one's own good in studies, one has also learned to depend as little as possible on others. In women it is always risky to cultivate abilities that require too much of a show.[58]
I take pleasure in closing my work with the words of this judicious feminist from Aragon. But much more time than she had suspected had to go by before that tendency toward "cultivating abilities that required a show" could be uprooted in the least. The conquest of loneliness through personal achievement was still far away.
Madrid, February 1968
Salamanca, December 1971
Notes
Translator's Preface
1. Mirella Servodidio and Marcia L. Welles, eds., From Fiction to Meta Fiction: Essays in Honor of Carmen Martín Gaite (Lincoln, Nebr.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1983). See also Joan Lipman Brown, Secrets from the Back Room: The Fiction of Carmen Martín Gaite (University of Mississippi: Romance Monographs, 1987). Carmen Martín Gaite, The Back Room , trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
2. Carmen Martín Gaite, El proceso de Macanaz. Historia de un empapelamiento (Madrid: Moneda y crédito, 1970; reprinted as Macanaz como otro paciente de la Inquisición , Madrid: Taurus, 1975).
3. Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuento de nunca acabar 2d ed. (Madrid: Trieste, 1983).
Introduction
1. Manuel Antonio Ramírez y Góongora, The Escort Seen Through a Magnifying Glass (Córdoba, 1774), 35—37.
2. Abbé de Vayrac, Present State of Affairs in Spain (Amsterdam, 1718), 1:56.
3. Ramón de la Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays (Madrid, 1843), 414.
4. María Rosa Gálvez de Cabrera, "Literary Figureheads," Complete Works (Madrid, 1804), 1:307.
5. One can find the original meaning of cortejo in some works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example: Bretón de los Herreros, "The Two Nephews," in Complete Works (Madrid, 1883-1884), act 1, sc. 3. B. Pérez Galdós, The Great Orient (Madrid: n.p., 1903), 175. E. Pardo Bazán, Memoirs of a Bachelor (Madrid: n.p., 1911), 26. Chichisveo is spelled chichisbeo in some texts of the period; as such it comes closer to the Italian cicisbeo .
6. Benigno Natural, Definition of the Cortejo (Málaga, 1789).
7. Juan Salazar y Ontivero, Catholic Protest Against the Custom of the Chichisveo (Madrid, 1737), 6. break
8. Franco Meregalli, "Goldoni and Ramón de la Cruz"; A. Mariutti, "Goldoni's Influence in Spain in the Eighteenth Century," Studies on Goldoni (Venice and Rome: Institute per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1959), 315-338.
9. Giuseppe Baretri, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy with Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travelers with Regard to that Country , (London, 1769), 1:101.
10. It seems peculiar to find chichisbear with the meaning of "to murmur" in a contemporary novel by Pérez de Ayala, Tigre Juan (N.p., n.d.), 10.
11. Constantino Roncaglia, Modern Conversations Commonly Termed of the Cicisbei (Lucca, 1753), 3-4.
12. F. J. del Corral, Some Advice to a friend Enthusiast About the Cortejo Defended by E. G. Lobo (Madrid, 1717), 6-7.
13. Luis de Granada, On Prayer and Thought , quoted in Julia Fitzmaurice Kelly, "Women in the Sixteenth Century," Revue Hispanique 70 (1927).
14. Philarète Chasles, Studies on Spain and on the Influence of Spanish Literature in France and in Italy (Paris, 1847).
15. Lope de Vega, The Right Moment , quoted in R. del Arco Garay, Spanish Society in the Works of Lope de Vega (Madrid: n.p., 1942).
16. Ernest Martinenche, Spanish Drama in France (Paris, 1900), 81.
17. Mme d' Aulnoy, 1679—Travel Notes in Spain , quoted in José Deleito Piñuela, The King is Having Fun (Madrid; n.p., 1955), 155.
18. Lope de Vega, To Guard and be on Guard (Guardar y Guardarse), vol. 12 of Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Real Academía Española).
19. E. Rodacanachi, Italian Women Before, During and After the Renaissance (Paris: Hachette, 1922), 324.
20. Gabriel Quijano, Six Dialogues Between a Clergyman and a Lady on the Vices of . . . Modern Conversations Otherwise Called Cortejo . . . . (Madrid, 1784) 220 ff. This book is an almost literal translation of an Italian work by Abbe S. Zucchino Stefani, The Mirror of Disillusion (Rome, 1751).
21. A. Salza, The Cicisbei in the Life and Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Rome: n.p., 1910). See also:
G. Natali, Ideas, Ways, and Men of the Eighteenth Century (Turin: n.p., 1926).
L. Valmaggi, The Cicisbei (N.p.: n.p., 1927).
Charles Rabany, Carlo Coldoni (Paris: n.p., 1896).
22. Jean Sarrailh, Mid-Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment in Spain , trans. A. Alatorre (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957), 375. break
23. Mariano Francisco Nipho, Answer to the Insults of "The Thinker" and its Followers Against Spain (Madrid, 1764), 32.
24. Salazar y Ontivero, "Dedication to the Duke of Arcos," Catholic Protest Against the Custom of the Chichisveo .
25. Sarrailh, 376.
26. A. Ossorio de la Cadena, Virtue in the Drawing Room: Judicious Guests (Salamanca, 1739), 96.
27. Baretti, 80.
28. Roncaglia, 219.
29. Ibid., 326.
28. Roncaglia, 219.
29. Ibid., 326.
1— Of Idleness and Amusement
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker: Critical Articles on Matters Pertinent to Society (Madrid, 1762-1767), 4:291.
2. E. and J. Goncourt, Women in the Eighteenth Century (Paris, 1878), 39-40.
3. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache , vol. 3 of Biblíoteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Real Academía Española), 554. Henceforth abbreviated BAE and RAE, respectively.
4. C. B. Bourland, "Family Life in Seventeenth-Century Spain," Homage to Menéndez y Pidal (N.p., 1925), 2:349.
5. Jean Francois Bourgoing, Travels in Spain: Contains a New, Accurate & Comprehensive View of the State of that Country to the Year 1806 , Trans. from the French, with engravings (London: Richard Phillips, 1808), 284. All passages from Bourgoing were extracted from this English translation rather than from the original French—Trans.
6. Nipho, Odds and Ends , (Madrid, 1781), 2:60.
7. Luis de León, The Perfect Married Woman , vol. 37 of BAE, 220.
8. Francisco Osuna, A Guide for Different Roles in Society , quoted in Fitzmaurice Kelly, 610.
9. León, 218.
10. Antonio de Guevara, Familiar Letters , quoted in Fitzmaurice Kelly, 601.
11. M. Fernández de Navarrete, On the Stability of Monarchies , Discourse 23 (Madrid, 1626).
12. Bourgoing, 101 and 154.
13. G. Desdevises Du Dézert, Old-Regime Spain (Paris, 1879-1904), 1:164ff.
14. Louis, Duke of Saint Simon, Complete and Authentic Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency 2, ch. 16 (Paris, 1856-1858).
15. Leopoldo Augusto Cueto y Ortega, Marquis of Valmar, Literary History of Spanish Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Madrid, 1893), 1.271. break
16. Nipho, Odds and Ends 2:202.
17. Juan Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury and on the Sumptuary Laws in Spain (Madrid: Royal Press, 1788), 203-205.
18. Sarrailh, 244.
19. Nipho, Odds and Ends 4:77-78.
20. Joseph Townsend, A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786- 1787 (London, 1791), 2:138.
21. Karl Vössler, Lope de Vega and His Time (Madrid: n.p., 1933), 184.
22. Antonio Muñoz, "Adventures in Verse and Prose, 1739" in Gesellschaft für Romantische Literatur (Dresden; n.p., 1907), 148.
23. Eloína Vílez López, "The Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Spain" (M.A. thesis, Madrid, 1970).
24. Auguste Geffroy, The Unpublished Letters of the Princess of Ursini (Paris, 1887). See also: Carmen Martín Gaite, The Inquisitional Case of Macanaz (Madrid: Moneda y Crédito, 1970), 43.
25. Bourgoing, 284.
26. Alexandre, Laborde, Descriptive Itinerary of Spain and a Basic Table of its Different Administrative and Industrial Branches (Paris, 1808), 5:340-343.
27. Muñoz, 151
28. Juan Antonio Zamácola, Elements of the Contredance (Madrid, 1796).
29. Jose Cadalso, The Complete Works (Madrid, 1818), 1:311.
30. Zamácola, 62.
31. Ibid., 68.
32. Ibid., 70-71.
30. Zamácola, 62.
31. Ibid., 68.
32. Ibid., 70-71.
30. Zamácola, 62.
31. Ibid., 68.
32. Ibid., 70-71.
33. Charles Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid , 1750-1800 (Berkeley: University Press, 1932), 279.
34. Zamácola, 21.
35. Ibid., 112.
34. Zamácola, 21.
35. Ibid., 112.
36. Ossorio, 99-100
37. Alejo de Dueñas, Up-to-date Education of Young Girls (Pamplona, 1786), 9-10.
38. The Censor 3:148. Periodical founded by Luis Cañuelo in 1781. For more information see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).
39. Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury , 178.
40. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:503.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 407.
40. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:503.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 407.
40. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:503.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 407.
43. Quijano, 167.
44. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:102. break
45. José Luis Velázquez, Marquis de Valdeflores, Collection of Various Writings on the Cortejo (Madrid, 1764), 25.
46. Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury , 177.
47. Diego Torres Villarroel, Moral Dreams (Madrid, 1794), 1:79.
48. Alfred Morel-Fatio, Studies on Spain (Paris: n.p., 1904), 3:252.
49. E. Gigas, "A German-Danish Traveler in the Spain of Charles III," Revue Hispanique 69 (1927) 459.
50. Zamácola, 128.
51. Esteban Terreros y Pando, Spanish Dictionary with Up-to-date Terms in French, Italian and Latin , vol. 1, entry abanico = "fan" (Madrid 1786-1793).
52. Muñoz, 20.
53. Ibid., 147-148.
52. Muñoz, 20.
53. Ibid., 147-148.
54. Luis de Eijoeceme, A Book on the Art of Pleasing (Madrid, 1785), 19-20.
55. Kany, 193.
56. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 3:294.
57. Luis Carmena y Millaá, Chronicle of Italian Opera in Madrid (Madrid, 1878), 7 ff.
58. Luis Coloma, Portraits of Yore (Madrid, 1895), 1:256-257.
59. Ibid., 26off.
58. Luis Coloma, Portraits of Yore (Madrid, 1895), 1:256-257.
59. Ibid., 26off.
60. Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury , 48.
61. Eijoecente, 41-43.
62. Literary Report . . . from Madrid , June 1989.
63. Nipho, A Friend to Women (Madrid, 1763), trans. and adapted by Mirabeau, 84. This little book must have been quite popular by 1801 when the Inquisition forbade its circulation, because "It is difficult to expurgate and, as it stands, it may be an eye opener for young people." The censors, nevertheless, were aware that "its goal is to correct and teach women." A.H.N., National Archive of History, State papers. Document 4.492, no. 5. The L.o refers to legajo = bundle (bundle of papers). From this point on I shall omit this Spanish abbreviation. Estado, L.o 4.492, no. 5.
64. Coloma 1:258.
65. Nipho, Odds and Ends , 82.
66. Ossorio, 298.
67. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 4:299.
68. Juan Ignacio Gonzalez del Castillo, The Cradle of Desires (Madrid: Royal Spanish Academy, 1914), 1:293.
69. Muñoz, no and 112.
70. Leandro Fernández de Moratín, "The Baron," Dramatic and Lyrical Works (Madrid, 1840), 1:80.
71. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 2:422. break
72. The Censor 2:449.
73. The Spanish Theater: History and Anthology (Madrid: Aguilar, 1943), 5:461ff.
74. The Censor 3:148.
75. The Diligent Escort , MS no. 14. 526, National Library, Madrid.
76. Ibid.
75. The Diligent Escort , MS no. 14. 526, National Library, Madrid.
76. Ibid.
2— Conversation and Its Participants
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:314.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Ibid., 55 and 309.
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:314.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Ibid., 55 and 309.
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:314.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Ibid., 55 and 309.
4. Nipho, A friend to Women , 128.
5. Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 74.
6. The Thinker , Thought 19, quoted in A. Morel-Fatio, Jovellanos' Satire on the Deficient Education of the Nobility (Paris, 1899).
7. Tomás de Iriarte, The Ill-bred Young Lady (Barcelona: n.d.), act 1.
8. J. Clavijo y Fajardo, Decree on Jealousy and the Vindication of Women (Madrid, 1755), 47 and 55.
9. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 4: 55 and 319.
10. Nipho, Answer to the Insults . . . , 55.
11. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 4:318.
12. Cruz, "The Dandy," Farces in Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1915).
13. Kany, 55 and 172.
14. Gigas, 464.
15. Bourgoing, 296.
16. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 4:54, 317.
17. Salazar y Ontivero, 3-4.
18. Zamácola, 18.
19. Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury , 179.
20. Eijoecente, 61ff.
21. Juan Antonio Mercadal, The 'Goblin" Speculating on Society (Madrid, 1761), 359, 374-375.
22. Ramírez y Góngora, 7.
23. Clavijo y Fajardo, Decree on Jealousy and Apology to Ladies , 7.
24. Eijoecente, 44.
25. Ibid., 49-51.
26. Ibid., 59-60.
24. Eijoecente, 44.
25. Ibid., 49-51.
26. Ibid., 59-60.
24. Eijoecente, 44.
25. Ibid., 49-51.
26. Ibid., 59-60.
27. Coloma 2:22.
28. Moreto's fashionable Love was one of the most polished and intelligent plays of the seventeenth century. Moreto took a skeptical view of continue
many customs and institutions of his day; thus the play was bound to be considered subversive in a period in which the theater rarely adopted a critical stance.
29. Quijano, 53-54.
30. Zamácola, 25.
31. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:87ff.
32. The Ill-bred Young Lady , quoted in E. Cotarelo y Mori, Iriarte and His Time (Madrid, 1897), 357.
33. Velázquez, 11.
34. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:293.
35. Gálvez De Cabrera, 327.
36. Torres Villarroel, Dreams . . ., 152.
37. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 1:344.
38. See Introduction, note 15.
39. Corral, 11.
40. Velázquez, 14.
41. See ch. 1, note 12.
42. Kany, 189.
43. Ossorio, 9.
44. Quijano, 21.
45. It would be worthwhile to study the popular verses and pamphlets satirizing the aristocracy. Though I have encountered quite a few, I have not been able to delve into them.
46. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:131.
47. Quijano, 36-37.
48. Ibid., 13-14.
49. Ibid., 39-40.
47. Quijano, 36-37.
48. Ibid., 13-14.
49. Ibid., 39-40.
47. Quijano, 36-37.
48. Ibid., 13-14.
49. Ibid., 39-40.
50. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 2:4.
51. Ibid., 1:98.
50. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 2:4.
51. Ibid., 1:98.
52. Quijano, 34.
53. The Sham Escort , MS no. 14.603/10, National Library, Madrid.
54. There are two possible etymologies for the eighteenth-century neologism majo/maja . It may be related to the argot majar/machacar (standard Spanish), meaning to pound, to crush, figuratively to bother, to pester somebody. The adjective "majo"—deriving from "majar," meaning impertinent, bothersome, was probably extended to characterize the arrogant, sharp-tongued artisans of Madrid and other large towns. On the other hand, it may be linked with the ancient May festivities, the highlight of which was the May queen, chosen from among the prettiest young girls in the popular sectors of Madrid. She would be accompanied by her young friends, singing and playing tambourines, castanets and guitars, to a portal adorned with mirrors, or to a window bedecked with flowers. May = mayo/majo. The passage of mayo to majo would have entailed a phonetic change: from a yod ( y ) to a velar fricative, unvoiced x . break
55. Coloma 2:270.
56. Bourgoing, 297.
57. The Censor 4:216.
58. Morel-Fatio, Jovellanos's Satire , 8.
59. Laborde, 5:340ff.
60. Kany, 313.
61. Cotarelo y Mori, History of Stagecraft in Spain (Madrid, 1896), 1:17.
62. Cueto, 311.
63. Morel-Fario, Jovellanos's Satire , 30.
64. Cotarelo y Mori, History of Stagecraft 2:62.
65. Ibid., 59.
64. Cotarelo y Mori, History of Stagecraft 2:62.
65. Ibid., 59.
66. "A famous actress called María Ignacia Ibáñez, the most talented woman I ever met, was extravagant enough to fall in love with me when my spirits and my finances were at the lowest ebb. Her company alleviated me greatly in my misfortune." "Autobiographical Notes," Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 161, no. 2 (October-December 1967): 132-133.
67. Morel-Fatio, Jovellanos's Satire, 35.
68. Gigas, 514.
69. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:320.
70. The Fair of Valdemoro , quoted in Morel-Fatio, Jovellanos's Satire , 12.
71. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:166ff. 72. Langle, Travel in Spain (Paris, 1796), 161. See also: C. Blanco Soler, The Duchess of Alba and Her Time (Madrid, 1949).
72. Langle, Travel in Spain (Paris, 1796), 161. See also: C. Blanco Soler, The Duchess of Alba and Her Time (Madrid, 1949).
73. Gigas, 363-364.
74. Yebes, The Countess-Duchess of Benavente (Madrid, 1954), 72ff.
3— Maidens and Married Ladies
1. Juan de Mora, Moral Discourses , quoted in Fitzmaurice Kelly, 751.
2. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote , part 2, chapter 22.
3. Ibid., part 1, chapter 28.
2. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote , part 2, chapter 22.
3. Ibid., part 1, chapter 28.
4. Antonio de Guevara, Familiar Letters , quoted in Fitzmaurice Kelly, n.p.
5. Josefa Amar Borbón, On the Physical and Moral Education of Women (Madrid, 1790), 265.
6. Vélez López, The Role of Women .
7. The Censor , Discourse 152.
8. The Censor , Discourse 131.
9. L. Fernández de Moratí'n, "When the Maiden Says Yes," Dramatic and Lyrical Works 1:51. break
10. Corral, 12.
11. Natural, 13.
12. Corral, 13.
13. F. M. Melo, Guide for the Married and Warnings to Courtiers (Madrid, 1724), 78.
14. Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, "The Fashionable Lady," The Spanish Theater: History and Anthology 5:118.
15. Ibid., 77.
14. Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, "The Fashionable Lady," The Spanish Theater: History and Anthology 5:118.
15. Ibid., 77.
16. Literary Report from Madrid , September 1787.
17. Ramírez y Góngora, 12.
18. Ibid., 6-7.
17. Ramírez y Góngora, 12.
18. Ibid., 6-7.
19. Zamacola 52-53.
20. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 1:451.
21. Fernández de Moratín, Dramatic and Lyrical Works 2:10.
22. Torres Villarroel, Moral Dreams 1:42.
23. J. Esteban Colomer, Men's Fickleness (Madrid, 1781), 98.
24. Nipho, Odds and Ends 5:439ff.
25. The Censor 5:508.
26. Juan Pablo Forner, A Modish Young Lady 63 of BAE.
27. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:402.
28. Ibid., 386.
27. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:402.
28. Ibid., 386.
29. Ossorio, 51, 75-78.
30. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 1:505.
31. The Censor's Correspondent , letter 6 (Madrid, 1787).
32. J. Ruiz de Alarcón, A Doubtful Truth , 20 of BAE, act 1, scene 3.
33. Cristóbal de Fonseca, On the Love of God , quoted in Fitzmaurice Kelly, 565.
34. Ossorio, 182.
35. Fernández de Moratín, "The Fashionable Lady," The Spanish Theater: History and Anthology 5:146-147.
36. Nipho, Odds and Ends , 6:3.
37. The Censor's Correspondent , letter 6.
38. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 2:3.
39. Ramírez y Góngora, 76-77.
40. Gigas, 458.
41. Fulgencio Afán De Ribera, The Modern Approach to Modesty and Mysticism , 33: of BAE.
4— Crisis in the Institution of Matrimony
1. Gálvez de Cabrera, "A Madman Makes One Hundred," New Spanish Theater (Madrid, 1801), 5:366ff. break
2. Velázquez, 10.
3. Quijano, 58-59.
4. Roncaglia, 219.
5. Salazar y Ontivero, 13, 17.
6. Journal of Spanish Men of Letters (Madrid, 1738), 4: 286.
7. Natural, 38.
8. Quijano, 202.
9. Ibid., 205—206.
8. Quijano, 202.
9. Ibid., 205—206.
10. Ossorio, 97.
11. The Censor , 6: 1004.
12. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:85.
13. J. Cadalso, "Autobiographical Notes." Bulletin of the Royal Academy of History (October-December 1967): 175.
14. J. Garcña De León y Pizarro, Memoirs (Madrid, 1894), 105-106.
15. William Beckford, The History of the Caliph Vathek and European Travels (London, 1891), 461-462.
16. Gigas, 362.
17. Blanco Soler, 55.
18. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 1:139.
19. Ramírez y Góngora, 37.
20. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 1:139.
21. García De León y Pizarro, 12.
22. Ibid., 37.
23. Ibid., 49.
21. García De León y Pizarro, 12.
22. Ibid., 37.
23. Ibid., 49.
21. García De León y Pizarro, 12.
22. Ibid., 37.
23. Ibid., 49.
24. The Censor's Correspondent , letter 12.
25. The Censor , vol. 5, Discourse 131.
26. F. Count of Cabarrus, Letters . . . on the Obstacles Placed by Nature, Public Opinion and the Law to the Citizens' Well-Being , vol. 62 of BAE, letter 5.
27. AHN, "Councils," Document 11.925 (Hearing of Ramón Salas).
28. AHN, "State," Document 3.158/8.
29. For similar cases see: AHN, "State," Document 4.828.
30. Antonio Matheu y Borja, "On the Harm Caused by Heavy Taxation on Dowries," Literary Report from Madrid (June 1794).
31. Josefa Amar Borbón, "On Ladies' Luxury: Proposal for a National Dress," Literary Report from Madrid ( July 1788).
32. Matheu y Borja, "On the Harm Caused by Excessive Taxation on Dowries," Literary Report from Madrid (June 1794).
33. J. A. Piñán y Zúñiga, A Guide for Bachelors (Madrid, 1774).
34. Sempere y Guarinos, Essay on Luxury , 183-184.
35. AHN, "State," Document 3.467.
36. Vayrac 1:64.
37. Gigas, 363. break
38. Literary Report from Madrid (June 1765).
39. Gálvez De Cabrera, 369.
40. Quijano, 208.
41. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 2:3.
42. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1. Thought 4.
43. Torres Villarroel, Moral Dreams , 258-266.
44. The Censor 5:509.
45. Nipho, Odds and Ends 2:53.
46. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays 1:344.
47. The Censor 5:504ff.
48. Laborde 5:367.
49. Tirso De Molina, The Mistrustful Condemned , vol. 5 of BAE, act 2, scene 3.
50. Pedro Luján, Matrimonial Dialogues (Seville, 1550), Dialogue 3.
51. Nipho, Answer to the Insults Perpetrated by "The Thinker" and His Followers , 24-26.
52. AHN, "State," Document 5.554, No. 91.
53. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 3:38.
54. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 151-154.
5— Love Opposed to Virtue
1. Ossorio, 324.
2. For example, Josefa Amar Borbón. One of the first feminists in the eighteenth century upheld Vives's ideas in her book On the Physical and Moral Education of Women .
3. Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman (Saragossa, 1555), b. 1, ch. 19.
4. Coloma, Portraits of Yore , n.p.
5. Thoughts on the Conduct Between Husband and Wife (Madrid, 1792), prologue, 9.
6. The Censor 5:654ff.
7. Anonymous, 4.
8. Anonymous, 4.
9. AHN, "State," Document 4.828/13.
10. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 61.
11. Rojas Zorrilla, There is Something Brewing There , vol. 54 of BAE, act 1, scene 1.
12. Lope de Vega, When the Master is Absent There is Grief , quoted in R. Arco. Garay, Spanish Society in Lope de Vega's Works (Madrid: n.p., 1942), 455.
13. Fitzmaurice Kelly, 571.
14. Ibid., 582. break
13. Fitzmaurice Kelly, 571.
14. Ibid., 582. break
15. Pedro Calatayud, Tracts and Doctrines (Logroño, 1754), 3:10.
16. Calatayud, 3:10.
17. Ibid., 16-17.
16. Calatayud, 3:10.
17. Ibid., 16-17.
18. Bourgoing, 2.88.
19. Rojas Zorrilla, vol. 54 of BAE, act 1, scene 1.
20. Lope de Vega, The Defense of Truth , quoted in Arco, 431.
21. Lope de Vega, The Secret Wedding , quoted in Arco, 433.
22. Terreros y Pando, entry "Gallant."
23. Ramírez y Góngora, 53.
24. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 150.
25. Cruz, "The Fastidious Young Ladies," The Spanish Theater (Madrid: Aguilar, 1943), 5:467.
26. Townsend 2:144-145.
27. Gigas, 469.
28. Zamácola, 64-65: see also Townsend 2:144.
29. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:101.
30. Ibid., 101, 112.
29. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:101.
30. Ibid., 101, 112.
31. Cruz, "The Exam of the Cortejo," Farces 2:138.
6— The Escort and Religion
1. Bourgoing, 276-277.
2. Laborde, 5:377.
3. Bourgoing, 276.
4. Ibid., 276.
3. Bourgoing, 276.
4. Ibid., 276.
5. Duchess d'Abrantes, Remembrances of a Diplomatic Mission and a Stay in Spain and Portugal from 1801 to 1811 (Paris, 1837), 2:4-5.
6. Gigas, 364.
7. MS 4.045, National Library, Madrid.
8. Townsend 2:142-143.
9. Fitzmaurice Kelly, 564.
10. Arco, 431.
11. Fitzmaurice Kelly, 600.
12. Gigas, 424-425.
13. Ibid., 422.
12. Gigas, 424-425.
13. Ibid., 422.
14. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 3:13.
15. Nipho, Odds and Ends 4:235-236.
16. Sarrailh, 687.
17. Quijano, 208-209.
18. Ibid., 279.
17. Quijano, 208-209.
18. Ibid., 279.
19. Townsend 2:147-149.
20. Ibid., 150.
19. Townsend 2:147-149.
20. Ibid., 150.
21. Calatayud, vol. 3, Introduction, notes 11 and 12. break
22. Salazar y Ontivero, 50.
23. Martín Gaite, The Inquisitional Case of Macanaz , 171-172.
24. Torres Villarroel, Moral Dreams , 102.
25. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Censor 3: 273.
26. Quijano, 77.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 110.
26. Quijano, 77.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 110.
26. Quijano, 77.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 110.
26. Quijano, 77.
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 110.
30. Morel-Fatio, Jovellanos's Satire , 38.
31. Salazar y Ontivero, 57.
32. Quijano, 92.
33. AHN, "State," Document 4.459, No. 22.
34. Ibid.
33. AHN, "State," Document 4.459, No. 22.
34. Ibid.
35. Manifesto on the Definition of Love , MS 4.045, National Library, Madrid, 8.
36. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:110.
37. See ch. 4, note 13.
38. Account of the "auto de fe" celebrated by the Holy Inquisition in the Church of San Domingo el Real , R 24.571 (R refers to raros , rare papers).
39. Velázquez, 47.
40. Journal of Spanish Men of Letters 4:289.
41. AHN, "State," Document 4.502, no. 5.
42. See ch. 1; also Cueto y Ortega, 1:265ff.
43. V varios/especiales, ca. 335, no. 36 (ca. refers to caja = box).
44. Velázquez, 1.
45. Ibid., 6.
44. Velázquez, 1.
45. Ibid., 6.
46. Cueto y Ortega, 1:311.
47. AHN, "State," Document 5.293, no. 179.
48. Ibid., Document 4.482, no. 19,
47. AHN, "State," Document 5.293, no. 179.
48. Ibid., Document 4.482, no. 19,
49. Quijano, 217.
50. Velázquez, 41.
7— The Conventional Language of the Cortejo
1. See Introduction, note 9.
2. Veáazquez, 22-23.
3. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 4: 319ff.
4. Clavijo y Fajardo, vol. 2, Thought 28.
5. Mateo Alemán, vol. 3, b. 3, p. 2, ch. 3.
6. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 90-91.
7. Ibid., 10. break
6. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 90-91.
7. Ibid., 10. break
8. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1: 43.
9. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 93.
10. Ibid., 65.
11. Ibid., 93.
9. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 93.
10. Ibid., 65.
11. Ibid., 93.
9. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 93.
10. Ibid., 65.
11. Ibid., 93.
12. Terreros y Pando, entry coqueta .
13. Cadalso, Complete Works 1:134.
14. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , vol. 2: Thought 18.
15. Velázquez, 45.
16. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 129.
17. Eijoecente, 69-70.
18. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 19-20.
19. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:309.
20. Cruz, Collection of One-Act Plays , 134.
21. Ramírez y Góngora, 45.
22. Melo, 50.
23. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , vol. 3: Thought 31.
24. Gigas, 458.
25. Ramírez y Góngora, 96.
26. Amar Borbón, "On Ladies' Talents and Aptitudes," Literary Report from Madrid , 215.
27. Duchess Abrantes, 78.
28. Quijano, 177.
29. Ibid., 130.
28. Quijano, 177.
29. Ibid., 130.
30. Muñoz, 163-164.
31. There were some exceptions, of course, and one of them is the Countess-Duchess of Benavente, praised for her enlightened ideas and culture. See Yebes and Cotarelo y Mori, Iriarte and His Time (Madrid, 1897).
32. Bourgoing, 283.
33. Eijoecente, 71-74.
34. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 70.
35. Duchess Abrantes, 1:30-31.
8— Women's Education
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:30.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. Ibid., 177.
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:30.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. Ibid., 177.
1. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , 1:30.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. Ibid., 177.
4. Mercadal, 39-40.
5. Nipho, A Friend to Women , 69.
6. Pedro Malon De Chaide, Magdalen's Conversation , vol. 27 of BAE, 279.
7. Rojas Zorrilla, vol. 54 of BAE, act 1, scene 1.
8. Lope de Vega, The Foolish Lady , vol. 24 of BAE, act 3, scene 10. break
9. María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Amorous and Exemplary Novels (Madrid: RAE, 1948), 21.
10. Lope de Vega, A Woman Vindicator of Womanhood , quoted in Arco.
11. Lope de Vega, A Maiden Called Theodorus , quoted in Arco, 320.
12. Lope de Vega, The Foolish Lady , act 3, scene 3.
13. Carmen Bravo-Villasante, Women Disguised as Men: An Aspect of the "Golden Age" Theatre (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1955).
14. Muñoz, 73.
15. The Censor's Correspondent , letter 47.
16. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:38.
17. Iriarte, The Ill-bred Young Lady act 2.
18. Literary Report from Madrid (June 1875).
19. Nipho, A Friend of Women , 6.
20. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker , vol. 2, Thought 28.
21. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:166.
22. Amar Borbón, On the . . . Education of Women , 229.
23. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:37.
24. Amar Borbón, On the . . . Education of Women , 91.
25. Ibid., xiii.
26. Ibid., xv, xviii .
24. Amar Borbón, On the . . . Education of Women , 91.
25. Ibid., xiii.
26. Ibid., xv, xviii .
24. Amar Borbón, On the . . . Education of Women , 91.
25. Ibid., xiii.
26. Ibid., xv, xviii .
27. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:90.
28. Ibid., 2:34ff.
29. Ibid., 6:180.
27. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:90.
28. Ibid., 2:34ff.
29. Ibid., 6:180.
27. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:90.
28. Ibid., 2:34ff.
29. Ibid., 6:180.
30. Jovellanos, "Report on the Freedom of the Arts," Works (Madrid, 1846), 4:66ff.
31. Amar Borbón, "Essay on Women's Talents and Aptitudes" Literary Report from Madrid (Madrid , 1786), 5.
32. Coloma 1:257.
33. Muñoz, 148ff.
34. Amar Borbón, Essay , prologue, xii .
35. Ibid., xxi ; also Sarrailh, 257ff.
34. Amar Borbón, Essay , prologue, xii .
35. Ibid., xxi ; also Sarrailh, 257ff.
36. Manuel Godoy, Memoirs , vol. 88 of BAE, xxxi .
37. Literary Report from Madrid ( April 1786).
38. Nipho, Journal from Abroad: Tempting News for Those Interested in Arts and Sciences (Madrid, 1763), 217.
39. Literary Report from Madrid (April 1786).
40. J. Sempere y Guarinos, Preliminary for a Collection of the Best Spanish Writers' Works During Charles III's Reign (Madrid, 1785-1789), 3:215.
41. See ch. 4, note 29.
42. "Letter to Lady Josefa Amar Borbón from Don Juan Antonio Hernández de Larrea," Literary Report from Madrid (August 1786).
43. The ladies referred to in the article are the Duchess Cayetana of continue
Alba; her mother, Mariana de Silva, Duchess of Arcos through her third marriage; and the Marchioness of Peñafiel, who is also the Countess-Duchess of Benavente.
44. "Letter to Lady Josefa Amar Bourbón."
45. Ibid.
44. "Letter to Lady Josefa Amar Bourbón."
45. Ibid.
46. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:293.
47. Ibid., 2:28.
48. Ibid., 1:39.
46. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:293.
47. Ibid., 2:28.
48. Ibid., 1:39.
46. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 1:293.
47. Ibid., 2:28.
48. Ibid., 1:39.
49. Amar Borbón, "Essay," (June 1768).
50. María Pilar Oñate, Feminism in Spanish Literature (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1938), 162ff.
51. Amar Borbón, "Essay," 257-259.
52. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 3:32-34.
53. Ibid., 40-45.
52. Clavijo y Fajardo, The Thinker 3:32-34.
53. Ibid., 40-45.
54. Literary Report (June 1785).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
54. Literary Report (June 1785).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
54. Literary Report (June 1785).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
54. Literary Report (June 1785).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Amar Borbón, On the . . . Education of Women, xxi , 200. break
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Index
A
Abrantes, Duchess of, 124
Academy of Good Taste, 20
Actresses, influence of, 65 -67
Adultery, 107 ;
cortejo relationship covers, 90 -91, 92 -93. 129 , 164 ;
dances hide, 25 -26
Afán de Ribera, Fulgencio, 86
Aire de taco , 68
Alba, Duchess of (Teresa Cayetana), xi , 31 , 69 -71, 94 , 125 , 167
Alberoni, Julio, 130
Alcovistes , 9
Alemán, Mateo, 15 , 143
Amar Borbón, Josefa, 97 , 185 ;
on maiden's position, 73 ;
on women, competition among, 149 ;
on women's conversation, 160 -161;
on women's education, 163 , 169 , 170 , 173 -174;
on women as weak, 162 ,
Appearance:
emphasis on, xii , 27 , 54 -55, 87 , 126 -127, 143 , 160 -162;
decency or rusticity of, 46 ;
judging by, 35 -37
Aranda, Count of, 33 , 34
Aristocracy:
cortejo understood by, 55 -56;
as effeminate, 44 -46 (see also Dandies);
loses prestige, 56 -57, 58 , 59 -60;
vs. lower class, xi , 57 , 58 -59, 61 -69;
as models of behavior, 58 , 62 -63, 71 ;
morality of, 57 , 58 , 6o, 90 ;
reputation of, 91 ;
as rustic or provincial, 19
Artisans, 59
Attire/clothing, 46 , 143 -144, 160 ;
as display/marks status, 29 -32., 39 -40;
distinguishes courtesans from ladies, 18 ;
modesty in, 17 ;
morality protected by, 57 ;
reflects beliefs, 50 -51
Aulnoy, Mme. d', 8
B
Barbarity, vs. civility, 49
Baretti, Giuseppe, 12
Basque Economic Society, 21
Beauty:
complimented, 160 ;
delined, 161 , 162 ;
preoccupation with, 126 -127, 160 -161;
women as objects of, 142 , 143 -145
Beauty spots, 141
Beckford, William, 92
Benavente, Countess-Duchess of (María Josefa Alonso Pimentel), 70 -71, 91 , 92 , 167 , 188 n. 31
Bluestocking (bachillera ), 153 -154, 157
Boredom, of women, 13 , 14 , 16 -17
Bourgoing, Jean François, 16 , 19 ;
on cortejo, 124 ;
on entertaining, 24 ;
on friendships of women, 150 ;
on lower classes, 47 -48, 63 ;
on religion of women, 122 , 123 ;
on theater's influence, 115
Brihuega and Villaviciosa, Battle of, 48
C
Cabarrus, Francisco, Count of, 95 , 164
Cadalso, José, 25 , 67 , 90 -91, 91 , 95 , 135
Calatayud, Pedro, 113 -115, 130
Cañuelo, Luis, 95
Castro, Hortensia de, 157
The Censor , 27 , 74 , 95 , 102
Cervantes, Miguel de, 72 -73
Charles III, 4 , 33 , 90 , 91 , 92 ;
on educa-
tion of women, 162 -163, 163 -164, 171
Charles IV, 4 ;
immorality in court of, 19 , 90 , 91 -92.
Chastity, 6 , 72 -73, 75 -76, 82 ;
in cortejo relationship, 1 , 5 , 8 , 88 -89, 90 , 125 , 130
Chevaliers servants , 9
Chichisveo/chichisveo relationship, xi , 3 ;
attacked, 88 , 136 -137;
conversation of, 140 ;
duties of, 12 -13;
as effeminate, 48 ;
etymology of, 5 , 140 ;
husbands accept, 12 ;
as illicit/immoral, 55 , 56 , 88 ;
institutionalized, 12 ;
in Italy, 4 -5, 12 ;
origin of, 10 -12, 140 ;
replaces marriage, 88 .
See also Cortejo / cortejo relationship
Chivalry, 7 , 154
Civility, 38 , 49 , 100 -101
Classes:
lower (see Majo/maja/majismo );
middle (see Middle class);
upper (see Aristocracy)
Clavijo y Fajardo, J., 14 , 105 , 148 ;
on beauty, 144 , 161 , 162 ;
on bluestocking, 153 ;
on church as social gathering, 128 ;
on clergy, 131 ;
on compliments, 67 -68;
on cortejo relationship, 29 , 42 -43, 45 , 53 -54, 90 , 101 , 120 , 135 , 141 , 142 , 161 ;
on fans, 32 ;
on friendships, 170 ;
on honor, 50 ;
on ideal woman, 168 ;
on luxuries, 37 ;
on treatment of servants, 58 ;
on women's education, 152 , 158 -159, 168 -169, 170 -171
Clergy:
corruptibility of, 130 -134;
as gallants/escorts, 12 , 132 , 133 ;
in society, 130 -132;
as tutors, 132 ;
types of, 133
Clothing. See Attire
Coloma, Luis, 34 -35
Colomer, J. Esteban, 79 -80
Confession, 5 , 129
Conversation:
in chichisveo relationship, 140 ;
codes in, 140 -141;
confession compared to, 5 ;
in cortejo relationship, xii -xiii, 4 -5, 42 -43, 53 , 88 -89, 140 -151, 152 ;
in dancing, 25 ;
as dangerous/harmful, 5 , 88 -89, 140 ;
as trivial/shallow, 42 -43 140 , 142 , 147 , 149 -I50, 152 , 153 -I54, 160 ;
whispered, x , 4 -5, 152 ;
of women, I49-150, 160 -161
Coquetry, 145 -146
Corral, F. J. del, 56 , 75
Cortejo/cortejo relationship, x , 69 ;
as adultery, 90 -91, 92 -93, 129 , 164 ;
as alternative to marriage, xii , 84 , 93 , 94 -95, 147 ;
ambiguities in, 90 , 135 -136;
appearance in, 54 ;
as aristocratic, 4 , 55 -56;
as chaste, 1 , 5 , 8 , 88 -89, 90 , 125 , 130 ;
choice in, 118 -119, 120 -121;
church/Inquisition on, xiv , 134 , 136 , 137 -139;
clergy as, 12 , 132 , 133 ;
coiffure assisted by, 29 -30;
as confidant, 6 ;
conventions substitute for language in, 141 ;
conversation as aim of, xii -xiii, 4 -5, 42 -43, 53 , 88 -89, 140 -151, 152 ;
dance influences, 25 ;
as dangerous/harmful to women, 10 , 57 , 81 -82, 100 -101, 128 -129;
defended, 9 ;
duties of, 1 , 9 , 87 ;
as enduring bond, 123 -124, 125 ;
eroticism in, 89 -90;
etymology of, 2 -3;
as exhibitionism, 28 -29, 53 -54;
expenses/economic impact of, 32 , 93 -94, 121 , 147 ;
husbands on, xii , 1 , 101 , 103 ;
intimacy in, 89 , 100 -101;
language of, 141 , 142 , 145 ;
in lower classes, xi ;
lower classes on, xi , 60 -62;
marriage threatened/weakened by, 93 , 95 , 100 -101;
middle class on, xi ;
for older women, 161
origin of, 4 -5,7-9, 10 , 11 ;
and religious activities, xiii , 127 -128, 129 -130;
reserve escorts in, 118 -120;
sacrifices of, 147 ;
satirized, 137 -138;
secrecy in, 135 -136;
seventeenth-century, 7 -9;
shallowness / triteness in, 43 , 44 , 140 -141;
sign language in, 141 ;
submission in, 2 -3, 148 ;
traditionalists vs. moderns on, xi -xii, 10 ;
unmarried daughters affected by, 79 -82;
unmarried women compete with mar-
ried for, 84 -85;
women as object in, 2 , 140 ;
women affected by, 125 , 142 , 143 , 148 -149.
See also Dandies
Cotarelo y Mori, E., 66
Cruz, Ramón de la, xiii , 28 , 85 ;
on cortejo, 2 , 81 -82, 93 , 94 , 120 -121, 147 ;
on dandies, 53 ;
on fashion, 46 , 55 ;
on husbands, 103 ;
on love and marriage, 117 -118;
on lower classes, 47 , 61 ;
on prudery, 79 ;
on women's attire, 40
Cueto y Ortega, Leopoldo Augusto, Marquis of Valmar, 20
D
Dancing, 34 -35, 64 -65, 78 ;
adultery hidden by, 25 -26;
conversation in, 25 ;
cortejo relationship affected by, 25
Dandies, 44 -46, 49 -53;
conversation of, 53 ;
exhibitionism of, 53 -54;
as idle, 53 ;
lower classes on, 47 , 48 , 53 ;
majismo imitated by, 64 , 67 ;
on religion, 49 ;
traditionalists on, 45 -46;
as trivial, 53
Despejo , 76
Divorce, 95 -96
Dowry, 97 -98
Dueñas, Alejo de, 27
E
Echar los estrechos , 6
Economic Society of Madrid, women admitted to, 163 -164, 165 -166
Education of women, 152 -174;
aim/purpose of, 156 -I57, 165 -166;
from books on chivalry, 154 ;
in Charles III's reign, 162 -163, 163 -164, 171 ;
debate over, 163 ;
described, 158 -159;
men don't allow, 158 , 169 ;
music teacher's role in, 26 ;
neglected, 158 , 168 -169;
society on, 156 ; theater influences, 155 -156;
women disguised as men to get, 156 , 157 ;
women don't want, 163
Eijoecente, Luis de, 32 , 35 , 146 , 150 ;
on dandies, 49 , 51
Enlightenment, 21 , 130 -131
Entertaining, 22 -24, 33 -35
Estepa, Marchioness of, 167
Estrado , 15 -16, 23 , 170
Estrecho , 3 , 6 . See also Cortejo/cortejo relationship
F
Fans, 31 -32, 141
Farinelli, Carlo, 33
Fashion, importance of, 27 , 42 -43, 46 , 55 , 168 . See also Appearance, emphasis on
Feijoo, Benito, 169
Feminism, opposition to, 164 , 165
Ferdinand V, 48 -49
Ferdinand VI, 33 , 99
Fernández de Moratín, Leandro, 39 , 76 , 79 ;
on marriage, 74 , 84
Fernández de Navarrete, M., 18
Fitzmaurice KeIly, J., 113 , 126 , 127
Fonseca, Cristóbal de, 83
Forner, Juan Pablo, 81
France:
cortejo from, 9 , 10 , 11 ;
influence of, 28 , 29 , 45 , 64
G
Gálvez de Cabrera, María Rosa, 87 , 100
García de León y Pizarro, José, 92 , 94
Gigas, E., 70 , 127 , 148
Godoy, Manuel de, 91 -92
Goldoni, Carlos, 4
Goncourt, E. and J., 14
González del Castillo, Juan Ignacio, 38
Gossip, 42 -43, 149
Goya, Francisco de, xi , 69
Granada, Luis de, 5
Guevara, Antonio de, 18 , 73
H
Hairdresser, importance of, 29
Herr, Richard, 44
Hoces de Castril, Josefa, 111
Honor, 50 , 98 -100, 104 ;
Calderonian, 99 -100;
duels for, 99 ;
loss of, 98 -99;
no longer valued, 49 -50;
women's role in code of, xi
Huéscar, Duchess of (Mariana del Pilar de Silva y Sarmiento), 69 , 94 , 167
Husbands:
absent, 112 ;
on cortejo/chichisveo, xii , 12 , 101 , 103 ;
cuck-
olded, 102 ;
ideal, 101 ;
jealous, 101 -102, 112 -113;
women's behavior around, 125
I
Ibañez, María Ignada, 67 , 182 n. 66
Idiáquez y Carvajal, María Ignacia, 96 -97
Idleness of women, 13 , 14 , 16 -17, 36 - 37 , 38
Inquisition, on cortejo, xiv , 134 , 136 , 138 -139
Iriarte, Toáas de, 45 , 157
Isabel I, 48 -49
Isabel de Farnesio, 32
Italy, 4 -5, 10 , 11 , 12
J
Jealousy, 103 ;
of husbands, 101 -102, 112 -113
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 66 , 162 , 165
L
Laborde, Alexandre, 64 , 103 , 123
Ladvenant, María, 65 -66
Lambert, Marchioness of, 151
Langle, 70
León, Fray Luis de, 16 -17, 27 , 55
Louis XIII, 9
Love, 151 ;
at first sight, 126 ;
fragility of, 112 , 113 ;
in marriage, 74 ;
vs. marriage, 117 -118;
rhetoric of, 142 , 154 -155;
renounced, 8 ;
theater on, 115 ;
Vega on, xiii , 8 , 116 , 126 , 155 ;
and window, 77 -78, 113
Luxury, 21 ;
as display, 20 , 36 -37, 55 , 143 ;
equated with sin, xi , 18 -19
M
Madrid, 39 -40
Majo/maja/majismo (lower class):
vs. aristocracy, 57 , 58 -59, 61 -69;
as cortejo, xi ;
on cortejo, xi , 60 -62;
as custodians of tradition, 100 ;
on dandies, 47 , 48 , 53 ;
dandies imitate, 64 , 67 ;
Duchess of Alba as, xi ;
etymology of, 181 n. 54 ;
foreigners appreciate, 63 -64;
imitates upper class, 61 ;
influence of, xi , 63 -64, 65 -66, 67 -71;
machismo of, 47 ;
native dances of, 64 -65;
as xenophobic, xi , 47 , 61 -63
Malón de Chaide, Pedro, 154
María Louisa of Parma/Savoy, 23 , 30 , 34 , 35 , 91 , 92 , 149
Marriage:
arranged, 73 -74;
decline/breakdown of, 93 , 95 -97, 98 , 100 -101;
chichisveo/cortejo as alternative to, xii , 84 , 88 , 93 , 94 -95, 147 ;
denigrated, 95 , 97 ;
dowry in, 97 -98;
as end of love, 117 -118;
husband's role in, 101 -102, 103 , 112 -113;
ideal, 104 ;
for love, 74 ;
moderation of passion in, 111 -112, 116 ;
modesty in, 109 -110;
monarchy defends, 97 , 166 ;
pleasure in, 107 , 108 , 109 -111;
as possession, 116 ;
prestige of, 83 -84, 104 ;
relationships in, 102 -103, 105 -106, 107 ;
as sacrifice, 107 , 108 -109;
satirized, 105 ;
for women, 14 , 15 , 73 , 83 -84, 86
Martial spirit, 76 -77
Martín Gaite, Carmen, ix -x
Matheu y Borja, Antonio, 97 -98
Mayans, Father, 11
Medici, Maria de, 9
Medinasidonia, Duke of, 162 -163
Melo, Manuel, 76 , 148
Mercadal, Juan Antonio, 50
Middle class, xi , 47
Modernity, emphasis on, 27 -28
Modesty:
declines in marriage, 109 -110;
in dress, 17 ;
feigned, 127 ;
as woman's virtue, 17 , 55 , 165 , 171
Mora, José Marquis of, 51 -52, 65 , 94 , 108
Mora, Juan de, 72
Morality:
of aristocracy, 57 , 58 , 6o, 90 ;
attire protects, 57 ;
divorce defends, 95 -96;
theater influences, 113 -115
Moratín. See Fernández de Moratín, Leandro
Morel-Fatio, Alfred, 30 , 133
Moreto, Agustín, 52
Muñoz, Antonio, 23 , 24 , 31 , 32 , 38 , 149
Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 10 -11
N
Natural, Benigno, 4 , 75 , 88 -89
Nipho, Mariano F., 11 , 16 , 112 ;
on coquetry, 145 -146;
on cortejo/dandies, 44 , 45 , 128 ;
on empty conversation, 153 -154;
on judging by appearance, 36 , 37 ;
on marriage, 20 , 21 , 80 , 84 , 104 , 105 , 116 , 143 -145, 147 , 158 , 165
Nobility. See Aristocracy
O
Ossorio de la Cadena, A., 12 , 16 , 83 ;
on marriage, 107 ;
on Spanish temperament, 89 ;
on women, 37 , 57
Osuna, Francisco, 17
P
Petimetra , 55
Petimetres , 44 , 48 . See also Dandies
Philip II, 9
Philip IV, 7 -8
Philip V, 4 , 33 , 48 , 99
Philip of Anjou, 11
Piñán y Zúñiga, J. A., 98
Polygamia , 136
Prudery, 79
Q
Quijano, Gabriel, 28 -2. 9 ;
on clergy, 131 -132;
on cortejo, 9 , 52 , 87 , 89 , 129 , 146 ;
on gossip, 149 ;
on morality, 58 , 59 , 60
Quintina Guzmán, María Isidora, 171 -172
R
Ramírez y Góngora, Manuel A., 77 , 86 , 93 , 116 , 147 ;
on cortejo, 1
Religious activities/religion:
on aristocracy, 57 ;
on chichisveo, 136 -137;
cortejo and, xiii , 127 -128, 129 -130;
Enlightenment affects, 130 -131;
lip service to, xii ;
on piety, 61 ;
as social event, 127 , 128 ;
of women, 57 , 122 , 123
Reputation, importance of, 73 , 86 , 91
Reserve (recato ), 72 -73, 75 -76, 82
Rivas, Marchioness of, 99 -100
Rojas Zorrila, F., 112 , 115
Romanticism, 10 , 78 , 114 , 115
Romero del Alamo, Manuel, 35 -36
Roncaglia, Constantino, 5 , 13 , 88
Ruiz de Alarcón, J., 83
S
Salas, Ramón, 96
Salazar y Ontivero, Juan, 7 , 88 , 133
Samaniego, Félix María, 63
Santiago, Marchioness of, 151
Saraos , 22 , 24
Sarrailh, Jean, 21 , 128
Sempere y Guarinos, Juan, 21 , 28 , 97 ;
on dandies, 49 ;
on entertainment, 35 ;
on loss of honor, 98 -99;
on women's education, 165 -166
Sixto García, Cayetano, 137 , 138 -139
T
Teba, Count of (Eulalio de Guzmán Palafox), 96 -97
Terreros y Pando, Esteban, 31 , 145
Tertulia , 22 , 24
Theater, influence of, 7 , 65 , 113 -115, 155 -156
Tirso de Molina, 104
Tonadilla , 64 -65
Torres Villarroel, Diego, 30 , 79 , 102 , 130
Townsend, Joseph, 22 , 118 , 125 , 129
Traditionalists vs. moderns:
on cortejo, xi -xii, 10 ;
on dandies, 45 -46;
on ideal woman, 27 , 39 ;
on unmarried women, 78 -79
Traveling, 44 -45
U
University of Alcalá, 171 -172
Ursins, Princess of the, 23 , 30
V
Vayrac, Abbé de, 2
Vega, Lope de, 7 ;
on absent husbands, 112 ;
on love, xiii , 8 , 116 , 126 , 155 ;
on women's education, 155
Velázquez, José Luis, Marquis of Valdeflores, 136 , 137 -138, 139 ;
on beauty spots, 141 ;
on cortejo, 140 , 145
Vendôme, Louis de, 48
Villahermosa, Marchioness of (María Manuela de Pignatelli), 108
Vives, Luis, 107 -108
Vössler, Karl, 23
W
Window, 77 -78, 113
Women:
aspirations of, 38 ;
attire of, 143 -144;
bored, 13 , 14 , 16 -17;
chastity of, 5 -6, 71 -73, 75 -76, 82 ;
in code of honor, xi ;
competition among, 149 ;
constraints on, 14 -16;
conversation of, 149 -150, 160 -161;
coquetry of, 145 -146;
cortejo relationship endangers, 10 , 57 , 81 -82, 100 -101, 125 , 128 -129, 142 , 143 , 148 -149;
deportment of, 124 -125;
discretion of, 152 -153;
displays by, 14 , 20 , 26 -27, 28 , 29 -32, 36 -37, 39 -40, 143 ;
and entertainment, 22 -24;
equality of, 155 ;
fans used by, 31 -32, 141 ;
frailty of, 162 ;
friendships of, 13 , 150 , 170 ;
ideal/perfect, 17 , 27 , 39 , 55 , 165 , 166 -168, 171 ;
idleness of, 13 , 14 , 16 -17, 36 -37, 38 ;
idolized, 7 -8;
ignorance of, 152 , 155 (see also Education of women);
independence for, 104 , 113 -115;
indolence of, 44 ;
isolation of, 15 -16;
luxuries for, 20 , 36 -37, 55 , 143 ;
majismo influences, 67 -69;
marriage as aim of, 14 , 15 , 73 , 83 -84, 86 ;
martial spirit of, 76 -77;
modesty of, 17 , 55 , 165 , 171 ;
needs of, 18 ;
as object, 2 , 14 , 140 , 142 , 143 -146, 158 ;
passion of, 116 ;
as petimetras, 55 ;
power of, 71 ;
as religious, 122 , 123 ;
repression of, 143 ;
reputation of, 73 , 86 , 91 ;
reserve of, 72 -73, 75 -76, 82 ;
role conflicts of, xii , 15 , 126 -127, 156 ;
spending by, 20 , 21 , 22 , 37 , 97 ;
traditionalists vs. moderns on, 27 , 39 , 78 -79;
unmarried vs. married, 14 -15, 73 , 79 -82, 84 -85;
vanity of, 146 , 147
X
Xenophobia, xi , 47 , 62 -63
Z
Zamácola, Juan Antonio:
on cortejo/dandy, 49 , 53 , 119 ;
on dancing, 25 , 26 , 78 ;
on women's shoes, 31
Zayas y Sotomayor, María de, 155
Zuñiga y Castro, Josefa de, 20
Designer: U.C. Press Staff
Compositor: Prestige Typography
Text: 10/12 Sabon
Display: Sabon
Printer: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Binder:
Preferred Citation: Gaite, Carmen Martín. Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6x0nb4m5/