Well into the 1870s women novelists also took seriously their responsibility as moral beacons for their readers by publishing lives of model

4

6

7

Susan Kirkpatrick, Las roma´nticas. Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 289.

Bridget Aldaraca, El a´ngel del hogar: Galdo´s and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Alicia Andreu, Galdo´s y la liter-atura popular (Madrid: Sociedad General Espan˜ ola de Librer´ıa, 1982). Jo Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 55 .

A more complete list can be foundin Mar´ıa del Carmen Simo´n Palmer, Escritoras espan˜ olas del siglo XIX. Manual bio-bliogra´fico (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), pp. 815–824. David T. Gies, The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 192.

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Women, conduct manuals on wifely duties, and treatises on the best ways to mold the family into the emerging bourgeois ideal.8 When women writers “veered from the enabling Romantic tradition and allowed the constraining angel of the domestic woman to enter into their homes,”9 they did not suddenly abandon sentimentality and devotion to Romantic ideals, rather they examined those sentiments and ideals within the prism of a domestic sphere which they themselves were newly fashioning as a safe haven from a corrupt society, or, more commonly, as a space under siege from encroaching civilization. While the lyric poetry of Coronado and others explored the frustrations of the feminine writing subject, the novel provided a more substantive platform for examining the trials and tribulations of domestic life, reflecting public debates about the complementary nature of men and women so dear to the Krausists.10

In this category, the novels of Cecilia Bo¨hl de Faber (1796–1877), Rosal´ıa de Castro, and Gertrudis Go´mez de Avellaneda played a key, though differing, early role during a period that has been characterized by critics as devoid of significant national literature when in fact, as Alda Blanco argues, it was a “cultural moment in which far-reaching discourses (literary and otherwise) were established and elaborated.”11 All three novelists depicted women who were crushed by overwhelming domestic and economic burdens. For example, following the model of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) negotiated the pressure points and limits of ideal femininity by equating the marriage contract with feminine subjugation.

8 Examples include: Mar´ıa del Pilar Sinue´s de Marco’s El a´ngel del hogar (“The Angel of

The House,” 1859) and La misio´n de la mujer (“Woman’s Mission,” 1886); Gimeno de

Flaquer’s La mujer espan˜ ola, estudios acerca de la educacio´ n (“Spanish Woman, Studies

On Education,” 1877), and Evangelios de la mujer (“Sermons for Women,” 1900); Angela

Grassi’s primers for mothers and newlyweds such as El a´ngel del hogar (“The Angel of

The House,” 1874), and El primer an˜o de matrimonio (“The First Year of Marriage,”

1877); Faustina Sa´ez de Melgar’s Deberes de la mujer (“Woman’s Duties,” 1866), Un

Libro para mis hijas (“A Book for My Daughters,” 1877), and Epistolario manual para

Sen˜ oritas (“Epistle for Young Ladies,” 1877); Joaquina Garc´ıa Balmaseda’s La madre

De familia (“Mother of the Family,” 1860), La mujer laboriosa (“The Hard-Working

Woman,” 1876), and La mujer sensata (“The Sensible Woman,” 1882) – to name but a

Few.

9 Alda Blanco, “Domesticity, Education and the Woman Writer: Spain 1850–1880.” In

Cultural and Historical Grounding for Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Literary

Criticism. Ed. Herna´n Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Lit

Erature, 1989), p. 372.

10 Followersof the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) whose

Ideas exerted immense influence on educational theories in late nineteenth-century Spain.

Among these men were Julia´n Sanz del R´ıo (1814–1869) and Francisco Giner de los R´ıos

(1839–1915). See Juan Lo´pez-Morillas, The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change

In Spain, 1854–1874. Tr. Frances M. Lo´ pez-Morillas (2nd. edn. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1981).

11 Alda Blanco, “Theorizing the Novel at Mid-Century.” Revista de Estudios Hispa´nicos

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