Ideal Female Subjects vs. Real Desires: the Visibilizations of the Ethical Contradictions of Patriarchal Projects of Regeneration in Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera´s Blanca Sol (1888) and Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo´s La Muñeca

Abstract

Blanca Sol (1888), by Peruvian writer Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, and La muñeca (1895), by Puerto Rican writer Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, are two novels that present disruptive female characters, who were seen as incarnations of the negative outcomes of women’s precarious education. Whereas their contemporary critics questioned the lack of signs of regrets in these characters —unlike traditional heroines of romantic and sentimental novels of the time—, other writers highlighted the novels’ stark realism, and considered it accurate for depicting the modern woman’s crisis. From a feminist literary studies perspective, these novels have been read as confrontational towards the construction of the feminine in modernist and naturalist aesthetics, which were dominant at the time.

Considering the very authors’ statements about the overlooked moralizing purpose of their works, I propose these novels stance a critical dialogue with a regeneration paradigm that aimed to confront dystopic or elusive imaginaries prevailing in modernista, decadentista and naturalist aesthetic and ideologies. Nevertheless, it constitutes a gendered pedagogic regeneration paradigm since, contrary to its hegemonic version (which disciplining target were female subjects), it sheds light on the ethical contradictions of masculinities, who were accountable of the stability of the patriarchal system. Thus, these texts bring to surface a submerged discourse that highlights the flaws of male subjects and, thus, turns them into culprits of the crisis customarily blamed on women. Moreover, these works create the conditions of possibility to undermine hegemonic archetypes of the feminine and, in turn, create paths for women’s transit into modernity.