Undergraduate Awards Essay
Abstract: Along with the arms, disease and oppression which the
Spanish brought to Latin America from the fifteenth century onwards,
the theoretical ideas of humanism also found place in the New World.
European literature maintained the same position of dominance in
relation to that of Latin America as existed in the political, economic and
social spheres of the colonial structure. The colonials, in an attempt to
counterbalance their peripheral status in relation to the metropolitan
centre in Europe would embrace its conventions as a means of
asserting their worth and gaining acceptance. This paper examines
texts by two female Latin American poets, writing in the seventeenth
century, in order to explore that relationship as it affected the female
subject within a patriarchal system. It does so through the identification
of the different strategies that each necessarily employed, addressing
different audiences, and with very different purposes in mind. An
important consideration here is the negotiation with masculine
hegemony that took place, dependant on whether the author was writing
for the private or public sphere. The key conclusion to be drawn from
this work is that we need to re-examine the universality of claims that
writing from the periphery must always be classified according to
models of domination, subversion or resistance.
Key Words: Centre-periphery relations; humanism; Latin America; 17 th Century poetry
Explore the relationship between the literary climate of Early Modern Spain and peripheral
writing subjects in Spanish America with reference to a relevant text or texts.
By considering two texts of female authorship, written at the start of the 17 th Century in two
important colonial centres, Santo Domingo in Hispaniola and Lima in Peru, this essay intends to
highlight the context within which they were produced. Within that context, the essay will contrast
the strategies employed by each author in addressing different audiences and with different
underlying purposes in mind; following on from this, the formal strategies that they adopt as they
enter into a masculine space of enunciation will be discussed; and finally, a brief examination will be
made of the relation of those strategies to an audience perceived as private or public in an attempt to
understand the degree to which this may constrain their performance of self. The first text under
consideration is ‘De la misma señora al mismo. En respuesta de otro suyo’ (‘From the Same Lady to
the Same Gentleman. In Response to Yours’), a sonnet written as part of an ongoing correspondence
between Leonor de Ovando and Eugenio de Salazar, a prominent member of the Spanish colonizing
mission. 1 The second is Discurso en loor de la poesía (‘In Praise of Poetry’), a prologue to the Primera
A selection of the epistolary poems, unpublished at the time, is reproduced and discussed in the chapter ‘El
modelo europeo y la impronta americana’, in Raquel Chang-Rodríguez (ed.), “Aquí, ninfas del sur, venid ligeras”:
Voces poéticas virreinales(Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008), pp. 177-180; other quotations are taken from Nela Rio,
‘Me hizo pensar cosa no pensada’: La poesía de Sor Leonor de Ovando (1548?-1612?)’, in Diálogos espirituales.
Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos, siglos XVI-XIX, ed. by Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto (Puebla:
Universidad de las Américas, 2006), pp. 1-31. Future references to de Ovando’s poetry will be identified as Leonor,
followed by the relevant author and page number.
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
Parte del Parnaso Antártico de Obras Amatorias at the request of its author, Spanish poet Diego
Mexía.23 The Parnaso principally consists of a translation of Ovid’s Heroides, a series of epistles
‘written’ by mythological heroines to their lovers, the prologue thus forming a continuation of the
female voice across time and space. The anonymous author of the Discurso has been commonly
assigned the name Clarinda, a reference made within the poem itself, and that nomenclature is
followed here.
The Year 1492 brought not only the beginning of a new political and economic golden age
(Siglo de Oro) for the Spanish, but also the burgeoning of humanism, which would rise to become a
hegemonic discourse within the hegemony of the Spanish Empire, and which was notably masculine
in voice. This rediscovery of classical thought and writing arose in response to the disillusionment felt
with medieval scholastic practice as well as to a new optimism felt across Europe. This optimism was
particularly marked in Spain, newly free from the threat presented by the Muslim world after centuries
of struggle, economically and politically stabilized and enthused by the promises of unknown lands.
As Greene has indicated, the simultaneous rise in imperialism and this new cultural ethic are not
unrelated, the latter incorporating Petrarchan subjectivity, the desire for the ‘other’, and the
potentiality of man into an appreciation of the classical and its commensurate heroic endeavour4.
Along with the arms, disease and oppression normally attributed to them, the Spanish also brought
this humanist thought to the New World, an influence which was adopted, adapted and reflected back
over the following years. Moreover, within decades of their arrival, the Spanish had replicated their
administrative and religious structures within a well-defined male-dominated social hierarchy, the
female subject position being restricted to domestic or submissive religious spheres and her literary,
as well as social, pretensions remaining strictly limited. While some evidence exists of reading activity
by females in Spain and Latin America during the period, both within religious and secular life, few
found or were permitted to find a public space in which to express themselves5. The irony is pointed
out by, amongst others, Barbeito Carneiro that the cloistered life often granted women greater
intellectual freedom than the secular. Women living within the religious community, in contrast with
the general female population, were expected to write, whether for private purposes in the
Clarinda, ‘Discurso en loor de la poesía’; all quotations taken from the full text reproduced in Raquel ChangRodríguez (ed.), ‘Aquí, ninfas del sur, venid ligeras’: Voces poéticas virreinales (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008),
pp. 193-203.
3 Mexía’s Parnasso, including Clarinda’s prologue, was first published in Seville in 1608 by Spanish publisher
Alonso Rodríguez Gamarra.
4 Roland Greene, ‘Petrarchism among the Discourses of Imperialism’, in America in European Consciousness,
1493-1750, ed. by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 130-165
(p.131).
5 Trinidad Barrera, ‘Una voz femenina anónima en el Perú colonial, la autora del “Discurso en loor de la poesía”’,
in Mujer y Cultura en la Colonia Hispanoamericana, ed. by Mabel Morana (University of Pittsburgh, 1996), pp. 111120 (p.112); Sonia Herpoel, ‘El lector femenino en el Siglo de Oro español’, in La mujer en la literatura hispánica
de la edad media y el siglo de oro, ed. by Rina Walthaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 91-98 (p.92).
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
autobiographical accounts of their lives which formed part of the self-reflection of convent life or in
more public expression, such as the didactic writing of Sor Teresa de Jesús in El Camino de Perfección6.
Of the two texts examined here, we know that the author of the first, Leonor, was prioress of
the Regina Angelorum convent in Santo Domingo while we may only speculate regarding the true
identity of Clarinda. The perceived need for the latter’s anonymity, combined with her participation
in, and public support of the Academia Antártica, the literary academy that formed the cultural hub
of Liman society during the period, may suggest a secular life. Each text forms part of a dialogue
between genders, cultures, and centre and periphery, providing a fertile ground for research.
However, a comparison of the works themselves yields a more productive insight into the alternative
strategies, motivations and gender performativity possible for the colonial female subject.
It is fitting to begin our discussion with an examination of the intended audiences for whom
Leonor and Clarinda were writing and the implications in terms of the theme of these texts. Leonor,
engaging in private correspondence with a trusted equal adopts an intimate and confidential tone,
expressing her thoughts unreservedly, and as evidenced by the addressing of Salazar’s sestina, ‘del
mismo a la misma señora, consolándola en la partida de tres hermanos’ (‘from the same to the same
lady, consoling her on the departure of three brothers’), revealing elements of her personal life7. By
contrast, Clarinda, writing the prologue to a published work, with a public audience in view, masks her
own identity and as Mexía informs us, solicits him to do the same:
Señora principal d’este Reino, mui ver
sada en la lengua Toscana, i Portuguesa por cuyo
mandamiento, i por justos respetos, no se escrive
su nombre.
(Foremost lady of this realm, well versed
in the Tuscan tongue and Portuguese, by whose
order, and in due respect, writes not
her name.)89
María Barbeito Carneiro, ‘Feminist Attitudes and Expression in Golden Age Spain: From Teresa de Jesús to
María de Guevara’, in Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, ed. by Lisa Vollendorf (New York: MLA of America,
2001), pp. 48-68 (pp. 52, 58).
7 Leonor (in Rio), p. 21.
8 Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, ‘Ecos Andinos: Clarinda y Diego Mexía en la Primera Parte del Parnaso Antártico
(1608)’, Calíope, 9.1 (2003), 67-80 (p. 71).
9 All poetry translations in the paper are by this author.
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
Conversely, Clarinda’s work, though expressive and impassioned on the theme of poetry and the
implicit message, reveals little of the personal.
The motivations of each could not be clearer. Leonor is articulating herself for herself (and for
Salazar), she seeks no quarter for her feminine sisterhood and reflects in her writing the personality
which is glimpsed in the autobiographical details uncovered by Nela Rio. A strong, determined woman,
Leonor demonstrates the attributes of a natural, though markedly individualistic, leader who enjoys
somewhat fraught relations with both religious and secular authority and her fellow sisters10. The
solitude of her position as a cultured women in orders is undeniable, as is her need to express herself,
at least in the private sphere as in the following, when calling on Salazar to interest himself in her
writings:
por sola me veays, si soys servido
que me edificareys con escucharos.
(However alone you may deem me, may it serve you
to edify me by listening to them.) 11
Her explicit theme is the celebration of the religious festival of Pentecost, a fitting activity given her
position. However, she links the religious imagery of the festival to Salazar’s poetry in order to
illuminate her implicit theme, an appreciation of poetry itself, the divine inspiration that underlies its
creation and which in turn will inspire others:
¿Cómo pudiera un hombre no encendido
en el divino fuego, ni abrasado,
hacer aquel soneto celebrado(…)?
(How could a man not alight
with the divine fire, nor scorched
forge that illustrious sonnet (…)?12
10
Leonor (in Rio), pp.6-9
ibid, p.18
12 Leonor (in Chang-Rodríguez), p.177
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
While we have no means of establishing Clarinda’s identity definitively, we do have ample evidence
that she writes, not for herself, but for her (female) community. She has established a genealogy of
female writers from the classical era, through to contemporary Spain, and by turns, to contemporary
Peru. By reference to the classical age so venerated by humanism, she invokes approbation for herself
and her fellow Peruvian writers, both female and male. As Colombí-Monguió has stated, Clarinda has
published a manifesto, positioning Peru at the forefront of literary greatness, creating a new cultural
space which may emulate the greatness of the acknowledged Centre.13 Apollo is first invoked Apollo
as authority for her praise of Spanish literary greatness:
También se sirve Apolo de leones
pues han mil españoles florecido
en épicas, en cómico y canciones
(Apollo is also served by lions
as a thousand Spaniards have flourished
in the epic, the comic and in song)14
The Peruvian poet then proposes equal status to the authors of Latin America:
y vosotras, Antárticas regiones
también podéis teneros por dichosas
pues alcanzáis tan célebres varones.
(And you, Antarctic regions,
amongst the blessed, may also declare
for you equal such renown.) 15
This is just one of a number of strategies that Clarinda employs which are markedly different
from those adopted by Leonor, correlating to the motivations of each in their writing. Both link poetry
with the divine, though Leonor maintains a strictly Christian tone, whereas Clarinda repeatedly
invokes the pagan deities. Both adopt poetic genres which are predominant in contemporary
European writing of the most cultivated nature, Leonor most frequently the sonnet, and Clarinda 11Alicia Colombí-Monguió, ‘El Discurso en Loor de la Poesía, Carta de Ciudadanía del Humanismo Sudamericano’,
in Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana, ed. by Mabel Morana (University of Pittsburgh, 1996), pp. 91110 (p. 93).
14 Clarinda, p. 194.
15 Ibid., p. 195.
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
syllable tercets as befits the ambition of her theme. Each thus conforms to the dominant voice of the
period, Eurocentric and masculine. However, by employing such genres, these female poets
additionally define themselves within a medium, which as Rivers has stated, encompasses knowledge
of the sciences, arts and the humanities, placing them firmly on an intellectual par with their male
contemporaries16. Finally, each is constructing a self through writing, although their aims differ. As
Nancy Armstrong has indicated for epistolary writing in general, this allows them individuality where
before, they will have formed part of an undifferentiated female social body17.
However, counterbalancing these commonalities of strategy, the two poets display others
markedly different, which raises questions of the degree to which the performance of the female role
depends on the space of enunciation, that is, the private or public arena. Whilst keeping an awareness
that epistolary writing is always mediated, by language, history or (sexual) politics, the sonnets of
Leonor provide an intensely personal vision of her identity and beliefs. She invokes no Muse, as
Clarinda will do, other than Eugenio de Salazar himself, who ‘me hizo pensar algo no pensada’ (‘made
me think of things not thought’)18. Rio has pointed out that, while she may speak in praise of Salazar,
theirs is a relationship of reciprocal appreciation, and that any traces of unequal status between the
two may be attributed to her adoption of the classical technique of imitatio19. In fact, they are social
equals, he as Oidor, or judge, in Santo Domingo, she as member of one of its principal families. They
both are educated within the humanist tradition, and in fact, in the hierarchy of the relationship, she
is given and claims as a right a higher standing on the matters of religious belief, confirming the divine
inspiration which underlies the Spanish poet’s work. Replying to an epistolary poem written by Salazar
in celebration of Easter, she writes:
Pecho, que tal concepto ha producido,
la lengua, que lo ha manifestado,
la mano, que escribió, me han declarado
que el dedo divinal os ha movido.
Breast, that such a concept produced,
tongue that has declared it,
hand, that wrote, they have declared
Elias Rivers, ‘La alabanza de la poesía’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 43/44 (1996), 11-16 (p.12).
Nancy Armstrong, ‘Writing Women and the Making of the Modern Middle Class’, in Epistolary Histories: Letters,
Fiction, Culture, ed. by Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia, 2000), pp. 29-50 (p. 32).
18 Leonor, (in Rio), p. 25
19 ibid, p. 20.
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Undergraduate Awards Essay
that the divine finger has guided them.20
In addition, Leonor does not overtly refer to either her gender or her socially conditioned weaker
position, nor does she excuse her work as unworthy. Her acknowledgement that Salazar, working
through divine inspiration has completed the circle by inspiring her to write in service of that divinity
does not diminish her own talent. Leonor shines through in every line as the leader and individualist
that she was.
By contrast, the strategies employed by Clarinda are striking. By invoking the muse as
speaking, she distances herself in the very first stanza from her writing and from her talent:
(…) Mas, será bien, pues soy mujer, que d’ellas
diga mi Musa, si el benigno cielo
quiso con tanto bien engrandecellas.
(But, well it is, since I am woman, that of them
speaks my Muse, if the blessèd heavens
did so want to exalt them) 21.
She repeatedly emphasizes her lowly status, referring to her lack of education as a ‘mujer indocta’
(unschooled woman), her gender (as in the lines above), and her physical weakness. 22 In ColombíMonguió’s reading, the insurmountable nature of the task that Clarinda sets herself is deliberately
positioned in counterposition to her fragility:
Bien sé qu’en intentar esta hazaña
pongo un monte, mayor qu’Etna el nombrado
en ombros de mujer, que son d’araña.
(Well I know that in attempting this feat
I set a mountain, greater than the Etna of renown
on the shoulders of a woman, as on those of the spider.) 23
20
Ibid. p. 25.
Clarinda, p. 194.
22 Ibid., p. 201.
23 Colombí-Monguió, p. 92.
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Colombí-Monguió argues that such references as Clarinda’s acknowledgement of the difficulty
of achieving her aim given her status as female in a masculine space are strategies that enable her to
claim greater credit should she succeed in overcoming such difficulties24.
However, it may also be
that by performing her role as weaker female, she intends to negotiate her place through the lowering
of resistance from the hegemonic institutions that she is publicly addressing – the masculine and
colonial Centres to which she stands in a peripheral relationship. As Rolena Adorno has so persuasively
underscored, in the context of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, colonials were unlikely to wish to
reject or subvert the dominant authority but to establish their place within it25. Having established
this submissive position, she then sets out to reposition herself, her fellow female women authors,
and finally colonial humanism as a whole, by a set of strategies which work in harmony to that end.
As mentioned, the Discurso references classical deities and thinkers, which combined with references
to contemporary writers in Spain and Peru, the latter tellingly by name, creates an association of
shared greatness through time and space, assigning equal status to periphery and centre. It is through
this association, and its extension to her own sex, that she can then create the abovementioned
female genealogy, stretching across millennia and continents from Eve to her anonymous Peruvian
contemporaries ‘[…] yo conozco en el Pirú tres damas, qu’han dado en la Poesía heroicas muestras’ (‘I
know of three ladies in Peru/ who have given heroic displays in Poetry’). 26
In conclusion, the arrival of the Spanish in the New World led to the expansion of the humanist
tradition to a new audience, who sought to establish an identity within a new colonial condition. The
strategies employed by Leonor and Clarinda, writing in the same period and within similar colonial
societies that were undergoing a process of assimilation of European ideas suggest that the standard
colonial discourse that limits the periphery to states of domination, subversion or resistance do not
universally apply. Leonor is in a position of relative authority and it shows; at least in private, she acts
as an equal to her Spanish correspondent Salazar and is accepted as such by him. Clarinda, writing in
a public arena, is unable to explicitly perform her equality, but must instead employ a number of
stratagems to undermine resistance and open up a new cultural space for both Peru with reference
to the European Centre and herself as a doubly subaltern subject.
24
Ibid., p. 92.
Rolena Adorno, ‘Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Spanish America’,
Latin American Research Review, 28.3 (1993), 135-145 (p. 143).
26 Clarinda, p. 195.
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Bibliography
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Adorno, Rolena, ‘Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century
Spanish America’, Latin American Research Review, 28.3 (1993), 135-45
-
Armstrong, Nancy, ‘Writing Women and the Making of the Modern Middle Class’, in Epistolary
Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. by Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville;
London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 29-50
-
Barbeito Carneiro, María, ‘Feminist Attitudes and Expression in Golden Age Spain: From
Teresa de Jesús to María de Guevara’, in Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, ed. by Lisa
Vollendorf (New York: MLA of America, 2001), pp. 48-68
-
Barrera, Trinidad, ‘Una voz femenina en el Perú colonial, la autora del “Discurso en Loor de la
Poesía”’, in Mujer y Cultura en la Colonia Hispanoamericana, ed. by Mabel Morana (University
of Pittsburgh, 1996), pp. 111-122
-
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel, ‘Ecos Andinos: Clarinda y Diego Mexía en la Primera Parte del
Parnaso Antártico (1608)’, Calíope, 9.1 (2003), 67-80
-
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel (ed.), “Aquí, ninfas del sur, venid ligeras”: Voces poéticas virreinales
(Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008)
-
Colombí-Monguió, Alicia, ‘El Discurso en Loor de la Poesía, carta de ciudadanía del humanismo
sudamericano’, in Mujer y Cultura en la Colonia Hispanoamericana, ed. by Mabel Morana
(University of Pittsburgh, 1996), pp. 91-110
-
Greene, Roland, ‘Petrarchism among the Discourses of Imperialism’, in America in European
Consciousness, 1493-1750, ed. by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995), pp.130-158
-
Herpoel, Sonia, ‘El Lector femenino en el Siglo de Oro español’, in La mujer en la literatura
hispánica de la edad media y el siglo de oro (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 91-98
-
Rio, Nela, ‘Me hizo pensar cosa no pensada’: La poesía de Sor Leonor de Ovando (1548?1612?)’, in Diálogos espirituales. Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos, siglos XVI-XIX,
ed. by Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto (Puebla: Universidad de las Américas, 2006), pp.
386-419
-
Rivers, Elias, ‘La alabanza de la poesía’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 43/44
(1996), 11-16
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