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Introduction

When did we become sentimental? Colonial stereotype, national discourse and gender in Galicia and Spain

The historical moment of political action must be thought of as part of the history of the form of its writing.

Homi Bhabha (1994)

Limítase a miúdo a cultura galega a umha versom adaptada da difundida por Espanha. (Galician culture has often been reduced to an adaptation of the version disseminated by Spain.)

Maurício Castro (2000)

The word ‘nation’ has never been too distant from a reference to sentiments. From Ernest Renan’s definition that ‘A nation is … a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made’ (Renan, 1896a: 81), to Benedict Anderson’s idea that nations are imagined political communities commanding ‘profound emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson, 2006: 4), the link between national identity and the world of affects has been a common constituent of modern thinking in this area. For the particular historical and geographical focus of this book – Galicia, a non-state nation in north-western Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the present day – the conjunction between the national and the sentimental has had particular historical significance. Beyond the definition of nations as communities joined to a great extent by an emotional bond, or of national belonging as a powerful affective experience, the national question in Galicia has been conditioned by a further association between sentiment and the body politic, which has crystallized in the historically recurrent myth of Galician sentimentality. As will become clear in the course of this book, the trope of Galician sentimentality as a marker of national identity has appeared repeatedly in modern representations of the region, its language and its people, forming a continuum that extends throughout the textual and visual corpus on Galician history and culture from the late nineteenth century up until present times. Its manifestations are as varied as they are historically complex and engrained, but they concentrate on the assumption that Galicians are a nostalgic people, living in harmonious communion with their landscape or yearning for its beauty if away from it. Both implicitly and explicitly, these images have evoked a millenary link between Galicians and an innate capacity for poetry and an aloof humour, a way of being in the world that is both impractical and unrealistic, but also astute and reserved. Such imagery appears entwined with discourses on the nation and the multiplicity of ideologies they serve, but also invariably with a gender politics. Thus, the trope of Galician sentimentality has bifurcated into different representations of Galician men and women, giving rise to a network of stereotypes evolving over the extended historical period of Galician national construction, from the first nationally aware movements and writings in the mid-nineteenth century to the diversity of national discourses positioned within and against Galicia’s current status as an Autonomous Historical Community in the Spanish state. Images of Galician masculinity have therefore fluctuated between those of the valiant Celtic warrior and the lachrymose man, whilst traditional representations of Galician women have tended to depict them either as raunchy and immoral or as examples of self-abnegation and grace. Pervasive as they are, these images have seldom been treated as historically grounded in the matrix of national narratives that converge in the Galician context, and even more rarely, if at all, have they been investigated as discursive formations arising from Galicia’s colonial condition. This book intends to be a first step in this line of research.

As has been the case with much scholarship in contemporary Galician studies, this study is indebted to Xoán González-Millán’s analysis of Galicia’s subaltern position within Spain and its history of cultural resistance. Particularly in his book Resistencia cultural e diferencia histórica: A experiencia da subalternidade (Cultural Resistance and Historical Difference: The Experience of Subalternity) (2000), González-Millán worked towards a theoretical framework for cultural historiography in Galicia that put Galician culture’s subaltern condition centre stage, thus foregrounding resistance as a distinguishing feature of Galician cultural politics and production. Following the work of Sherry B. Ortner, González-Millán’s proposition was groundbreaking for the Galician context, in that it promoted an understanding of cultural resistance not as a protective discourse bent on the preservation of a presupposed original, national quality, but as a reactive and dialectic network of discourses, responding organically to dominant forces often in contradictory ways, both productive and counterproductive. A seldom acknowledged function of resistant cultural forms is, in González-Millán’s own words, that their study can lead us to a ‘diagnóstico do poder’ (a diagnosis of power), rather than to the teleological goal of empowerment and emancipation (2000: 131). Resistance, he concludes, should be analysed not as ‘unha calidade de determinados actos ou políticas, senón como unha loita incesante coas estratexias do poder que están en constante transformación’ (a characteristic of certain acts or politics, but as a tireless struggle against the strategies of power, which are in constant transformation) (2000: 134). This dialectical logic of cultural resistance helps us understand discourses of the nation in Galicia as a semantic body that cannot be studied in isolation from other adjacent national discourses or from the power dynamics informing their interaction. As a consequence, although this relational frame of study has seldom been pursued in Iberian Studies, Galician cultural history and the discourses of the nation underpinning it cannot be adequately investigated without a keen eye for the diversity of often antagonistic discourses of the nation developing in the peninsular context, including Spanish and Portuguese nationalisms, state centralism and its associated anti-Catalan, anti-Basque and anti-Galician discourses. A consideration of the historical power dynamics undergirding such interactions sheds substantial light on the origins, development and persistent currency of some of the metaphors of Galician cultural nationalism. This book centres upon one such metaphor, that of Galician sentimentality, and will argue that its history and contemporary circulation cannot be dissociated from the asymmetrical power dynamics informing the colonial relationship between Galicia and Spain.

González-Millán’s theory of cultural resistance in Galicia as a historically dynamic interplay of forces helps us bring into the same analytic space national discourses developing in Galicia and Spain. However, it is the theoretical framework provided by postcolonial and Orientalist forms of cultural critique that has assisted me with the question of representation. It is no coincidence, as Edward Said paradigmatically showed in Orientalism (1995), that colonialist discourses have been so extensively reliant on the practice of representation and portrayal. Because of its dual function as both projection and self-reflection, the praxis of representation is also a politics. Moreover, when framed in the colonial context, representations of the colonized serve the two-way purpose of legitimization and control, generating a body of knowledge aimed at perpetuating the unequal power structures that sustain the subjection of certain populations under others, a body of knowledge that is, for this very reason, repetitive and monotonous. This is partly why the concept of ‘colonial stereotype’, already present in the work of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, and influentially elaborated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), becomes instrumental for any understanding of cultural interactions in contexts of political oppression and domination. I take as a starting point Bhabha’s theorization that the colonial stereotype, itself one of the fundamental rhetorical techniques of colonial discourse, does not simply concern ‘the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices’, but functions rather as:

a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, aggressivity, the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and phantasmic knowledges to construct the possibilities and oppositionalities of racist discourse. (Bhabha, 1994: 117)

The function of the colonial stereotype both as a tool for colonial subjection and as a space for oppositional resistance is thus facilitated by its structural ambivalence as a political trope. In Bhabha’s own terms, if the colonial stereotype can be taken as one of the key mechanisms for the ‘production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised’ (101), it is also the object of a certain anxiety of appropriation, internalized by the colonized through a fetishistic investment, in their struggle towards liberation. The trope of Galician sentimentality provides us with an eloquent example of how the idea of the colonial stereotype and its defining ambivalence has also been relevant for the context of Spanish and Galician national politics. As we shall see, the genesis and historical unfolding of the image of Galician sentimentality cannot be extricated from the interrelated processes of the Galician national awakening and Spanish state centralism, with their respective interruptions and crises, but also their mutual permeability. It is for this reason that the rhetorical and metaphorical use of the image of Galician sentimentality can be found in the vast array of cultural and historical artefacts produced by the competing discourses on the nation arising in Galicia and Spain from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, often serving different, yet interconnected, political objectives that cannot be understood simply in terms of an antithetical play of oppression and resistance. As we shall see in the course of the book, we shall come across the image of Galician sentimentality again and again in the competing discourses of Galician apolitical regionalism emerging in the late nineteenth century; in the politically aspiring nationalist movement developing in the 1920s and 1930s; in the discourse of cultural nationalism that developed during Franco’s dictatorship after the legacy of pre-war political nationalism had been estranged from the project of national reconstruction; and, of course, in the overarching discourse of Spanish state centralism taking root in several Galician-based discourses of the nation, particularly in the neo-regionalist discourses upheld by the conservative Popular Party of Galicia (the PPdG). In all these discourses, as we shall see, the trope of Galician sentimentality can be understood as an ambivalent colonial stereotype used by the dominant position seeking to disarticulate an insurgent national culture whilst facilitating a space for its controlled difference. However, it has simultaneously been of use to the oppressed national culture’s programme for self-differentiation and expression, often in ways that collude with the dominant discourses and aims.

The recurrent discursive image of Galician sentimentality is a prime example of the colonial stereotype in yet a further sense, and one that was adumbrated by Frantz Fanon’s stark theorization of national cultures under colonial domination as ‘contested culture[s] whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion’ (Fanon, 2001: 191). While the colonial stereotype’s ambivalent structure allows for a politically versatile combination of ‘desire and derision’ (Bhabha, 1994: 96) which is differently exploited by dominant and insurgent positions, the network of associated values elicited by the stereotype is often aligned with meanings that have been negatively connoted in a hegemonic politics of representation. Hence recurrent explanations of what Fanon called the ‘constitutional depravity’ of the colonized (2001: 32) systematically refer to traits such as their congenital incapacity for logic, their sexual degeneracy and their spiritual insensitivity to transcendence, where such markers are understood as devalued by a Eurocentric logic of bourgeois morality and capitalist imperialism. It is in this framework that the identity marker of sentimentality emerges as a negative trope related to inadequacy and lack. Two bodies of critical work have helped me formulate the link between colonial discourses and gendered politics of representation, which forms the theoretical basis of this book. First, gender critiques of Orientalism such as those by Sara Mills (1991), Regina Lewis (1996) and Meyda Yeğenoğlu (1998) have demonstrated that processes of colonial ‘othering’ have seldom been separated from sexual politics, whether it be through the different uses and gratifications that men and women who invested in – or were subjected to – imperial discourses were able to effect, or in the almost systematically gendered rhetoric informing such discourses, thereby rendering the political stakes of the colonial narratives more multilayered. A central argument underlying this body of work, as well as my own, is that ‘representations of sexual difference cannot be treated as [a] subdomain [of Orientalism]’ but must be regarded as ‘of fundamental importance in the formation of a colonial subject position’ (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 2). Second, in parallel with this line of research, the conflation of gender studies and cultural historiography has given rise to a solid body of work tracing the gradual semantic deterioration of the notion of sentimentality, which went from functioning as the desired token of civilized refinement and sensibility in eighteenth-century central Europe to being a marker of poor aesthetic value, widely associated with a particular type of narrative genre developing in late nineteenth-century Western literary traditions, directed to a growing market of women readers and focused mainly on female characters. The work of the feminist scholar Suzanne Clark has traced how the trope of sentimentality in cultural production has fulfilled the double function of promoting ‘a stereotyped and normalizing emotional responsiveness that both defined the value of feminine discourse and trapped women within it’ (Clark, 1994: 97), thereby sealing the binary distribution of reason and emotion as two hierarchically gendered spaces. Thus sentimentality is aligned, on the one hand, with images of the undeveloped, uncritical or infantilized mind, and, on the other, with low qualitative value, especially in processes of aesthetic canonization. As the work of Andreas Huyssen has influentially shown, ‘the persistent gendering of that which is devalued’ was a central discursive strategy for turn-of-the-century Western intellectuals, at a time when the anxiety of contamination between high and low, mass and elite forms of culture was becoming a staple of the times (1986: 53). The semantic devaluation of sentimentality as a feminine trope occurring in cultural discourses of this period serves as a prime example of such reactive positions: if coupled with the processes of national awakening and struggle within and against European state apparatuses also emerging at this time – from the British Isles to Spain – we see how the trope of sentimentality emerges as a feminizing colonial stereotype, of particular strategic value against national insurgence movements that were seen as a challenge to still unstable state politics.

I shall add another theoretical viewpoint to this introductory discussion, before I turn to the historical account of how the trope of Galician sentimentality became a double-sided canvas on which both the discourses of Galician national awakening and anti-peripheral Spanish state centralism were inscribed. For, if sentimentality underwent a process of semantic deterioration through feminization that was useful for the preservation of modernist cultural hierarchies, it is no less true that in colonial/national contexts the trope of sentimentality found its political actualization in the image of the sentimental – and therefore feminized – Celt. As postcolonial critics of English imperialism such as Robert C. Young and Janet Sorensen have shown, the feminization of the ‘Celtic’ fringes became a recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century national discourses in the British Isles. The image of the feminized Celt functioned doubly as a discursive tool with which to estrange the subsumed nations of Wales, Ireland and Scotland from English power centres, but also as a means of debilitating their potential for full-fledged political nationhood. In her study of how linguistic practices and theories in eighteenth-century Britain reveal the range of politically motivated representations of the various conflicting national variants (English, Scottish, ‘British’, etc.), Sorensen did not fail to acknowledge the centrality of gender in imperialist power play (Sorensen, 2000). From the feminization of the Welsh-inflected language of the working-class characters in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Sorensen, 2000: 106), to representations of ‘a disempowered and feminized’ Scottish Gaelic as connotative of a ‘beautiful but defeated state’ in John Clark’s preface to The Works of the Caledonian Bards (190–1), Sorensen traces how British imperial cultural strategies were awash with references to the ‘Celtic peripheries’ as feminized, in an attempt to prefigure their ‘political quietude’ (Sorensen, 2000: 29). Such were the cultural and political underpinnings of European Romanticism’s interest in Celtic subjects during the nineteenth century, and its unsurprising political crystallization in those cultural contexts – England, Ireland, France, Spain – where different forms of state nationalism had to grapple with internal national movements for which the claim of a distinct Celtic heritage had become instrumental. Forming a rhetorical continuum that went from the Brittany-born historian Ernest Renan’s 1854 essay ‘La poésie des races celtiques’ (‘The poetry of the Celtic races’), to its translation into English by William Hutchison (1896b) and Matthew Arnold’s influential relaying of its main tenets in his 1910 essay ‘On the study of Celtic literature’, the gendering of the Celt as either objectionably sentimental or overly excitable was of a piece with the sort of ‘sympathetic imperialism’ with which Celtic revivalist movements such as those emerging in Ireland and Wales in the late nineteenth century had forcefully to negotiate their claim for national status (Howes, 1996: 43). The pervasiveness of the image of the feminized Celt, as Robert C. Young has argued, thus became ‘part of a knowledge which has no distinct source or centre, but which a whole range of writings, from history to science, all repeat and reaffirm with an authority drawn from its very ubiquity’ (2008: 45). That the trope of the feminized Celt became something of a truism among cultural and political commentators in late nineteenth-century Britain and France is a sign of the heightened political convenience of that very image, at a time when the threat to national unity coming from the ‘Celtic peripheries’ was gathering momentum.

While the trope of the feminized Celt has been placed under historicizing scrutiny in critical assessments of British imperialist culture, from feminist and postcolonial perspectives (Howes, 1996; Young, 1995: 55–89; 2008: 40–70), the issue of Galician celtismo has never been approached in Iberian studies from a postcolonial perspective. To date this has meant that no study has explored whether Spanish centralist discourses have capitalized on a similar use of the feminized/sentimental Celt trope, as part of the discursive negotiations used in internal national conflict. This comes as a surprise, given that the issue of celtismo has been so pivotal a force in the history of Galician national insurgence, and one that Spanish centralist discourse has undoubtedly had to deal with throughout the modern period as both a historical and a political construct. This critical void further illustrates that postcolonial approaches to Spanish history have tended to focus on Spain’s ‘non-European ethnic and racial traditions’ (Santaolalla, 2002: 55), particularly on the role of Moorish and Jewish cultures in the history of the formation of Spanish national identity (Martin-Márquez, 2008; Fuchs, 2009; Flesler, Linhard and Pérez-Melgosa, 2011). As a result, there is little historical and cultural analysis from a postcolonial perspective of the discursive formations arising from the political tension between hegemonic Spanish nationalism and insurgent Catalan, Basque or Galician nationalisms, which have historically struggled for greater autonomy or total independence from the Spanish state. The present study makes a first research contribution in this vein, with a focus on the Galician/Spanish context, for which the question of Celtic sentimentality has been of overriding importance.

From rugged to soft: Galician sentimentality and national discourses in the late nineteenth century

The myth of Galicia’s Celtic origins, for all its engrained iconicity in modern discourses of the nation in and about Galicia, is a relatively recent conception. The association between the north-western territories of the Iberian Peninsula and Celtic populations was indeed part of a historiographical continuum present in classical and medieval historical sources on the Iberian Peninsula, which through an amalgam of etymological and ethnographic assumptions had brought the populations of Galicia and Gaul under the same genealogical family. Both in Spanish and Galician historical works, the idea that Celtic peoples had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and in Galicia particularly, was well established and widespread, but it was not until the nineteenth century that Galician historians would start treating such historical accounts as a basis for the construction of a Galician national identity. Texts such as José Verea y Aguiar’s Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1838), which is conventionally considered the first one to promulgate the theory of Galicia’s Celtic origins as a foundation of its historical difference, had not appeared in a vacuum, but were engaging with the French tradition of historical interest in the Celts (represented in the texts of eighteenth-century historians such as Paul-Yves Pezron and Simon Pelloutier) and with the response they had elicited among historians of Spain such as the Catalan Juan Francisco Masdeu (Pereira González, 2000). I am not interested in the process whereby the theory of Galician Celtic origins, and its nineteenth-century historiographical elaboration known as celtismo, became a central allegory for Galician national narratives; this process has been widely studied in both historical and literary analyses of the period (Axeitos, 1993, 1997; Barreiro Fernández, 1986; Renales Cortés, 1996). I shall focus, rather, on a less frequently discussed discursive movement, which concerns the gendered imagery accompanying the historical association between Galician national identity and the Celts. Put in succinct terms, I am interested in what political stakes may have been involved in a line of discourse that went from mid-nineteenth-century depictions of the Celts, and therefore of Galician ancestors and their latter-day counterparts, as a valiant, violent and bellicose people, to later characterizations of Galicians as quiet, nostalgic and sentimental also precisely because of their Celtic origins. This transformation from bellicose to sedate, I will argue, has enjoyed a currency that is still to be found today in cultural representations of Galicians, and has had far-reaching implications, as we shall see, for men’s and women’s differentiated investment in Galician national discourses.

Leandro de Saralegui y Medina’s work Estudios sobre la época céltica en Galicia (Studies on Galicia’s Celtic Period) (1867) is an example of what could be termed a ‘pre-sentimental’ period of Celtic discourses of national identity in Galicia. Establishing from the outset that ‘no es posible, al ménos sin aventurarse mucho, asignar á Galicia una población más antigua que los celtas’ (it is not possible – not, at least, without making rash assumptions – to claim an older ancestry than the Celts for the Galician people) (Saralegui y Medina, 1867: 6, emphasis in original), the author embarks upon a theorization of how Galicia’s Celtic origins should be taken as a matter of national pride, historiographical biases notwithstanding. A central source of such pride, as developed in the text, is the brave and heroic nature of Galicia’s Celtic ancestors, which also functions as an explanation for their customs and overall way of life. Thus, in the face of scarce historical sources, Saralegui affirms that ‘Teniendo en cuenta el espíritu belicoso de esta raza, su condicion batalladora, y la rudeza de sus costumbres, es fácil presumir que la caza y la guerra serian constantemente la ocupacion de nuestros aborígenes’ (Bearing in mind the bellicose spirit of their race, their belligerent character and harsh customs, it is easy to assume that the main occupation of our first ancestors must have been hunting and war) (1867: 14). Referring interchangeably to the Celtic populations in the North-Western regions as ‘gallaicos’ (Gallaic peoples) (19), ‘los celtas gallegos’ (the Galician Celts) (20) and ‘nuestros mayores’ (our elders) (38), Saralegui’s text places the emphasis repeatedly on their bellicose nature and, more crucially, on their desire and capacity for territorial protection. ‘Los gallaicos’, he asserts, ‘se hallaban por efecto de su atraso social fuera de las leyes internacionales, y unida esta circunstancia á sus hábitos de feroz independencia, constituia un obstáculo poderoso á toda transacción pacífica con ellos’ (The Gallaic peoples, owing to the backwardness of their society, were outside international laws. This, combined with their habits of fierce independence, made any peaceful dealings with them truly difficult) (19). Saralegui’s account of the clash between Phoenician invaders and Celtic populations is a good example of how early versions of Galician celtismo were bound to the rhetoric of warfare and force, which thereby linked the inaugural moments of Galician national construction to the idea of fiercely defended historical difference:

al desembarcar en nuestro territorio, arrastrados por la presciencia de sus grandes riquezas, debieron encontrar una resistencia desesperada por parte de los naturales, cuya agreste rudeza hacia muy difícil entrar en tratos ni aun en comunicacion con ellos. Debió, pues, haber un choque rudo, formidable, entre el pueblo invasor y el pueblo indígena, entre el fenicio que llegaba y el celta que resistia con la fiereza indomable de su raza: choque violento, terrible, de qué la tradicion nos ha conservado el recuerdo en la simbólica lucha de Hércules y Gerion sobre las costas de nuestra pàtria. (1867: 19)

(after disembarking on our territories, driven here by the foreknowledge of its wealth, they must have confronted a desperate resistance from the indigenous populations, whose rugged spirit made it truly difficult to begin negotiating or even communicating with them. A formidable, cruel clash must have ensued between the invaders and the indigenous peoples, between the Phoenician newcomers and the Celts, who resisted with the full indomitable fierceness of their race. A violent, terrible clash, whose memory has been preserved in the symbolic fight between Hercules and Geryon on the shores of our fatherland.)

Saralegui was claiming explicitly that Galicia’s origin as a nation was rooted in a heroic defence of its difference and autonomy, made possible by the Celtic people’s innate adeptness at war. It is for this reason that the historian’s account of the Roman invasion of the north-western regions of the Iberian Peninsula is explained in openly colonial terms, with recourse to the vocabulary of subjection, domination and resistance. Interestingly too, the historian posits that the bitter memory of Roman enforced rule over the ‘Galician Celts’ is a central part of Galicia’s inherited lore, as well as a constant reminder of their original sovereignty and self-sufficiency. His description of how the Galician character is naturally averse to foreign interventions can be read as an important formulation of Galicia’s colonial condition in the nineteenth century. Importantly too, the theory of Galicians’ Celtic ancestry acts here as a historical reminder of the threat of future division and separation:

La población indígena, si asi podemos llamarle, aquella parte de la gran familia galaica en quién vive como perpetuada la primitiva raza céltica, conserva aun hoy, como parte de su carácter, un sentimiento de repulsion hácia todo lo extraño, hacia [sic] todo aquello que no ha heredado de sus padres y que no ha sido santificado por la tradicion. Y esa particularidad, propia del carácter gallego, tal vez no es otra cosa que un resto del antiguo odio á la soberbia Roma, ejemplo vivo del perpétuo anatema que reserva la historia á las grandes iniquidades y á los sangrientos atentados contra la independencia de los pueblos. (1867: 58)

(The indigenous people – if we can thus name that part of the great Gallaic family in which the primitive Celtic race lives on – still displays today, as a part of its character, a sense of repulsion towards anything that is foreign, anything that has not been directly inherited from its parents and sanctified by tradition. And this particularity of the Galician character is perhaps nothing less than a trace of that ancient hatred towards proud Rome: a living example of the perpetual curse that history reserves for the gross injustices and cruel attacks executed against the independence of peoples.)

One final point needs to be added to this delineation of a pre-sentimental period of Galician national historiography, and this is the one that concerns the politically loaded association between Galicians’ capacity for poetry or lack thereof. Colonial representations of Galicians as inept at poetic composition had emerged and become widespread from the early Spanish modern period: Lope de Vega’s adage ‘Galicia, nunca fértil en poetas’ (Galicia, never fertile in poets) is perhaps one of the best-known formulations of this idea, which has peppered many a description of Galicia and Galicians from a centralist viewpoint since the Spanish Golden Age.¹ That this negative stereotype was enjoying wide circulation at the time of Saralegui y Medina’s writing is demonstrated by the prolonged counterargument he included in his 1867 book. The conception that Galicians were unsuited for poetry may well have been, as Saralegui acknowledged, ‘la injuria que lastima, pero no es la amarga realidad que desconsuela’ (an injurious comment that may hurt, but not a bitter reality that causes despair) (120). In his attempt to dismantle the demeaning stereotype about Galicians about which ‘sueña la inmensa mayoría de los españoles’ (the vast majority of Spaniards dream) (120), the historian explains that, although the climate of the region is not perhaps most conducive to the ‘desarrollo de la imaginacion’ (development of the imagination) necessary for poetic inspiration (117), Galician oral traditions of sung celebrations and legend-telling prove that this is not ‘un pueblo á quien ha negado el cielo el divino don de la poesia y la aptitud para las artes liberales’ (a people to which the heavens have denied the divine gift of poetry and aptitude for the liberal arts) (117). Saralegui’s passages on this question show that the coordination between Galician identity and sentimentality had not yet been forged at the time of his writing:

De qué el génio poético no haya llegado á desarrollarse entre nosotros, por efecto de circunstancias que todos conocemos, se ha querido sacar la consecuencia de que la inspiracion y el sentimiento son incompatibles con nuestro caracter y con nuestro clima, como si bajo el cielo todavia màs nebuloso de Bretagne, hombres de nuestra misma raza y del mismo caracter que nosotros no hubieran dado á la Francia épocas enteras de verdadera gloria literaria … (1867: 115–16, emphasis mine)

(From the fact that poetic genius has not yet developed among us owing to circumstances which we all know, some have reached the conclusion that inspiration and sentiment are not compatible with our character and climate, as if under the Breton sky, which is even cloudier than ours, men of our race and character had not given France whole periods of true literary glory.)

Saralegui’s words above outline a fundamental discursive structure of colonial power play between Spain and Galicia: the notion of sentimentality was, in the decades before the political articulation of Galician nationalism, a desirable feature for Galicia’s national character profile, one which would conveniently help counteract Spanish stereotypical depictions of Galicians as boorish and barbaric. It is with this function in mind that Saralegui saw it as necessary to ascertain that poetic skill was ‘uno de los caractéres peculiares de nuestra raza’ (one of the specific traits of our race) (115). However, as we are about to see, a second discursive turn emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, during a key period in the development of Galician nationalist discourses, whereby the trope of sentimentality would be reappropriated by centralist positions as a colonial stereotype with which to stall the political articulation of Galician national insurgence.

For a historical elucidation of the origins of this trope, I would like now to focus on the polemics among the historians Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Antonio Sánchez Moguel, Manuel Murguía and the Marqués de Figueroa, who between 1886 and 1889, and in a discursive interaction moving transnationally between Madrid, Galicia and Havana, rearranged the imagery and language of Galician sentimentality for decades and, arguably, centuries to come. The 1880s were a heady and transformative decade for Galician national insurgence. The years before had seen a proliferation of texts and enterprises which had the purpose of national construction at their core, from the publication of Manuel Murguía’s first two volumes of his Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1865–6), to Benito Vicetto’s Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) in seven volumes (1865–73), to Rosalía de Castro’s foundational poetry collection in Galician Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs) in 1863 and, importantly too, its second, slightly expanded edition in 1872 (Castro de Murguía, 1863, 1872). A myriad regional periodicals and publishing houses were also established, which would serve the explosion of material being produced at the time by a growing number of regionalist writers and intellectuals.² The use of written Galician was also on the rise, a process that symbolized the increasing self-awareness and politicization of the regionalist movement. In 1876, for example, the first monolingual periodical in Galician appeared in Ourense, the weekly O Tío Marcos da Portela (Old Marcos of Portela). Tellingly too, Eduardo Pondal’s Rumores de los pinos (The Murmur of the Pine-Trees), a collection of twenty-one poems in both Galician and Spanish appearing in 1877, formed the basis of a full Galician edition published in 1886 as Queixumes dos pinos (The Moaning of the Pine-Trees), in which the coordination of Celtic myth, national insurgence and the characterization of Galician identity as rugged, brave and heroic found its utmost expression. However, in parallel, a nationalist movement amassing increasing political clout was also resorting to positive portrayals of Galicians as sentimental, as a way of neutralizing Spanish prejudices against them. Manuel Murguía’s prologue to José Ojea’s Célticos: Cuentos y leyendas de Galicia (Celtic Peoples: Tales and Legends of Galicia), published in 1883, supplies a good example of this discursive strategy. Murguía’s text is animated by an awareness of the negative conceptions about Galicians widely in circulation in Spain, and appearing in travellers’ accounts of the region. Writing tacitly in opposition to these images, Murguía exhorts readers, particularly Spanish readers, to enter the heart of Galician rural territories and judge for themselves:

de una manera evidente, cómo esta multitud á la cual se creía muda, sin aspiraciones ni recuerdos, está viva y á su hora habla entre sí y para sí, el lenguaje de los dioses. Al oirles, vereis levantarse poderosa, una de esas realidades vivientes que llamamos todavía antiguos reinos, y son en definitiva, nacionalidades vencidas pero no muertas. (Murguía, 1883: vii)

(how, in an evident way, these masses that were believed to be mute and lacking in aspirations or memories are alive, and speak among and for themselves the language of the gods. When you hear them, you will see powerfully rising before you one of those living realities, which we still call former kingdoms but are, in short, nationalities, defeated but not dead.)

After restoring the collective dignity of Galicians as a historic nation held together by ‘a godly language’, Murguía introduces the marker of sentimentality, in unequivocally positive terms, as a further defining feature of the Galician national character. This trait needs to be understood here both as affirmative and self-differentiating, against the ‘sequedad y dureza [de] los que hablan desde la cuna la lengua castellana’ (the curtness and harshness of those who have spoken Castilian since infancy) (x–xi), this being a language that reflects ‘las frialdades y monotonia de sus llanuras’ (the coldness and monotony of the Castilian plains) (xi). Sentimentality appears thus as a marker of Galician national dignity, with no trace of negative or self-deprecating meanings, as can be perceived in the following passage, where Murguía brings together historical difference, sentimentality and natural poetic instinct under the same axis of national definition:

cada libro que se publica, cada nuevo escritor que aparece, cada inteligencia que se manifiesta, cada alma que se revela, nos dice de una manera clara é indubitable que este pueblo gallego, diverso bajo tantos aspectos de la mayoría de los que forman la nacion española, lo es, sobre todo, por las tendencias de su literatura y muy en especial por el predominio del sentimiento en todas las esferas del arte. Bien pronto se echa de ver, tratándose de ella, que es una raza distinta y perfectamente acusada, la cual se mueve en su mundo, tiene vida propia y por lo tanto su instinto poético, su filosofía, historia y costumbres que rijen y explican su vida social á través de grandes y dilatados períodos, ni bien conocidos ni mejor explicados. (Murguía, 1883: v, emphases mine)

(every book that is published, every new writer that appears, every individual intelligence that manifests itself, every soul that reveals itself tells us clearly and without the shadow of a doubt that the Galician people, different in so many ways from the majority of those that form the Spanish nation, demonstrate this difference in the tendencies of their literature and, above all, in the predominance of sentiment in all the spheres of their art. It is plain to see that this is a distinct and perfectly defined race, one that moves in its own world, has its own life and therefore its own poetic instinct, its philosophy, its history and its customs, which govern and explain its social life through long periods of history, although these have not been adequately explained or known.)

The process whereby the trope of Galician sentimentality goes from being a symbol of positive national reaffirmation as formulated above by Murguía to a byword for Galicia’s incapacity for national defence and articulation is a paramount discursive movement in Galician political and cultural history, whose inflections and contractions cannot be understood without considering the cultural interactions between Galicia and Spain. Only three years after the publication of Murguía’s text, the Spanish poet and liberal politician Gaspar Núñez de Arce delivered a speech at the Ateneo Científico y Literario de Madrid (Literary and Scientific Association of Madrid) on the subject of regionalist movements in Spain. The theme of his speech (and its timing) suggest that the perceived momentum of separatist national movements was becoming a pressing question for state politics, and Núñez de Arce concedes as much in his exhortation that ‘Es general, y vicio inveterado, por desgracia entre nosotros, el no conceder importancia á un mal hasta que estalla con violencia’ (Unfortunately, it is a widespread and inveterate habit among us Spaniards to fail to consider an evil to be important until it explodes violently) (1886: 8). The primordial worry motivating Núñez de Arce’s text is the political mobilization of peripheral nationalisms and the possibility of armed conflict between such movements – referred to in his speech as ‘particularistas’ (particularist; italics in original) (9) – and the central government. Several textual signs indicate that both Núñez de Arce and his audience were aware that violent conflict could turn into a fairly likely outcome, from his reference to ‘esa novísima secta política’ (that newest of political sects) summoning meetings and ‘reuniones revolucionarias’ (revolutionary gatherings) in Catalonia (7), to his protestation that the ultimate aim of these groups is ‘el siniestro designio de encender otra vez entre pueblos hermanos la terrible guerra civil’ (the sinister objective of again lighting the terrible flame of civil war among sister peoples) (43). For the most part of his speech, Núñez de Arce describes the process of Catalan national articulation as an irrational aberration, but it is in his account of the Basque and Galician contexts, which he sees as less advanced than the Catalan case, that the colonial imagery of control and political inhibition finds its pithy expression. Two important strategies are put to use, which are relevant for our study. First, he has extensive recourse to regional stereotypes such as ‘esos risueños pueblos de la costa mediterránea’ (those merry Mediterranean people) (18), ‘la viva impresionabilidad de los meridionales’ (the ready impressionability of the southerners) (32), ‘la impetuosidad irreflexiva de los levantinos’ (the unthinking impetuosity of the people of the Levante) (32) or the ‘cálculo prudente, aunque tardo, de los hijos del Norte’ (the prudent, yet slow calculation of the northerners) (32) – all of them geared towards the demobilization of political activity from a top-down perspective. Second, we find the influential depiction of processes of national awakening as two-staged, going from the legitimate expression of national yearnings purely on the literary plane to their undesirable political articulation into grassroots activism and, subsequently, party politics. On this point, Núñez de Arce affirms that the Galician regionalist movement is developing mainly as a literary movement (13), and he does so after having acknowledged that he finds the literary use of regional languages legitimate and understandable, although purely as an expression of sentimental attachment towards one’s mother tongue, which he describes as ‘la lengua del hogar, de las ternuras maternales, … la lengua que más penetrantes raíces echa en el corazón’ (the language of the hearth, of maternal tenderness … the language that takes deepest root in our hearts) (10). A link is thus sealed between Galician literary forms and sentimentality, whose function was not, as in Manuel Murguía’s text, to induce a national pride in the nascent regionalist movement, but rather to disarticulate the political consequences of such pride.

The public debate over the degree of political articulation of peripheral national movements went through a peak between 1888 and 1889, with the acceptance address of the historian Antonio Sánchez Moguel at the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History) and Manuel Murguía’s swiftly written response to it, published in Havana and endorsed by a list of 1,200 signatories. Unlike Núñez de Arce, who had brushed off the existence of a Galician regionalist movement as ‘tímido, inofensivo y nebuloso’ (timid, harmless and nebulous) (1886: 20), Sánchez Moguel dedicated over twenty pages to dismantling what must have been perceived as one of its most enabling discursive strategies, the identification of Galicians as a Celtic nation and, therefore, the link between Galicians and a heritage of heroism, sacrifice in battle and political independence. Sánchez Moguel’s speech had a sarcastic and facetious tone to it, and Murguía’s riposte did not fail to note that the historian ‘no pudo en tan solemne ocasión sustraerse al deseo de arrancar una sonrisa á sus compañeros de Academia y demás señores no gallegos’ (could not, on such a solemn occasion, resist the desire to bring a smile to the faces of his fellow academicians, and other non-Galician gentlemen) (Murguía, 1889: 41). The tone of mockery that runs through Sánchez Moguel’s speech needs to be understood in the context of history’s professionalization as a way of estranging a new generation of historians working in Spain’s peripheral nations from the rigours of objectivity and historical truth, which were now seen as required qualifications for entering the discipline. For this reason, historians of what he terms ‘la celto-manía gallega’ (Galician Celto-mania) (Sánchez Moguel, 1888: 37) are to be derided for their ‘pueriles estravíos’ (puerile wanderings) (38), and for a historiographic practice that ‘en vez de proseguir en la segura senda que la erudición y la crítica le señalaron, se apartó de ella, entrando en el peligroso camino de las pasiones políticas y de los entusiasmos locales’ (instead of following the sure path that erudition and critical thinking have shown it, has strayed down the dangerous road of political passion and local enthusiasms) (8). Ostracism and ridicule, therefore, were the fates awaiting historians working for the cause of non-Spanish nationalisms. Murguía’s vehement defence of his position as a serious historian and of the Celtic theory of Galician national difference – of which he had become, by then, the main proponent – needs to be understood as a reinstatement of Galicia’s right to political emancipation from centralist domination, or, as Murguía puts it in similar colonial terms, of the right of ‘una nación con caracteres propios, distinta de gran parte de las que constituyen el Estado español’ (a nation with its own characteristics, distinct in large measure from other nations in the Spanish state) to operate free from ‘el imperio de gentes y de cosas que le son contrarias’ (the domination of peoples and things that are contrary to its nature) (Murguía, 1889: 48). His affirmation that ‘el tipo celta, y con él su carácter y sentimientos propios, perseveró de tal modo que forma la principal base de nuestra población actual’ (the Celtic type, and with it its own character and sentiments, has endured in such a way that it is the basis of our population today) (43) lies at the core of Galicia’s right to national difference and political destiny in Murguía’s vision.

However, the concept of Celtic-rooted sentimentality and Galician national identity was simultaneously acquiring a different signification in the texts of other commentators amassing symbolic capital in the debate over peninsular nationalist movements, which were by now undeniably a matter of concern for the Spanish state and, as such, debated in its main cultural and political institutions. Let us turn to another immediate response to Sánchez Moguel’s speech, the one delivered by Juan Armada Losada, better known as the Marqués de Figueroa, also at Madrid’s Ateneo. The Marqués de Figueroa was fast becoming one of the main representatives of the Conservative Party in Galicia and of the support movement for one of its leaders, Antonio Maura, who would be president of Spain on five different occasions thanks to the Liberal–Conservative pact for party alternation in government that ruled Spanish politics from 1885 to 1923. The Maurista doctrine on the rise of regionalisms in Spain was based on a combination of relative tolerance and control, compounded by the belief that a healthy dose of regional difference could contribute, if kept under rein, to the greater glory and stability of the Spanish state.³ The speech delivered by the Marqués de Figueroa in 1889, which bore the title of ‘De la poesía gallega’ (‘Of Galician poetry’), affords a rich example of precisely what discursive strategies would be put to the service of Spanish state control over peripheral national awakenings. For the Galician context, the semantic domain offered by the myth of Celtic origins, which had so far functioned as the construction ground for discourses of national identity, would become, instead, the battleground for their debilitation.

The speech opens with an acknowledgement of the undeniable force of peripheral regionalisms in Spain, an admission which was partly revealed in the preceding interventions of Sánchez Moguel and Núñez de Arce by their very existence and length. ‘Sólo donde hay energías y vitalidades puede surgir una literatura regional, que es el signo de fuerza y de vida’ (Only where there is energy and vitality can a regional literature emerge, as it is the sign of force and life) (1889: 6–7), affirms the Marqués de Figueroa in an attempt to paint a benevolent face on the rise of non-Spanish nationalisms, whilst acknowledging, in parallel, that this rise moved along both the literary and political planes (8). It is not long, however, before the notion appears that Galicia’s regionalist resurgence has been mainly a literary affair unconcerned with strong political claims:

El amor á la región debe referirse siempre, como en la poesía de Mistral se refiere, al amor de la patria común. No sé si porque el gallego tiene menos actividades para la iniciativa que energías para la resistencia, ello es que en Galicia no han sonado gritos de combate, ni hay voces bélicas ni ensueños de independencia en sus cantos, llenos sólo de quejas por el olvido de propios y de extraños en que vivió durante siglos. (1889: 9)

(Love for one’s region should always be directed, as it is in Mistral’s poetry, to the common fatherland. I do not know whether it is because Galicians have less energy for initiative than for resistance, but the fact is that war cries have not sounded out in the region, nor are there any belligerent voices or dreams of independence in their songs, which are marked only by complaints about the abandonment in which the region has been left for centuries, both by its native sons and by outsiders.)

Crucial to the politically interested formulation that the history of Galician national awakening had not displayed any violent tendencies is the further discursive anchoring of the theory that Galicians are ethnically incapable of violent political action. A series of rhetorical artifices enforce this view. First, the idea that the Galician soul and language have found their best expression in Galicians’ natural instinct for lyricism. We see here how Murguía’s use of the trope of Galicians as a poetic race serves no longer a dignifying purpose, but a nationally undermining one. Remarking that ‘[t]iene otro carácter la lengua catalana, más trabajada y pulida’ (the Catalan language, more fully wrought and polished, has a different character) (39), the Marqués de Figueroa describes Galician as a language only suited for popular poetry, that is, as the natural medium for the expression of the popular classes’ raw and unworked sentimental afflictions, which are at the same time their most characteristic psychical feature. The Galician language is thus placed in the private, domestic sphere, away from public affairs and political communication:

La complexión especial del habla gallega, su falta de desenvolvimiento por no haber transcendido á otras relaciones que las del hogar, son causa de que tenga ese cierto sabor arcáico que tan bien se presta á expresar los sentimientos propios del estado de alma del pueblo, que corresponde á ese estado del lenguaje. (1889: 39)

(The special complexion of the Galician language, its lack of development through not having extended to any relationships except those of the home, are the reason why it has that certain archaic flavour that so befits the expression of the sentiments characteristic of the state of the people’s soul, which corresponds to that state of the language.)

An undeveloped language for an undeveloped people seems to be the running metaphor for the Marqués de Figueroa’s speech, in which a lack of development is repeatedly associated with sentimentality. A crucial moment in his intervention occurs when the myth of Celtic origins is posited as the genealogical source of Galicians’ ethnic sentimentality and, therefore, as the reason for a series of unflattering traits in their collective psychology:

Llega la raza céltica primero, y queda como rezagada, escondida, durante largo período: no importa; por sus condiciones de resistencia en que está su fuerza mayor, aún subsistirá su influencia cuando haya pasado la de otras razas en quienes parece que la movilidad es ley. Por su origen celta se explica el modo de ser del gallego, ese extraño dualismo de su carácter en que se amalgaman la cualidad afectiva que se muestra en el amor al terruño y el don de observar, la facultad crítica, que matiza con suaves ironías y finas burlas las coplas populares. Ese amor al terruño, esa especie de absorción por la naturaleza, da el secreto de la duración de la raza, de la pasividad y abandono de sus hijos, de su resignación fatalista con no pocos residuos de pagana … (1889: 36–7)

(The Celtic race arrived first, but straggled behind, hidden, for a long period; but this does not matter. Because of its natural disposition for resistance – wherein its biggest strength lies – its influence remained when that of other races that are naturally inclined to mobility disappeared. The Galicians’ character is explained by their Celtic origin, that strange dualism combining an affective disposition – which manifests itself in their love for the land – and their gift for observation, their critical faculty, which colours their popular songs with gentle irony and subtle mockery. That love for the land, that absorption into nature, is the secret of the race’s endurance, the passivity and fecklessness of its sons, their fatalistic resignation, in which there are not a few traces of paganism …)

A static and passive nature, coupled with a profound sentimental attachment to the land, thus forms the psychological legacy of Galicia’s Celtic past, and hence of its populations’ collective resignation to a state of subjugation. This passivity, broken only by the Galicians’ natural capacity for ‘gentle irony’, is promptly aligned with notions of femininity in the Marqués de Figueroa’s speech. Central for the purposes of this study is the role that the Galician poet and novelist Rosalía de Castro was made to play in this discursive transaction. By 1889, Rosalía de Castro had been dead for four years, and the signification of her literary and intellectual legacy was now available for appropriation in the market of competing discourses on the nation developing in Galicia and Spain. In the years following her death and for the length of the twentieth century, the equation between Rosalía de Castro and Galician sentimentality acted as a highly serviceable ruse geared towards the feminization of Galicia and, thus, its political demobilization. Against Murguía’s description of de Castro’s Cantares gallegos as a veritable ‘grito de guerra’ (war cry) (1889: 18), a reactive discursive structure was also emerging which sought to redefine her legacy in more pacifying terms. Rosalía de Castro thus turned into the transmogrified voice of a sentimentalized Galician people, a turn made possible by her literary status in Galicia mainly as a writer of popular poetry and, of course, her womanhood. The Galician national psyche, ‘tan paciente y sufrid[a] en las cuitas como tenaz en sus afecciones y ensueños’ (as patient as abnegated in its sorrows, as it is steady in its affections and yearnings) (Figueroa, 1889: 43), found not only its vehicle but its archetype in the figure and poetry of de Castro, and this turn was also instrumental for the further categorization of Galician as a soft and mellifluous language, apt for the expression not of hard political realities, but of private, delicate emotions:

Para esto de decir ternezas y mimos, frases de amor y caricias, tienen singularísimo valor los diminutivos gallegos, principalmente en los labios de las hijas del país, que parece hacen rítmica con la frase la melodía de su acento. Las mujeres son, según nos enseña el P. Sarmiento, las que inventan la letra y la música de los cantares gallegos: en ellas hay, pues, que buscar la filiación literaria de Rosalía Castro.

Y no se entienda que rebajo el mérito á Rosalía y sus cantares, que tienen por principal excelencia la intensidad de sentimiento, la frescura y precisión de los del pueblo… Es la naturaleza femenina de Rosalía Castro, admirable para la percepción de las bellezas gallegas: sus afinadas facultades sorprenden con los secretos del lenguaje los del alma, de que arranca sentidos lamentos al pulsar la cuerda de la sensibilidad. (1889: 62–3)

(When it comes to expressing tenderness and sweet nothings, words of love and fondness, Galician diminutives are most perfectly suited, principally on the lips of the daughters of this country, whose melodic accent seems to render their speech more rhythmic. As Father Sarmiento taught us, women are the creators of both the melody and the lyrics of the Galician popular songs: and it is in them that we must search for Rosalía de Castro’s literary lineage.

And let it be understood that I am not demeaning Rosalía’s merits or those of her songs, whose principal excellence lies in the intensity of feeling, the freshness and precision of the feeling of the people … That is Rosalía de Castro’s feminine nature, so admirably sensitive to Galician beauty: her finely tuned faculties reveal both the secrets of language and the secrets of the soul, from which they extract the deepest of laments by playing the chords of sensitivity.)

A year before the Marqués de Figueroa’s address in Madrid, the figure and legacy of Rosalía de Castro had already provided an occasion for the consolidation of the above tropes in another key voice of centralist anti-galeguismo, that of the Galician novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. The speech she delivered in 1885 at A Coruña’s Liceo de Artesanos (Artisans’ Lyceum), which was subsequently published in slightly revised form in her book De mi tierra (About my Homeland) (1888), offers a crystallization of how references to Galician identity, sentimentality and femininity appeared in easy tandem, and how literary commentary on Rosalía de Castro was already offering a convenient vehicle for this arrangement. In Pardo Bazán’s view, Rosalía de Castro had selected the Galician ‘dialect’ as the best vehicle for her popular poetry, because it ‘posee un dejo grato y fresquísimo, que impensadamente se nos sube á los labios cuando necesitamos balbucir una frase amante, arrullar á una criatura, lanzar un festivo epigrama, exhalar un ¡ay! de pena’ (has a fresh and pleasant cadence, which springs inadvertently to our lips when we need to whisper a sweet nothing, lull a baby to sleep, give forth a festive epigram, breathe a cry of sorrow) (Pardo Bazán, 1984: 16–17). It is not difficult to perceive how the images of a sentimentalized Galician language, popular poetry and Rosalía de Castro are fastened together through the gendered trope of infantile lack of development and femininity. The author remarks that, in Galicia, popular lore and traditions cannot possibly be transmitted through men, ‘mientras las mujeres … los comunican con singular exactitud’ (while women do so with unique dexterity) (1984: 32), and this is primarily because:

el alma de la mujer, acaso por su contacto con la niñez, está más cerca del alma ingenua del pueblo; que es más capaz de comprenderle, de entrar en su orden de ideas, de interesarse por las pequeñeces que le preocupan. Ese es el principal encanto de Rosalía: haber expresado como poeta lo que entendió como mujer … (32)

(a woman’s soul (perhaps owing to its contact with childhood) is closer to the simple soul of the populace and is therefore more capable of understanding them, of entering their thought structures and of caring for the trifles that concern them. And that is Rosalía’s most outstanding charm: that she expressed as a poet what she was able to grasp as a woman …)

In the endnotes to the published edition of her speech, Pardo Bazán elaborated on the theory of Galician as an undeveloped dialect in the pseudo-scientific language that would become characteristic of Spanish naturalism. Her gendered differentiation between a feminized Galician and a Castilian that is ‘rudo y musculoso’ (rough and muscular) lends itself to a colonialist reading, particularly in her clarification that Castilian ‘necesitó mucho más tiempo para formarse, quizás por la misma causa que influye en que la pubertad sea más pronta en las hembras que en los varones, y más rápido el desarrollo de su osatura’ (took much longer to be formed, perhaps for the same reason that makes women reach puberty before men, and makes their bone structure develop earlier) (1984: 44). A further interesting element emerges in her text which seals the colonial power logic informing the sentimentalization of Galician identity: its description as a collective pathology. The rhetorical use of a pseudo-medical language serves as a figurative medium with which to weaken the national function of the myth of Celtic origins, turning it ultimately into a colonial form of representation that explains Galicia’s subaltern condition as both inferior and dominated:

Cuando un país tiene contra sí la fortuna y, como Galicia, se ve primero relegado á puesto secundario, casi anulado después, al paso que aumenta su desdicha, suele crecer también en apasionada intensidad, hasta rayar en el fanatismo, el amor que á sus hijos infunde … Este sentimiento de exaltado cariño hacia el suelo natal, – complicado con la enfermedad afectiva que se conoce por nostalgia, privación de aire que acaba por asfixiarnos cuando no respiramos la atmósfera de los lugares donde vive nuestro corazón – es más profundo en los pueblos de raza céltica, esa rama del nobilísimo tronco ariano, cuya condición parece tan sedentaria, como son inmóviles y permanentes sus colosales dólmenes de piedra. En los celtas de origen, el natural apego al país presenta caracteres morbosos, es un mal físico del cual se muere … (1984: 37–8)

(When a land is opposed by fortune and, like Galicia, finds itself first relegated to a secondary position and then almost annihilated, what usually happens is that, as its misfortune increases, the love that it inspires in its people also grows in passionate intensity, until it verges on fanaticism. This sentiment of impassioned love for the native land – complicated by the affective disease known as nostalgia, a deprivation of air that ends up suffocating us when we do not breathe the atmosphere of the places where our hearts live – is certainly profoundest in peoples of the Celtic race, that branch of the most noble Aryan stock, whose condition seems as sedentary as their colossal stone dolmens are motionless and permanent. In those of Celtic breed, natural fondness for the native land presents morbid characteristics: it is a physical illness from which people die …)

The above stands for one of the most enduring and politically convenient justifications of Galician national identity as a narrative of deficits and drawbacks. For this narrative to gather force, the gendered reversal of the myth of Celtic origins from worthy edifice in the process of nation building to convenient explanation for Galicia’s colonial condition was, as we have seen, of paramount importance. This narrative found immediate currency in the discourses of apolitical regionalism and Spanish centralism that competed with an emerging Galician nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, as shown by texts contemporary with those studied in this introductory chapter – Leopoldo Pedreira Taibo’s El regionalismo en Galicia (Estudio crítico) (Regionalism in Galicia (A Critical Study)) (1894) is a case in point – and others such as Augusto González Besada’s Galician literary histories (1885, 1887), which will be the subject of extended analysis in Chapter 1. The colonial trope of sentimental femininity as an outcome of Galician Celtic origins will continue to reverberate with persistent force throughout the twentieth century, being alternately contested and affirmed in the discourses of Galician political nationalism and Spanish centralism respectively. Its political function as a vehicle for colonizing discourses on Galicia was reinstated, for example, during the first decades of the twentieth century in the myriad texts about Galicia published in Spanish, including travel writings, popular fiction and non-fiction books about the region. Azorín’s book Galicia (Paisajes, gentes, carácter, costumbres, escritores …) (Galicia (Landscapes, People, Character, Customs, Writers)) – an anthology of the articles he wrote on Galician themes after 1912 – is marked by images of Galicia as a ‘región serena e inaccesible’ (a serene and inaccessible region) (1929a: 62), where a kind of poetry and music predominate that are characterized by being ‘dulcemente plañider[a]s’ (sweetly plaintive) (1930: 37) and where a population of lachrymose men (1930: 38) and loving and tender women live (1929b: 33). In 1911, Miguel de Unamuno published his travelogue Por tierras de Portugal y de España (Through the Lands of Portugal and Spain), in which his chapter on Galicia draws on analogous metaphors. Galicia is described as ‘Un paisaje femenino … incubador de morriñas y saudades’ (A feminine landscape … where nostalgia and homesickness are nurtured) (Unamuno, 1941: 163, italics in the original). After acknowledging that the Celtic ancestry of the Galician people cannot be denied (165), Unamuno elaborates on the trope of the melancholy Galician, a race that ‘rehuye luchar y se adapta y acomoda con adaptación pasiva más que activa, haciéndose al ámbito en vez de hacérselo a sí’ (avoids fighting and adapts itself with an adaptation that is more passive than active, adjusting itself to the surroundings rather than forcing the surroundings to adjust to it) and displays its characteristic ‘mansedumbre y blandura’ (meekness and softness) at all times (1941: 167). Similar images pepper Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose on Galician themes, where negative portrayals abound of the Galician ‘hombre escaso en la opaca totalidad melancólica’ (hardly a man in the opaque melancholic totality) living in a ‘cárcel de ventanas en condenación de agua, niebla, llanto’ (a prison of windows, under a curse of rain, mist and tears) (1958: 109–10). Again, in the writings of the Galician Madrid-based essayist Victoriano García Martí throughout his career, we find this recurrent metaphoric structure. Both in his 1927 book Una punta de Europa: Ritmo y matices de la vida gallega (A European Corner: The Rhythm and Features of Galician Life) and in the reworked edition he published during the Franco dictatorship, Galicia: la esquina verde (alma, historia, paisaje) (Galicia: The Green Corner (Soul, History, Landscape)) (1954), Galicia and Galicians appear as a pathologically melancholy people, living in a state of subjugation and inhibition that is the result not of ‘causas puramente políticas’ (purely political reasons), but rather of the ‘condiciones psicológicas del alma galaica’ (psychological conditions of the Galician soul) (1954: 14), encapsulated in their ‘finura sentimental y nativa’ (native, sentimental sensitivity) (27) and their congenital inability for any form of action (24). The historical reappropriation of this discursive compound, paradoxically, lay at the core of Galician cultural resistance to Spanish fascist rule, mainly in the national rehabilitation programme devised by Ramón Piñeiro and the group of writers and intellectuals orbiting the publishing house Galaxia, established in 1950. Of prim ordial importance for the preservation of a Galician discourse of national difference, which the Galaxia intellectuals saw as the only way of salvaging Galicia’s political survival in a post-dictatorship future, was the theorization of Galicians’ differentiated psychological makeup, for which the trope of sentimentality (encapsulated in the concept of Galician saudade) served as a channel. An often unacknowledged aspect of the discourse of piñeirismo – whose legacy is still present today in the cultural institutions created under its auspices – is that one of its chief metaphors shared a history with those repeatedly utilized in centralist/colonialist depictions of Galician identity, whilst simultaneously supplying a line of continuity for these metaphors’ circulation in present-day discourses about Galicia and Galician nationalism. Yet one question remains to be asked of the historical significance and continuity of the trope of Galician ‘Celtic’ sentimentality: what has been Galician women’s role in it?

Celticism, colonial fantasy and the Galician woman question

Between 1905 and 1915 Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s unfinished study Orígenes de la novela (Origins of the Novel) was published, a work that is today considered a towering monument of nationalist Spanish literary history. Although it was written in the last years of the literary historian’s life and was truncated by his death in 1912, Orígenes de la novela represents the defining traits of Menéndez Pelayo’s intellectual project, which was firmly embedded in the Spanish nationalist, Catholic tradition of philological studies. I am bringing it to bear on my discussion of colonial discourses of the nation in and about Galicia because it bears the mark of the far-reaching tensions between centre and periphery that, as Catherine Davies has also noted, were everywhere to be seen in peninsular cultural life at the turn of the century (Davies, 2006: 172).

Menéndez Pelayo’s historical account of how Arthurian literature penetrated the Iberian Peninsula is marked by an underlying debate on national morals. The forms and themes of the Matter of Britain, by which texts such as Amadís de Gaula were inspired, are described by the historian as ‘[A]quella nueva y misteriosa literatura que de tan extraña manera había venido a renovar la imaginación occidental, revelándola al mundo de la pasión fatal, ilícita o quimérica, del amoroso devaneo o del ensueño místico’ (That new and mysterious literature that in such a strange way had come to renew the Western imagination, exposing it to the world of fatal, illicit or fanciful passions, of love affairs or of mystical yearnings) (Ménéndez Pelayo, 1946: 257–8). The link is promptly established between ‘narraciones bretonas, en que casi siempre ardía la llama del amor culpable’ (Breton narratives, where the flame of adulterous love almost always burnt) (267) and the question of ethnic difference: ‘los héroes de la epopeya germánica, francesa o castellana, eran motivos racionales y sólidos’ (the heroes of Germanic, French or Castilian epic poems were rational and solid motifs) (266), while those produced by a differentiated Celtic race were ‘arbitrarios y fútiles’ (arbitrary and futile), generally pursuing the principle of pleasure with no transcendental aim or sense of moral rectitude (266). Among the harmful features of the Celtic literary traditions, Menéndez Pelayo singles out their differently portrayed feminine ideal, which he established as alien to Spain’s classical tradition. In his words, the problem lay with:

la intervención continua de la mujer, no ya como sumisa esposa ni como reina del hogar, sino como criatura entre divina y diabólica, a la cual se tributaba un culto idolátrico, inmolando a sus pasiones o caprichos la austera realidad de la vida; con el perpetuo sofisma de erigir el orden sentimental en disciplina ética y confundir el sueño del arte y del amor con la acción viril. (1946: 273)

(the continuous intervention of women, not as submissive wives or queens of the home, but as creatures halfway between the divine and the diabolical, to whom idolatrous worship was directed, as life’s austere reality sacrificed its passions or whims to her; with the perpetual sophism of erecting sentimentality into an ethical discipline and mistaking the dreams of love and art for virile action.)

In an association that betrays more than it expresses about early twentieth-century Spanish discourses on Galicia, the historian subsequently adds that the above rhetorically debased literary forms found an accommodating host only in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, in the ‘reinos de Galicia y Portugal’ (kingdoms of Galicia and Portugal), he specifies, ‘de cuyo primitivismo céltico … sería demasiado escepticismo dudar, aunque de ningún modo apadrinemos los sueños y fantasías que sobre este tópico ha forjado la imaginación de los arqueólogos locales’ (of whose Celtic primitivism it would show too much scepticism to doubt, although by no means do we subscribe to the fantasies and fancies that the imagination of local historians shaped) (1946: 276). An elusive yet key concept of Spanish colonial discourses on Galicia was being consolidated, which linked the myth of Celtic origins to a lack of morals and decency that was most disturbingly displayed by the female members of the population.

Indeed, images of sexually active Galician female peasants were not infrequent in late nineteenth-century Galician popular prose and poetry. As anthropological studies such as Allyson Poska’s Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain (2005) have neatly demonstrated, the lives of Galician peasant women since the early modern period and up until recently were not determined by the culture of sexual honour that permeated other parts of the Iberian Peninsula, mostly on account of a combination of distinct legal traditions that empowered women’s authority in the household and a history of massive male migration, which left peasant women the full responsibility of house and land management, as well as child care. At the level of cultural representation, such historical conditionings were partly to account for the images of women as unconcerned with restrictive moral codes, images that appear in profusion in the early Galician-language texts of the Rexurdimento, the Galician literary revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Galician-language poems of Benito Losada or the novels of Xesús Rodríguez López are populated with sexually active single women, pregnant servants and adulterous wives. Worryingly, as we shall see, for early theorists of the language’s role in Galician regionalism, such as Eugenio Carré Aldao, Galician was fast becoming the preferred vehicle for a literature of sexual mischief and innuendo, in which women played a far from submissive role. This was a problem for a nationalist movement that was at a crucially formative stage of its political development. As has been argued in feminist approaches to nationalisms, women in colonial nations have been expected to ‘uphold standards of “civilized” respectability’, thus turning the question of women’s sexual propriety into a central national concern (Day and Thompson, 2004: 109). It is therefore not surprising that positions antagonistic to the construction of a robust Galician nationalist discourse seized upon these images and presented them as a debilitating national trope within a moralistic frame for national construction. Leopoldo Pedreira’s anti-regionalist texts, for example, include references to how ‘el pueblo gallego no da importancia á la virginidad de la mujer’ (Galician people do not grant importance to women’s virginity) (1894: 161). The novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán, particularly those linked to Galician rural life and settings, as in Los pazos de Ulloa (The Houses of Ulloa) (1886), are interspersed with references to Galician female peasants or servants as sexually ‘irresponsible’.⁴ By 1916, when the Galician conservative politician Augusto González Besada selected the theme of Galician women as the topic of his acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), it is evident that the ‘Galician woman question’ had turned into a contested zone for discourses on the nation competing to be regarded as representative in Spain and Galicia. I shall analyse González Besada’s speech in more detail in the next chapter, but I would like here to dwell on the seldom discussed link between sexualized representations of Galician rural women and the discourse of Galician celtismo.

Just as the myth of Celtic origins had supplied the metaphors for centralist/colonialist representations of Galician identity as humble, sentimental and inactive, a parallel discursive mutation was developing apace that conceived of Galician rural women in terms of a sexualized colonial fantasy. For the network of interacting discourses of the nation developing in Galicia and Spain in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, this meant that, while Galician nationalism was invested in the political and social mobilization of women partially through a Celticist discourse that depicted them as valiant and sturdy, centralist/colonialist narratives on Galicia were working towards a different characterization, one geared towards the weakening of the nascent Galician nationalist movement through a most effective assault: the questioning of its women’s decency. In the past two decades, a solid body of feminist work on nationalisms has shown how ‘[w]omen especially are often required to carry this “burden of representation”, as they are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour, both personally and collectively’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 45). In the logic of patriarchal nation-building projects, women’s decency and honour has been the subject of a particularly protective order. For the Galician context, this has had far-reaching implications. The proliferation during the first decades of the twentieth century of popular narratives on Galicia written for a Spanish readership can be taken as an example of the kind of texts aiming to subvert such order. Novels such as Wenceslao Fernández Flórez’s Volvoreta (Butterfly) or Rafael López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas (The Grandchildren of the Celts), both published in 1917, serve as cases in point. Both novels exploit the romantic plot between a Galician rural girl and a male protagonist who either is not Galician or has returned to the region after a long spell abroad. It is the female characters, however, and, crucially, their sexual attitudes and behaviours that act in both novels as the motivating argument, with the male protagonists’ perplexed reactions functioning as manifestations of normative identity. In Fernández Flórez’s novel, Federica goes by the name of ‘Volvoreta’ (Galician for ‘butterfly’) for the reason that she ‘[t]enía muchos novios … Á lo mejor, tres á un tiempo’ (had several boyfriends … sometimes three at a time) (1917: 51). Sergio’s jealousy is incited throughout the novel by Federica’s reluctance to censure what appear as the lax sexual mores of her rural environment, which are described from the young man’s unsettled perspective as ‘un drama bestial’ (a bestial drama) (1917: 105). What remains in the realm of suggestion and allusiveness in Fernández Flórez’s novel is spelt out more clearly in López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas. Here, depictions of Galician rural women are almost always sexualized, even when they are described as ‘mujer[es] recia[s] con los huesos sólidamente ensamblados’ (tough women with a robust bone structure) (López de Haro, 1917: 68), and thus not conforming to the metropolitan canon of feminine beauty. More importantly, the text is replete with references to Galician rural lifestyles as permeated by a sexual permissiveness that is classed as either atavistic or plain immoral. Single motherhood is described as rife in the Galician countryside, and met with ‘una indulgencia plenaria’ (plenary indulgence) by its society (1917: 80). Popular celebrations such as the fiada, based on a group’s singing and dancing around the spinning of linen, are depicted as ‘una tertulia en promiscuidad donde se bebe, se baila y se retoza’ (a gathering of promiscuity, where they drink, dance and frolic) (52). The association between such customs and the Galicians’ Celtic origins is made explicit from the book’s title, of course, but also in the frequent references to characters as ‘uno de tantos documentos vivos en que pueden apoyar sus asertos los partidarios de la teoría céltica, en lo atañadero a los probables aborígenes de Galicia’ (one of the many living documents that provide backing for the supporters of the Celtic theory, as regards the probable original inhabitants of Galicia) (71). As one of the novel’s main aims was, as acknowledged by the author in the prologue, ‘ensayar un psicoanálisis de los elementos ancestrales del alma de la mujer gallega’ (to attempt a psychoanalysis of the ancestral features of the soul of Galician women) (1917: 8), the link between Galicia’s Celtic origins and the characteristic proneness to promiscuity of its women is turned into a central leitmotif.

The process of turning Galician women into national embodiments of abnegation and virtue was, therefore, a circuitous one for the nascent nationalist movement in Galicia. A crucial discursive struggle was taking place between those positions presenting Galician women as both the bearers and the essence of national legitimacy and, conversely, those which described them in ways that could prove demeaning for the national cause. One text produced in the context of Galician emerging nationalism stands out for its overt engagement with this struggle: Francisca Herrera Garrido’s article ‘A muller galega’ (‘Galician women’). The article was first drafted, as the author said, in 1916, but she then made a series of additions to it before it went to print as a contribution to the Ourense-based nationalist magazine Nós (Ourselves), in 1921. Herrera’s article can and has been read as a paean to Galician women from a staunchly conservative, anti-feminist perspective (Blanco, 1986). Yet the additions that Herrera made to it before publication turn the text also into a document responding to the heated question of Galician women’s morality, and one that evinces the high stakes that a nascent Galician nationalist movement had in this debate. As Blanco has noted, the added material included a loaded reference to certain novels about Galicia published after she had finished the first draft. Choosing not to mention the authors’ names to avoid granting them greater fame (Herrera Garrido, 1921: 12), Herrera nevertheless elaborates on the content of their novels, a content that she sees as morally deleterious for the public image of Galician women, both outside and within the borders of Galicia. Emphatically, she claimed, ‘a nosa muller non é, nin nunca foi, nin será xamáis, a que retratan alguns libros qu’houbera que queimar o seu autor, dinantes de qu’eles traspuxeran as lindes do terruiro própeo’ (our women are not, never have been and never will be, like the women depicted in those books, which their authors should have burnt before they entered the boundaries of our homeland) (12). Probably with Wenceslao Fernández Flórez in mind (a Galician, as opposed to Rafael López de Haro), Herrera wrote that such demeaning descriptions were all the more condemnable if the author was of Galician origins; thereby she reinforced the deep dialectic nature of Galician nationalist discourse in its early phases, when it was reacting to a, by then, widespread colonial narrative about Galician women. Such is my interpretation of one of the questions she poses in her article, where she establishes that any attempt to disparage Galician women on moral grounds cannot possibly originate from a nationally aware Galician man, who would be, by dint of doing that, condemning the whole nation as if he were condemning his own mother (1921: 11–12). With this configuration Herrera was laying bare the dialectical structure of one of the central metaphors of Galician nationalism, that of Galicia as the revered terra nai (Mother Land), a symbol of a femininely connoted hearth, home and landscape, which stood historically in opposition to the masculine spaces of migration, high-sea fishing and forced displacement from the land of one’s birth. The myth of the terra nai, so integral to Galician cultural history from Otero Pedrayo to Juan Rof Carballo, Alfonso R. Castelao and Manuel Rivas, has lent itself to feminist appraisals of images of the nation in Galician nationalist discourse (Rios Bergantinhos, 2001: 159–61; Blanco, 2006: 205–11). However, I would argue that the history of this trope, its origins and staggering durability in Galicia, cannot be disassociated from turn-of-the-century colonial representations of Galician rural women as indecent and immoral. The force with which the trope of Galician women as pious and self-abnegating, and of Galicia itself as a saintly mother in need of care and protection, erupted in the early programmatic texts of Galician nationalism, and subsequently as a recurrent metaphor of cultural nationalism throughout the twentieth century, is a testament to the perceived magnitude of the attacks, and also, as we shall see in the course of this book, to the extent to which the codes of sexual morality have informed nationalist discourses on women in Galicia.⁵

The critical reception of Rosalía de Castro is paradigmatic of the above friction between national construction and sexual politics in Galicia. As this book’s five chapters show, the national exegesis of Rosalía de Castro has been so intricately linked with the discourse of Galician sentimentality that any suggestion that she may have been anything less than its absolute embodiment has been met with hostility and uproar until quite recently. As a result, traditional Rosalian scholarship in Galicia has tended to avoid the question of just what it was that made this author the object of such extraordinary levels of discursive control. Large gaps in biographical and documentary data remain either irremediable or inadequately confronted, while some aspects of de Castro’s life and writings, including the fact that she was the daughter of an unmarried woman and a priest, the anti-clerical meanings of her texts and the trace of adulterous desire in her poems, were treated with formulaic, pious evasion for most of the twentieth century. We do know, however, that the uneasy conflation between gender and national politics was a problem for her authorial position and a central concern of her literary project, as a female nationalist writer in both Galician and Castilian who addressed gender and national politics in her texts.⁶ One of this book’s aims is to offer an explanation for why the study of this aspect of Rosalía de Castro’s legacy has been delayed by a critical establishment more preoccupied with the construction and maintenance of a worthy national symbol, one that would prove resilient against the specific attacks of Spanish centralism but which, paradoxically, ended up having a disabling effect for political nationalism in Galicia. Rosalía de Castro has been, for this reason, an overloaded code in Galician cultural history. Casting her, and keeping custody of her image, as a devoted mother, a loving wife and, above all, as the icon of Galicia has been a central aim of the principal loci of Galician cultural history, from the seminal texts of nationalist literary history to essays on cultural anthropology and the House-Museum of Rosalía de Castro, open to the public since 1971.

Galicia, a Sentimental Nation aims to chart the various stages of this colonial dialectic between Spanish and Galician discourses of the Galician nation, as well as its implications for Galician cultural history and the history of its own nationalist movement. I have come to this study from a disciplinary position midway between literary criticism and cultural history, and this will become evident in the range of historical, literary and extra-literary sources I will draw on for the construction of my argument. Amongst the plethora of textual – and occasionally visual – material to which I will be referring, one type stands out, and that is the texts of Galician literary historiography, in both Spanish and Galician. The reason for this goes beyond the consensus among critics of colonialist discourses that the mechanisms of Orientalism have provided an ‘enunciative capacity’ to travellers, writers and anthropologists, but crucially also to historians (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 23). For the Galician context, close analyses of literary histories as a narrative corpus have been seldom attempted, mainly because literary history has enjoyed a protected high-status position in the nation-building process. Yet it is precisely because of their overloaded status, as both monuments and inventories of a national literary genius that is to be projected against historically specific paradigms of value and authority, that Galician literary historiography provides us with a rich textual corpus for the study of how those paradigms have remained static or have shifted. A central argument of this book is that such paradigms for national definitions in Galicia have been forged in close relation to colonizing and self-colonizing discourses about the region, developing both outside and within its borders. I have structured my arguments in each chapter to foreground the textual sites of these cultural and political negotiations, as can be traced in the texts of Galician literary history and the network of cultural artefacts with which they interact, including literary dictionaries, institutional speeches, cultural criticism, literary writing and audiovisual material. In the first chapter, which examines the inaugural texts of Galician literary history written by the Galician conservative politician Augusto González Besada (1885, 1887) and his acceptance address at the Real Academia Española in 1916, I look at how feminizing metaphors of Galicia, Galician and Galicians lie at the core of the discourse of ‘regionalismo instrumental’ (instrumental regionalism) emerging in the late nineteenth century (Vallejo Pousada, 2005), a discourse for which the image of a self-abnegating Galician woman embodied in the figure of Rosalía de Castro was of paramount importance. In the second chapter, which analyses the literary histories written by the regionalist polymath Eugenio Carré Aldao (1911, 1915), his bio-bibliography of Rosalía de Castro (1926–7) and the narrative texts he wrote between 1919 and 1925, the focus is on how a nascent Galician cultural nationalism reacts to two debilitating tropes emerging out of colonial reappropriations of the myth of Celtic origins, namely those of the emasculated, sentimental Galician man and of the sexually avid Galician woman. In the third chapter, I reread the political turn in Galician nationalism after 1916 as a narrative of masculinization aimed at counteracting the feminizing metaphors operative in Galician apolitical regionalism and Spanish centralism, and I propose that a chief function of texts such as Antonio Couceiro Freijomil’s Diccionario bio-bibliográfico de escritores (Bio-bibliographic Dictionary of Writers) (1951–3) was to restore pre-war colonial discourses about Galicia during the fascist dictatorship. The fourth chapter turns to the work and figure of the man conventionally considered the founding father of nationalist Galician literary history, Ricardo Carvalho Calero, and examines his histories of Galician literature, criticism and narrative, as an influential example of how national and sexual politics have marked Galician cultural nationalism, specifically where questions of masculine potency and feminine morality are concerned.⁷ In the fifth chapter, which takes up a series of contemporary texts of literary history, criticism and writing, I look at how more recent discourses of the nation such as those underpinning the ideological legacy of Ramón Piñeiro, known as piñeirismo, and contemporary discourses around cultural normalization continue to respond to the discourse of Galician sentimentality that arose from the colonial discursive framework for Galician–Spanish relations, a structure that has had far-reaching consequences for female cultural producers in Galicia. Finally, in the afterword, I address what I feel is a pivotal aspect of my study, the enduring political implications that the discourse of Galician sentimentality still holds for the perpetuation of what the historian Lourenzo Fernández Prieto has described as the ubiquitous narrative of Galicia’s backwardness (2011: 27), which I see as a colonial ‘intentional fallacy’.

An unsettling accompaniment to my research and writing for this book was that I never felt at a loss for evidence. Even more unsettling has been the realization that images of a feminized Galicia as a land of dewy-eyed, politically inactive, sentimental people are still everywhere to be found in those discourses about the region that are invested in Galicia’s continued political dependence on the Spanish state. I have tried to present the sheer volume of evidence I have found for this under a cogent, yet admittedly multiple-angled, argument. I have kept one particular aim in steady focus: to contend, by way of fleshing out the history of a particularly colonial stereotype emerging out of Spanish–Galician relations, that such a representation has conditioned not only the images of Galicians that have been ‘difundidas por España’ (disseminated by Spain), as Maurício Castro put it in one of the epigraphs of this book, but more crucially, the way Galicians have been able to think about themselves and about their own (right to) nationhood. Identifying the cultural and political workings of such mediated self-representations is the principal aim of this book. Tracing what other forms lie underneath these mediations, or surface when these are shed, must remain for now the aim of a perhaps more heartening, future project.