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Chapter 1

Shaping Galician femininity: method, metaphor and myth in Augusto González Besada’s cultural writing

The Galician jurist and politician Augusto González Besada (Tui, 1865–Madrid, 1919) holds the momentous merit of writing the first history of Galician literature. Yet his status as founder of modern Galician literary history has been compromised by his political career as a conservative minister in several central governments between 1903 and 1918, and his lifelong ambivalent relationship with early Galician nationalism. As we shall see in this chapter, González Besada’s life strays significantly from the models of ideological consistency and steadiness of commitment generally attributed to the pioneering minds of Galician nationalism – and most nationalist movements, for that matter. For this reason its refashioning as the biography of one of the founding figures of Galician culture has been troublesome. Already in the pages of the periodical A Nosa Terra, which functioned as the main medium for Galician nationalism from 1916 onwards, we find numerous references to the Galician-born ministers who had held or were holding office in the central governments as opportunistic and disloyal. Portrayed as Galician by birth, not by affiliation, ministers such as Gabino Bugallal, Eduardo Cobián, José Canalejas and Augusto González Besada were often referred to as ‘os sempre ridícolos parlamentarios galegos’ (those ever ridiculous Galician members of parliament) (Z., 1921: 2), acting strategically as displaced caciques and poorly representing ‘unha cativa comedia’ (a paltry comedy), but never ‘lexítimamente un país’ (their country legitimately) (A Nosa Terra, 1921: 6). With time, however, the figure of González Besada has been portrayed in a more benevolent light by Galician historians and cultural critics, owing to his connection with Galician regionalism during his student years in Santiago de Compostela. For this reason, his significance as a political agent of considerable clout in the Conservative Party (he was periodically, and at times of political crisis, one of the king’s solid candidates for presidency) has at times been played down in portrayals that emphasize instead his role as a genuine friend of Galicia, who deflected his regionalist trajectory, almost unwillingly, because of politics’ forceful call. The Galician poet Ramón Cabanillas, a prominent member of the Irmandades da Fala (Language Brotherhoods) who would, like González Besada, base his activities in Madrid in the second half of his life, referred to the politician in laudatory terms as a man who:

inda cando nos foi roubado pol-a política, entoóu no seu discurso de entrada na Academia Española o máis deleitoso canto en honor da muller aldeán que c-o alzado por Rovira Pita en loubanza do campesío de arado e fouce, son os máis acabados e profundos estudeos sobor da laboreira xente dos nosos agros. (Cabanillas, 1952: 6, emphasis mine)

(even though he was stolen from us by politics, he delivered the most delightful acceptance address at the Spanish Royal Academy in honour of Galician peasant women, which, together with Rovira Pita’s panegyric of our peasants, with their ploughs and scythes, is the best polished and most profound study ever made of the hard-working people in our fields.)

More recently, studies in both the historical and literary fields have revised González Besada’s biography, highlighting his role in the dissemination of Galician culture in Spain. The historian Rafael Vallejo Pousada, for example, has studied González Besada’s importance in the context of the so-called ‘Goberno dos galegos’ (Cabinet of Galicians), during which, with Fernández Villaverde as president in 1903, three of the ministers in a cabinet of eight were of Galician origin: Gabino Bugallal (Public Affairs), Eduardo Cobián (Navy) and Augusto González Besada (Treasury). Vallejo Pousada’s account attempts to counteract the traditional conflation between the history of Galicia and the history of Galician nationalism, which, he argues, has clouded over the political significance of those figures whose relationship to the nationalist movement was not one of outright adherence. His critique is in tune with the generalized admission in Galician historiography that this interaction has made Galician historical narratives resonate with the tone of national identity politics, therefore avoiding the study of those historical figures who, despite being ‘os verdadeiros rectores da política galega’ (the main commanders of Galicia politics) (Veiga, 2003: 15), either hindered or instrumentalized Galicia’s nascent national aspirations. In contrast to this trend, Vallejo Pousada’s account reconsiders the complexities of these Galician ministers’ real scope of action in a context of rampant structural corruption and political nepotism, conceding that some of their actions and decisions while in government could be interpreted as of benefit to Galicia’s progress (2005: 18). Central to his more magnanimous interpretation of González Besada’s relationship with Galicia is his emphasis on the politician’s activities during the first years of the regionalist movement, his presence at most of its symbolic events and, crucially, his collaborations with the movement’s associated publications and cultural activism. In the main, he argues for a greater critical acknowledgement of the link between González Besada’s ‘aficciones literarias’ (literary inclinations) as a young man in Santiago de Compostela and his life as a politician in Madrid (75), and is critical of a historiographical tradition that has ignored this interrelation or refused to cast it under a positive light. This tradition, he adds, has been sustained by both historical and literary studies in Galicia, as the result of an implicit criterion whereby political ambivalence or dissidence with regard to pro-national positions has hindered straightforward processes of canonization. In opposition to this, Vallejo Pousada’s proposition is that Besada’s regionalist inclinations were to accompany him throughout his life as a front-line politician in Madrid and that political and literary historians in Galicia have been inclined to obliterate this fact mainly because ‘González Besada non permanece na nómina intelectual do rexionalismo militante’ (González Besada did not remain on the intellectual payroll of militant regionalism) (80).

The young Augusto González Besada was certainly present at the key moments of the nascent regionalist movement in Galicia. He contributed to periodicals such as El País Gallego (The Galician Country) or Galicia after 1885, was one of the founding members of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) in 1890 and played a part in the organization of the Xogos Florais (Floral Games) in Tui (1891), where Manuel Murguía would use Galician publicly for the first time. Recent re-evaluations of González Besada’s political biography as coherently in line with his years of ‘euforia rexionalista’ (regionalist fervour) (Vallejo Pousada, 2005: 86) have therefore turned to the Galician literary histories he wrote in 1885 and 1887, as well as to his acceptance speech on Rosalía de Castro at the Real Academia Española in 1916, as evidence that he never ceased to nurse his bonds with Galicia and with Galician regionalism fondly. Although his literary histories have attracted virtually no critical attention in Galicia beyond nominal reference, his speech at the Royal Spanish Academy has recently been translated into Galician, re-edited and presented to the Galician public as an ‘obra reabilitadora da vera effigies de Rosalia’ (a text that rehabilitates the true image of Rosalía de Castro) (Garcia Negro, 2004: 5). Besada’s speech, the first biography of Rosalía de Castro after Manuel Murguía’s chapter in Los precursores (The Precursors) (1885: 168–200), is approached in this re-edition as the work of a politician who, three years before his death and at the cusp of his political career in Madrid, looks back nostalgically at his youthful affiliation with regionalism and inscribes in the text a certain desire for redemption.¹ Garcia Negro’s rebranding of this speech resorts to the image of the return to the maternal homeland, when Garcia Negro describes it as a ‘¿reparación? ou [d]unha devolución á sua terra de nacimento, como unha sorte de unión umbilical con ela, através dun símbolo superlativo’ (reparation? Or perhaps a return to his homeland, as a kind of umbilical attachment with it, expressed through a superlative symbol) (2004: 14, emphasis in the original). However, although Garcia Negro introduces the text as the politician’s heartfelt tribute to Rosalía de Castro, she still puzzles over the paradox that what she sees as a thoughtful and sensitive account of Rosalía de Castro’s significance should have sprung from a man whose sensitivity towards Galicia had been mangled by years of self-serving political activity in Madrid (2004: 11). The same paradox underlies Francisco Rodríguez’s afterword in the book, where, after a description of the text as unexpectedly appreciative of Rosalía de Castro’s ‘true image’, the critic still grapples with the glaring contradiction between Besada’s seeming reverence for Rosalía de Castro and the fact that he was ‘un dos manipuladores ao servizo dunha estratéxia ideolóxico-cultural do Estado español’ (one of the manipulators in the service of the Spanish state’s ideological/cultural strategies) (Rodríguez, 2004: 93). In a necessarily decontextualizing turn, the scholar decides that the politician must have been simply appreciative of literary talent (94).

We see, then, that intermediary cultural and political agents such as Augusto González Besada have posed a challenge for Galician cultural history and its practitioners. In a nutshell, the study of such figures has been temporarily delayed – because of their direct responsibility in forging Galicia’s ineffective exchange of progress for identity at the beginning of the twentieth century (Veiga, 2003: 35) – only to be recently promoted by cultural critics who have seen in their writing a kernel of genuine attachment towards Galicia, albeit one riddled with contradictions. A more historicizing scrutiny of such contradictions may help us disambiguate, at least tentatively, questions of differentiation and power during a formative period of Galician national discourse in the frame of Spanish state politics. Figures such as Augusto González Besada, who straddled political and cultural boundaries between Galicia and Spain throughout his career, provide us with crucial keys to the discursive understanding of Spanish–Galician power relations at the beginning of the twentieth century, beyond the question of these figures’ commitment or affiliation to one cause or the other. Thus Garcia Negro’s passing observation that González Besada moved in a constant conflict of duality between ‘Galiza/España; sentimento/práctica política; devocións/intereses; cariño/diñeiro e poder’ (Galicia/Spain, sentiment/political praxis, devotion/interests, affection/power) (2004: 17) provides a suitable perspective for this chapter’s content.

The above reference to a sentimental angle offers an insight into the controversy that I will analyse with regard to González Besada’s cultural writings. An exploration of his cultural texts, from the two histories of Galician literature he wrote in 1885 and 1887, at the time of his involvement with Galician regionalism, to his Academy address on Rosalía de Castro when he was an influential politician in the Spanish government, throws light on how different discourses of Galician identity were being used to negotiate the formation and scope of Galician national resurgence, and on how cultural texts such as literary histories were crucial in this process. Specifically, we will see how the politician’s cultural texts include repeated theorizations of Galician identity – and of its three main constituents: Galician territory, language and people – as harmonious with a definition of Galician regionalism that would consentingly delegate its aspirations to the greater good of the Spanish nation. Further, this political outline is carried across by the gender metaphors on which his texts rest, which help the author depict an image of Galician identity and culture not only as naturally gentle and innocuous, but as politically inoperative. In other words, region, language and culture are described in relation to images of women and femininity, which, with the aid of ingratiating comment and undermining rhetoric, served to deny the region’s capacity for action. In political terms, this gendered vision of a region only fit for sentimental expression served the double purpose of appearing to pander to Galician regionalist aspirations while simultaneously obstructing their material political advances. Keeping this general outline in mind, my analysis in this chapter will look at three critical questions thrown up by González Besada’s texts. First, I shall look at the matter of historical methodology as a ground on which a much-berated host of ‘local historians’ had to prove their academic worth. As we saw in the Introduction, attacks on the erudite men who were directing their efforts towards the histories of the country’s peripheral nations were becoming a frequent leitmotif in the institutional circuits of Spanish historical practice. Doing regional history was, therefore, a hazardous occupation, and one whose stakes were being raised by a gendered rhetoric of attack and ridicule, of exclusion and inclusion, in increasingly professionalized homosocial circuits. I will look at the texts of González Besada’s Galician literary history as an anxious response to such raised stakes, and one that both seals and unleashes the role of regional historical practice as a space where homosocial processes of solidarity or rejection were crucial to the circulation of texts. I will then examine the multiple gendered metaphors appearing in González Besada’s texts as fulfilling the double function of tantalizing a male-defined audience, whilst simultaneously affirming the trope of Galician femininity and sentimentality in a colonial political structure. Finally, I will explain how the colonial narrative of Galician femininity and sentimentality is aptly embodied in González Besada’s 1916 biography of Rosalía de Castro, at a time when cultural conflict on her legacy had become a veritable ground for political manoeuvring on Galicia’s national question.

‘Los historiadores modernos de Galicia’: historical method in the periphery

González Besada was a law student in Santiago de Compostela during the heady early years of Galician regionalism. As part of the cultural programme of the Ateneo Gallego de la Juventud Católica de Santiago (Santiago’s Catholic Youth Society), founded by the main representative of traditionalist regionalism, Alfredo Brañas, the young González Besada wrote and published a variety of articles on the theme of the Galician language, which were part of his dissertation Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV (Overview of Galician Literature in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries). This piece was awarded the ‘escribanía de plata’ (silver inkstand) in the Juegos florales of 1885 and was immediately published as a book by the Diputación de Pontevedra (the local government of the Galician province of Pontevedra). In 1887, an expanded version of this first study, entitled Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (Critical History of Galician Literature), was published by Andrés Martínez Salazar’s Biblioteca Gallega (Galician Library), which was fast becoming the main medium for the texts of Galician regionalism.

The Cuadro de la literatura gallega en los siglos XIII y XIV comprises eight brief chapters, accompanied by a prologue and an epilogue. The book’s contents in terms of historical narrative can be summarized as follows. The first chapter is a brief account of why in historical – and, as González Besada puts it, ‘logical’ – terms the Galician and Portuguese languages should be considered indistinguishable entities during the periods he will survey. The second chapter is a theoretical digression on the defining characteristics of Galicia, its territory, language and literature. Chapters 3 and 4 itemize the poets and troubadours who used Galician-Portuguese as a literary medium during the thirteenth century, with particular attention to the figure of Alfonso X of Castile, traditionally named Alfonso the Wise. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the Galician-Portuguese texts of the period that have been preserved, including that of Dinis, King of Portugal, portrayed as a literary disciple of his grandfather Alfonso. Chapters 7 and 8 revert back to the digressive mode of the opening sections, as González Besada analyses other texts and genres (including prose and historical compositions) and considers the evidence that Galician-Portuguese popular songs played a central role in the formation of Occitan literature.

The book’s value as literary history is offset by the substantial digressive material it includes. But it is in its lengthy digressions that the metaphorical network I will examine in this chapter comes sharply into view, as the author elaborates profusely on what emerge as the book’s two main sites of anxiety: his own authorial status as a regionalist historian on the one hand, and the legitimacy, that is the ‘defendability’, of his object of study – Galician language and literature – on the other. In this section I will focus on the question of historiographical authority as homosocial enactment, whereby amateur historians such as the young González Besada calibrated their own capacity for access into the increasingly professionalized and prestigious circles of historical practice through the display of new neo-positivist methodologies such as objectivity and source accreditation, combined with the conspicuous adulation of peers. I will be arguing that, because of their subaltern position with regard to state-sanctioned Spanish historians, Galician regionalist historians’ entry into the new homosocial institutions of historical practice was under a particular strain, one that often materialized in the debate over neutrality or patriotic bias in historical method, with the latter usually functioning as a token of inadequacy that was expressed in gendered terms.

An overriding concern in González Besada’s Galician literary histories is, indeed, his awareness that, as a regionalist historian, he was particularly vulnerable to accusations of partiality. From the outset, therefore, he attempts to portray himself and his account as unmotivated by patriotic passion. For example, when affirming that any literary inventory of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries needs to include texts written in Galician and Portuguese without distinction, he hastens to add that ‘No me ofusca la pasion, ni la parcialidad mueve mi pluma’ (Passion does not blind me, nor does bias move my pen) (1885: 7). Throughout the text, he is keen to reproduce the views and words of other contemporary historians, normally to substantiate his own and to confer on his study, as we shall see, a sense of erudition, lest he is accused by his peers of ‘temor, ignorancia ú olvido’ (fear, ignorance or forgetfulness) (58). However, uppermost in his methodological design is his drive to distance himself from the acts of patriotic overstatement that other regionalist historians of his time had committed. For example, he criticizes Teodosio Vesteiro Torres and his Galería de Gallegos Ilustres. Poetas de la Edad Media (Catalogue of Illustrious Galicians: The Poets of the Middle Ages) (1874) as follows, carefully differentiating Vesteiro’s historiographical praxis from his own:

Honran, en verdad, á la patria los hijos que la quieren y tienen disculpa también honrosa los errores, que del cariño dimanan, pero sería altamente punible secundar una opinión estraviada, cuando vistas las cosas con un criterio imparcial, se conoce el estravío; por eso formulé mi opinión contraria á la del malogrado joven que consagró su vida á la noble tierra que le vió nacer. (1885: 32)

(Our homeland is indeed honoured by its adoring sons and there are honourable excuses for mistakes motivated by love, but it would be extremely reprehensible to endorse an erroneous opinion if, when things are viewed with an impartial criterion, the error is spotted. This is why my opinion is not that of the prematurely deceased young man, who devoted his life to the noble land of his birth.)

We see, then, that González Besada’s first text of Galician literary history is marked by a methodological aspiration for objectivity. In a variety of self-ironic turns throughout the book, the young historian will reveal his anxiety that any future attack on his historical hypotheses may be justified, or that his lack of expertise in the field of knowledge he is trying to enter will become too evident (57–8). This anxiety becomes a tension running throughout his Historia crítica de la literatura gallega (1887), in which González Besada’s efforts at adjusting to neutrality collapse with the inevitable pull of ideological and political vision. This methodological conflict is, as we will see, a profoundly gendered one. In his prologue to Historia crítica de la literatura gallega, which he sententiously presents as ‘la primera historia de la literatura gallega’ (the first history of Galician literature) (1887: x), anxieties over the legitimacy of his object of study are conveyed in a heavily gendered rhetoric, for example when he advises the reader that, even if his study does not match the ‘simétricas proporciones’ (symmetric proportions) (1887: x) demanded by the new neo-positivist historical methods, it will at least show a womanly kind of honesty:

Es la primera historia de la literatura gallega, y con ello está dicho todo. No será, pues, rica en noticias, ni amena, ni curiosa, ni abundante y acertada en sana crítica, pero desde luego será verdadera; y cualidad es esta en la historia, que á semejanza de la honradez de la mujer, disculpa sus efectos, encubre sus flaquezas y legitima la pobreza que lejos de denigrar, ensalza. (x–xi)

(This is the first history of Galician literature, and that says everything. It will not, then, be rich in new revelations, or entertaining, or intriguing, or full of sound, accurate criticism, but it will certainly be truthful; and this, in history, is a quality which, like decency in a woman, excuses faults, covers up weaknesses and legitimizes poverty which, far from degrading, extols.)

The theme of feminine decency repeatedly appears in González Besada’s history as a discursive device with which to approach questions of quality and beauty, and this becomes notoriously the case, as we shall see in the next section, when the historian discusses the literary qualities of the Galician language. However, there is a further function to the use of a gendered rhetoric here, beyond its use as a marker of the historian’s unstable authorial status as a writer of regionalist history. Using gendered images in historical writing was also a question of codification, a discursive strategy with which to allure and unite a male elite of practitioners, who in turn formed the prospective readership of history books. As the work of Michèle Le Doeuff has analysed at length (2002, 2003), the discursive codification of Western knowledge has been historically cut across by the use of gender metaphors, serving as much a generative as a communal function. While these gendered ‘forms of the learned imagination’ (2002: 171) drive the intellectual enterprise forward by helping the author lighten the darkness of abstract thought, they also play a part in the strengthening of bonds between the philosopher and his desired readership, thus contributing to the carving out of an enclosed imaginary, a ‘psychotheoretical situation’ (2002: 14), that is both attuned and responsive to a readership of male peers. Similarly, as Le Doeuff has explained, references to assiduous research and painstaking processes of historical verification served to ease practitioners’ passage into the increasingly professionalized worlds of sociology, medicine or history; and it was through strategic recourse to a gender rhetoric that new practitioners could ‘work a seduction’ (2002: 12) on this new erudite elite, while simultaneously displaying their methodological prowess. For aspiring historians such as the young González Besada, working in the still precarious field of Galician historiography, the stakes were doubly high, as historical practices put in the service of Spain’s emerging regionalisms were constantly under attack by centralist Spanish positions (see my discussion of the polemic between Antonio Sánchez Moguel and Manuel Murguía in the Introduction). Constant references to neutrality and methodological rigour therefore fulfilled a self-protective and preventative function for a new generation of regionalist historians in Galicia, whilst they simultaneously enforced what could be termed a ‘reactively hyper-masculine’ structure for historical practice in a subaltern context that manifested itself, as we shall see in the next section, in the use of tantalizing references to the female body and in overt protestations of scientific method. Let us examine, for example, González Besada’s own admission of this deeply felt methodological anxiety when writing Galician literary history:

Hasta ahora caminé de broma ni más ni menos que rapazuelo alegre en día de suelta, pero ahora preciso presentarme grave como un teólogo profundo, y sério como dómine de aldea. Bien sabe Dios que los siento, pero las circunstancias me obligan, y por mi honor, que sólo en pensar lo que me espera, tiemblo como estudiante en víspera de exámenes. Depongo pues mi estilo llano y corriente para elevarme á las serenas regiones de la discusión, que por mi vida tengo de habérmelas con graves y muy sesudos varones. (1887: 120)

(So far I have proceeded in jocular vein, just like the carefree child given a day’s break, but I now need to present myself as grave as a profound theologian, and as serious as a village schoolmaster. God knows I am sorry for this, but the circumstances oblige me. And I swear by my honour that just thinking about what awaits me makes me tremble like a student on the eve of his exams. Thus, I abandon my plain, casual style, and elevate myself to the serene levels of argument, for, by Jove, I shall have to face up to some very serious and brainy men.)

That the literary historian should purport to worry about the methodological robustness of his work and give vent to this anxiety almost in chivalric terms is explicated by the raised stakes of historical practice in turn-of-the-century Spain, when the rise of peripheral regionalisms had brought debates on historical methodology to centre stage. With economic and politic modernization timidly under way, the professionalization of cultural writing practices and academic disciplines developed apace by way of setting standards of quality and procedures that served to demarcate professional boundaries. Disciplines such as Geography, Psychology or Economy started to acquire autonomous status in academic institutions across Europe, while fields such as Sociology were attracting the kind of proto-systematic attention (mainly in the works of eclectic theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber or Georg Simmel) that would result in its gradual institutionalization throughout the twentieth century. In her study of the gendering of historical practice in late nineteenth-century Europe, Bonnie G. Smith explains how writing historical works went from being the recreation of jurists, theologians and bureaucrats whose ‘practices and impulses were expressed in a variety of ways that had not been reduced to a formal method’ (Smith, 1998: 19), to becoming an increasingly apt way of legitimizing one of the most commanding concepts to come out of nineteenth-century conceptual revolutions: the nation-state. To practise History therefore was to participate in the politically relevant process of sanctioning an increasingly powerful structure. The emergence of neo-positivist methodologies for historical practice, which usually rested on the notion that no deserving historical understanding could be achieved without laborious empirical research, needs to be understood, therefore, as a regulatory phenomenon. In this context, the new definition of History as science, and the use of neo-positivist methodologies as an admission requirement into an elite of validated practitioners, bore the significance of a power-apportioning exercise. As Bonnie G. Smith has argued, nowhere as in the field of history were these definitional procedures more acute, as the growing division between a trade of ‘scientific’ historians and a host of amateur practitioners gradually acquired the significance of a vital differentiation between the professional and the menial, as two distinctly gendered spheres. In the interactive context of Galician–Spanish relations, charges of unprofessionalism, partisanship and lack of method in historical practice often came in the form of accusations coloured by a gendered rhetoric. Only a year after the publication of González Besada’s Historia crítica, for example, Antonio Sánchez Moguel delivered his public tirade against the ‘vanidad regionalista’ (regionalist vanity) of the ‘nuevos historiadores de Galicia’ (new Galician historians) (Sánchez Moguel, 1888: 35, 37), as opposed to the ‘fortaleza, la valentía’ of the ‘gloriosos defensores de la verdad histórica’ (the strength and valour of the glorious defenders of historical truth) (9).

González Besada’s claim to elevate himself to ‘the serene levels of argument’ in order to be able to deal with ‘some very serious and brainy men’ can therefore be read as a protective gesture against this gendered framework for historiographical practice during the early stages of Galician regionalism. Foremost among the ways in which González Besada tried to shield himself from attacks, such as those by Sánchez Moguel above, is his anxiety at every turn to give evidence of archival research. When discussing competing historical accounts, for example, he will meticulously use them to validate his own, while seldom missing the chance to mention the high degree of self-discipline that knowledge of different sources demands of the committed historian. Aware of the possibility that he may be refused entry into the increasingly prestigious circle of historical scientificism, González Besada makes a series of explicit nods to historical practices such as source criticism, which had been spearheaded by historians such as Leopold von Ranke in the first third of the nineteenth century. The following is one example:

Monumento probable del siglo XII es el canto de Gonzalo Hormiguez, y aun más que probable pudiéramos decir, seguro; y si comparamos ambos documentos, no sale ciertamente muy medrada la pretensión de antigüedad. Mas, no se diga que abuso de mis opiniones y renuncio desde luego al cotejo de ambos textos para apelar á otro de fecha indudable. (1887: 165)

(Gonzalo Hormiguez’s piece most probably dates back to the twelfth century; and rather than ‘probably’ we could well say ‘certainly’; and if we compare both documents, any pretensions to antiquity are not precisely strengthened. But let it not be said that I overstate my opinions, so I now leave aside the comparison of the two texts in order to turn to another one, the date of which is beyond doubt.)

Performing erudition was of capital importance for any historian wishing to distance himself from historical practices that were fast becoming substandard. At stake was the historian’s access to, as Bonnie G. Smith writes, ‘a brotherhood, a republic, a peer group’ (Smith, 1998: 103). For a writer of Galician history in the late nineteenth century, entering this ‘brotherhood’ was subject to a double test. On the one hand, it was important to shield one’s historical method against the potentially humiliating accusations of passion, local bigotry and vanity that usually characterized centralist attacks against the practice of regional historiography. But just as important was the practice of adulation of those ‘local’ historians who were gradually becoming the custodians of Galicia’s consolidating national narrative, usually also through the rhetoric of methodological righteousness. González Besada’s literary history is therefore conspicuously careful in its treatment of Manuel Murguía’s work, with the aim of not perpetrating ‘una ofensa al erudito historiador de Galicia’ (an offence against Galicia’s erudite historian) (1887: 171). González Besada’s emphasis on his scientific approach based on pure logic, rational induction and consideration of other methodologically comparable sources needs to be understood as a strategic alignment with Murguía’s project for a national Galician history, at a time when Murguía’s increasing methodological influence and authority in the context of Galician culture was on the increase.² A new generation of historians of Galicia was therefore consolidating itself through a methodological debate, whereby the values of truth and objectivity, as well as the methods of painstaking archival research and comparison of sources, were being hailed as a token of masculine professionalism, as opposed to practices such as speculation or the expression of patriotic feelings, which were now categorized as amateurish. The early texts of Galician national historiography were, therefore, inscribed in a careful play of power, whereby practitioners aiming to enter the gilded halls of historical practice had to elude the potentially humiliating invective of state-sanctioned historians, whilst at the same time pandering to the emerging figures of local authority. Whether they succeeded in this or not, regional historiography was gradually being sealed as a space of competitive homosociality, where the material prestige of a male coterie of practitioners was negotiated according to codes of methodological respectability or failure that were often expressed in gendered terms.

If we briefly analyse the Spanish writer Jacinto Octavio Picón’s response to González Besada’s acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española in 1916, we see that Besada’s anxiety over methodology at the time of writing his literary histories was not unfounded. Poorly disguising his dim view of González Besada’s ‘pequeñas historias’ (little histories) (1916: 70), Picón concedes that their value lies in the fact that they may inspire a sense of curiosity for the small, which the greater works of the ‘varones meritísimos para los cuales toda gratitud es poca’ (meritorious men to whom we could never be too grateful) tend to overlook purposefully (1916: 69). In his commentary on the methodological failings of González Besada’s literary histories, he criticizes the fact that they reproduced the empirical findings of other ‘meritorious men’, and described them as ‘obras modestas que difunden y propagan lo que aquéllos hicieron’ (modest works, which promulgate and propagate what they did) (70). Interestingly then, on the cusp of his political career and in the ceremony at which he was being accepted into the quintessential institution for Spanish cultural oversight, González Besada was simultaneously denied a part in the ‘señorío de la historia literaria’ (high gentry of literary history), next to the likes of Menéndez y Pelayo (Picón, 1916: 70), for having devoted himself to the writing of regionalist literary histories in his youth, which were categorized from a centralist perspective as derivative and substandard. The masculinist rhetoric used by Picón in his public riposte, with its emphasis on the valiant authority of Spain’s historians and the imitative practices of amateurs in the peripheries, exemplifies the central role that virile dignity played in the early twentieth-century debate on historical method. In the next section, I shall examine the gendered rhetoric in González Besada’s literary histories as also fulfilling a differently formulated function in the context of the power struggle between Spain and Galicia, namely that of consolidating the colonial stereotype of Galician feminine sentimentality at a time when discourses of Galician national identity were becoming increasingly politicized.

Feminine faults in Galician language and literature

Published in 1885 and 1887, the texts of González Besada’s Galician literary history engaged centrally with the discursive construction of Galician sentimentality which, as we saw in our Introduction, motivated many a cultural writing in Galicia in the late nineteenth century. As we are about to see, González Besada’s literary histories rely on a gendered politics of representation of its objects of study (Galician language and literature, and by extension, Galician identity), which cannot be extricated from the formative period that the 1880s and 1890s were in the history of Galician nationalist discourse. A network of dualities lies at the heart of the process towards political articulation of the movement, dualities that materialized during this period in the growing disassociation between liberals and traditionalists (represented in the intellectual leadership of Manuel Murguía and Alfredo Brañas respectively), and in the increasingly apparent problem – particularly after the formation in 1890 of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (Galician Regionalist Association) – of double militancy, whereby some of the new militants of early Galician nationalism were also active participants in Spanish state politics. Augusto González Besada was one such figure. He had been a founding member of the Asociación Regionalista Gallega in 1890 and had played an active role in the association’s delegation in the city of Pontevedra, all the while also nurturing his ascendancy in Spanish state politics as a member of the Conservative Party. After an episode of open conflict in 1893 between the Asociación Regionalista Gallega and the Spanish government over the latter’s decision to move the Marine headquarters from the city of A Coruña, González Besada decided to abandon the by now openly political ranks of Galician regionalism and concentrate his efforts on Spanish politics.³ Historians such as Ramón Máiz have explained these acts of desertion on the part of ‘distinguished regionalists’ such as González Besada as an example of the structural interferences between Spanish party politics and Galician regionalist structures, interferences that ultimately worked to the detriment of the latter (1984: 152). Yet we may acquire a more nuanced understanding of the duplicity already at work in the founding texts of Galician cultural regionalism if we examine some of their constituting metaphors. González Besada’s Galician literary histories supply us with a prime example of how the undermining of Galician regionalism’s articulation as a political movement was already embedded in the politician’s vision of Galician identity as feminine and sentimental.

Already in his Cuadro de la literatura gallega, and particularly in his discussion of Alfonso the Wise’s Galician compositions, we see a formulation of one of the book’s central gendered tropes, namely that of the undeveloped, ‘infantile’ nature of the Galician language. Whilst these songs, he says, ‘encierran un fondo de muy sana moral, condicion indispensable para que la belleza exista’ (contain a healthy sense of morality, which is an indispensable quality for beauty to exist) (1885: 20), the literary medium in which they are conveyed displays a number of fundamental inadequacies. Despite exuding tenderness and harmony, González Besada adds, those poems still had an air of rusticity, a lack of refinement, which the historian puts down to the medium:

Acaso será escentricidad mia y acuse mal gusto literario, pero en mi entender el dialécto de las Cantigas y el dialécto de nuestra región, no pide mucho arte, no se amolda bien con él; lo encuentro más armonioso, más bello y más sentido, cuando rompe todas las trabas que el arte impone y se presenta, combinado si, pero tan desaliñado, como naturalmente es. (25)

(Maybe it is my own eccentricity and I am revealing poor literary taste, but in my view the dialect of the Cantigas, that is, the dialect spoken in our region, does not demand much art, does not adapt well to it; I find it more harmonious, beautiful and heartfelt when it breaks all the obstacles imposed by art and presents itself in one piece yet in all its natural disarray.)

The above formulation of the Galician language as naturally unkempt is subsequently firmed up through the use of a powerful gender metaphor, that of the Galician peasant girl, which helps to enforce the stereotype of Galician identity as infantile and undeveloped. Drawing on a heavily ideational rhetoric, the historian further elaborates on his theory of Galician language in the following way:

Sugetar la poesía gallega á muchas formas artísticas, es lo mismo que aprisionar en doradas rejas al cánoro ruiseñor, es ajustar á simétrica medida la frondosidad de un árbol, es vestir con vistoso y cortesano atavío á la humilde campesina que nació para vivir y morir entre las flores del campo y la soledad de los bosques, vestida con pobres ropas que la prestan más poesía que el más preciado ornamento de aristocrática dama. (25)

(Subjecting Galician-language poetry to many artistic forms is like imprisoning the sweet-singing nightingale behind golden bars; like reducing a tree’s luxuriance to symmetrical dimensions; like dressing a humble peasant girl in the gaudy garb of a courtier, when this girl was born to live and die among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest, dressed in her poor, plain clothes, which confer more poetry on her than the most prized adornment of an aristocratic lady.)

The positively connoted images of the tuneful nightingale and the lush, leafy tree serve to align Galician language with images of harmonious nature. Soon enough, however, natural candidness turns into naivety, or the limited understanding, condescendingly portrayed as blissful, of the disenfranchised. Here the trope of the peasant girl in rags – which constantly appears in hyper-sexualized form in Galician cultural nationalism’s imaginary, from Eduardo Pondal to Ricardo Carvalho Calero – falls short of fulfilling the usual tale of male-induced upward mobility that it usually betokens. On the contrary, the Galician language is represented as the poor, unassuming peasant girl whose state of isolation is so all-embracing that she is incapable of the kind of self-awareness that would lead her to covet the status of others. Further, this inability for self-drive is indicative of her own doomed fate: only by not resisting her own destruction will she afford herself a dignified death ‘among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest’, irrelevant and unsung.

As the text moves on to other compositions by Alfonso the Wise and the troubadours of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, González Besada progressively builds on his theory of Galician language and literature as naturally – and suitably – defective. This theory rests on the acknowledgement that the language displays both assets and shortcomings. Thus, after pointing out that, by virtue of being expressed in the ‘dialécto de Macías’ (dialect of Macías) (1885: 28), no poetic composition in Galician can show any artistic quality, the historian admits that it will still display a triad of qualities conferred to it by the Galician language itself: ‘Facilidad, sencillez y armonía’ (Facility of expression, simplicity and harmony) (1885: 28).⁴ In his discussion of the main differences between the Galician poetry of the Middle Ages and that of his contemporary period, the trope of Galician’s simplicity is again conveyed through a reworking of the peasant metaphor:

La poesía de entonces es melodiosa y áspera al mismo tiempo, con una melodía y aspereza que recuerda el llanto y la risa de la mujer del pueblo, que conmueve, alegra y molesta á un mismo tiempo; la de hoy es tierna y sentida y sin gran arte corrige sin embargo la escesiva melosidad del dialécto y yá llora yá rie el poeta, pero con un llanto, con una risa que recuerda el gemir de una madre, sin violentos arranques, sin gritos altisonantes, sin conmovedores y molestos esfuerzos … (1885: 38)

(Poetry in those times was both rough and melodious in ways reminiscent of the weeping and the laughing of the peasant woman, which moves, cheers and annoys us at the same time. Today’s poetry is tender and heartfelt, and yet it artlessly rectifies the dialect’s excessive sugariness, and the poet sometimes weeps and sometimes laughs, but with tears and laughter that recall a mother’s lament, without violent outbursts, without high-flown shrieks, without touching, tiresome exertions …)

We see, then, how a curious evolutionary logic informs the historical transformation of Galician as a literary language. Early Galician-language poetry displayed the irritating roughness typical of country women, while its nineteenth-century counterpart has gained, in mother-like gentleness, a kind of soft-heartedness that avoids making any loud claims for itself. As this image makes clear, the transition is not one of progressive development, but one of implicit stagnation, and the specifically female body that serves as a thread between one and the other historical stage helps strengthen the point that the language’s state (and status) invariably falls out of favour with the established taste.

The identification of Galician poetry with femininity played an instrumental role in the ideological casting of Galician identity, first as naturally sensitive to lyricism and, ultimately, also as feminine. For this metaphoric assemblage to work, the historian sets out to settle the controversy over the feminine origins of popular poetry in Galicia, first of all by conceding in his Historia crítica that ‘las mujeres – ya de antiguo listas y poetisas – son según sabios autores cuentan, las inventoras de la poesía popular’ (women – from the earliest times smart, and poetesses – are, as wise authors tell us, the inventors of popular poetry) (1887: 86). In order not to run counter to the propositions of those learned men before him – to whom he will reverently refer as ‘el ilustre Sarmiento’ (the illustrious Sarmiento) and the ‘no menos ilustre marqués de Santillana’ (no less illustrious Marquis of Santillana) (86) – González Besada chooses to bypass this philological question by invoking the metaphoric equation between women and sentiment: ‘Siendo la mujer encarnación del sentimiento, es lógico y natural suponer que sea verdad la noble invención que se le atribuye’ (Seeing as women are the embodiment of sentiment, it is only logical and natural to suppose that the noble invention attributed to them is true) (1887: 87). Galician women’s momentous merit of bringing Galician popular poetry into being is gladly offered here as a historical concession. It will become apparent, however, that, whenever the metaphoric triad ‘women–sentiment–poetry’ is brought to bear on descriptions of Galician literature, it will act as a politically functional form of ingratiation. In other words, while Galician is portrayed as a tender and melodious language, perfectly moulded for the expression of sweet sentiments in all manner of nuance, the region and people that the language represents are simultaneously transformed into a feminine, sentimental entity, innately disinclined to violent action. The correlation between femininity and sentimentality is therefore historically significant, and was particularly aimed at dismantling alternative discourses of Galician sentimentality as a positive national narrative in circulation during the second half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the link between sentimentality, femininity and Galician poetry acts as a channel for a less felicitous legacy for Galician identity:

Todas las mujeres tienen sus cualidades buenas ó malas, pero al fin y al cabo características y hasta me atreveré á decir originales; además de éstas que bien pueden llamarse anímicas porque radican en el alma, hay otras que más que tales, son rasgos distintivos, perfiles fisonómicos. Pues bien: la poesía no en vano pertenece al sexo y por eso no es de admirar que esté adornada de esas cualidades y aquellos rasgos … La espontaneidad, la sencillez y la ternura son los perfiles fisonómicos, los rasgos distintivos, las cualidades que afectan á la forma de esas composiciones. (1887: 104, emphasis in the original)

(All women have their good and bad qualities, but after all they are specific to them and even, dare I say, original; apart from these, which can well be called qualities of the soul, because this is where they are rooted, there are others that rather than qualities are distinctive features, physiognomic traits. Well then: it is not in vain that poetry belongs to the fair sex, and so it is not surprising that it is embellished by those qualities and those features … Spontaneity, simplicity and tenderness are the physiognomic traits, the distinctive features that affect the form of those compositions.)

While the features of spontaneity, simplicity and tenderness are presented as the desirable, natural adornments of a language that has been described as feminine, these traits are quickly assigned to Galician-language poetry with a variety of debilitating effects. Spontaneity, for example, is defined as ‘algo parecido á la irreflexión en las personas’ (something similar to a lack of reflective thinking in people) (1887: 110, emphasis in original): the historian is quick to dwell again on the correlation between Galicians, their natural poetic streak and, ultimately, their inability for measured thought and their irresponsibility (111). The quality of simplicity is also endowed with negative connotations, as Galician-language poetry is further described as unfit to don the luxurious garbs of historical or romantic poetry. Here the link with images of the female body and its associated wavering between the pull of vanity and the duty of self-effacement is clear:

No andan los versos de Galicia cargados de cruces, que en poesía son palabras, como cualquier empleado público ó benemérito militar, ni andan tampoco revestidos de polisón, como dama presumida, ni gastan diges ni alfileres como polluela presuntuosa. Viste simplemente el severo y sencillo traje que el pudor le impone, y pienso que no está exenta esta virtud de cierta y disculpable vanidad, si es que tan plebeya dama puede compaginarse con tan aristocrática señora. (1887: 111, emphasis in original)

(Galician poetry is not laden with crosses, which in poetry are words, like any civil servant or distinguished soldier, nor is it dressed up in the bustle skirts of a vain lady, nor does it wear trinkets and brooches like a presumptuous girl. It is dressed straightforwardly in the austere and simple outfit that her modesty dictates, and I think that this virtue is not without a certain excusable vanity, if such a plebeian woman can be associated with such an aristocratic lady.)