From Sentimentality to Masculine Excess in Galician National Discourse

Emasculated Men in a Feminine Land: The Rhetoric of Regionalist and Antiregionalist Discourses

In an article published in the short-lived regionalist periodical Galicia: Revista Regional (1887–93), a certain E. J. Butrón reflected thus on the issue of “Spanish” regional types:

Regional stereotypification is used in this article and, as we shall see, in the proliferation of writings on the Galician regionalist movement emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, as a stick with which antiregionalist commentators could beat back the threat of peripheral, potentially separatist nationalist movements. In the passage above the gist of an instrumental ideological trope is laid out—namely that of the submissive, pliable Galician—which will decisively determine the forms and cadences of Galician nationalist discourse, particularly in its (proto-)political phase during the 1910s and 1920s. The above commentator clearly capitalizes on the political use of such trope when he subsequently affirms, not without a hint of irony, that “El gallego es respetuoso, es subordinado, es humilde, cualidades que son muy aplaudidas por el que manda, pero que no son las mejores para fomentar el regionalismo” [Galicians are respectful, submissive and humble, qualities that are very much applauded by those in power, but are not particularly conducive to promoting regionalism] (Butrón 1888, 101). With this pointed statement, he was laying bare the ideological work behind the profusion of texts appearing both in regionalist and antiregionalist periodicals of the time, which tactically hindered the political aspirations of early Galician nationalism as a full-fledged political movement, by conceptualizing such aspirations almost as an ethnic oxymoron.

The concept of Galician submissiveness, for all its ubiquity in turn-of-the century cultural and political writings, is not so readily found in earlier nineteenth-century representations of the region and its inhabitants. In an anonymously coauthored travelogue published in 1842 and entitled Viaje á Galicia, verificado recientemente por dos amigos [A Journey to Galicia, as Verified Recently by Two Friends], descriptions of Galicians abound which rather emphasize a far less passive aspect of their purported identity, namely their cunningness and overzealous self-interest. An example of these portrayals is the passage below, where the authors try to attenuate the negative tone with some initial praiseful adjectives:

Descriptions such as the above, where Galicians are portrayed as cunning, devious or distrustful, would not entirely disappear from the discursive map of Galician cultural writings (or of writing about Galicia) unfurling in the first third of the twentieth century. The work of Galician polymaths such as Antonio Couceiro Freijomil, who vehemently opposed the transformation, particularly after 1916, of what he saw as a desirably harmless regionalism into a politically aspiring nationalist movement, is peppered with references to the “defectos nada estimables de la psicología aldeana” [the by no means commendable defects of the peasant psychology] (Couceiro Freijomil 1935, 336), defects which are often condensed in the notions of “picaresca,” “malicia o socarronería de nuestros paisanos” [the cunning, malicious and snide humor of our peasant class] (p. 326). Other earlier, profoundly antinationalist writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán had also resorted to the concept of “ingenuas malicias” [the naïve malice] to refer to those undesirable traits characterizing the “arte del pueblo” [the art of the populace], of which Galician-language literature was, because of its inherently lowly status, its best suited medium (Pardo Bazán 1888/1984, 15, 16). However, in parallel to this enduring trope, an enormous amount of energy was devoted during the decades of Galician nationalism's mounting political articulation to consolidating an image of Galicians as a meek and humble people. For this new construction to stabilize itself and function effectively as a hindrance to the advances of political nationalism, the powerful metaphor of Galician femininity was introduced and disseminated. Evidence of the irruption of this image emerges again and again in the cultural writings of the period, as its ideological utility gradually ended up servicing the causes of both the so-called apolitical, traditionalist factions within Galician regionalism—which strongly opposed the view that a healthy dose of patriotic love for one’s place of origin could ever evolve into a political movement—and antiregionalist positions altogether.

New views of Galicia as a feminine region—and of its inhabitants as a melancholy, incorrigibly nostalgic people—formed the backdrop for Emilia Pardo Bazán’s antiregionalist campaign at the turn of the century. On September 2, 1885, only a month and a half after Rosalía de Castro’s death, and in an address she delivered at the Liceo de Artesanos de La Coruña, Pardo Bazán would dwell lengthily on the shared characteristics of the literary corpus emerging from Galicia’s regionalist revival. ² In her address, Pardo Bazán established a correspondence between Galician popular culture and a definition of feminine essence marked by the turn-of-the-century logic of sexual difference, and crucially, she presented this binary correlation as a positively connoted one. In so doing, she was rehearsing one of the most enduring discursive moves of the Galician antinationalist intelligentsia: to articulate a seemingly complimentary response to the (re-)birth of Galician letters while simultaneously cancelling out its potential successes, and importantly, its insurgent tone. The key notion advanced by Pardo Bazán and others (including, e.g., the writer of the first history of Galician literature and minister-to-be in various Spanish governments during the Restoration, Augusto González Besada), was that the quintessence of Galician culture, so tender and yielding, was best conveyed by women’s voices, insofar as the themes and forms deemed suitable for Galician regionalist literature comprised exclusively the amorous and lyrical—and inevitably too, as enabled by the use of an undeveloped dialect that was neither spoken nor written by the “clases educadas” [the educated classes] (Pardo Bazán 1888/1984, 16)—the coarse concerns of the rural population. According to Pardo Bazán, then:

An interesting aspect of the passage above, beyond its articulation of a twisted homage to Galician popular culture and to Rosalía de Castro as its most suitable vehicle, is that it drives the cultural discourse on the Galician national revival away from the vocabularies of masculinity. In other words, passages such as this one were often as motivated by the weakening of Galician regionalism through a feminization of its “primary matter” (Galicia, Galicians, and Galician), as by a wish to drive “real men” away from the enterprise of claiming Galicia’s historical difference. The inherent sexual logic of this ideological construction was reinforced again and again in the myriad texts also appearing in regionalist identified periodicals, published both in Galicia and by émigré communities in America in the first decades of the twentieth century. In an article published in the Almanaque gallego for 1903, for example, old-school regionalist Leandro Saralegui y Medina described the undeniable “afeminación” [effeminate nature] of Galician letters as a direct consequence of the “espíritu regional que la informa” [the regional spirit that informs it], which presents a “predominio del elemento afectivo, propio de la organización femenina, que explica la participación de la mujer en la formación y el cultivo de la poesía popular de este antiguo reino” [a predominance of the affective element, one that is characteristic of the female order and which explains women’s participation in the formation and development of popular poetry in this old kingdom] (1903, 75, 76). With the feminization of Galicia as a “tierra bellísima, dulce y melancólica” [a most beautiful, sweet and melancholy land] (Burgueite 1913, 7), the parallel emasculation of those whom Leopoldo Pedreira Taibo had sarcastically called “los chicos del regionalismo” [the boys of regionalism] (1894, 101, emphasis in the original) also gradually crystallized into the form of two particular Galician “ethnic” markers. First was sadness. Already in her 1885 address at the Artisans’ Association, Pardo Bazán had cautioned that the poor literary results of the Galician regionalist movement were the natural consequence of the “abatimiento general en que la desventura, y la apatía que engendrar suele, nos tiene sumidos” [the state of general dejection that ill fate and apathy usually engender, and in which we are fully immersed] (1888/1984, 21). The engrained gloominess of Galicians was also repeatedly recognized in early twentieth-century texts as their most distinct identity marker. In an article entitled “La tristeza gallega” [Galician sadness], for example, a commentator declared that “Somos los gallegos, los seres más propensos a la tristeza” [We Galicians are a people most prone to sadness] (Moldes 1913, 12), while suggesting that Galician-language literature could not possibly shed that coating of melancholy that is as much its emblem as its debilitating paradox:

The image of the melancholy Galician was frequently a byword for the problematic trope of the lachrymose Galician man. In his tirade against the nascent regionalist movement, Leopoldo Pedreira Taibo had already formulated his attack in such gendered terms when he declared that the best poetry was one which did not gratuitously resort to the elegiac tone, and that for this reason, one of the least flattering forms “á que propende el carácter tristón de los gallegos” [to which the gloomy character of Galicians is generally inclined] was the accustomed ‘lloriqueos mujeriles, opuestos á la dignidad de un varón” [womanly whimpering, so anathema to a man’s dignity] (Pedreira Taibo 1894, 210).

On the back of this sort of figuration, came the second trope I would like to highlight here, namely the one surfacing around images of Galician sentimentality as a pathological malfunction which, when exhibited by men, had profoundly limiting effects on their development as (masculine) subjects. As literary writers, Galician men were often portrayed as impaired by their inner sentimental condition and only capable of producing what Emilia Pardo Bazán catalogued as “la enfermiza poesía lírica de medio siglo acá” [the sickly lyrical poetry of the last half-century] (1888/1984, 33). In addition to representations of the literary revival inspired by the nascent regionalist sentiment as pathologically plaintive—a discursive turn which simultaneously classed the emerging sense of nationalist grievance as ungrounded—discussions of the perceived inadequacy of Galician men for other spheres of masculine activity also unfolded. The following passage, taken from the Buenos Aires-based periodical Suevia: Revista gallega regionalista, is dominated precisely by this particular theme:

We see then how the rhetorical emasculation of Galician men was deeply embedded in both regionalist and antiregionalist writings of the period. For the first faction, the trope of the sentimental Galician man enabled the articulation of a mild discourse of difference which was nevertheless, and by virtue of its associated gender problematics, profoundly unassuming in its political aspirations. From an antiregionalist perspective, the metaphorical alignment between Galician men and a morbid, misplaced attachment to a feminine land, was used as a strategically disempowering ruse. If we return momentarily to the quotation with which I started this section, which audaciously spelt out that Galicians’ ingrained humility and submissiveness did not make the best regionalist weapons, we have come full circle to one of this article’s central arguments: that in the context of Galician nationalist discourse, the process toward the movement’s political articulation unfurled along the contested terrain, at least in rhetorical terms, of Galician national virility.

Becoming a Nation (of Men)

It is no coincidence, in the light of the above outline, that the early texts of Galician nationalism should be replete with vehement references to the virility of Galician men. The year 1916 is a significant one in this respect, as it saw the publication of Antón Villar Ponte’s Nacionalismo gallego (Apuntes para un libro): Nuestra afirmación regional, an extended pamphlet outlining the new demands of a nationalist movement intent on leaving behind the exclusively culturalist line of action upheld by turn-of-the-century regionalists, which was now classed as too timid, elitist, and ultimately sterile. It is not the aim of this article to offer an all-encompassing account of how the political mobilization of Galician nationalism, which took place mainly between 1916 and 1936, could be construed as, in fact, a process of masculinization of its discourse. A cursory glance at the key texts of the period, from Villar Ponte’s booklet and the myriad opinion pieces published in the movement’s associated periodical A Nosa Terra, to avant-garde manifestos such as Manuel Antonio and Álvaro Cebreiro’s “Máis alá”[Further Still] (1922), indeed reveals an accumulation of metaphors of manhood and of the heightened vocabulary of virile energy that is eloquent of this rhetorical transformation. But I would like to focus here on the protonationalist texts arising from the formation of the Liga de Acción Gallega, a prepolitical association that led the Galician agrarianist movement between 1910 and 1914 and whose masculinist rhetoric already participated in the reactive logic that Galician political nationalism would sharpen a few years later. The activities of the Liga de Acción Gallega were geared toward the mobilization of the Galician peasant class against the endemic caciquismo of the system. The insurgent nature of their efforts, which included the obstruction of peasants’ payment of dues to local patricians, was reflected in the violent, often bloody repression of which they were a target (Beramendi 2005, 228). The Liga’s associated discourse therefore supplies us with a valuable case study for the purposes of this article, insofar as it was marked by a purposefully incendiary force ultimately seeking to animate a largely disenfranchised class into civic and political activism. An example of such discourse is provided by one of the Liga’s manifestos, published in 1913 in the regionalist periodical Suevia. A multiply-authored text, yet visibly imprinted with the inflammatory tone that had become a staple of the movement’s main leader, Basilio Losada, the manifesto resorts to the gendered narrative that Galician nationalism would also utilize to gather political momentum:

The main preoccupation coloring the view outlined in the Liga’s manifesto is that of Galicians’ weakness, as evidenced in their state of almost indentured servitude to the very political and economic forces that cut them off from political action, but also in the impoverished state of their letters. The main point here concerns specifically the perceived bland and sentimental nature of the literature emerging from the Galician regionalist revival, which in the view of the Liga activists had served to sedate, and ultimately paralyze Galicians in political terms. Amorous themes and elegiac mourning, which antiregionalists had been so eager to claim as the only “ethnically possible” forms of a Galician-identified culture, are conceptualized above as the blight of Galicia’s national insurgence. Against it, a revitalized aesthetics should be fashioned, a new virile literature in fact, which could be brandished against what was regarded as the pernicious construct of Galician sentimentality. Certainly the vocabulary of virility was the distinctive marker of this new discourse, as the subsequent lines in the Liga’s manifesto evince:

It is worth pausing for a moment on the dichotomous structure of meaning forming with the above declaration of political intention. On one hand, and with the overt marking of the term regionalist as obsolete, several connotative terms are established: first, the categorization of folkloristic cultural activity as anathema to the new lines of sociopolitical action. The overused image of the Galician bagpipe (gaita), which had so often acted as a metaphor for Galician lachrymosity, is now to be discarded from national discourses, alongside the myriad forms of “regionalist” cultural activity that had declined into mere self-serving convention (it will not be unusual, e.g., for post-1916 nationalist propaganda to ridicule the Juegos florales as vain and futile gatherings of complacent poets). The idea that regionalist forms of cultural “resistance” in fact operated at a complete remove from real Galician society was conveyed in the manifesto’s condemnation of its “fórmulas de salón” and “soluciones académicas”. In speaking of the increasingly institutionalized fora of Galician culture—and pointedly of the recently created Real Academia Gallega—in caricaturesque lines, the men of the Liga were also denouncing the profoundly classist conception of Galician culture that motivated regionalist lines of action, particularly their preoccupation with what was regarded as the ingrained coarseness of the Galician language and its undesirable connection with rurality.

Against this concatenation of images of vacuous sentiment and sterility, the men of the Liga proposed a new virile order. This was to be defined, in opposition to regionalist passivity, through the vocabulary of war and struggle (cruzada), which had been conspicuously absent from the rhetoric of the compliant Galician, and interestingly too, by invoking the empowering benefits of rationality (conocimiento). Against regionalist sentimentality, now a gendered notion that could only be understood in the context of what had begun to emerge as appropriate male and female behavior, a particular notion of political citizenship was also forming in the nascent nationalist discourse, one bent upon the refashioning of Galicia’s political struggle as a question of national manhood. Soon enough the efforts of the Liga de Acción Gallega were lauded in other kindred newsletters and periodicals in accordance with the necessary gender logic. Thus in praise of the movement's men, a commentator pitted their actions against those of the old-school regionalists, which were now to be devalued as undignified and unmanly in the starkest of terms, that is by resorting to the image of castration: “Era dignidad flotante en aquel naufragio de honorabilidades; era la virtud esplendente en aquella baranda de vicios; era el espíritu de los nuevos que surgía viril y capacitado, después de quinientos años de castración moral” [The spirit of the new men, so virile and capable, rose like a ray of dignity amid that wreckage of egos; it shone like a virtue in a nest of vice, after a hundred years of moral castration] (Lández 1913, 6).

We see then how in the early twentieth century, a new Galician nationalist discourse was being forged which capitalized on a masculinist rhetoric, both with a view to estranging the supporters of an apolitical form of regionalism on the one hand, and to galvanizing a new generation of men into political action on the other. This was a period of marked discursive tentativeness, when as Justo Beramendi has pointed out, the cause of galeguismo still had the capacity to appeal to a motley assortment of ideological identities, from hard-nosed traditionalists to turnistas, or the men gathering around the initially culturalist formations known as “Irmandades da fala”(Beramendi 2005, 436), all joined together by the seemingly innocuous notion that “un regionalismo sano y bien entendido” [regionalism of a healthy and well-meaning kind] could in fact be everybody’s patrimony. Beramendi’s account of the rapid politicization of these formations (as exemplified in the creation of their signature periodical A Nosa Terra or in the celebration, particularly from 1917 onward, of the first rallies) perhaps misses the discursive dimension of this change, and with it, an account of the instrumental role played by the discourse of masculinity in the definition of Galician nationalism as a full-fledged political movement. In the next section, I will read a seminal text of Galician cultural nationalism, Ricardo Carvalho Calero’s Historia da literatura galega contemporánea, as a prime example of the rarely acknowledged, yet enduring prominence that the values of hegemonic masculinity have had in the delineation of Galician national culture.

Approaching Masculine Excess in Ricardo Carvalho Calero’s Historia da literatura galega contemporánea

Just as the masculine-associated values of energy, belligerence, action, or rationality had featured prominently as mobilizing tropes in the early stages of Galician nationalist discourse, other related notions such as heroism, forcefulness, and promiscuity have also been hailed in later periods, particularly as Galician nationalism consolidated itself as a discourse of resistance during the dictatorship. The field of literary history supplies us with a highly useful corpus on which to trace the gradual formation of these images, if only because, as Lorena Domínguez Mallo has explained, literary history became the testing ground for the discursive preservation of national identity politics at a time when the discipline of nationalist historiography proper, because of its apparently more ostensible link with political nationalism, was thwarted by censorship (Domínguez Mallo 2010).

Originally published in 1963 under Franco’s dictatorship, and then subsequently in the two revised and expanded editions of 1978 and 1981, Carvalho Calero’s HLGC continues to be hailed as a monument of Galician national culture. Its genesis harks back to Carvalho’s doctoral research, which he was able to initiate in the 1950s, the decade that would see his rehabilitation as a key continuator of the legacy of pre-war nationalism after a difficult return to post-war Galicia with an official ban from public service. A section of the contents of his thesis was first published as the book Aportaciones a la literatura gallega contemporánea [Approaches to Contem porary Galician Literature] (1955), an introductory manual aimed at a non-Galician readership. Carvalho’s expanded research project would subsequently be coopted for the nascent cultural project led by the publishing house Galaxia and its associated intellectuals—Ramón Piñeiro, Francisco Fernández del Riego, and Ramón Otero Pedrayo—whose chief aim was to endow Galician culture with a solid literary corpus and a more confident place in the map of European aesthetic currents. References to Carvalho’s writing of the HLGC as a titanic labor of research and compilation abound in the mainly encomiastic secondary literature that exists on his work and figure (Montero Santalha 1993, 166; García Negro 2010, 12). It is not unusual either for such references to resort to the image of the lonely hero when referring to Carvalho’s work on and for Galician literature as the tireless and disinterested effort of someone who worked “silenciosa e incesantemente durante toda a súa vida, no canto de procurar acomodo persoal ou dedicarse á ostentación ou á procura de favores de superioridade” [quietly and tirelessly throughout his life, instead of securing a comfortable position for himself, indulging in ostentation, or seeking the favor of others] (García Negro 2010, 15). Carvalho himself referred to his HLGC as an “[obra] feita nos tempos heroicos en que todo se fazia directamente” [a book written during the heroic times when everything had to be done through one's own devices] (Carballo Calero in Fernán-Vello and Pillado Mayor 1986, 161, my emphasis), and Carmen Blanco would dramatize this process with a similar image, when she reiterated in her eulogy of the author “a enorme forza de vontade e a grande capacidade de traballo que mostra esta obra, resultado, na case totalidade, da investigación persoal e o autodidacticismo” [the enormous willpower and industriousness evidenced by this book, which is the result almost in its entirety of his individual research and autodidacticism] (Blanco 1991, 92). Any critical revision of Carvalho Calero’s work and particularly of the vastly formulaic nature of the critical reception to his contribution to Galician culture would need to address this configuration of a masculine vocabulary of praise: the tropes of heroism and solitude in particular would have to be recontextualized in the light of recent documents such as the lifelong correspondence between Carvalho and Fernández del Riego, where there is ample evidence of how deeply reliant Carvalho was on del Riego’s tireless supply of primary and secondary sources and, crucially, of the unsung role that Carvalho’s wife, María Ignacia Ramos, also played in the process. ³

In this article, I will focus on the metaphorization of the masculine that develops in Carvalho’s HLGC with a view to opening up a line of research that reconsiders and rehistoricizes the chief texts of Galician cultural nationalism as coherent with a particular gender metanarrative. As explained in the previous sections, the image of the submissive, sentimental Galician man peppering regionalist and antiregionalist texts in the opening decades of the twentieth century had turned into the backdrop against which a nationalist movement with increasing political consciousness could forge its own reactive discourse. By constructing a notion of political citizenship that rested on the markers of energetic virility and rationality, Galician nationalism was no doubt metaphorizing the language of power and strategy in a way that would appeal to a young generation of men at a time of historical need. On the cultural plane, such metaphorization would have long-lasting implications for the definition of certain supporting—if not essential—concepts of the national culture, including authorship, resistance, aesthetic value or the very make-up of the institutions that oversee cultural production in Galicia.

In Carvalho Calero’s HLGC, the metaphorization of masculinity as an instrument for national construction and consolidation becomes manifest in its treatment of two of the chief figures of the Galician literary revival: Eduardo Pondal (1835–1917) and Rosalía de Castro (1837–85). While the symbolic significance carried by these names is vastly different—in ways that, as we are about to see, have been determined by their gender—both authors are conventionally assigned a pioneering role in the literary expression of a Galician national sentiment in the last third of the nineteenth century. For this reason, in his literary history Carvalho grants these authors, together with Curros Enríquez (1851–1908), also considered one of the founding figures of the Galician revival, an extended, independent chapter each, while the rest of the text proceeds by way of periodizing a series of literary generations under his influential, militaristic terminology (precursores, diádocos, and epígonos). Carvalho’s ninety-eight page chapter on Eduardo Pondal offers a highly eloquent deployment of the discourse of virility as a discourse of national formation, specifically in its extended development of the theme of predatory sexuality. In a methodological move that emphatically exposed the gender principle informing the long-established debate over the question of biographical detail in Galician literary historiography, Carvalho offers several pages of biographical commentary on Pondal’s amorous life, while it settles de Castro’s swiftly with an outright negation of the amorous theme in her poetry—in Follas novas, he curtly asserts, “non hai lírica amorosa propiamente” [there is no amorous poetry as such] (1981, 203)—and with a visibly moralizing—and sanitized—description of her marriage to Murguía. ⁴ Interestingly, Carvalho pauses briefly to justify giving so much attention to the question of Pondal’s liaisons by stating that “Cuestións son ístas de moita curiosidade pra os devotos do poeta, que ben quixeran coñecer puntualmente a historia do seu corazón, por amor ao mesmo” [These matters are of utmost interest to the poet’s devotees, who would like to learn about the history of his heart out of love towards him] (1981, 247). He also shows an awareness that he may be devoting an inordinate amount of attention to this question when he asks for the reader’s forebearance on the matter: “escusen […] a relativa estensión que adicamos a istas conxeturas”[please excuse the slight extension of our conjectures on this matter] (p. 247). Yet, several pages are devoted to elucidating whether Eduardo Pondal, who died a bachelor, had mainly one or several relationships in his youth, what were the physical attributes of his “meniña[s]” [little girls] (p. 248), whether they were from Santiago de Compostela or Pontevedra, and what could have been the location of their amorous encounters (p. 250). In line with this thematic preoccupation with Pondal’s sexual exploits, Carvalho’s HLGC also keenly highlights what is presented as the chief line of Pondal’s literary texts, namely the so-called ética da virilidade primitiva [ethic of primitive virility] running through his poems (p. 290). The close conjugation between Carvalho’s definition of this notion and early twentieth-century configurations of Galician sentimentality as a pernicious trope for Galician nationalism is best appreciated in his emphatic treatment of Pondal’s poetry as “menos sentimental” [less sentimental] (p. 272), or also as “enérxica, grave, sonora” [energic, grave, and resounding] (pp. 272–73). Here, the national bard is not portrayed, as had been repeatedly the case with turn-of-the-century representations of Galician regionalist poets, as a teary-eyed, melancholy, unmanly man, but rather as uncompromisingly virile. In this new framework, the values of forcefulness and willpower become the new bywords for the model of national manhood promoted by Galician nationalist discourse in the second half of the twentieth century, curiously during a historical period where the movement’s political backbone was at its most brittle. The following quote perhaps amounts to the HLGC’s most heightened moment of virility in Carvalho’s text, as the historian offers a panegyric to what he terms the erotismo in Pondal’s poems:

The attempted dislocation of the sentimentality trope is evident in Carvalho’s emphatic remark that the sexual impetus motivating Pondal’s poems shows no ethical qualms. At the level of form this means that the trite conventions and vacuous rhetoric associated with the theme of Galician sentimentality entirely disappear in Pondal’s texts, giving way to unaccustomed poetic protocols in the context of the Galician regionalist revival. At a symbolic level, the trope of sentimentality in Carvalho’s text is not pitted against a notion of masculinity defined generically by the values of rationality, courage or belligerence, but against a new kind of virility measured by an openly predatory display of sexual force. Sentimental conventions—understood as the circuitous, unyielding protocols of romantic courtship—offer inadequate literary forms to the national bard, whose thirst for beauty can only be met with the forcible taking of what he wants. This affirmation of rape as emblem of national masculinity finds its actualization in Carvalho’s description of Pondal’s relation to the land, or to put it in the heavily feminized vocabulary of traditional galeguismo, the terra nai. The recurrent image of the nation as the “iconic mother” has been extensively studied in feminist critiques of nationalist discourse (Boehmer 2005, 108). In the Galician context, Noa Rios Bergantinhos has likewise identified that “A figura de Galiza como nai –necessitada do carinho e o afecto do povo galego –, é muito recorrente no conjunto das obras dos teóricos e dirigentes nacionalistas” [The image of Galicia as a mother in need of her people’s love and affection recurs frequently in the texts of the Galician nationalist ideologues and leaders] (2001, 159). In this framework, the metaphor of rape—concretely of the native land as violated by colonial force—was also analyzed by Rios Bergantinhos as proof of the sexualization of Galician nationalist discourse in its formative stages (p. 161). But a historicizing account of Galician nationalist discourse that is not only wary of its sexist or patriarchal patterns, but of its engrained masculinist politics, helps us reassess the rape metaphor as a galvanizing image for a new political generation educated into a discourse of resistance that was inextricably marked by the notion of hegemonic manhood. Under this light, the image of Galicia as a violated mother is another cog in the machinery of a discourse of nationalist insurgence that was to be acted out by an army of protecting sons. But one of the most disconcerting aspects of Carvalho’s design for a national literary history is that it operates against the very conventions—and interests—of national discourse by way of displaying certain moments of what I term masculine excess. Or, put differently, there are points in his HLGC where some of the chief metaphors of national-patriarchal ideology become devoid of their national purpose and fulfill exclusively a masculinist one. We can take Carvalho’s reading of Pondal’s poetic depiction of the Galician landscape as an example of such moments. Carvalho positively acclaims what he sees as an audacious move in Pondalian poetics “que non pode menos de suscitar o noso asombro admirativo” [which commands our admiration and our awe] (1981, 263). He is referring to the way in which Pondal, far from portraying his native landscape of Bergantiños (in the western province of A Coruña) in the accustomed feminized rhetoric as a “motherly hearth,” resorts instead to an aesthetics of force:

Here the national landscape is defined in feminized terms, not as a mother to be revered and protected from outward affront, but as a yielding prey to the poet’s sexual thirst. To Carvalho—and here lies the contradiction in national terms—the question of national honor underlying the conventional feminization of the nation as a mother is suspended in favor of an uncompromising display of virile force, which becomes, by virtue of this discursive move, the best measure of national authority. Rape therefore ceases to act doubly as a byword for colonization and as a call to arms for national insurgence: it becomes the emblem for national virility, even at the cost of the moral infrastructure of traditional nationalist discourse in Galicia, which was so strongly based on the image of the respected—and respectable—motherland.

A further moment of masculine excess in Carvalho’s HLGC cannot escape notice, although three decades of feminist cultural criticism in Galician Studies have not been enough to bring it under critical scrutiny. I am referring here to the almost four pages devoted in his book to the description of Rosalía de Castro’s physique, and pointedly, to the question of her alleged unattractiveness. Rosalía de Castro’s body has of course proved to be one of the fraught spaces of Galician cultural nationalism. As demonstrated by the debate over her amorous biography, which had been ignited by Manuel Murguía’s forewarning in his own biographical words on his wife that “Después de todo la vida de una mujer, por muy ilustre que sea, es siempre bien sencilla” [After all, a woman’s life, even if she is an illustrious figure, is always fairly simple] (Murguía 1909, xx), and which acquired a certain level of acrimony with the controversy surrounding Machado de Rosa’s thesis, the tensions around the possibility of Rosalía de Castro’s desiring body have manifested themselves in the many attempts by Galician cultural nationalism to blot out this theme from its critical designs. One just needs to think of the staple project of the Galaxia group, the recasting of Rosalía de Castro as a metaphysical poet as was developed in the signature volume 7 ensayos sobre Rosalía [Seven Essays on Rosalía] (1952), to appreciate the strategic importance that Rosalía de Castro’s decorporealization held for the ideologues of galeguismo. Carvalho himself was a key overseer of this process, and his HLGC is replete with examples of his own anxiety at the possibility of a corporeal reading of de Castro’s poems. Thus rather patently in his analysis of Follas novas, Carvalho precludes all possibility of reading her poems as “lírica confidencial” [confessional poetry] (1981, 187) and explains this contrariety in gendered terms as the result of de Castro’s essentially nonfeminine—that is, masculine and universal—symbolism:

In the context of this configuration, it may come across as ideologically disconcerting that Carvalho Calero should include a section called “Physis” in his chapter on Rosalía de Castro—a section which is nowhere else replicated as a discrete unit in his HLGC. Perhaps even more baffling is his unmitigated critique of Rosalía de Castro’s body in the most literal sense, and by recourse to a language that does not shy away from using the often abusive vocabulary of the long misogynist tradition of women’s objectualization. The passage below therefore makes for one of the most startling instances of the critical abuses incurred by a patriarchal cultural nationalism in Galicia:

The starkly sexist and classist terms of Carvalho’s description of Rosalía de Castro’s body lend themselves readily to a feminist critique of Galician nationalist politics, particularly one that recognizes, as recent critical voices have begun to do, that traditional definitions of the nation in the Galician context have not only delayed, but in fact actively defied the basic premises of the feminist cause. But to translate Carva-lho's words above back into the main final argument of this article—the one about there being certain moments of masculine excess in his literary history where the premises of nationalism are cancelled out—I would ask the following question: what is the possible function of such an elaboration on the theme of Rosalía de Castro’s “irredeemable ugliness,” particularly in the context of a nationalist program bent upon preserving her status as idealized national symbol? In other words, in a text that has been hailed as the magnum opus of national literary history, what particular definition of nation is at work in the almost four pages devoted to discussing the degree to which “o aspeito físico de Rosalía defrauda a espeitación” [Rosalía’s physical appearance disappoints expectation] (p. 155)? I would argue that the conventionally mythologizing rhetoric of cultural nationalism is here arrested to give way to what I see as one of nationalism’s overriding aims: the reassertion of masculine authority over the definitions of the nation. The fact that Carvalho should digress almost pleasurably on how Rosalía de Castro’s body was unsalvageable for the patriarchal gaze can therefore be read as an act of virile self-assertion of the literary historian as the prime custodian of national value. This act of virile affirmation, not of national identity itself but of its architects—and at the cost of the very objectives of national construction—, of course responds to the overarching metanarrative of feminization against which Galician nationalism has had to pitch itself. But it also eloquently exposes Galician nationalist discourse as a flagrantly masculinist terrain where even the utmost symbol of national literary genius could be swiftly reduced to an ugly face in the name of a national historiographic practice eager to present itself as unequivocally manly. The consequences of such a framework of national discourse have of course been far-reaching for Galician women aiming to participate in a national project thus defined, as has been recently demonstrated by the Real Academia Galega’s acceptance of four new male members, even after a particularly visible campaign—spearheaded by prominent feminist writers and critics—against the minute female representation in its ranks. Future reassessments of Galician women’s impacting role in the national cultural framework, I suspect, will have to consider their practices as determined in no small measure by the specific masculinist molds they aim to defy.