Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century by Christine Arkinstall;

Author:Christine Arkinstall;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spanish literature – Women authors – History and criticism, Spanish literature – 19th century – History and criticism, Spanish literature – 20th century – History and criticism, War in literature. | LCSH: Women in literature, Women and war – Spain
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Figure 7.1. Las operaciones militares en el Rif (1909; Military Operations in the Rif).

By kind permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Ref.: BA/13323 (1909).

Figure 7.2. Las operaciones militares en el Rif: La misa de campaña del día 27 de agosto (1909; Military Operations in the Rif: Army Mass, 27 August).

By kind permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Ref.: BA/13323 (1909).

Challenging the rigid enclosures of masculinist colonial and domestic worlds is adulterous desire, which Nicholas White (1999, 10) conceives of as “transmural.” It is therefore relevant that Alina and Gonzalo’s amorous encounters, which the text repeatedly couches as escapes – “el oficial escapaba del campamento” (the officer escaped from the military camp), “[a]quellas escapatorias” (those escapades), “para escapar” (to escape) – occur in Melilla’s park, a liminal space where shells and palm trees evoke the wilderness of the sea and forests beyond: “Los dos salían juntos, iban a sentarse en los bancos de conchas marinas, entre los bosquecillos de palmeras del Parque Hernández. Aquellas noches africanas, con su tranquila calma, tenían una poesía suprema …” (The two of them would leave together to sit on the shell-shaped benches, among the palm groves of the Hernández Park. Those African nights, with their peaceful calm, were supremely poetic; Burgos [1909] 1989, 205).19 These episodes illustrate a pattern that Tanner (1979, 23) has identified in nineteenth-century novels of adultery, in which couples strive to locate an area of greater freedom, imagined as outside society, only to discover that all spaces are subject to the laws from which they seek release. Burgos juxtaposes the lovers’ rendezvous with sequences that narrate the Rif Arabs’ guerrilla attacks, thus drawing an implicit analogy between adulterous and racialized Others; the actions of both, facilitated by the dark African night, rebel against the intertwined strictures of patriarchy and colonialism.

During their romantic idylls Alina and Gonzalo exchange palm leaves and shells: “Ya una hoja de palmera arrancada por él iba a ocultarse en el pecho de ella con el incentivo misterioso de la cigarra de oro de Cloe; ya una concha que acariciaba la mano de Alina hallaba albergue sobre el corazón del bravo capitán, con cariño de escapulario” (Now a palm leaf that he had torn off would end up concealed in her bosom with the mysterious enticement of Chloe’s golden grasshopper; now a shell that Alina’s hand had caressed would find shelter over the brave captain’s heart, with the love afforded a sacramental; Burgos [1909] 1989, 206). This scene evokes a pastoral tradition that, Sara Prieto (2018, 146) indicates, recalls a frequent trope of peace in US colonial literature: the Garden of Eden. Moreover, in World War I reports pastoral elements would serve to contrast situations of war and peace (133–4).20 Burgos’s nod to Longus’s pastoral novel on Daphnis and Chloe, and particularly the reference to Chloe’s grasshopper, recalls the intensely erotic sequence in the Greek’s text when Daphnis retrieves a grasshopper that has flown into a sleeping Chloe’s bosom (Longus 2002, 12).21 This scene also expresses the possibility of cultural cross-fertilizations and the recognition of similarities in difference.

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