davis, catherine_colonial dependence and sexual difference_simon bolivars writings_2005
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Colonial Dependence and Sexual Difference: Reading for Gender in the Writing's of SimónBolívar (1783-1830)Author(s): Catherine DaviesReviewed work(s):Source: Feminist Review, No. 79, Latin America: History, war and independence (2005), pp. 5-19Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals
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7 9 colonial dependence a n d
s e x u a l difference: read ing
f o r g e n d e r in t h e wri t ings
o f S i m o n B o l i v a r
(1783-1830)
CatherineDavies
ctbstract
The article explores the textual constructionof gender categories in the political
discourseof SimonBolivarbymeans of a close critical readingof his seminalwritings
made publicbetween 1812 and 1820. Thehistorical and political processesknownas
LatinAmericanndependenceconstitute a moment of radical transformation. t was
during his period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship
were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the
category woman s constructedambiguously n Independence/anti-colonial iscourse,
how gender is employed to create hierarchicalsystems of social organization o
legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is
deployed in order to reinforcegenderhegemonies. It will be shownthat in Bolivar's
writingscolonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence
from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and musculinedomination.
keywords
LatinAmerica;Bolivar;gender; anti-colonial discourse; politics; myth
feminist review 79 2005 5
(5-19) (i 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com
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The nations who succeed are not the feminine nations, but the masculine.
(H. Fielding Hall)
La domination musculine est assez assuree pour ce passer de justification.
(Bourdieu, 1990: 5)
1 Quoted by C.K.Ogden in Militarismversus Feminism
(1915). See Marshallet al. (1987: 77).
This article examines the rhetorical strategies employed in the first two decades of
the l9th century in Spanish American anti-colonial discourse that predicates
individual rights on the male universal subject. A strategic re-reading of the
canonical works of the military and political leaders of the Spanish American
revolutions will draw attention to what Bourdieu refers to as 'le mode d'operation
propre de l'habitus sexue et sexuant et les conditions de sa formation' in that
particular conjuncture (Bourdieu, 1990: 11). Simon Bolivar (the 'Liberator'), the
wealthy, white, £uropean educated, Venezuelan aristocrat (son of a Basque
landowner), fought between 1810 and 1824 to emancipute Spanish America from
the Spanish Crown. He did this for the benefit of his class, the white native-born
elite. Today, Bolivar is revered as an icon representing the sub-continent's
independence from £uropean domination; his figure has acquired mythic
proportions, above all in the northern republics (Peru, Bolivia, £cuador, Venezuela
and Colombia). This status is due not only to his militury achievements but also to
his political doctrine and vision of a united South America. The bibliography about
him is immense. But despite his successes as a soldier and politician, Bolivar's
writings are riddled with tensions, especially, as we shall see, with respect to
gender. During his lifetime, he produced over 10,000 documents (letters, speeches,
essays, declarations and constitutions). Here I will focus on just three of these,
two of which, theCartagena
Manifesto (1812) and theJamaica Letter (1815), are
considered to be founding Spanish American political texts. The third is Bolivar's
short speech, the Address to the Ladies of Socorro, delivered in 1820. I will show
how the case for colonial independence is argued for on the basis of deeply
embedded gender hierarchies.
the Cartagena Manifesto
An early example of ambiguities arising from the inscription of gender in
Independence discourse is the Cartagena Manifesto of 1812, Bolivar's first
important public document.2 It was written at the very sturt of his militury career
in the wake of the disastrous reversals experienced in the first wave of fighting
against Spain. In it he examines the failure of the first Venezuelan Republic and
proposes means by which Venezuela might yet be wrested away from Spain. The
Manifesto is in the form of a report addressed to the citizens ('ciudadanos') of
New Granada (Colombia) by a native of Caracas. Venezuela and New Granada are
both figured as women in need of rescue by Bolivar, the 'son of unhappy Caracas',
a feminized city suffering 'physical and political ruin' (Perez Vila, 1979: 8). Further
on in the text, this association through personification of the feminine with
weakness is extended to encompass ignorance, insonity and, more worryingly for
2 For further dis-
cussion of genderand revolutionary/republican discoursesee Kerber (1980),Landes (1988) andScott (1996). Alltranslations andemphases are myown. I have retainedas far as possibleBolivar's syntax,lexis and imagery.The translations are
therefore fairly
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Bolivar (whose militury success depended on conflict) leniency and tolerance. The
town Coro, for example, which remained loyal to the Spanish, is also referred to
implicitly as a woman, but now in need of subjugation. Bolivar berates the
feminized government or 'junta' because it was too weak to do this. It based itspolitics on 'misunderstood principles of humanity', which do not authorize 'a
government to liberate stupid people, who do not know the value of their rights, by
force'. In other words, musculine authority ('gobierno'/government) must force
freedom onto ignorant peoples. Tolerance is ineffective, a 'senseless weakness';
'clemency' is 'criminal', and human rights is a 'pious doctrine' that takes
secondary place in the Bolivarian real politik (Perez Vila, 1979: 10). The 'son' will
need to restore masculine values to this lamentable situation: that is, strength,
unity and force. The feminine is presented therefore as both in need of protection
and as a threat to order.
literal, and thegender of the wordsindicated wherereIevant.
yet although the feminine is associated with lack of discipline, 'universal
dissolution' and naivety, it also stands for the domain of human rights,
philanthropy and philosophy (here labelled sophistry), in other words, culture. The
musculine is associated with unity, discipline and leadership, and is the domain of
law, tactics and militury might, the 'machine', as Bolivarputs it, that hcis yet to
finish its task (Perez Vila, 1979: 10).The federal government, consisting of civilians
not soldiers, has failed because it respected human rights and adhered to the
'exaggerated precepts of the rights of man' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). It has allowed
each city to govern itself, that is, it has not imposed control by force. Bolivar
complains that each city (marked feminine) wants autonomy and self-government
according to 'the theory that all men and all peoples have the right to install the
government which best suits them at their whim' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Bolivar
finds this unacceptable. But in refusing to recognize the right of the feminine-
cities to independence and self-rule, Bolivar assumes the very tyrannical power
against which he himself was fighting, thus undercutting his own legitimacy as
'liberator'. He does not endorse the Federal government's view of royalist Caracas
as a female 'tyrant' (Perez Vila, 1979: 11), but three years later in the Jamaica
Letter, as we shall see, he represents Spain in these very terms (the evil monstrous
mother) to justify his own political ambitions. In Bolivar's version, as we have
seen, Caracas is suffering and 'far from assisting her' the confederation
abandoned her and 'increased her embarrassments/difficulties' (the word'embarazo' also means pregnancy) by not sending troops on time (Perez Vila,
1979: 12). The desired outcome, then, call it civilization, is perceived in terms of
masculine authority, law and order, and a suspension of personal freedoms in the
name of liberty; that is, repression. Bycontrast, the negative that sustains it, call
it barbarism, is associated with feminine ignorance, superstition, chaos, pluralism
and tolerance in need of subjection, that is, liberty. Thesubjects or actants in this
discourse are the rational (male) elite who also wield the moral force, while the
objects or predicates over which moral force is wielded are the (feminized)
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musses. Underscoring this Bolivar adds, 'it is not always the physical majority that
which decides, but it is the superiority of the moral force which tips the balance of
power towards it' (Perez Vila, 1979: 14). The moral force of the superior male elite
rules over the dependent feminized masses.
In Spanish America in the second half of the 19th century, typically in republican
morality, women came to represent the moral fibre of the nation. As Francine
Masiello writes of Argentina, 'women were brought into the political imagination of
men to represent the virtues of nationhood' (Masiello, 1992: 5), although they
might still be identified with disorder. In the Manifesto, however, it is the male
elite which assume this moral responsibility. Those who are incapable of governing
themselves 'lack [the] political virtues' that characterize true republicans and
need to be controlled (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Here 'the Government' (with a capital
'G') is government by a male (military) elite of others who, in as much as they are
'inept' and in need of government, full into the feminine comp. 'The Government',
it is inferred, rules his family (of women and minors) like a stern father: 'If they
are prosperous and serene, he should be mild and protective; but if they are
calumitous and turbulent, he should show himself to be terrible ... without regard
for laws and constitutions' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Paradoxically, then, to be
liberated they must submit to the patriarch's authority and discipline.
the Jamaica Letter
Typically, Bolivar's Independence discourse is underpinned by this patriarchal
family-nation metaphor, but with telling variations, as seen in nis famousJamaica
Letter. This letter was written in Kingston on 6 September 1815 and signed 'a South
Americon' in reply to a letter sent to Bolivar by a Jamaican, Henry Cullen, the
previous April (Perez Vila, 1979: 55-75, 55).3 The context is important. Bolivar had
started his militury campaigns against the Spanish in 1812, but when Colombia
(New Granada) refused to give him troops to liberate Venezuela, he resigned from
the army and sailed to Jamaica where he hoped to levy support from the British, a
hopeless task while Britain and Spain were allies fighting Napoleon in the
Peninsular War. Bolivar reached Kingston in May 1815, just as the Spanish forces
reached Venezuela to pacify the region. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo one
month later, Bolivar lost no time in putting forward the case for Independence to
the British, using as justification Cullen's letter. The Jamaica etter, in which he
analyses the recent past and sketches the potential future of Spanish America, is
one of his most forceful and rhetorical pieces, in the words of John Lynch 'a
mordant attack on the Spanish colonial system' (Lynch, 1986: 210). It is widely
accepted as 'one of the most prophetic documents of universal political thought'
(Pino Iturrieta, 1999: 12).4 Bolivar's argument in the JamaicaLetter was, as
always, the need for robust centralized government. He uses logical reasoning to
connote rational thought as well as a plethora of rhetorical strategies to persuade
3 For full transla-tions of the JamaicaLetter and theCartagenaManifesto seeFitzgerald (1971).
4 Quoted fro m Venezuelan Rafael Ar-mando Rojus, mytranslation. Pino
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Iturrieta offers aradical re-reading ofthe Jamaica Letteridentifying the classand race (though
not gender) preju-dices informing thetext.
5 As noted byRebecca £arle in herdiscussion of Re-publican mother-hood (£arle, 2000:131). On the use offamilial and parent-child relationships inindependence dis-course in the Amer-ican Revolution seealso Kerber (1980:28). The analogy of
national indepen-dence/a boy reach-ing maturity iswidespread in £n-lightenment writing,as are other biolo-gical, evolutionaryand genealogicalmetaphors through-out the 19th cen-tury. See Lopez(2003) .
resisting readers. The prime rhetorical strategy, as we shall see, is to bring into
play the dominant cultural phantasy on which Western rational discourse is
predicated: the demonized maternal feminine.
The Jamaica Letter represents the struggle against colonial rule in terms of a
family narrative; the leitmotif of this political document is a family crisis.5 The
crisis is set up in two stages: the first is to do with the mother, the second with her
offspring. The embedded narrative goes like this: the Spanish Americandominions,
who once obeyed their parents blindly, have now grown up and hcive realized that
what they took for mutual affection is an intolerable imposition. The young,
rebellious adult has entered the age of reason and seen the light; the bond must
be broken to ensure further development. However, altnot gh the Spanish word
'padres'/parents implies the father, it is the mother who is cast as demon,
although the more logical argument would be the need to break with the father,
that is, the absolutist Spanish King,FerdinandVll, who had recovered his throne in1814. Metaphorical figures, including allegories such as this, are anything but
logical. A Freudian reading in terms of the fantasy of the phallic, pre-oedipal
mother is tempting, especially as emasculation (though never mentioned
explicitly) is a constant preoccupation in this text. However, more productive
for my purposes is ErichNeumann'sstructural analysis of the collective archetype
The Great Mother, not with a view to subscribing to his version of analytical
psychology but to draw on his insights into the workingsof myth (Neumann, 1963).
As Bourdieu has argued the mythopoetic rendering of sexual difference (symbolic
violence) is central to the predominance of the masculine vision of the world
(Bourdieu, 1990: 15). Deeply engrained as 'schemes de pensee impenses' or
'inconscient culturel' this symbolic violence is manifested in the implied meanings
and presupposition inscribed in discourse (Bourdieu, 1990: 11-12). Myth
naturalizes and lends coherence to hierarchies of sexual difference and male
dom nation.
Bolivarwrites as follows:
The habit of obedience, the commerce of common interests, ideas, religion, reciprocal
benevolence, the tender affection for the cradle and the glory of our parents/fathers, in
short, all our hopes came from Spain. From this was born a principle of adherence that
seemed eternal, despite the fact that the conduct of those who dominated us weakened
that bond, or rather that attachment forced upon us by the rule/empireof dominance.Right now, the opposite occurs: death, dishonour, all that is harmful threatens us and
makes us fearful; we suffer greatly due to that denaturedstep-mother. The veii has been
torn, we have seen the light, and they want to return us to the shadows; the chains have
been broken; we have been freed yet our enemies try to enslave us.
(Perez Vila, 1979: 56-57)
TheJamaica Letter represents Spain as the demonized mother-figure, no longer the
natural mother, but the unnatural, de-natured, perverse, cruel (all synonyms of
'desnaturalizado') step-mother, who dominates without the legitimate authority
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of biological family ties (in Latin, 'matrastra' meant wife of a widowed father, but
like its equivalent in English has accumulated negative connotations). The woman,
once respected as mother, has gone mad; she is violent and out of order. The trope
family-nation draws on derivatives of the Latin 'natus' (to be born) (cf. nation,
native, nature), which in turn derived from the Greek term for 'blood relation'. The
Jamaica Letter refers to the Hispanic family/nation, Spain and Spanish America, as
one; indeed, Peninsular Spanish and American Spanish were common terms used at
the time. The first article of the famously progressive Spanish Constitution of 1812
(the Constitution of Cadiz) drawn up while Napoleon occupied Madrid, stated 'The
Spanish Nation is the assembly of all Spaniards in both hemispheres' (Gonzalez-
Doria, 1986: 295). It was this concept of a single Spanish nation that Bolivar aimed
to destroy and to replace with the idea of the (Spanish) American family. Thus, the
identification of law and legitimation with nature and blood ties is broken; the
legal step-mother (Spain) is represented as unnatural.In the Jamaica Letter the
'Hispanic' family/nation still exists but is shown to be deeply troubled.
'Desnaturalizado' means not only unnatural but also 'to give up one's nationality'
(whereas to naturalize is to admit to citizenship). Spain, then, is no longer fit to
be a mother of the family and all ties to her must be severed. Despotic, enraged
and over-possessive she has become animal-like, a barbaric, blood-sucking
monster, an old serpent about to devour her offspring:
insatiable for blood and crimes, they [the Spanish] rival the first monsters that erused
from America her primitivero.ce. [Spain is] an old serpent (f.) [who] to satisfy her
poisonous rage devours he most beautiful part of our globe.[ .. . ] What nsanity is that of
our enemy (f.), to try to reconquerAmerica.(PerezVila, 1979: 58-59)
Spain fits the description of the archetypal Terrible Mother. According to
Neumann's scheme, the positive elementary character of the Feminine is the
mother-child dyad, and the negative elementury character of the Feminine is this
Terrible Mother, an archetype found in myths and religions across the world: the
'dark side of the Terrible Mother takes the form of monsters' in which the
'generative nourishing, protecting' aspects of Femininity turn to 'death,
destruction, danger and distress, hunger and nakedness'. The Terrible Female
has phallic attributes, such as the teeth and tusks of the Gorgon, and snakes: the
'terrible aspect of the Feminine always includes the uroboric snake woman, thewoman with the phallus'; the earth's womb becomes the 'hungry earth, which
devours its own children' (Neumann, 1963: 149).
This progression of Mother Spain from cradle-protector to child-eater is made
explicit in the Jamaica Letter. Bolivar, well read in classical literature, may have
taken the figure from classical myth in order to impress his educated, male, British
and creole readers, familiar with Hecate, Medea and the Gorgon. But the text also
draws on local religious symbolism and alludes to the Aztec goddess and earth
mother Coatlicue, the dreaded 'ludy of the skirt of snakes', the 'Great Mother with
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Serpents'. Coatlicue was later incorporated into MexicanCatholicism as Mary,the
Virginof Guadalupe, who is explicitly mentioned in the Jamaica Letter (Perez Vila,
1979: 73). The reference is of interest. Bolivardismisses the idea that the Aztec
god Quetzalcoatl might serve as a symbol to rally the Mexicans in the struggle forindependence: the god is hardly known in Mexico, he objects, and as divine
legislator does not serve the purpose. The Mexicans' religious fanaticism has been
channelled 'happily), by the 'directors of independence' towards veneration for the
Virgin of Guadalupe, 'the queen of the patriots', who thus symbolizes both
Catholicism and liberty. £qually, Coutlicue would need to be sanitized (rendered an
unthreatening virgin) by the fathers of the Catholic Church before being allowed
into nationalist discourse.6
Coupling Mother Spain to Coatlicue as the epitome of female savagery clearly
presents a paradox and a curious reversal of perspective. Throughout he Jamaica
Letter, Bolivar panders to the British by citing Bartolome de las Casas and theBlack Legend, thus equating Spain with barbarism and the rest of £urope with
civilization. Spain and its 'race of exterminators' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58) is
denounced for wiping out the indigenous populations and, by extension, the
modern creoles. yet in order to underline Spain's primitive savagery, the text
implicitly draws an analogy with Aztec sacrificial rites by means of references, for
example, to the 'bloody crimes' and 'human sacrifices' wrought by Spain, so that
'this ground/land ... seems fated to be soaked with the blood of its sons/children'
(Perez Vila, 1979: 58). In the Jamaica Letter, neither Spain nor the Aztecs
signify rational civilization: both are cast as the Terrible Mother, thus carving
out and legitimating the discursive space occupied by the rational, male, creole
el ite.
6 The statue ofCoatlicue was dis-covered in MexicoCity in 1790 andburied again soon
after. It was un-earthed for Alexan-der von Humboldt in1803 and quicklyreburied until afterIndependence i n1824.
For Neumann an archetype such as the Great Mother is 'an image at work in the
human psyche' (Neumann, 1963: 3). The negative Feminineoriginates not in actual
women or their attributes but in the inner 'anguish, horrorand fear of danger'
produced by the unconscious in consciousness. Humanconsciousness, he adds, 'is
experienced as 'masculine' ... the masculine has identified itself with
consciousness and its growth wherever a patriarchal world has developed'
(Neumann, 1963: 148). Conversely, the unconscious is experienced (in relation to
consciousness) as maternal and feminine:
The phases in the development of consciousness appear then as embryonic containment in
the mother, as childlike dependence on the mother, as the relation of the beloved son to the
Great Mother, and finally as the heroic struggle of the male hero against the Great Mother.
In other words, the dialectical relation of consciousness to the unconscious takes the
symbolic, mythological form of a struggle between the Maternal-Feminine and the male
child, and here the growing strength of the male corresponds to the increasing power of
consciousness in human development ... the liberation of the male consciousness from the
feminine-maternal unconscious is a hard and painful struggle for all mankind.
(Neumann, 1963: 148, my emphases)
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The narrative Neumann employs in his analysis of the archetype is remarkably
similar to that inscribed by Bolivar in his Jamaica etter some 150 years earlier
(Neumann signed his foreword in 1954), indicating the persistence of the
patriarchal paradigm (or deep myth-structure). The process of transformation andrebirth, of maturity leading to separation and independence, recurs in this
symbolical representation: 'A male immature in his development ( .. . ) perceives
the feminine as a castrator, a murderer of the phallus' (Neumann, 1963: 172). The
narrative of the Jamaica etter points to a similar deep structure strategically
employed to indicate the political relationship between the murderous Spanish
metropolis and the developing Spanish American colonies.
Having established the illegitimacy and unnaturalness of the Terrible Mother, the
Jamaicczetter develops the family trope with reference to the children or wards of
the 'denatured step-mother' (Perez Vila, 1979: 57) who have broken the maternalbond, 'the tie ... is cut' (Perez Vila, 1979: 56), and wish to go their separate ways.
The text lists the new states/offspring one by one, caught in the fracture between
monarchy and republic. Although the words 'republica' and 'nacion' are gendered
feminine in Spanish, all these children are gendered masculine: 'el belicoso estado'
(the warring state) River Plate; 'el Reino de Chile ... Iidiando' (the fighting
Kingdom of Chile); the 'virreinato del Peru' (viceroyalty of Peru) (Perez Vila, 1979:
57). If they are worth their salt, they are fighting for their independence rather
than giving in. The one exception is 'la heroica y desdichada Venezuela' (heroic
and unfortunate Venezuela) who is reduced, like a poor woman, to 'absolute
destitution and shocking isolation/loneliness' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). This view
echoes the Jamaica Letter's opening sentence where Cullen is thanked for his
interest in Venezuela and for 'commiserating with her on account of the tortures
she suffers' (Perez Vila, 1979: 55). The gender distinction, and resulting attributes,
is repeated throughout the text: masculinity signifies revolutionery combat and
femininity passive suffering. Such difference is inscribed subtly, not by reference to
men and women as such, but in the symbolic effects of language. There is only one
mention of 'women' in theJamaica Letter (compared to half a dozen references to
'hombres', men) but it is a significant one. Bolivar describes the situation in
(possive, femininzed) Venezuela: 'those who remain are some women, children and
old people. Most of the men have died, so as not to be slaves, and those that live
fight with fury' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). In other words, adult men who are not
elderly have died rather than give in or are still fighting. Women, children,
old people do not fight; they need to be protected and if they survive,
therefore, they are like slaves. Otherwise, the Jamaica Letter ingeniously avoids
any mention of women as a distinctive group by denoting the peoples of Spanish
America with an array of collective nouns, mostly in the masculine, in which
women are subsumed: inhabitants, population, souls, people, residents,
Americans, indigenous, slaves, shepherds and peasants. Men, 'hombres', as a
category, appears more often; 'citizens' appears three times, in the abstract with
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reference to republicanismand synonymouswith 'hermanos' (brothers) (Perez Vila,
1979: 66, 63).
The second part of the Jamaica Letter puts forward the case for independence in
terms of unjustly arrested development and infantilization, thus reconfirming the
narrative of the Terrible Mother:
A people are slaves when the government,by its nature or vices, treads upon or usurps he
rights of the citizen or the subject (subdito). Applying hese principles, we find that
Americawas not only deprived of liberty but even of active and authoritarian yranny ...
they left us in a kind of permanent nfancy as far as public affairs are concerned ... if we
had at least managed our dome t; affairs in our internal administration,we would know
the ways of public business and we w, uldalso enjoy the personalconsiderationthat in the
eyes of the people (pueblo) imposes 1 certain automatic respect, which is so necessary to
maintain in revolutions.(Perez Vila, 1979: 62-63)
According to this paragraph, both a (republican) citizen and a subject (of a
monarchy) have rights that entail a certain degree of autonomy or self-
governance, which in turn command respect from the 'people'. Whoare the 'we' on
whose behalf Bolivar speaks and among whom he includes himself? He is clearly
not one of the 'people', those who give respect and publicly recognize the worth
and honour of the dominant elite. The 'we' here is the white, male, creole elite who
since early colonial times acted as 'padres de familia', patriarchs of the great
family of subservient masses who were guided by their paternalistic benevolence
(Pino Iturrieta, 1999: 36). The 'people' here refers to the subaltern, to all
dependents, that is, slaves, indigenous, mestizos, pardos, and women. As
Chambers notes in her study of the Peruvian Constitutions of the 1820s, 'only
slaves and women were excluded [from citizenship] as groups, regardless of
conduct or status'; the assumption that women were by nature dependent on
putriarchal authority was a powerful 'political fiction' (Chambers, 1999: 199). In
the new republican morality, as exemplified in the Napoleonic Code of 1804 (the
model for many South American republics' codes of law), women were made
dependents legally and economically and strictly subject to patriarchal control.
The husband/father ruled the household (Smith, 1989: 120-123; Socolow, 2000:
178-180).
Dependence, presented in the Jamaica Letter in terms of the infuncy of humanity
(in-fans meaning not speaking, or without speech), means specifically dependency
on the mother, uncertainty and error:
Could one foresee when the human race was in its infancy surroundedby so much ...
uncertaintyand error, which government t would embrace for its conservation?We are a
small humanrace ... new to all things in the arts and sciences.
(Perez Vila, 1979: 62)
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It follows then that to be certain and right is to follow the father. According to the
Jamaica Letter if the creoles, 'a small human race' (used metonymically to signify
the entire population) do not break with the mother they will become: submissive,
passive consumers, politically nalve, excluded from public life, absent from the
world of government and state administration, obedient, and ruled by custom. In
other words, it is inferred that they will become like women:
To expect that a countryso ... rich and populous should be merelypassive, is not this an
insult and a violation of humanrights? ... Wewere ... absent-minded and ... absent from
the world n relation to the science of governmentand the administrationof the state.
(Perez Vila, 1979: 63-64)
Here lies the ambiguity. To be excluded from public life) to be forcibly rendered
passive (like women) is considered a breach of human rights. Human, therefore) inthis context signifies male. Obedience and ignorance is the domain of the
feminine. The desired alternative-violent resistance) aggression) revolution and
enlightenment-is the remit of fighting men and masculinity. Moreover) according
to the Jamaica Letter it is the warring) enlightened men who provide the 'fuerza
moral), the moral strength of the struggle) while those associated with submission
to established power relations (such as women) provide the mere 'masa fisica', the
'physical muss' (Perez Vila, 1979: 74). Women represent substance or corporality
rather than the idea. Such an equivalence brings to mind Luce Irigaray's concept of
mother-matter, the unacknowledged, unrepresentable maternal-feminine, which
makes possible rational discourse (Irigaray, 1985: 301-302). It is alluded to
indirectly by Bolivar in his reference to Plato's allegory of the cave ('we have seen
the light (...) the chains have been broken'), quoted above (Perez Vila) 1979: 57;
Cornford, 1941: 222-230).
To recap, maturity, growth and self-fulfilment is stymied by the Terrible Mother
who keeps her sons (the male creole elite, the states, Viceroyalties and kingdoms)
in a state of permanent infancy, that is, in oedipal terms, castrates them and
reduces them to the position of weak women (such as Venezuela). To develop into
mature republics they have to make the break. Bolivar ends the Jamaica Letter by
suggesting that what the Americon territories need is the paternal (rather than
maternal) care of government to cure their scars and wounds, 'los cuidados de
gobierno puternales que curen las llagas y las heridas' (Perez Vila, 1979: 68). Thus,
power is wrested from the imperious mother by the newly fledged father.
Having sanctioned the ancient tenets of putriarchy-inculpating the unreasonable,
phallus-wielding mother, equating mindless submission and obedience with
femininity, and, on the other hand, future progress, self-fulfilment and legitimate
authority with macho bravado and the father-the Jamaica Letter m ght wel I stri ke
a chord with its readers (included among which, it was hoped, were British
politicians), who would immediately recognize and sympathize with this (arguably
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deeply felt) mythic structure or cultural phantusy. But it raised uncomfortable
problems for revolutionary Independence discourse.
address to The Ladies of Socorro
The clash of discourses will be illustrated with reference to another of Bolivar's
political texts, an example of performative discourse, the Address to the Ladies
('matronas') of Socorro read out in public in February 1820 (Perez Vila, 1979:
136-137). Socorro was a town in New Granada (Colombia), famous for its
18th-century rebellion against the Spanish Crown, and had recently fought the
Spanish once again. The word 'matrona', akin to 'lady', was usually used only
for married women or housekeepers and denoted great respect. In this context,
the term represents culture and stands in contradistinction to the (barbaric)
step-mother. 'Woman' ('mujer'), like 'hombre', 'man', occurs only once in the text;
it is avoided by reference to 'socorrenas' (female townsfolk of Socorro) and a
string of family terms which positions women in relation to men: wives, daughters
and mothers. When it does appear the word 'woman' is qual if ied significantly.
Bolivar employs a phrase that crops up repeatedly in 19th-century Latin American
discourse: 'mujer varonil', virile or manly woman. Later in the century, it was used
derogatively to denote unfeminine (unnatural) women and, later, feminists. Here
it is used positively. The speech reads:
To the IllustriousLadies of Socorro:
A people that have producedvirilewomen,no humanpower s capable of subjugating.yOu,daughters of Socorro,you will be the stumbling-block of your oppressors. They, in their
frenetic fury,profuned he most sacred, the most innocent, the most beautiful part of our
species, they trampled uponyou. yOuhave raised your dignity by hardeningyour tender
hearts under the blows of those who are cruel.
Heroic adies of Socorro: he mothersof Spartadid not ask for theirchildren's ives, but for
the victoryof their country; he mothers of Romecontemplated with pleasure the glorious
wounds of their family; they encouragedthem to achieve the honourof dying in combat.
Moresublime are you in yourgenerous patriotism,you have wielded the lance, you have
taken up position in the columns and you ask to die for the homeland. Mothers, wives,
sisters, who could follow yoursteps in the race towards heroism?Arethere men worthyof
you? No, no, no! But you are worth he admirationof the Universe nd the adoration of the
liberatorsof Colombia.
(PerezVila, 1979: 136)
These women are not domesticated, put under the yoke, or 'subjugated', due to
their masculine attributes. They are praised precisely because rather than send
their male loved ones into battle, that is, participate by means of affective
solidarity with a man, they have wielded the (phallic) lance 'habeis empunado la
lanza' (Perez Vila, 1979: 137) in their very own hands.
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Such symbolism was nevertheless risky; after all, these women might end up as
dreaded phallic mothersJ despots illegitimately daring to assume authority. But
any such suggestion is neatly sidelined in the Address by means of four textual
strategies. First, as mentioned, women are referred to only in relation to men: they
are not conferred autonomy. Second, they are shown to be worthy of praise and
thus contributing to the revolution only in as much as they adopt masculine
attributes: they have done this by hardening their hearts, so rejecting purportedly
inherent 'feminine' feelings. Third, it is implied that their aggression was for self-
defence against the profanation of the innocent, echoing resistance to the Spanish
imperial 'rape' of the Americas. In this way, sanctioned gender categories are not
disturbed. In fact, sexual difference and hierarchy is reinforced by means of a
fourth strategy: the displacement of the significance of these women from
historical time into epic and myth. They are compared to the mothers of Sparta
and Rome; they are to be adored as goddesses, admired by the Universe. They are
sublimated from solid individuals to gaseous fantasy. Throughout the Address to
'virile women' masculinity is still associated with heroics and enlightenment, and
femininity with beauty, innocence, the sucred, the tender and the family. Women
will be excluded from the polis unless they act, unnaturally, like men in these
'unnatural' circumstances (in the Jamaica Letter, Bolivar stresses the uniqueness
of the historical context) to disurm the phallic mother (Perez Vila, 1979: 63).
In short, Bolivar brings into play a dominant cultural phantasy, the demonized
mother, on which, according to Irigaray at least, Western rational discourse is
predicated (Irigaray, 1985). Progress is represented as movement away from the
dark threat of the maternal unconscious and submission to the light of malereason and action. The rejection of the maternal-feminine is thus shown to make
possible enlightenment thought. However,this would pose great problems for the
future when Bolivar no longer wanted Spanish Americans to fight like men, but to
be submissive and obedient like women, not to the mother Spain, of course, but to
patriarchs like him, to the newly legitimated fathers, authorized by republican
Constitutions of their own making, rather than by lineage. In official documents
and letters of the time, Bolivarwas often referred to as the 'father of the patria'
(i.e. of Bolivia) and Bolivia as his daughter. He was also the 'father of Colombia';
Antonio Jose de Sucre, for example, Bolivia's first President (1826-1828) and
Bolivar's most loyal commander wrote 'I love Bolivia as the dear daughter of the
father of Colombia' (Lecuna, 1975: 163, 165, 587, 588).7
BoRivar's writings carefully avoid undermining the father-figure. However,
legitimacy and stability were not achieved in Spanish America. As £dwin
Williamson observes, 'only in retrospect was it pqssible to perceive that the
colonial pact which had kept the creoles loyal to the Crownfor centuries had
involved the exchange of precious metals for the intangible but no less precious
benefits of legitimate royal authority' (Williamson, 1992: 232). Once the all-
powerful father-King-Crown and its unifying myth, Mother Spain, were removed,
7 Colombia is alsoreferred to as 'themother of the Boli-var Republic' andthe latter 'her first-born daughter',suggesting that Bo-Iivarfathered Boliviathrough an incestu-ous relationship withhis own daughterColombia (Lecuna,1975: 332).
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there was no strong rule of law to take their place. It would take time for the
denatured Mother to be replaced by the myth of the legitimate Father; until then,
boys would be boys, and the 'liberators' fell to fighting their 'jeux de pouvoir'
among themselves (Bourdieu, 1990: 25).
Reading for gender in the networks of meaning constituting political discourse
exposes the tensions and ambiguities in anti-colonial texts. The political discourse
of the nascent Spanish American republics remained profoundly patriarchal; the
male was taken as norm in the exercise of power and colonial institutionalized
gender differences were confirmed, indeed exacerbated, in the new republican
morality (Chambers, 1999: 200-214). The moral welfore of the collectivity is
regulated by a male elite embodying musculine values: order, strength, and the
right to enforce obedience. Progress is represented as the subjection of the
feminine threat to the light of male reason and action. Although it is generally
agreed that Bolivar was more of a constitutionalist than a dictator, and that heaimed for government through institutionalized power rather than personal caprice
(Lynch, 1992: 60), his words in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto on order and control
will sound uncomfortably familiar to Latin Americans today. I will end with a quote
taken from Chilean semiologist Giselle Munizaga's discourse analysis of a corpus of
political speeches. She concludes:
The main structural axis ... is Order, plit into a mythical plane, which is transcendental
and utopian ..., and an operationalor instrumentalplane (the maintainingof publicorder,
social discipline ... the principleof authority, respect for hierarchyetc).
Orderwill pre-exist any form of collective or individualwill ... It is a universalprinciple.
(Munizaga,1988: 88)
The speeches in question are not those of General Simon Bolivar, but of General
Augusto Pinochet for whom 'the Patria ... is like a virgin who knows no evil or sin'
and who must therefore be defended (Munizaga, 1988: 85). The putriarch embodies
the principle of (his) irrefutable Order imposed on those thus made dependent on
him. Munizaga's analysis is not gendered but her conclusion on the role of woman
in Pinochet's texts, 'woman ... is not a subject but an object in history'
(Munizaga, 1988: 30) comes as no surprise. Domination on the basis of sexual
difference underpins all such dictatorial phantasies.
As suggested, it could be argued that these are further instances of the structure
of specularization, the dominant cultural phanstasy in which the male projects his
ego in all culture and discourse, and in which the maternal body, woman matter,
functions as the tain of that mirror, the other of the same (Irigaray, 1985: 302).
I9tasculine rationality is predicated on the demonized maternal-feminine who,
reduced to physical mass, is subordinated to the autonomous male whose effective
use of reason enables him to govern those who are not fully men and therefore not
fully entitled to human rights (Bonilla, 1990). These are the discursive traces of
the libido dominandi identified by Bourdieu in male dominated societies, in which
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social relations of sexual difference position women as 'spectatrices' in order to
publicly recognise and ratify the male ego, political power and symbolical capital
(Bourdieu, 1990: 24). Unresolved ambiguities, such as those in the Address to the
Ladies of Socorro, would be exploited by women in the future for their ownpurposes (see Craske in this issue). Ultimately, colonial relations of dependency
would prove easier to break than dependencies resulting from essentialisms such
as sexism, 'sans doute le plus difficile a deracine' (Bourdieu, 1990: 12);
essentialisms employed strategically by the Spanish American male creole elite to
justify and secure their own political hegemony.
acknowledgementsThe research for this paper was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Bourd.
author biography
Catherine Davies is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the
Department of Hispanic and Latin Americon Studies, University of Nottingham. She
is the director of the research project 'Gendering Latin American Independence:
Women's Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender', funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Bourd. She has published widely on Spanish and
Latin American literature, culture and film with special emphasis on women's and
gender studies.
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