‘A Web of Complex Relations’: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Botany and Sab (1841)

Abstract

This article offers an ecocritical reading of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel Sab (1841) informed by the religious, magical beliefs attributed to the wilderness or ‘monte’ as recorded in Lydia Cabrera’s classic ethnography, El Monte (1954). It goes on to contextualize the novel within the botanical studies published in Cuba in the 1820s and 1830s, notably the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Ramón de la Sagra, to which Avellaneda may have had access through the Sociedad de los Amigos del País in Puerto Príncipe.