Configuring the Nation in Fin-de-Siecle Spain: Rosario de Acuna's La voz de la Patria

Abstract

In October 1893 the Spanish government called up its army reserves to defend the garrison town of Melilla against the Rif Arabs. Rosario de Acuna's La voz de la Patria, a one-act play in verse first performed in December that same year, is a contemporary drama written in response to the crisis.1 In it Acuna's cast are not so much individuals as stock characters who present contrasting theses on what constitutes the nation as patria. In the following article I propose to explore how Acuna's depiction of the conflict in Melilla serves a double purpose. First, I will demonstrate how it works to privilege the concept of national unity, founded on civic duty, virtuous reason and the transcending of class barriers, that is essential to the consolidation of nineteenth-century liberalism. secondly, however, it encapsulates the diverse paradoxes dominant in Spanish liberalism in the latter part of the century.In particular, Melilla becomes a symbolic space that not only allows Acuna to interrogate Spain's imperial pretensions. More importantly, it represents a means of revindicating the ideals of Progressive liberalism, associated with republicanism and federalism, and critiquing the Moderate liberalism of the Restoration period.2 The viewpoints put forward in the play will be compared with those discourses of freethinking liberalism elaborated in 1893 in articles from the weekly publication, Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento, to which Acuna was a regular contributor.3Set in an unspecified Aragonese village just two days' march from the French border, La voz is not intended to be, Acuna states, obra de lucha, de controversia, but eco de una realidad del presente (Dedicatoria 6). Its opening broaches the dilemma to be resolved: whether or not twenty-three-year-old Pedro, the only surviving child of Maria and Juan, well-off landholders, should fulfil his patriotic duty and join the Spanish forces in Melilla. Whereas Maria and Pedro's pregnant fiancee, Isabel, urge him to escape conscription and flee to France, Juan and fifty-year-old Rosa, Pedro's former wetnurse, argue vehemently for responding to the nation's call to its reservists. The initial lack of consensus among members of an extended family unit to heed the nation's request places in doubt any one vision of Spain and highlights how national identities are configured through competing discourses. Likewise, the eventual resolution of differences, so that all characters eventually speak with one voice, advocates an imaginary national unity attainable through reason and dialogue.Unity, as Paloma Cirujano Marin, Teresa Elorriaga Planes and Juan Sisinio Perez, Garzon have insisted, is central to nineteenth-century paradigms of the Spanish liberal nation. Moreover, they affirm, it was through the diverse meanings attached to the word espanol that these paradigms were either justified or discredited:Segun se entienda lo especifico espanol, asi se argumentara en favor de un regimen tradicionalista, moderado, progresista o democrate. Nos encontramos [. . .] una vez mas ante el concepto de nacion espanola como nueva realidad que ya no solo se utiliza para vertebrar los hechos del pasado, sino tambien para justificar la pertinencia o la inconsistencia de las distintas posiciones politicas inmersas en la revolucion liberal. (153)A similar process to that pertaining to espanol can be mapped, I suggest, in the different meanings and values attributed to patria by Acuna's characters. Following the French revolution, the concept of putria was inextricably intertwined with those of society and nation, since all privileged the loyalty of the individual to the sociopolitical community and the collective good.4 It is this framework that assumes prominence in Acuna's work.Of primary significance throughout the play, therefore, is the question of whether an individual's primary allegiance should be to family or nation. Central to this concern are the themes of maternal love and female honor, which allow Acuna to explore the various relationships envisaged as ideal between the nation, its citizens, and its colonies. …