Coronado a la sombra de Avellaneda. La reelaboración (política) de la feminidad liberal en España entre la igualdad y la diferencia (1837-1868) = Coronado in the Shade of Avellaneda. The (Political) Reelaboration of Liberal Femininity in Spain...

Abstract

This article traces an intertwined vision of the lives and works of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) and Carolina Coronado (1820-1911) throughout the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century, as they (re)invented themselves as literary celebrities. The text reconstructs the discursive contexts from which they emerged as products of different Liberal political cultures; Avellaneda associated with moderantism, Coronado with progressivism. As such, they represented competing and alternative models of femininity and talent. In this context, it underlines the importance of the different emphases of a cacophonic reflection that came about throughout their own personally and politically competing voices in the midst of Liberal imaginaries that both praised them and stigmatized them as symbols of moral and sexual disorder. From the mid-1840, once Avellaneda was canonized as a “poet,” Coronado redefined herself, and a whole generation of women writers during the following ten years, throughout a structurally ironical, paradoxical reflection, in favor of Avellaneda’s sublime genius, and, at the same time, against her masculinization and all the fears she embodied. Along these lines, a biographical perspective allows me to draw a subjective and vital changing self, that crystalized in the texts of a set of women’s voices who re(invented themselves) in a world of men.