Flower Power: Cultivating Creativity in Spanish Women’s Press Writings, 1845–1866

Abstract

In keeping with a long tradition, nineteenth-century poems and poetic anthologies across Anglo-American and European cultures privileged flower tropes. Within Spain a plethora of periodicals and anthologies from 1845 onward bore titles allusive to flowers and gardens, while a number of Spanish women published under floral pseudonyms or represented themselves and each other as flowers. Floral symbolism, however, not only gave female authors license to write within sanctioned codes that identified femininity with nature rather than culture. Importantly, their reworking of floristic imagery allowed them to refashion conventional, socio-cultural parameters, express their subjectivity, affirm creative agency and denounce socio-political ills.