Lágrimas andinas: Sentimentalismo, género y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner (review)

Abstract

PELUFFO, ANA. Lagrimas andinas: Sentimentalismo, genero y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2005. 307 pages.Ana Peluffo's reading of Clorinda Matto de Turner offers an important and carefully researched contribution to Hispanic studies's growing body of work on nineteenth-century feminine and domestic culture. Peluffo's thesis is simple and compelling: it argues that Matto deploys sentimental discourse throughout her novels and essays as a didactic device, as a methodology for communicating her advocacy of gender and racial equality as an integral component of an idealized, modern Peru. The author situates Matto's sentimental discourse between the patriarchal boundaries of Lima's conservative social and literary scene, on the one hand, and Manuel Gonzalez Prada's masculine discourse of indigenous empowerment on the other. In doing so she distances herself from the popular idea that Matto was the devoted follower of Gonzalez Prada's charismatic indigenist movement; instead, Peluffo argues that the masculinization of both conservative and liberal ideologies in the era following the War of the Pacific (1879-84) provoked Matto's subversion of these patriarchal codes as the only discursive option available to a feminine narrative voice. Accordingly, she posits that Matto's female figures and highly lachrymose style invert traditional narrative models of femininity in order to create a hybrid discourse that promotes feminine and indigenous empowerment through charitable authority and affective bonds with the reader.This monograph differs from much of the bibliography on Matto in that Peluffo considers the writer's many different narrative modes-in her novels as well as in her fragmentary collections of biographies and journalistic essays-in order to trace the common threads of the author's methodology. Although the text begins with Matto's most well-known work, the novel Aves sin nido (1889), Peluffo's essays break away from the common critical tendency to address that text in isolation. Lagrimas andinas studies not only the author's other two novels, Indole (1891) and Herencia (1895), but also several little-known texts from Matto's collections of neoromantic tradiciones and biographical essays, Tradiciones cuzquenas, leyendas, biografias, y hojas sueltas (1884), Bocetos al lapis de americanos celebres (1889), and Boreales, miniaturas y porcelanas (1902). Indeed, one of Peluffo's most unique chapters explores the complex negotiations of the hybrid genre of the nineteenthcentury biographical perfil, examining the interaction between the writing subject and the subject of writing. Peluffo proposes that autobiography and biography intersect within Matto's essay on Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, a well-known soldier of the wars of independence known as La Mariscala. The essay underscores the complex discursive negotiations necessary for creating a feminine writing subject, as it suggests that Matto's reflections on this historical figure reveal the frustrations and difficulties of Matto's own life, a perspective that in turn implies that history is inexorably bound to the present, and that a writing subject inevitably writes (about) herself.In other chapters dealing principally with Matto's three novels, Peluffo explores issues of authority and female subjectivity as they enter into Matto's vision of a utopian, modern Peru that might resolve the Indian problem and gender inequities still plaguing the nation as it recovers from war and a lingering colonial mentality. …