Liberal Individualism and the Fear of the Feminine in Spanish Romantic Drama

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines the ways in which four major Spanish Romantic plays first staged during 1834–7 — La conjuración de Venecia by Martínez de la Rosa, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino by the Duque de Rivas, El trovador by García Gutiérrez, and Los amantes de Teruel by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch — dramatise the contradictions inherent in liberal individualism. In particular, the chapter shows how the latter cannot be understood without reference to gender. Martínez de la Rosa and Rivas, both prominent liberal statesmen, had firsthand knowledge of Britain and France as political émigrés; it was in those countries that liberal political theory was developed. However, their plays show an identical understanding of the construction of the individual subject, for liberal political theory was predicated on new models of the family and of sexual difference which became commonly accepted by the European bourgeoisie.