Sincronismo literario y flexión genérica: la novela histórica de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Abstract

This essay considers Gómez de Avellaneda’s historical fiction, focusing on her transformation of European models in order to display New World plots and space. Her first historical novel, Espatolino, published in 1844 and set in southern Italy, tells the story of the eponymous bandit and his heroic adventures defending the oppressed, opposing injustice, and fighting tyranny. Gómez de Avellaneda expresses here her liberal ideology and opposition to the penal justice of the period. At the same time, she demonstrates the importance for her of describing landscapes and her notion of reading as an act of travelling through a text. After Espatolino she turned, in 1846, to Guatimozín, named after the last emperor of Mexico. It proved to be her most ambitious and demanding historical work: an encyclopaedic reconstruction of Aztec civilization — in which a romantic plot of love and epic heroism is placed against the historical backdrop of the Spanish conquest — Guatimozín, in its narcissistic display, evidences her detailed study not only of historical sources but also of ethnography, pre-Hispanic architecture, art, flora, fauna, and the Náhuatl language. In her Conquest-themed novel, Gómez de Avellaneda adapted the paradigm of the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, as did other Spanish-American authors. Historical novels became a prime space in which to manifest political thought and proposals of national agendas during the postcolonial period, a foundational moment for the newly independent nations.