The Best of all Possible Worlds? Challenging Patriarchy in Fernán Caballero's "“La flor de las ruinas"

Abstract

The Best of all Possible Worlds?Challenging Patriarchy in Fernán Caballero's "“La flor de las ruinas" Megan L. Kelly From Leibnitz learn we not by what unseenBonds, in this best of all imagined worlds,Endless disorder, chaos of distress,Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain;Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woeIn common with the most abhorrent guilt.'T is mockery to tell me all is well.Voltaire, "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster" (1756) The short fiction of Fernán Caballero, penname adopted by Cecilia Böhl de Faber (1796–1877), is principally praised for its costumbrista depictions of the Spanish countryside and the local traditions native to it, in which Caballero "archiv[a] el recuerdo de lo que va a morir" (Montesinos 34). While these traditional landscapes largely portray Andalusia, "La flor de las ruinas" (1857) strikingly depicts the picturesque promenades and crumbling ruins of early nineteenth-century Lisbon.1 This relación commands critical attention not only for this departure from the paradigmatic Andalusian setting, but because the focal point of the Lisbon cityscape is the untouched ruins of the disastrous earthquake that leveled the city in 1755. To be sure, the description of the ruined city conforms to Caballero's approach to costumbrismo. It is a picture of nostalgia that condemns incipient modernity, a vision of deterioration frozen in time that goes unnoticed by the hurried passersby, whom Caballero describes as separated from the 1755 catastrophe "por lo que anonada y destruye más que la muerte, que es el olvido" (205). Critics cite a "curiosidad fotográfica" (Herrero, Nuevo 292) as the genesis of the costumbrista depictions, and have pinpointed numerous [End Page 243] destinations in Böhl de Faber's European tour of 1836 as the model for atypical settings, such the description of an English home in "Lady Virginia" (1857).2 Javier Herrero deduces that "en La flor de las ruinas hallamos una descripción de Lisboa que debe pertenecer a las cartas de ese viaje," a speculation that, while probable, fails to examine the extent to which the remarkable specificity of the Portuguese setting frames the action that Caballero sets among the ruins (Nuevo 299). While abandoned ruins afford a unique opportunity for an elaborate description, it is the existential ramifications of this natural disaster that provide the important lens with which to read the story. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 constitutes a philosophical watershed in that it challenged the reigning belief in the omnipotence and benevolence of God that Gottfried Leibniz had famously envisioned in Théodicée (1709). Leibniz posited that mankind thrives under the optimal conditions that, despite the existence of evil, were created by a perfect and knowing God. He asserts: "God, having chosen the most perfect of all possible worlds, had been prompted by his wisdom to permit the evil which was bound up with it, but which still did not prevent this world from being, all things considered, the best that could be chosen" (68). This image of an infinitely wise and benevolent God proved discordant and absurd to the writers that chronicled the destruction caused by the Lisbon earthquake, which struck on All Saint's Day, when many of its 275,000 residents were attending church services. Tens of thousands of people perished, both during the initial quake, and as a result of an ensuing tsunami, widespread fires, and a series of five hundred aftershocks that occurred during the following nine months.3 The thriving city was devastated, and according to Russell Dynes, only three thousand of the twenty thousand dwellings remained habitable after the quake (39). The events of the Lisbon earthquake figure prominently in Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism (1759), a novella that ridicules the notion that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. In it, Voltaire takes the naïve Candide on an enlightening journey in which he faces the inevitability of evil in the world, helplessly watching it befall his travelling companions. Candide, a "youth, endowed by Nature with the most gentle character [. . .] extremely simple-minded," and his optimistic tutor Pangloss are shipwrecked in Lisbon shortly after the earthquake strikes (3). Confronted with...