The Black Butterfly. Concepts of Spanish Romanticism

Abstract

Black Butterfly: Concepts of Spanish Romanticism. By John R. Rosenberg. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. xii+ 180 pages. This engaging volume by Rosenberg-the fifty-third title of the University of Mississippi's Romance Monographs series-attempts to trace the fundamental motifs and characteristics of Spanish through the creative works of the most important Romantic writers of 19th-century Spain. author does not attempt to locate in its historical element nor in its political context, indicating clearly that this research has already been accomplished by other Hispanists in the past sixty years. In short, this new monograph focuses on a few emblematic Romantic writers of Spain-Larra, Espronceda, Becquer, Duque de Rivas, Fern/n Caballero, Coronado, Gomez de Avellaneda and Gil y Carrasco-and illustrates how the various motifs of Spanish express a legacy of hollowness and psychic disintegration and delirium of the soul (ix). clever title of the book, borrowed from Nicomedes Pastor Diaz' (1811-1863) memorable poem, La mariposa negra (1834), refers to the black butterfly that appears in one of the Galician poet's octavas, initially interpreted by the poem's speaker as a horrible, evil shadow. speaker, argues Rosenberg, later associates the butterfly with his own psychic degeneration and fragmentation, suggests that the insect announces his own death or is some sort of messenger of fate, considers its relationship to the idea of the absent lover and, finally, hints that the butterfly might be a symbol of truth (viii). In short, the author opens his book with a reference to La mariposa negra in order to outline the markers of Spanish Romanticism and to argue that the black butterfly is, in essence, a reworking of the classical Romantic tradition (ix). monograph, which includes a general Bibliography on Spanish and a very helpful Onomastic Index, is divided into an opening Prologue entitled, La mariposa negra, and five chapters, or cardinal points, as Rosenberg labels them: Romancing Spanish Romanticism; Perfectibility; The Beautiful and the Sublime; The Grotesque; and Ethics. Although a significant amount of the research in Black Butterfly appeared in print before 1998-portions of chapters 2, 3 and 5 were previously published in Modern Language Review, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos and Hispanic Review, respectively-the book does manage to present a fresh perspective of Spanish as a literary and cultural aesthetic in 19th-century Europe. In the first full chapter, Romancing Spanish Romanticism, Rosenberg deftly illustrates how many Spanish writers were able to displace and destabilize the basic myths of romance forms such as archetypal spaces, movements and figures. In the following cardinal point, entitled Perfectibility, the author contends that these same Peninsular Romantic writers were unable to sustain any notion of optimistic infinite perfectibility, such as the perfectibility maintained by the less pessimistic English and German writers of 19th-century Europe. (It is surprising why Rosenberg does not examine at length in this chapter the nautical metaphors of hopelessness and solitude in Espronceda's infamous Cancion del pirata, all major themes mentioned in the Prologue.) In the third chapter, The Beautiful and the Sublime, the author argues that the Spanish Romantics were never quite able to achieve and attain the beautiful as an aesthetic ideal. Instead, he argues, they expressed themselves in the irrational, orderless and uncertain sublime. text illustrates that other major European Romantics-namely, the Germans and English-were able to move about and express themselves in both the sublime and beautiful aesthetic. In the next section, The Grotesque, the author describes in detail the anatomy of the sublime, the gothic, the grotesque, as well as the importance of carnivalization and the gothic notion of petrification in Spanish Romanticism. …