The Subaltern Cannot Speak But Performs: Women's Public and Literary Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

This article deals with the concept of the literary and proposes that, in order to study women's culture in nineteenth-century Spain, other social classes and other cultural forms must be incorporated. In the case of subaltern women, performance is the main cultural form that must be addressed, as exemplified by the case of flamenco and Böhl de Faber's costumbrista literature. After analysing Pardo Bazán's 'La mujer española', the article concludes that the literary is a subset of a larger performative culture that encompasses women of different social classes and affects both the public and private spheres, so that the literary becomes part of a larger cultural practice involving fashion, photography and print, promenading, theatre, etc. As a result, women are reconsidered as central subjects of a public Spanish performance culture, rather than marginal writers and readers. This historicization permits the article to redefine naturalism (Galdós) as a masculine literary reaction to women's public performative culture. Finally, the article addresses subaltern theory (Spivak) in order to criticize a literary-centred understanding of the ways in which the subaltern subject (does not) speak, which are an effect of Derrida's own literary theorizing of culture. The article defends the argument that performance theory helps to rethink the subaltern subject as performative, and as such, as being capable of speaking and acting politically.