Abstract
Gender violence is one of the multiple issues nineteenth-century women writers portrayed in their fictions. Early feminists understood that the ideal of domesticity had an objectionable side that had to be addressed to improve the situation of women. In this essay, Ortiz-Loyola examines the way in which Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo’s “Marido y mujer” (1893) and Ana Roqué’s Sara la obrera (1895) approach the question of violence. She argues that, for both authors, gender violence disrupts the discourse of love that portrays the home as a safe place. She further contends that narratives of violence expose sexual and domestic aggressions as an evil reproduced not only by social and legal structures but also by the members of the privileged classes.
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Notes
- 1.
See Ana Peluffo’s discussion of violence in the work of Clorinda Matto de Turner. Ana Peluffo, “Aborto y violencia de género en ‘Guillermina: La tempestad del nido’ (1902) de Clorinda Matto de Turner,” Revista Transas, June 13, 2019, https://www.revistatransas.com/2019/06/13/aborto-clorinda-matto/. For an analysis of the role of violence in Emilia Pardó Bazan’s fiction, consult Cristina Patiño Eirín, El encaje roto: Antología de cuentos de violencia contra las mujeres (Zaragoza: Contraseña, 2018).
- 2.
Astrid Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Individual Conflict, Gender, and the Law (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006), 54.
- 3.
Carmen de Burgos to Ana Roqué, August 24, year unknown, Colección de Manuscritos de Ana Roqué de Duprey, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico.
- 4.
Loreina Santos Silva, “Esquema biográfico de Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo,” in La muñeca, by Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, ed. Angel M. Aguirre (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1987), 124.
- 5.
Marcela Saldivia-Berglund, “Engendering Race: (Mis)Representations of Blacks in Late Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rican Fiction (1890–1895),” Revista del CESLA 9 (2006): 96.
- 6.
Natalie J. Sokoloff and Ida Dupont, “Violence at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender,” Violence Against Women 11, no. 1 (2005): 42.
- 7.
Kersti A. Yllö, “Through a Feminist Lens: Gender, Diversity, and Violence: Extending the Feminist Framework,” in Current Controversies on Family Violence, ed. Donileen R. Loseke, Richard J. Gelles, and Mary M. Cavanaugh (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), 22.
- 8.
Yllö, “Through a Feminist Lens,” 20.
- 9.
Aída Hurtado, The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17.
- 10.
Hurtado, The Color of Privilege, 17–18.
- 11.
Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 71.
- 12.
Eileen Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 61.
- 13.
Victor Karandashev, Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts (Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 157.
- 14.
Hurtado, The Color of Privilege, 14.
- 15.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 65.
- 16.
Código Penal para las provincias de Cuba y Puerto Rico y Ley provisional de enjuiciamiento criminal (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1879), art. 610 §2.
- 17.
Código Penal, art. 610 §3.
- 18.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 60.
- 19.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 53–54.
- 20.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 65.
- 21.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 66.
- 22.
Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence, 52.
- 23.
Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” Ilustración Puertorriqueña, June 10, 1893, 86.
- 24.
Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” 86.
- 25.
Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” 87.
- 26.
Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” 87.
- 27.
Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” 87.
- 28.
Sanjurjo, “Marido y mujer,” 87.
- 29.
Saldivia-Berglund, “Engendering Race,” 95; Nancy Bird-Soto, Sara la obrera y otros cuentos: El repertorio femenino de Ana Roqué (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 19.
- 30.
Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency, 23.
- 31.
Saldivia-Berglund, “Engendering Race,” 97.
- 32.
Ana Roqué, Sara la obrera y otros cuentos (Ponce: Imprenta de Manuel López, 1895), 15.
- 33.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 20.
- 34.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 14.
- 35.
Código Penal, art. 453 §2.
- 36.
Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 130.
- 37.
Eileen Suárez Findlay, “Courtroom Tales of Sex and Honor: Rapto and Rape in Late-Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, ed. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 212.
- 38.
Saldivia-Berglund, “Engendering Race,” 97.
- 39.
Leone Sandra Hankey, “Women Write Patriarchal Wrongs: Narrative Resistance to the Rape Culture,” in Beyond Portia: Women, Law, and Literature in the United States, ed. Jacqueline St. Joan and Annette Bennington McElhiney (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 206.
- 40.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 21.
- 41.
Ward, Law and Literature, 128.
- 42.
Hankey, “Women Write,” 208.
- 43.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 14.
- 44.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 14–15.
- 45.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 16.
- 46.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 19.
- 47.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 16.
- 48.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 18.
- 49.
Roqué, Sara la obrera, 25.
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Ortiz-Loyola, B. (2024). Writing About the Unspeakable: Gender Violence in the Nineteenth Century. In: Martin, C.E., Donato, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40494-8_24
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