ABSTRACT
Gender became a focus of debates about the possibilities and discontents of modernity. In Spain, as in the rest of the Western world, the predominant nineteenth-century ideology of gender had asserted the essential difference of women from men through the doctrine of separate spheres and the strictly domestic concept of feminine nature. The playwright Jacinto Benavente, himself considered a modernista by some, reflects contemporary discourse in writing of "our lackluster and feminine modernistas" in contraposition to Spanish literature of the Golden Age, "all energy, virility, nobility and subtlety of feeling." The movement was implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, accused of effeminacy, of failing to keep the genders distinct. A satirical sonnet titled "Modernism" made the point in 1903: "They say that, as in ancient Rome, men contaminated by vice have changed sex". Within the accused literature itself, however, gender ambiguity was most often represented by dangerous, phallic women.
