ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the political significance of cultures of love in the making of modern female subjectivity and feminisms in nineteenth-century Spain. It explores how Romantic notions of the feminine self exacerbated the tensions within enlightened codes of sensibility that implied “reasonable sentiments,” even while holding on to these codes. National literary celebrities such as Cuban Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda represented paradoxical subjectivities: talented, free, passionate, and respectable women as rational (manly) individuals and sentimental women. The chapter focuses on Avellaneda's carefully prepared farewell to the Spanish public in 1858, following 15 years of theatrical productions in Madrid. Drawing on two plays, Los tres amores and Baltasar, which premiered just 20 days apart, it reconstructs how the author understood the politics of affect and romantic love and their role in the “complete” emancipation of women. It shows how Avellaneda aimed to publicly reconcile a femininity of “reasonable sentiments” with a radical conception of female affective individualism and genius. It argues that in both plays, the author envisions the emancipation of women within a Christian civilizing moral order while undertaking a critical reimagining of romantic love, based on equal male and female souls (of all races and classes). Avellaneda thus helps us explore the contradictions inherent in an emotional transition to female affective individualism at the heart of modern feminisms.
