Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Literature, Cuba
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873). Cuban narrator, poet, and playwright. She is an exceptional figure in Spanish-language letters of the nineteenth century.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was born in Puerto Príncipe (today Camagüey). Her father was an officer in the Spanish Navy and her mother was a native of Camagüey.

She began writing at a very early age; according to what she stated in autobiographical pages, before turning nine years old she was composing passionate verses. She studied French and engaged in abundant reading (mainly of Spanish and French authors) in her native city and, in addition to dedicating herself to literature, distinguished herself as an amateur actress.

In 1836 she departed for Europe with her family and, after passing through Bordeaux and living a year in La Coruña, settled in Seville, where she experienced frustrated love affairs with Ignacio Cepeda.

She began publishing in various newspapers and magazines, and associated with Spanish intellectuals such as Quintana, Espronceda, and Zorrilla. From then on she lived most of her life in Spain, the setting of her greatest triumphs.

Around 1844 she had a romantic relationship with poet Gabriel García Tassara, which resulted in a daughter who died a few months after being born.

After a convent retreat, motivated by the death of her first husband, Pedro Sabater, who died in Bordeaux just three months after their marriage, she settled in Madrid and there developed an intense intellectual activity.

In 1844 she wrote a prologue for the Viaje a La Habana by the Countess of Merlín, with whom she shared her condition as a woman writer and Cuban resident in Europe.

Between 1846 and 1858 she premiered nearly thirteen theatrical works with great critical and public success. Around 1853 she attempted to gain admission to the Spanish Academy, but her application was denied due to her being a woman.

In 1859 she returned to her native country with her new husband, Colonel Domingo Verdugo, and given her prestige both inside and outside Cuba, the following year Avellaneda was honored at a public ceremony held at the Tacón theater in Havana, and there she was crowned by Cuban poet Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, to whom Avellaneda wrote a prologue for her book Poesías that same year.

In the capital of Havana she founded and directed starting in 1860 the Álbum cubano de lo bueno y de lo bello, an important publication for the renewal of national literary taste and for the defense of women's rights.

After Verdugo's death in Pinar del Río in 1863, she returned to Spain in 1864 and dedicated herself to overseeing the revised edition of her Obras literarias. The epistolary correspondence and memoirs, published posthumously, allow us to understand how her obsessions, disappointments, and intimacies manifest themselves in multiple ways in her literary work. In several writings she used the pseudonym La peregrina.

In 1836 took place Avellaneda's literary birth with the composition of her first significant poem, "Al partir," motivated by her departure to Spain with her family. Then opened the first stage of her lyrical work, which lasted until 1850, and to it belong both her most significant poems and her imitations and translations of French poetry. The second stage, of lesser creativity, spans from 1857 to 1869.

From her earliest compositions, Avellaneda demonstrated an exacting stylistic will and great self-critical rigor.

Of an essentially romantic temperament, with strong neoclassical training and marked intention to correspond to the lyrical taste of her era, all of her poetry maintains uniformity in both theme and composition, although a greater tendency is noted, in the final years of her life, toward mysticism and religiosity. Hence some of her poems are vehement and passionate, such as those dedicated to her eternal lover Ignacio Cepeda, whereas her religious verses are restrained and melancholic, where the lyrical subject expresses humility before an implicit interlocutor (almost always, God).

But if the fundamental themes of Avellaneda's poetry are love and religiosity, also outstanding are nostalgia for Cuba, longing for freedom, exaltation of poetry, philosophical reflections, and occasional compositions dedicated to great figures of world letters and history.

Avellaneda's poetic work is also characterized by her mastery of versification; not only did she work with all metrical combinations (from two-syllable to twenty-syllable verses), she also made innovations in the composition of fourteen-syllable verses (the so-called alexandrines), with periods of 8 and 6, rather than 7 and 7.

In her dramaturgy, Avellaneda preferred themes and characters foreign to Cuba and rather related to the Christian tradition and the Spanish setting. For this reason, in general, her theatrical work is characterized by peninsular language, by preference for legendary courtly circumstances, and by mysticism expressed in her choice of biblical figures and themes. According to what Avellaneda stated in some of the prefaces to her works, her dramatic ideal was to merge neoclassical and romantic principles.

Characterized by technical mastery of her dramatic art, she wrote more than twenty works for the stage, some of which were adaptations of French pieces, such as La aventurera (1853), by Emile Augier; or Catilina (1867), by Alexandre Dumas père and Auguste Maquet.

In 1840 she wrote her first work: Leoncia, whose plot is essentially romantic thanks to the use of certain resources also repeated in later comedies La hija de las flores and Todos están locos (1852). Among those resources are the use of hidden or unknown kinships, or confusions and coincidences related to the civil status of the characters.

But Avellaneda's greatest theatrical successes are her six tragic pieces: Saúl (1849) and Baltasar (1858), the most outstanding, where her interest in biblical stories is demonstrated and with which she achieved resounding success. Baltasar will be the most important and accomplished of her dramatic works for the effective structure in the plot design, for the depth of historical thought, and for the psychological complexity of its main character (the king of Babylon during the sixth century before Christ), who embodies weariness, misanthropy and romantic pessimism, but at the same time the symbolic representation of humanity without God.

In addition to nature and belonging to one's own space from which to proclaim identity, among the topics of her narrative work appears love in its multiple variants, always from a pessimistic and bitter point of view.

These are typical elements of Romanticism, to which Avellaneda knew how to give her personal mark. The questioning about where the true values of society were found, ethical concern associated with virtue and the capacity for sacrifice, was another of the great themes taken up by her narrative. Sab (1841), Dos mujeres (1842-1843), Espatolino (1844), and El artista barquero (1861) are protagonized by the slave, the woman, the bandit, and the artist—subjects displaced by society.

In Sab, Avellaneda takes advantage of the romantic disillusionment of two characters to identify the destiny of a white woman and a mulatto (neither of the two can be happy because of social conventions).

In Dos mujeres she also resorts to bold reflections on the social condition of women and speaks out against marriage accepted as an indissoluble social contract. However, the historical novel Guatimozín o el último emperador de México (1845) harvested better critical praise, especially for the treatment of the indigenist theme and its approach to the history of the conquest of Mexico.

The choice of subjugated characters, without possibility of legitimizing themselves or who rebel against injustices, made her narrative work a forum for explicit questioning of political, economic, and social powers. Due to this transgressive spirit, the entry of some of these works into Cuba was even prohibited.

She died in Madrid, Spain

Source: EnCaribe.org