Colonial Dependence and Sexual Difference: Reading for Gender in the Writing's of Simn Bolvar (1783-1830) Author(s): Catherine

Davies Reviewed work(s): Source: Feminist Review, No. 79, Latin America: History, war and independence (2005), pp. 519 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3874425 . Accessed: 29/02/2012 13:00
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79

colonial
sexual
for of gender Simon

dependence
difference:
in the

and

reading
writings

Bolivar

(1783-1830)

Catherine Davies ctbstract

The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourseof SimonBolivar means of a close critical readingof his seminalwritings by made public between 1812 and 1820. Thehistoricaland political processes knownas LatinAmericanindependenceconstitute a momentof radical transformation.It was duringthis period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughoutthe continent. The article shows how the categorywomanis constructedambiguously Independence/anti-colonial in discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchicalsystems of social organizationto legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in orderto reinforcegender hegemonies. It will be shownthat in Bolivar's writingscolonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and musculinedomination.

keywords
LatinAmerica;Bolivar;gender; anti-colonial discourse; politics; myth

feminist
(5-19) (i

review 79 2005

2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com

The nations who succeed are not the feminine nations, but the masculine. (H. Fielding Hall) La domination musculine est assez assuree pour ce passer de justification. (Bourdieu, 1990: 5)

1 Quoted by C.K. Ogden in Militarism

versus Feminism

(1915). See Marshall

et al. (1987: 77).

This article examines the rhetorical strategies the l9th individual canonical

employed in the first two decades of discourse that predicates of the A strategic re-reading

century in Spanish American anti-colonial rights on the male universal subject. works of the military and political leaders

of the Spanish American de sa formation' (son in that

revolutions will draw attention particular conjuncture wealthy, white, landowner), elite.

to what Bourdieu refers to as 'le mode d'operation 1990: Simon Bolivar (the 'Liberator'), the aristocrat of a Basque Spanish America from the has sub-continent's acquired mythic

propre de l'habitus sexue et sexuant et les conditions (Bourdieu,

11).

uropean

educated,

Venezuelan

fought between 1810 and 1824 to emancipute as an icon representing domination; his figure

the Spanish Crown. He did this for the benefit of his class, the white native-born Today, Bolivar is revered from uropean independence

proportions, above all in the northern republics (Peru, Bolivia, cuador, Venezuela and Colombia). This status is due not only to his militury achievements him is immense. But despite his successes but also to Bolivar's his political doctrine and vision of a united South America. The bibliography about as a soldier and politician, writings are riddled with tensions, essays, declarations especially, as we shall see, with respect to (letters, speeches,

gender. During his lifetime, he produced over 10,000 documents and constitutions). two of which, the Cartagena Manifesto (1812) and theJamaica considered

Here I will focus on just three of these,

Letter (1815), are

to be founding Spanish American political texts. The third is Bolivar's independence is argued for on the basis of deeply

short speech, the Address to the Ladies of Socorro, delivered in 1820. I will show how the case for colonial embedded gender hierarchies.

the Cartagena Manifesto

An early example Independence of ambiguities is the arising Cartagena from the Manifesto inscription of 1812, of gender in discourse Bolivar's first
2 For further discussion of gender and revolutionary/ republican discourse see Kerber (1980), Landes (1988) and Scott (1996). All and translations emphases are my own. I have retained as far as possible Bolivar's syntax, lexis and imagery. are The translations therefore fairly

important public document.2 It was written at the very sturt of his militury career in the wake of the disastrous reversals experienced in the first wave of fighting against Spain. In it he examines the failure of the first Venezuelan Republic and proposes means by which Venezuela might yet be wrested away from Spain. The Manifesto is in the form of a report addressed to the citizens ('ciudadanos') of New Granada (Colombia) by a native of Caracas. Venezuela and New Granada are both figured as women in need of rescue by Bolivar, the 'son of unhappy Caracas', a feminized city suffering 'physical and political ruin' (Perez Vila, 1979: 8). Further on in the text, weakness this association through personification ignorance, of the feminine with is extended to encompass insonity and, more worryingly for

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literal, and the gender of the words indicated where reIevant.

Bolivar (whose militury success depended on conflict) leniency and tolerance. The town Coro, for example, which remained loyal to the Spanish, is also referred to implicitly as a woman, but now in need of subjugation. Bolivar berates the feminized government or 'junta' because it was too weak to do this. It based its politics on 'misunderstood principles of humanity', which do not authorize 'a government to liberate stupid people, who do not know the value of their rights, by force'. In other words, musculine authority ('gobierno'/government) must force freedom onto ignorant peoples. Tolerance is ineffective, a 'senseless weakness'; 'clemency' is 'criminal', and human rights is a 'pious doctrine' that takes secondary place in the Bolivarian real politik (Perez Vila, 1979: 10). The 'son' will need to restore masculine values to this lamentable situation: that is, strength, unity and force. The feminine is presented therefore as both in need of protection and as a threat to order. yet although the feminine is associated with lack of discipline, 'universal dissolution' and naivety, it also stands for the domain of human rights, philanthropy and philosophy (here labelled sophistry), in other words, culture. The musculine is associated with unity, discipline and leadership, and is the domain of law, tactics and militury might, the 'machine', as Bolivar puts it, that hcis yet to finish its task (Perez Vila, 1979: 10).The federal government, consisting of civilians not soldiers, has failed because it respected human rights and adhered to the 'exaggerated precepts of the rights of man' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). It has allowed each city to govern itself, that is, it has not imposed control by force. Bolivar complains that each city (marked feminine) wants autonomy and self-government according to 'the theory that all men and all peoples have the right to install the government which best suits them at their whim' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Bolivar finds this unacceptable. But in refusing to recognize the right of the femininecities to independence and self-rule, Bolivar assumes the very tyrannical power against which he himself was fighting, thus undercutting his own legitimacy as 'liberator'. He does not endorse the Federal government's view of royalist Caracas as a female 'tyrant' (Perez Vila, 1979: 11), but three years later in the Jamaica Letter, as we shall see, he represents Spain in these very terms (the evil monstrous mother) to justify his own political ambitions. In Bolivar's version, as we have seen, Caracas is suffering and 'far from assisting her' the confederation abandoned her and 'increased her embarrassments/difficulties' (the word 'embarazo' also means pregnancy) by not sending troops on time (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). The desired outcome, then, call it civilization, is perceived in terms of masculine authority, law and order, and a suspension of personal freedoms in the name of liberty; that is, repression. By contrast, the negative that sustains it, call it barbarism, is associated with feminine ignorance, superstition, chaos, pluralism and tolerance in need of subjection, that is, liberty. The subjects or actants in this discourse are the rational (male) elite who also wield the moral force, while the objects or predicates over which moral force is wielded are the (feminized)

Catherine Davies

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musses. Underscoring this Bolivar adds, 'it is not always the physical majority that which decides, but it is the superiority of the moral force which tips the balance of feminized masses. power towards it' (Perez Vila, 1979: 14). The moral force of the superior male elite rules over the dependent

In Spanish America in the second half of the 19th century, typically in republican morality, women came to represent the moral fibre of the nation. As Francine Masiello writes of Argentina, 'women were brought into the political imagination of men to represent the virtues of nationhood' might still be identified themselves 'lack [the] elite which assume this moral responsibility. political (Masiello, 1992: 5), although they however, it is the male true republicans and with disorder. In the Manifesto, virtues' that characterize

Those who are incapable of governing

need to be controlled (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Here 'the Government' (with a capital 'G') is government by a male (military) elite of others who, in as much as they are 'inept' and in need of government, full into the feminine comp. 'The Government', it is inferred, rules his family (of women and minors) like a stern father: 'If they are prosperous and serene, calumitous for laws and constitutions' he should be mild and protective; but if they are then, to be and turbulent, he should show himself to be terrible ... without regard (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Paradoxically,

liberated they must submit to the patriarch's authority and discipline.

the Jamaica Letter

Typically, Bolivar's Independence discourse is underpinned by this patriarchal family-nation metaphor, but with telling variations, as seen in nis famousJamaica Henry Cullen, the 3 For full translations of the Jamaica Letter and the
Cartagena Manifesto see

Letter. This letter was written in Kingston on 6 September 1815 and signed 'a South Americon' in reply to a letter sent to Bolivar by a Jamaican, previous April (Perez Vila, 1979: 55-75, started his militury campaigns against 55).3 The context is important. Bolivar had the Spanish in 1812, but when Colombia

(New Granada) refused to give him troops to liberate Venezuela, he resigned from the army and sailed to Jamaica where he hoped to levy support from the British, a hopeless task while Britain and Spain were allies fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular War. Bolivar reached Kingston in May 1815, just as the Spanish forces reached Venezuela to pacify the region. After Napoleon's defeat the British, using as justification one of his most forceful mordant attack accepted (Pino Iturrieta, at Waterloo one to month later, Bolivar lost no time in putting forward the case for Independence analyses the recent past and sketches the potential and rhetorical pieces, on the Spanish colonial system' 1999: 12).4 Bolivar's argument

Fitzgerald (1971).

Letter, in which he Cullen's letter. The Jamaica future of Spanish America, is in the words of John Lynch 'a (Lynch, 1986: 210). It is widely of universal political thought' in the

as 'one of the most prophetic documents government.

JamaicaLetter

was, as

always, the need for robust centralized

He uses logical reasoning to to persuade

connote rational thought as well as a plethora of rhetorical strategies

4 Quoted fro m Venezuelan Rafael Armando Rojus, my translation. Pino

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Iturrieta offers a radical re-reading of the Jamaica Letter identifying the class and race (though not gender) prejudices informing the text. 5 As noted by Rebecca arle in her discussion of Republican motherhood (arle, 2000: 131). On the use of familial and parentchild relationships in independence discourse in the American Revolution see also Kerber (1980: 28). The analogy of national independence/a boy reaching maturity is widespread in nlightenment writing, as are other biological, evolutionary and genealogical metaphors throughout the 19th century. See Lopez (2003) .

resisting readers. The prime rhetorical strategy, as we shall see, is to bring into play the dominant cultural phantasy on which Western rational discourse is predicated: the demonized maternal feminine. The Jamaica Letter represents the struggle against colonial rule in terms of a family narrative; the leitmotif of this political document is a family crisis.5 The crisis is set up in two stages: the first is to do with the mother, the second with her offspring. The embedded narrative goes like this: the Spanish American dominions, who once obeyed their parents blindly, have now grown up and hcive realized that what they took for mutual affection is an intolerable imposition. The young, rebellious adult has entered the age of reason and seen the light; the bond must be broken to ensure further development. However, altnot gh the Spanish word 'padres'/parents implies the father, it is the mother who is cast as demon, although the more logical argument would be the need to break with the father, that is, the absolutist Spanish King, FerdinandVll, who had recovered his throne in 1814. Metaphorical figures, including allegories such as this, are anything but logical. A Freudian reading in terms of the fantasy of the phallic, pre-oedipal mother is tempting, especially as emasculation (though never mentioned explicitly) is a constant preoccupation in this text. However, more productive for my purposes is Erich Neumann's structural analysis of the collective archetype The Great Mother, not with a view to subscribing to his version of analytical psychology but to draw on his insights into the workings of myth (Neumann, 1963). As Bourdieu has argued the mythopoetic rendering of sexual difference (symbolic violence) is central to the predominance of the masculine vision of the world (Bourdieu, 1990: 15). Deeply engrained as 'schemes de pensee impenses' or 'inconscient culturel' this symbolic violence is manifested in the implied meanings and presupposition inscribed in discourse (Bourdieu, 1990: 11-12). Myth naturalizes and lends coherence to hierarchies of sexual difference and male domination. Bolivar writes as follows:
The habit of obedience, the commerce of common interests, ideas, religion, reciprocal benevolence, the tender affection for the cradle and the glory of our parents/fathers, in short, all our hopes came from Spain. From this was born a principle of adherence that seemed eternal, despite the fact that the conduct of those who dominated us weakened

that bond, or rather that attachment forced upon us by the rule/empire of dominance.
Right now, the opposite occurs: death, dishonour, all that is harmful threatens us and makes us fearful; we suffer greatly due to that denatured step-mother. The veii has been torn, we have seen the light, and they want to return us to the shadows; the chains have been broken; we have been freed yet our enemies try to enslave us. (Perez Vila, 1979: 56-57)

TheJamaica Letter represents Spain as the demonized mother-figure, no longer the natural mother, but the unnatural, de-natured, perverse, cruel (all synonyms of 'desnaturalizado') step-mother, who dominates without the legitimate authority

Catherine Davies

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of biological family ties (in Latin, 'matrastra' meant wife of a widowed father, but like its equivalent in English has accumulated negative connotations). The woman, once respected as mother, has gone mad; she is violent and out of order. The trope family-nation draws on derivatives of the Latin 'natus' (to be born) (cf. nation, native, nature), which in turn derived from the Greek term for 'blood relation'. The

Jamaica Letter refers to the Hispanic family/nation,

Spain and Spanish America, as one; indeed, Peninsular Spanish and American Spanish were common terms used at

the time. The first article of the famously progressive Spanish Constitution of 1812 (the Constitution of Cadiz) drawn up while Napoleon occupied Madrid, stated 'The Spanish Nation is the assembly of all Spaniards in both hemispheres' (GonzalezDoria, 1986: 295). It was this concept of a single Spanish nation that Bolivar aimed to destroy and to replace with the idea of the (Spanish) American family. Thus, the identification 'Hispanic' of law and legitimation still exists with nature and blood ties is broken; the as unnatural. In the Jamaica Letter the but is shown to be deeply troubled. legal step-mother 'Desnaturalizado' (Spain) is represented

family/nation

means not only unnatural but also 'to give up one's nationality'

(whereas to naturalize is to admit to citizenship). Spain, then, is no longer fit to be a mother of the family and all ties to her must be severed. Despotic, enraged and over-possessive she has become animal-like, a barbaric, blood-sucking monster, an old serpent about to devour her offspring: insatiable for blood and crimes, they [the Spanish] rival the first monsters that erused from America her primitive ro.ce. [Spain is] an old serpent (f.) [who] to satisfy her poisonous rage devoursthe most beautiful part of our globe. [ .. . ] Whatinsanity is that of our enemy (f.), to try to reconquerAmerica. (Perez Vila, 1979: 58-59) Spain fits the description of the archetypal Terrible Mother. According to

Neumann's

scheme,

the positive

elementary

character

of the Feminine is the

mother-child dyad, and the negative elementury character of the Feminine is this Terrible Mother, an archetype found in myths and religions across the world: the 'dark side 'generative destruction, of the Terrible Mother takes nourishing, protecting' danger and distress, the form of monsters' of Femininity turn in which the to 'death, aspects

hunger and nakedness'.

The Terrible Female

has phallic attributes, 'terrible aspect

such as the teeth and tusks of the Gorgon, and snakes: the the 'hungry earth, which

of the Feminine always includes the uroboric snake woman, the

woman with the phallus'; the earth's womb becomes devours its own children' (Neumann, 1963: 149). This progression of Mother Spain from cradle-protector

to child-eater literature,

is made may have

explicit in the Jamaica Letter. Bolivar, well read in classical taken the figure from classical

myth in order to impress his educated,

male, British

and creole readers, familiar with Hecate, Medea and the Gorgon. But the text also draws on local religious symbolism and alludes to the Aztec goddess and earth mother Coatlicue, the dreaded 'ludy of the skirt of snakes', the 'Great Mother with

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6 The statue of Coatlicue was discovered in Mexico City in 1790 and buried again soon after. It was unearthed for Alexander von Humboldt in 1803 and quickly reburied until after Independence in 1824.

Serpents'. Coatlicue was later incorporated into Mexican Catholicism as Mary,the Virginof Guadalupe, who is explicitly mentioned in the Jamaica Letter (Perez Vila, 1979: 73). The reference is of interest. Bolivar dismisses the idea that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl might serve as a symbol to rally the Mexicans in the struggle for independence: the god is hardly known in Mexico, he objects, and as divine legislator does not serve the purpose. The Mexicans' religious fanaticism has been channelled 'happily), by the 'directors of independence' towards veneration for the Virgin of Guadalupe, 'the queen of the patriots', who thus symbolizes both Catholicism and liberty. qually, Coutlicue would need to be sanitized (rendered an unthreatening virgin) by the fathers of the Catholic Churchbefore being allowed into nationalist discourse.6 Coupling Mother Spain to Coatlicue as the epitome of female savagery clearly presents a paradox and a curious reversal of perspective. Throughoutthe Jamaica Letter, Bolivar panders to the British by citing Bartolome de las Casas and the Black Legend, thus equating Spain with barbarism and the rest of urope with civilization. Spain and its 'race of exterminators' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58) is denounced for wiping out the indigenous populations and, by extension, the modern creoles. yet in order to underline Spain's primitive savagery, the text implicitly draws an analogy with Aztec sacrificial rites by means of references, for example, to the 'bloody crimes' and 'human sacrifices' wrought by Spain, so that 'this ground/land ... seems fated to be soaked with the blood of its sons/children' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). In the Jamaica Letter, neither Spain nor the Aztecs signify rational civilization: both are cast as the Terrible Mother, thus carving out and legitimating the discursive space occupied by the rational, male, creole el ite. For Neumann an archetype such as the Great Mother is 'an image at work in the human psyche' (Neumann, 1963: 3). The negative Feminine originates not in actual women or their attributes but in the inner 'anguish, horror and fear of danger' produced by the unconscious in consciousness. Human consciousness, he adds, 'is experienced as 'masculine' ... the masculine has identified itself with consciousness and its growth wherever a patriarchal world has developed' (Neumann, 1963: 148). Conversely, the unconscious is experienced (in relation to consciousness) as maternal and feminine:
The phases in the development of consciousness appear then as embryonic containment in

the mother, as childlike dependence on the mother, as the relation of the beloved son to the Great Mother, and finally as the heroic struggle of the male hero against the Great Mother. In other words, the dialectical relation of consciousness to the unconscious takes the

symbolic, mythological form of a struggle between the Maternal-Feminine and the male child, and here the growing strength of the male corresponds to the increasing power of consciousness in human development ... the liberation of the male consciousness from the feminine-maternal unconscious is a hard and painful struggle for all mankind. (Neumann, 1963: 148, my emphases)

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The narrative Neumann employs in his analysis similar to that inscribed by Bolivar in his (Neumann rebirth, signed his foreword leading in 1954),

of the archetype the

is remarkably of the and

Jamaica Letter
indicating

some 150 years earlier persistence

patriarchal paradigm (or deep myth-structure). of maturity to separation symbolical representation:

The process of transformation and independence,

recurs in this ( .. . ) perceives

'A male immature in his development

the feminine as a castrator, narrative of the employed to indicate

a murderer of the phallus' (Neumann, 1963: 172). The points to a similar deep structure strategically relationship between the murderous Spanish

Jamaica Letter

the political

metropolis and the developing

Spanish American colonies.

Having established

the illegitimacy

and unnaturalness

of the Terrible Mother, the

Jamaiccz Letter

develops the family trope with reference to the children or wards of (Perez Vila, 1979: 57) who have broken the maternal one by one, caught in the fracture between

the 'denatured step-mother'

bond, 'the tie ... is cut' (Perez Vila, 1979: 56), and wish to go their separate ways. The text lists the new states/offspring monarchy and republic. Although the words 'republica' and 'nacion' are gendered feminine in Spanish, all these children are gendered masculine: 'el belicoso estado' (the warring state) River Plate; 'el Reino de Chile ... Iidiando' (the fighting rather Kingdom of Chile); the 'virreinato del Peru' (viceroyalty than giving in. The one exception and unfortunate destitution echoes Venezuela) and shocking of Peru) (Perez Vila, 1979: Venezuela' (heroic

57). If they are worth their salt, they are fighting for their independence is 'la heroica y desdichada who is reduced,

like a poor woman, to 'absolute (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). This view where Cullen is thanked for his with her on account of the tortures and resulting attributes, revolutionery combat and signifies

isolation/loneliness'

the Jamaica

Letter's opening sentence

interest in Venezuela and for 'commiserating is repeated throughout the text: masculinity

she suffers' (Perez Vila, 1979: 55). The gender distinction,

femininity passive suffering. Such difference is inscribed subtly, not by reference to men and women as such, but in the symbolic effects mention of 'women' in theJamaica 'hombres', (possive, femininzed) men) but it is a significant of language. There is only one the situation in Letter (compared to half a dozen references to one. Bolivar describes

Venezuela: 'those who remain are some women, children and

old people. Most of the men have died, so as not to be slaves, and those that live fight with fury' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). In other words, adult men who are not elderly old have died rather than give in or are still fighting. do not fight; they need to be protected and they are like slaves. Otherwise, the Jamaica Women, children, if they survive, people

therefore,

Letter ingeniously avoids in which residents, as a

any mention of women as a distinctive America with an array of collective women category, are subsumed: indigenous, inhabitants, slaves, Americans,

group by denoting the peoples of Spanish nouns, mostly in the masculine, population, souls, people, and peasants.

shepherds

Men, 'hombres',

appears more often; 'citizens' appears three times, in the abstract with

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reference to republicanism and synonymous with 'hermanos' (brothers) (Perez Vila, 1979: 66, 63). The second part of the Jamaica Letter puts forward the case for independence in terms of unjustly arrested development and infantilization, thus reconfirming the narrative of the TerribleMother:
A people are slaves whenthe government,by its nature or vices, treads upon or usurpsthe rights of the citizen or the subject (subdito). Applyingthese principles, we find that Americawas not only deprivedof liberty but even of active and authoritariantyranny ... they left us in a kind of permanentinfancy as far as public affairs are concerned ... if we had at least managed our dome t; affairs in our internal administration,we would know the ways of public business and we w,luld also enjoy the personal considerationthat in the eyes of the people (pueblo) imposes 1 certain automatic respect, which is so necessary to maintain in revolutions. (Perez Vila, 1979: 62-63)

According to this paragraph, both a (republican) citizen and a subject (of a monarchy) have rights that entail a certain degree of autonomy or selfgovernance, which in turn command respect from the 'people'. Whoare the 'we' on whose behalf Bolivar speaks and among whom he includes himself? He is clearly not one of the 'people', those who give respect and publicly recognize the worth and honour of the dominant elite. The 'we' here is the white, male, creole elite who since early colonial times acted as 'padres de familia', patriarchs of the great family of subservient masses who were guided by their paternalistic benevolence (Pino Iturrieta, 1999: 36). The 'people' here refers to the subaltern, to all dependents, that is, slaves, indigenous, mestizos, pardos, and women. As Chambers notes in her study of the Peruvian Constitutions of the 1820s, 'only slaves and women were excluded [from citizenship] as groups, regardless of conduct or status'; the assumption that women were by nature dependent on putriarchal authority was a powerful 'political fiction' (Chambers, 1999: 199). In the new republican morality, as exemplified in the Napoleonic Code of 1804 (the model for many South American republics' codes of law), women were made dependents legally and economically and strictly subject to patriarchal control. The husband/father ruled the household (Smith, 1989: 120-123; Socolow, 2000: 178-180). Dependence, presented in the Jamaica Letter in terms of the infuncy of humanity (in-fans meaning not speaking, or without speech), means specifically dependency on the mother, uncertainty and error:
Could one foresee when the human race was in its infancy surroundedby so much ... uncertaintyand error, which governmentit would embrace for its conservation?We are a small human race ... new to all things in the arts and sciences. (Perez Vila, 1979: 62)

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It follows then that to be certain and right is to follow the father. According to the Jamaica Letter if the creoles, 'a small human race' (used metonymically to signify the entire population) passive consumers, do not break with the mother they will become: submissive, nalve, excluded from public life, absent from the obedient, and ruled by custom. In politically

world of government and state administration,

other words, it is inferred that they will become like women:

To expect that a countryso ... rich and populous should be merelypassive, is not this an insult and a violation of humanrights? ... Wewere ... absent-minded and ... absent from the worldin relation to the science of governmentand the administrationof the state. (Perez Vila, 1979: 63-64) Here lies the ambiguity. To be excluded from public life) to be forcibly rendered passive (like women) is considered a breach of human rights. Human, therefore) in this context signifies male. Obedience and ignorance resistance) is the domain of the feminine. The desired alternative-violent enlightenment-is aggression) revolution and

the remit of fighting men and masculinity.

Moreover) according with submission or corporality which to

to the Jamaica Letter it is the warring) enlightened to established

men who provide the 'fuerza

moral), the moral strength of the struggle) while those associated 'physical muss' (Perez Vila, 1979: 74). Women represent substance rather than the idea. Such an equivalence mother-matter, makes possible the unacknowledged, rational discourse unrepresentable (Irigaray,

power relations (such as women) provide the mere 'masa fisica', the brings to mind Luce Irigaray's concept of maternal-feminine, 1985: 301-302). It is alluded

indirectly by Bolivar in his reference to Plato's allegory of the cave ('we have seen the light (...) the chains have been broken'), quoted above (Perez Vila) 1979: 57; Cornford, 1941: 222-230). To recap, maturity, growth and self-fulfilment in a state of permanent is stymied by the Terrible Mother Viceroyalties and kingdoms) them and To develop into

who keeps her sons (the male creole elite, the states,

infancy, that is, in oedipal terms, castrates

reduces them to the position of weak women (such as Venezuela). suggesting maternal) that what the Americon territories

mature republics they have to make the break. Bolivar ends the Jamaica Letter by need is the paternal (rather than de care of government to cure their scars and wounds, 'los cuidados

gobierno puternales que curen las llagas y las heridas' (Perez Vila, 1979: 68). Thus, power is wrested from the imperious mother by the newly fledged father. Having sanctioned the ancient tenets of putriarchy-inculpating phallus-wielding mother, equating mindless submission and the unreasonable, obedience with and legitimate were British

femininity, and, on the other hand, future progress, self-fulfilment authority with macho bravado and the father-the a chord with its readers politicians), (included who would immediately

Jamaica Letter m ight wel I stri ke

among which, it was hoped,

recognize and sympathize with this (arguably

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deeply felt)

mythic structure or cultural phantusy. discourse.

But it raised uncomfortable

problems for revolutionary Independence

address to The Ladies of Socorro

The clash of discourses political texts, ('matronas') 136-137). 18th-century will be illustrated with reference to another of Bolivar's discourse, the Address to the Ladies of Socorro read out in public in February 1820 (Perez Vila, 1979: an example of performative in New Granada (Colombia), famous for its rebellion against the Spanish Crown, and had recently fought the akin to 'lady', was usually used only great respect. In this context, in contradistinction (female townsfolk to the (barbaric) of Socorro) and a and denoted

Socorro was a town

Spanish once again. The word 'matrona', for married women or housekeepers the term represents step-mother. it is avoided culture and stands

'Woman' ('mujer'), like 'hombre', 'man', occurs only once in the text; by reference to 'socorrenas'

string of family terms which positions women in relation to men: wives, daughters and mothers. When it does appear the word 'woman' is qual if ied significantly. Bolivar employs a phrase that crops up repeatedly derogatively to denote unfeminine (unnatural) in 19th-century Latin American Here discourse: 'mujer varonil', virile or manly woman. Later in the century, it was used women and, later, feminists. it is used positively. The speech reads: To the IllustriousLadies of Socorro: A people that have producedvirile women, no humanpoweris capable of subjugating.yOu, daughters of Socorro, you will be the stumbling-blockof your oppressors. They, in their frenetic fury, profunedthe most sacred, the most innocent, the most beautiful part of our species, they trampled upon you. yOu have raised your dignity by hardeningyour tender hearts under the blows of those who are cruel. Heroicladies of Socorro:the mothersof Sparta did not ask for their children'slives, but for the victory of their country;the mothers of Romecontemplated with pleasure the glorious wounds of their family; they encouraged them to achieve the honourof dying in combat. Moresublime are you in your generous patriotism, you have wielded the lance, you have taken up position in the columns and you ask to die for the homeland. Mothers,wives, sisters, who could follow your steps in the race towards heroism?Arethere men worthyof you? No, no, no! Butyou are worththe admirationof the Universeand the adoration of the liberators of Colombia. (Perez Vila, 1979: 136) These women are not domesticated, their masculine attributes. their male loved ones into battle, put under the yoke, or 'subjugated', that is, participate due to

They are praised precisely because

rather than send

by means of affective

solidarity with a man, they have wielded the (phallic) lanza' (Perez Vila, 1979: 137) in their very own hands.

lance 'habeis empunado la

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Such symbolism was nevertheless dreaded phallic mothersJ despots any such suggestion strategies.

risky; after all, these women might end up as illegitimately daring to assume authority. But in the Address by means of four textual

is neatly sidelined

First, as mentioned, women are referred to only in relation to men: they Second, they are shown to be worthy of praise and only in as much as they adopt masculine to the revolution

are not conferred autonomy. thus contributing attributes:

they have done this by hardening their hearts, so rejecting purportedly

inherent 'feminine' feelings. Third, it is implied that their aggression was for selfdefence against the profanation of the innocent, echoing resistance to the Spanish imperial 'rape' of the Americas. In this way, sanctioned disturbed. fourth In fact, sexual difference the displacement strategy: of the significance gender categories of these are not and hierarchy is reinforced by means of a women from

historical time into epic and myth. They are compared to the mothers of Sparta and Rome; they are to be adored as goddesses, sublimated from solid individuals to gaseous is still associated 'virile women' masculinity admired by the Universe. They are fantasy. Throughout the Address to and

with heroics and enlightenment,

femininity with beauty, innocence, 'unnatural' circumstances of the historical context)

the sucred, the tender and the family. Women like men in these the uniqueness

will be excluded from the polis unless they act, unnaturally,

(in the Jamaica Letter, Bolivar stresses

to disurm the phallic mother (Perez Vila, 1979: 63).

In short, Bolivar brings into play a dominant cultural phantasy, the demonized mother, on which, according to Irigaray at least, Western rational discourse is predicated (Irigaray, 1985). Progress is represented as movement away from the dark threat of the maternal unconscious and submission to the light of male reason and action. The rejection of the maternal-feminine is thus shown to make possible enlightenment thought. However, this would pose great problems for the future when Bolivar no longer wanted Spanish Americans to fight like men, but to be submissive and obedient like women, not to the mother Spain, of course, but to patriarchs like him, to the newly legitimated fathers, authorized by republican Constitutions of their own making, rather than by lineage. In official documents and letters of the time, Bolivar was often referred to as the 'father of the patria' (i.e. of Bolivia) and Bolivia as his daughter. He was also the 'father of Colombia'; Antonio Jose de Sucre, for example, Bolivia's first President (1826-1828) and Bolivar's most loyal commander wrote 'I love Bolivia as the dear daughter of the father of Colombia' (Lecuna, 1975: 163, 165, 587, 588).7 BoRivar's writings carefully avoid undermining the father-figure. However, legitimacy and stability were not achieved in Spanish America. As dwin Williamson observes, 'only in retrospect was it pqssible to perceive that the colonial pact which had kept the creoles loyal to the Crownfor centuries had involved the exchange of precious metals for the intangible but no less precious benefits of legitimate royal authority' (Williamson, 1992: 232). Once the allpowerful father-King-Crown and its unifying myth, Mother Spain, were removed,

7 Colombia is also referred to as 'the mother of the Bolivar Republic' and the latter 'her firstborn daughter', suggesting that BoIivar fathered Bolivia through an incestuous relationship with his own daughter Colombia (Lecuna, 1975: 332).

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there was no strong rule of law to take their place. boys would be boys, and the 'liberators' among themselves (Bourdieu, 1990: 25).

It would take time for the Father; until then,

denatured Mother to be replaced by the myth of the legitimate

fell to fighting their 'jeux de pouvoir'

Reading for gender in the networks of meaning constituting exposes the tensions and ambiguities of the nascent in anti-colonial

political

discourse

texts. The political discourse institutionalized is

Spanish American republics remained profoundly patriarchal; the were confirmed, 1999: 200-214). indeed exacerbated, The moral welfore in the new republican of the collectivity and the of the

male was taken as norm in the exercise of power and colonial gender differences morality regulated (Chambers,

by a male elite embodying musculine values: order, strength, obedience. Progress is represented as the subjection

right to enforce

feminine threat to the light of male reason and action. Although it is generally agreed that Bolivar was more of a constitutionalist aimed for government through institutionalized than a dictator, and that he power rather than personal caprice

(Lynch, 1992: 60), his words in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto on order and control will sound uncomfortably familiar to Latin Americans today. I will end with a quote taken from Chilean semiologist political speeches. Giselle Munizaga's discourse analysis of a corpus of She concludes:

The main structural axis ... is Order,split into a mythical plane, which is transcendental and utopian ..., and an operationalor instrumentalplane (the maintainingof publicorder, social discipline ... the principleof authority, respect for hierarchyetc). Orderwill pre-exist any form of collective or individualwill ... It is a universalprinciple. (Munizaga,1988: 88) The speeches in question are not those of General Simon Bolivar, but of General

Augusto Pinochet for whom 'the Patria ... is like a virgin who knows no evil or sin' and who must therefore be defended (Munizaga, 1988: 85). The putriarch embodies the principle of (his) irrefutable Order imposed on those thus made dependent in Pinochet's (Munizaga, difference texts, 'woman ... is not a subject phantasies. of the structure but an object on him. Munizaga's analysis is not gendered but her conclusion on the role of woman in history' 1988: 30) comes as no surprise. Domination on the basis of sexual underpins all such dictatorial

As suggested,

it could be argued that these are further instances

of specularization, functions

the dominant cultural phanstasy in which the male projects his and in which the maternal body, woman matter, on the demonized maternal-feminine who,

ego in all culture and discourse, I9tasculine rationality

as the tain of that mirror, the other of the same (Irigaray, 1985: 302). is predicated male whose effective

reduced to physical mass, is subordinated to the autonomous fully entitled to human rights (Bonilla, the libido dominandi identified

use of reason enables him to govern those who are not fully men and therefore not 1990). These are the discursive traces of in which by Bourdieu in male dominated societies,

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social relations of sexual difference

position women as 'spectatrices'

in order to

publicly recognise and ratify the male ego, political power and symbolical capital (Bourdieu, 1990: 24). Unresolved ambiguities, such as those in the Address to the colonial relations of dependency resulting from essentialisms (Bourdieu, 1990: such 12);

Ladies of Socorro, would be exploited

purposes (see Craske in this issue). as sexism, 'sans doute

by women in the future for their own

Ultimately,

would prove easier to break than dependencies le plus difficile essentialisms employed strategically

a deracine'

by the Spanish American male creole elite to hegemony.

justify and secure their own political

acknowledgements
The research for this paper was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Bourd.

author biography
Catherine Davies is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of Hispanic and Latin Americon Studies, University of Nottingham. She is the director of the research project 'Gendering Latin American Independence: Women's Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender', funded by the Arts and Humanities gender studies. Research Bourd. She has published widely on Spanish and Latin American literature, culture and film with special emphasis on women's and

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