Radical metrics and feminist modernism: Agustini rewrites Dario's prosas profanas
2014; CIESPAL; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-4247
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Literature and Culture Studies
ResumoIn the earliest years of the twentieth century, as modernista poets including Ruben Dario, Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, and Leopoldo Lugones explored new rhythms and experimented with poetic gaps, a young Uruguayan woman looked at structure and its breaks with a gendered eye. The work of Delmira Agustini clearly situates itself within the modernista tradition, with constant use of its forms and images, even as her position within that tradition was made tenuous by the fact of her sex. This essay will examine Agustini's critique of modernista tradition by analyzing several of her poems that respond to Dario's Prosas profanas (1896/1901). We will see that Agustini's material, poetic void, dependant upon her mastery and violations of metrical norms specific to modernismo, is key to understanding her critique, which rejected the movement's emphasis on aesthetic perfection. In this way the essay supports, with additional detail in the field of prosody, the argument of Cathy L. Jrade's impressive new book, Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest, which proposes that Agustini's greatest breakthrough is how she recasts the language of literary paternity from a woman's perspective, permitting her eroticism to capture her empowering vision for (76). As a woman, Agustini reads other modernistas differently, and that gender difference allows her new insight into the movement's favored tropes and forms. Her exclusion as a woman led her to a double rebellion that helps us to read modernismo more productively today, a double rebellion that began with her appropriation of the style that sought to exclude her, and continued with her violation of metrical conventions in order to call attention to that exclusion. Women writers of this period met with profound challenges to their vocation. Triste, tristisima es la condicion de la mujer sudamericana wrote Eva Angelina, a pseudonym for Zoila Aurora Caceres, in 1896 (qtd. in Glickman 104). Women had very few rights, and those who attempted to make a living by writing, Caceres explained, were met with scorn: [Una] idea muy general es la de que la literata es un ser perdido para las obligaciones del hogar, pensando que alrededor de ella todo es desorden. !Que error tan grande! La que tiene orden y juicio para escribir mayor lo tendra para arreglar su plan de vida, puesto que es asunto mas sencillo (Angelina, quoted in Glickman 106-7). Five years earlier, in her speech upon joining the Ateneo de Lima, another writer, Amalia Puga, described the overwhelmingly negative reactions of men when faced with women's writing: Inclinese norabuena la mujer a todo, dijeron al convencerse de que era imposible cortar el vuelo de su espiritu y poner trabas a sus poderosas y nobles propensiones; no se haga escritora; renuncie a la literatura como al mas repugnante de los vicios. Por consiguiente, se le nego toda voz autorizada, toda frase a los demas; cuando mucho, se le permitio cantar a las fuentes y a los prados, (qtd. in Glickman 99) Puga goes on to link progress and modernity to the new avenues opening to women writers, and closes her address on a resounding note by calling upon women around the continent to form literary circles: ojala mi voz, desautorizada, pero llena de buena intencion, hallara resonancia en el pecho de todas (102). For Clorinda Matto de Turner, a Peruvian who edited Bucaro Americano, a women's literary magazine in Argentina, women writers (whom she calls obreras del pensamiento) faced their challenges with heroism: [Son] verdaderas heroinas, repito, que no solo tienen que luchar contra la calumnia, la rivalidad, el indiferentismo y toda clase de dificultades para obtener elementos de instruccion, sino hasta correr el peligro de quedarse para tias, porque si algunos hombres de talento procuran acercarse a la mujer ilustrada, los tontos le tienen miedo. (Matto, qtd. in Glickman 112) If women's status in the writing world in general was shaky, their position as writers within modernismo was even less secure. …
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