Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Porque la quiero tanto: Historia del amor en la sociedad rioplatense (1750-1860)

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-022

1527-1900

Gertrude M. Yeager,

Latin American history and culture

While studies of sexuality, marriage, and honor appear with greater frequency on Latin American bibliographies, those dealing with love and affection are rare finds. By carefully rereading judicial records and uncovering private correspondence, Carlos A. Mayo reintroduces emotion and romance into early Argentine national history. A compact study arranged in seven chapters and a documentary appendix, Porque la quiero tanto contains two essential sections. The first, a journey through the changing landscape of romantic love and marriage from the 1730s to 1860, is based on archival records, private correspondence, and the periodical press. The second is the cache of about 30 love letters, written by mostly notable Argentines.Mayo situates his narrative in the age of romanticism, adjusted to Argentine history. Mayo links romanticism to the invention of individualism and the notion of equality. The study begins with an archivally based reconstruction of the 1739 marriage between Victoria Antonia Pesoa and Fernando Maceira. From a close reading of Victoria’s letters to Fernando, Mayo concludes that it was more than a strategic marriage; although Victoria was unhappy with Fernando’s extended absence, she loved him. From the tone of her letters, Mayo believes the marriage had modern attributes. Victoria’s attitude toward Fernando was not the least deferential, and her subordination more formal than real. Moreover, Victoria had mastered the vocabulary of love, and she could not have been the only Porteña to do so. Customs were changing. The Maceira marriage represents the Bourbon era, the Enlightenment, and traditional approaches to marriage. Love belonged to the private world of morals and manners and was unnecessary in marriage.Mayo next turns to the court records of unequal marriages to continue the story of love as sedition. Here he acknowledges and builds upon existing scholarship. He separates marriage from love (society only condemned marriage between persons of unequal status) and reads the documents for the language of love, which he finds subversive to the social order. This revolt of feelings by a youthful generation provided the fuel for the coming conflict.Mayo dedicates four chapters to the evolution of romantic love. He reconstructs the venues and forms of sociability that allowed young people — especially young women — to participate in society. Courtship signaled a revolution of customs and made it possible for young people to choose their mates based on love. The tertulia and the ball allowed anxious mothers to assess the pool of eligible men and enabled daughters to display their grace and wit. Such changes occurred as war disrupted society and increased the passions of the era. When independence campaigns deteriorated into civil war and dictatorship, the importance of romantic love rose. Mayo sketches out the private lives of a generation of young men whose lives were disrupted by exile during the dictatorship of Juan de Rosas; he writes of marriages by proxy, broken engagements, and new attachments in adopted lands. Vicente Fidel López’s separation from his fiancée Carmen Lozano is particularly moving. The empirical data he presents demonstrate that judges increasingly ruled in favor of couples who based their desire to marry on love and against parental wishes. Even Rosas-era courts demonstrated compassion for young lovers, perhaps because Rosas himself defied his family when he married, the Camila O’Gorman and Uladislao Gutiérrez case being an exception. The periodical press, which expanded to include the first reviews for women, brought the emotional language of romanticism to the reading public in the works of Jose Mármol and especially Esteban Echeverría.Mayo charts changes in the language and meaning of love, from “crazy love [un loco amor],” which society condemned, to a highly spiritualized, purified, and sublimated form of the generation of the Association of May. Love had changed from a private expression to an emotion celebrated in public, and also a requirement for marriage. People wrote of “honest passion” and believed love strong enough to survive death. By the 1860s, love became a topic to be analyzed, and topologies of lovers and advice columns began to appear in the periodical press. The appendix contains letters between spouses, which span the period studied and allow the reader to enter the private world of couples.Although Mayo’s purpose is to introduce sentiments into history, this is not a sentimental work. He argues convincingly that important social changes can be examined in highly personal decisions. Though Mayo’s book is not the final word on the subject (one thinks of Juana Manuela Gorriti and Manuel Belzú, for example), it provides a useful template for additional study.