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Colonial Dependence and Sexual Difference: Reading for Gender in the Writing's of SimónBolívar (1783-1830)Author(s): Catherine DaviesReviewed work(s):Source: Feminist Review, No. 79, Latin America: History, war and independence (2005), pp. 5-19Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals

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7 9 colonial dependence a n d

s e x u a l difference: read ing

f o r g e n d e r in t h e wri t ings

o f S i m o n B o l i v a r

(1783-1830)

CatherineDavies

ctbstract

The article explores the textual constructionof gender categories in the political

discourseof SimonBolivarbymeans of a close critical readingof his seminalwritings

made publicbetween 1812 and 1820. Thehistorical and political processesknownas

LatinAmericanndependenceconstitute a moment of radical transformation. t was

during his period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship

were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the

category woman s constructedambiguously n Independence/anti-colonial iscourse,

how gender is employed to create hierarchicalsystems of social organization o

legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is

deployed in order to reinforcegenderhegemonies. 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 review 79 2005 5

(5-19) (i 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 Militarismversus Feminism

(1915). See Marshallet al. (1987: 77).

This article examines the rhetorical strategies employed in the first two decades of

the l9th century in Spanish American anti-colonial discourse that predicates

individual rights on the male universal subject. A strategic re-reading of the

canonical works of the military and political leaders of the Spanish American

revolutions will draw attention to what Bourdieu refers to as 'le mode d'operation

propre de l'habitus sexue et sexuant et les conditions de sa formation' in that

particular conjuncture (Bourdieu, 1990: 11). Simon Bolivar (the 'Liberator'), the

wealthy, white, £uropean educated, Venezuelan aristocrat (son of a Basque

landowner), fought between 1810 and 1824 to emancipute Spanish America from

the Spanish Crown. He did this for the benefit of his class, the white native-born

elite. Today, Bolivar is revered as an icon representing the sub-continent's

independence from £uropean domination; his figure has acquired mythic

proportions, above all in the northern republics (Peru, Bolivia, £cuador, Venezuela

and Colombia). This status is due not only to his militury achievements but also to

his political doctrine and vision of a united South America. The bibliography about

him is immense. But despite his successes as a soldier and politician, Bolivar's

writings are riddled with tensions, especially, as we shall see, with respect to

gender. During his lifetime, he produced over 10,000 documents (letters, speeches,

essays, declarations and constitutions). Here I will focus on just three of these,

two of which, theCartagena

Manifesto (1812) and theJamaica Letter (1815), are

considered to be founding Spanish American political texts. The third is Bolivar's

short speech, the Address to the Ladies of Socorro, delivered in 1820. I will show

how the case for colonial independence is argued for on the basis of deeply

embedded gender hierarchies.

the Cartagena Manifesto

An early example of ambiguities arising from the inscription of gender in

Independence discourse is the Cartagena Manifesto of 1812, Bolivar's first

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, this association through personification of the feminine with

weakness is extended to encompass ignorance, insonity and, more worryingly for

2 For further dis-

cussion of genderand revolutionary/republican discoursesee Kerber (1980),Landes (1988) andScott (1996). Alltranslations andemphases are myown. I have retainedas far as possibleBolivar's syntax,lexis and imagery.The translations are

therefore fairly

6 fe m i n i st revi ew 79 2 0 0 5 colonial dependence and sexual difference



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 itspolitics 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.

literal, and thegender of the wordsindicated wherereIevant.

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 Bolivarputs 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 feminine-

cities 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. Bycontrast, 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. Thesubjects 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 fe m i n i st revi ew 79 2 0 0 5 7



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

power towards it' (Perez Vila, 1979: 14). The moral force of the superior male elite

rules over the dependent feminized masses.

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' (Masiello, 1992: 5), although they

might still be identified with disorder. In the Manifesto, however, it is the male

elite which assume this moral responsibility. Those who are incapable of governing

themselves 'lack [the] political virtues' that characterize true republicans and

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, he should be mild and protective; but if they are

calumitous and turbulent, he should show himself to be terrible ... without regard

for laws and constitutions' (Perez Vila, 1979: 12). Paradoxically, then, to be

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

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, Henry Cullen, the

previous April (Perez Vila, 1979: 55-75, 55).3 The context is important. Bolivar had

started his militury campaigns against 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 at Waterloo one

month later, Bolivar lost no time in putting forward the case for Independence to

the British, using as justification Cullen's letter. The Jamaica etter, in which he

analyses the recent past and sketches the potential future of Spanish America, is

one of his most forceful and rhetorical pieces, in the words of John Lynch 'a

mordant attack on the Spanish colonial system' (Lynch, 1986: 210). It is widely

accepted as 'one of the most prophetic documents of universal political thought'

(Pino Iturrieta, 1999: 12).4 Bolivar's argument in the JamaicaLetter was, as

always, the need for robust centralized government. He uses logical reasoning to

connote rational thought as well as a plethora of rhetorical strategies to persuade

3 For full transla-tions of the JamaicaLetter and theCartagenaManifesto seeFitzgerald (1971).

4 Quoted fro m Venezuelan Rafael Ar-mando Rojus, mytranslation. Pino

8 fe m i n i st revi ew 79 2 0 0 5 coioniQl dependenceand sexual difference



Iturrieta offers aradical re-reading ofthe Jamaica Letteridentifying the classand race (though

not gender) preju-dices informing thetext.

5 As noted byRebecca £arle in herdiscussion of Re-publican mother-hood (£arle, 2000:131). On the use offamilial and parent-child relationships inindependence dis-course in the Amer-ican Revolution seealso Kerber (1980:28). The analogy of

national indepen-dence/a boy reach-ing maturity iswidespread in £n-lightenment writing,as are other biolo-gical, evolutionaryand genealogicalmetaphors through-out the 19th cen-tury. 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 Americandominions,

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 in1814. 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 ErichNeumann'sstructural 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 workingsof 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

dom nation.

Bolivarwrites 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/empireof dominance.Right now, the opposite occurs: death, dishonour, all that is harmful threatens us and

makes us fearful; we suffer greatly due to that denaturedstep-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 fe m i n i st re v i e w 79 2 0 0 5 9



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' (Gonzalez-

Doria, 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 of law and legitimation with nature and blood ties is broken; the

legal step-mother (Spain) is represented as unnatural.In the Jamaica Letter the

'Hispanic' family/nation still exists but is shown to be deeply troubled.

'Desnaturalizado' 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 primitivero.ce. [Spain is] an old serpent (f.) [who] to satisfy her

poisonous rage devours he most beautiful part of our globe.[ .. . ] What nsanity is that of

our enemy (f.), to try to reconquerAmerica.(PerezVila, 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 of the Terrible Mother takes the form of monsters' in which the

'generative nourishing, protecting' aspects of Femininity turn to 'death,

destruction, danger and distress, hunger and nakedness'. The Terrible Female

has phallic attributes, such as the teeth and tusks of the Gorgon, and snakes: the

'terrible aspect of the Feminine always includes the uroboric snake woman, thewoman with the phallus'; the earth's womb becomes the 'hungry earth, which

devours its own children' (Neumann, 1963: 149).

This progression of Mother Spain from cradle-protector to child-eater is made

explicit in the Jamaica Letter. Bolivar, well read in classical literature, may have

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

10 fe m i n i st revi ew 79 2 0 0 5 colonial dependence and sexual difference



Serpents'. Coatlicue was later incorporated into MexicanCatholicism as Mary,the

Virginof Guadalupe, who is explicitly mentioned in the Jamaica Letter (Perez Vila,

1979: 73). The reference is of interest. Bolivardismisses the idea that the Aztec

god Quetzalcoatl might serve as a symbol to rally the Mexicans in the struggle forindependence: 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 Church before 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. Throughout he Jamaica

Letter, Bolivar panders to the British by citing Bartolome de las Casas and theBlack 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.

6 The statue ofCoatlicue was dis-covered in MexicoCity in 1790 andburied again soon

after. It was un-earthed for Alexan-der von Humboldt in1803 and quicklyreburied until afterIndependence i n1824.

For Neumann an archetype such as the Great Mother is 'an image at work in the

human psyche' (Neumann, 1963: 3). The negative Feminineoriginates not in actual

women or their attributes but in the inner 'anguish, horrorand fear of danger'

produced by the unconscious in consciousness. Humanconsciousness, 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)

CatherineDavies fe m i n i st rev i e w 79 2 0 0 5 11



The narrative Neumann employs in his analysis of the archetype is remarkably

similar to that inscribed by Bolivar in his Jamaica etter some 150 years earlier

(Neumann signed his foreword in 1954), indicating the persistence of the

patriarchal paradigm (or deep myth-structure). The process of transformation andrebirth, of maturity leading to separation and independence, recurs in this

symbolical representation: 'A male immature in his development ( .. . ) perceives

the feminine as a castrator, a murderer of the phallus' (Neumann, 1963: 172). The

narrative of the Jamaica etter points to a similar deep structure strategically

employed to indicate the political relationship between the murderous Spanish

metropolis and the developing Spanish American colonies.

Having established the illegitimacy and unnaturalness of the Terrible Mother, the

Jamaicczetter develops the family trope with reference to the children or wards of

the 'denatured step-mother' (Perez Vila, 1979: 57) who have broken the maternalbond, 'the tie ... is cut' (Perez Vila, 1979: 56), and wish to go their separate ways.

The text lists the new states/offspring one by one, caught in the fracture between

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

Kingdom of Chile); the 'virreinato del Peru' (viceroyalty of Peru) (Perez Vila, 1979:

57). If they are worth their salt, they are fighting for their independence rather

than giving in. The one exception is 'la heroica y desdichada Venezuela' (heroic

and unfortunate Venezuela) who is reduced, like a poor woman, to 'absolute

destitution and shocking isolation/loneliness' (Perez Vila, 1979: 58). This view

echoes the Jamaica Letter's opening sentence where Cullen is thanked for his

interest in Venezuela and for 'commiserating with her on account of the tortures

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

is repeated throughout the text: masculinity signifies revolutionery combat and

femininity passive suffering. Such difference is inscribed subtly, not by reference to

men and women as such, but in the symbolic effects of language. There is only one

mention of 'women' in theJamaica Letter (compared to half a dozen references to

'hombres', men) but it is a significant one. Bolivar describes the situation in

(possive, femininzed) 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 have died rather than give in or are still fighting. Women, children,

old people do not fight; they need to be protected and if they survive,

therefore, they are like slaves. Otherwise, the Jamaica Letter ingeniously avoids

any mention of women as a distinctive group by denoting the peoples of Spanish

America with an array of collective nouns, mostly in the masculine, in which

women are subsumed: inhabitants, population, souls, people, residents,

Americans, indigenous, slaves, shepherds and peasants. Men, 'hombres', as a

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

12 fe m i n i st re v i e w 79 2 0 0 5 colonial dependenceand sexual difference



reference to republicanismand synonymouswith '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 Terrible Mother:

A people are slaves when the government,by its nature or vices, treads upon or usurps he

rights of the citizen or the subject (subdito). Applying hese principles, we find that

Americawas not only deprived of liberty but even of active and authoritarian yranny ...

they left us in a kind of permanent nfancy 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, uldalso enjoy the personalconsiderationthat 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 self-

governance, 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 government t would embrace for its conservation?We are a

small humanrace ... new to all things in the arts and sciences.

(Perez Vila, 1979: 62)

Catherine Davies femn t revi w 79 2005 13



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) do not break with the mother they will become: submissive,

passive consumers, politically nalve, excluded from public life, absent from the

world of government and state administration, obedient, and ruled by custom. In

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 world n 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) inthis context signifies male. Obedience and ignorance is the domain of the

feminine. The desired alternative-violent resistance) aggression) revolution and

enlightenment-is the remit of fighting men and masculinity. Moreover) according

to the Jamaica Letter it is the warring) enlightened men who provide the 'fuerza

moral), the moral strength of the struggle) while those associated with submission

to established power relations (such as women) provide the mere 'masa fisica', the

'physical muss' (Perez Vila, 1979: 74). Women represent substance or corporality

rather than the idea. Such an equivalence brings to mind Luce Irigaray's concept of

mother-matter, the unacknowledged, unrepresentable maternal-feminine, which

makes possible rational discourse (Irigaray, 1985: 301-302). It is alluded to

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 is stymied by the Terrible Mother

who keeps her sons (the male creole elite, the states, Viceroyalties and kingdoms)

in a state of permanent infancy, that is, in oedipal terms, castrates them and

reduces them to the position of weak women (such as Venezuela). To develop into

mature republics they have to make the break. Bolivar ends the Jamaica Letter by

suggesting that what the Americon territories need is the paternal (rather than

maternal) care of government to cure their scars and wounds, 'los cuidados de

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 the unreasonable,

phallus-wielding mother, equating mindless submission and obedience with

femininity, and, on the other hand, future progress, self-fulfilment and legitimate

authority with macho bravado and the father-the Jamaica Letter m ght wel I stri ke

a chord with its readers (included among which, it was hoped, were British

politicians), who would immediately recognize and sympathize with this (arguably

14 feminist review 79 2005 colonial dependence and sexual difference



deeply felt) mythic structure or cultural phantusy. But it raised uncomfortable

problems for revolutionary Independence discourse.

address to The Ladies of Socorro

The clash of discourses will be illustrated with reference to another of Bolivar's

political texts, an example of performative discourse, the Address to the Ladies

('matronas') of Socorro read out in public in February 1820 (Perez Vila, 1979:

136-137). Socorro was a town in New Granada (Colombia), famous for its

18th-century rebellion against the Spanish Crown, and had recently fought the

Spanish once again. The word 'matrona', akin to 'lady', was usually used only

for married women or housekeepers and denoted great respect. In this context,

the term represents culture and stands in contradistinction to the (barbaric)

step-mother. 'Woman' ('mujer'), like 'hombre', 'man', occurs only once in the text;

it is avoided by reference to 'socorrenas' (female townsfolk of Socorro) and a

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 in 19th-century Latin American

discourse: 'mujer varonil', virile or manly woman. Later in the century, it was used

derogatively to denote unfeminine (unnatural) women and, later, feminists. Here

it is used positively. The speech reads:

To the IllustriousLadies of Socorro:

A people that have producedvirilewomen,no humanpower s capable of subjugating.yOu,daughters of Socorro,you will be the stumbling-block of your oppressors. They, in their

frenetic fury,profuned he most sacred, the most innocent, the most beautiful part of our

species, they trampled uponyou. yOuhave raised your dignity by hardeningyour tender

hearts under the blows of those who are cruel.

Heroic adies of Socorro: he mothersof Spartadid not ask for theirchildren's ives, but for

the victoryof their country; he mothers of Romecontemplated with pleasure the glorious

wounds of their family; they encouragedthem to achieve the honourof dying in combat.

Moresublime are you in yourgenerous 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 yoursteps in the race towards heroism?Arethere men worthyof

you? No, no, no! But you are worth he admirationof the Universe nd the adoration of the

liberatorsof Colombia.

(PerezVila, 1979: 136)

These women are not domesticated, put under the yoke, or 'subjugated', due to

their masculine attributes. They are praised precisely because rather than send

their male loved ones into battle, that is, participate by means of affective

solidarity with a man, they have wielded the (phallic) lance 'habeis empunado la

lanza' (Perez Vila, 1979: 137) in their very own hands.

Catherine Davies fe m i n i st rev i ew 79 2 0 0 5 15



Such symbolism was nevertheless risky; after all, these women might end up as

dreaded phallic mothersJ despots illegitimately daring to assume authority. But

any such suggestion is neatly sidelined in the Address by means of four textual

strategies. First, as mentioned, women are referred to only in relation to men: they

are not conferred autonomy. Second, they are shown to be worthy of praise and

thus contributing to the revolution only in as much as they adopt masculine

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

inherent 'feminine' feelings. Third, it is implied that their aggression was for self-

defence against the profanation of the innocent, echoing resistance to the Spanish

imperial 'rape' of the Americas. In this way, sanctioned gender categories are not

disturbed. In fact, sexual difference and hierarchy is reinforced by means of a

fourth strategy: the displacement of the significance of these 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, admired by the Universe. They are

sublimated from solid individuals to gaseous fantasy. Throughout the Address to

'virile women' masculinity is still associated with heroics and enlightenment, and

femininity with beauty, innocence, the sucred, the tender and the family. Women

will be excluded from the polis unless they act, unnaturally, like men in these

'unnatural' circumstances (in the Jamaica Letter, Bolivar stresses the uniqueness

of the historical context) 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 malereason 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, Bolivarwas 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 all-

powerful father-King-Crown and its unifying myth, Mother Spain, were removed,

7 Colombia is alsoreferred to as 'themother of the Boli-var Republic' andthe latter 'her first-born daughter',suggesting that Bo-Iivarfathered Boliviathrough an incestu-ous relationship withhis own daughterColombia (Lecuna,1975: 332).

16 feminist review 79 2005 colonial dependence and sexual difference



there was no strong rule of law to take their place. It would take time for the

denatured Mother to be replaced by the myth of the legitimate Father; until then,

boys would be boys, and the 'liberators' fell to fighting their 'jeux de pouvoir'

among themselves (Bourdieu, 1990: 25).

Reading for gender in the networks of meaning constituting political discourse

exposes the tensions and ambiguities in anti-colonial texts. The political discourse

of the nascent Spanish American republics remained profoundly patriarchal; the

male was taken as norm in the exercise of power and colonial institutionalized

gender differences were confirmed, indeed exacerbated, in the new republican

morality (Chambers, 1999: 200-214). The moral welfore of the collectivity is

regulated by a male elite embodying musculine values: order, strength, and the

right to enforce obedience. Progress is represented as the subjection of the

feminine threat to the light of male reason and action. Although it is generally

agreed that Bolivar was more of a constitutionalist than a dictator, and that heaimed for government through institutionalized 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 Giselle Munizaga's discourse analysis of a corpus of

political speeches. She concludes:

The main structural axis ... is Order, plit 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 on

him. Munizaga's analysis is not gendered but her conclusion on the role of woman

in Pinochet's texts, 'woman ... is not a subject but an object in history'

(Munizaga, 1988: 30) comes as no surprise. Domination on the basis of sexual

difference underpins all such dictatorial phantasies.

As suggested, it could be argued that these are further instances of the structure

of specularization, the dominant cultural phanstasy in which the male projects his

ego in all culture and discourse, and in which the maternal body, woman matter,

functions as the tain of that mirror, the other of the same (Irigaray, 1985: 302).

I9tasculine rationality is predicated on the demonized maternal-feminine who,

reduced to physical mass, is subordinated to the autonomous male whose effective

use of reason enables him to govern those who are not fully men and therefore not

fully entitled to human rights (Bonilla, 1990). These are the discursive traces of

the libido dominandi identified by Bourdieu in male dominated societies, in which

Cutherine Davies feminist review 79 2005 17



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

Ladies of Socorro, would be exploited by women in the future for their ownpurposes (see Craske in this issue). Ultimately, colonial relations of dependency

would prove easier to break than dependencies resulting from essentialisms such

as sexism, 'sans doute le plus difficile a deracine' (Bourdieu, 1990: 12);

essentialisms employed strategically by the Spanish American male creole elite to

justify and secure their own political hegemony.

acknowledgementsThe 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 Research Bourd. She has published widely on Spanish and

Latin American literature, culture and film with special emphasis on women's and

gender studies.

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