Table Of ContentWriting Teresa
Writing Teresa
The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo
Denise DuPont
Published by Bucknell University Press
Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by Denise DuPont
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DuPont, Denise, 1966-
Writing Teresa : the saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo / Denise DuPont.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-61148-406-9 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61148-407-6 (electronic)
1. Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515-1582--In literature. 2. Spanish literature--20th century--History and criticism. 3.
Spanish literature--19th century--History and criticism. 4. Christian hagiography in literature. 5. Mysticism and
literature--Spain. I. Title.
PQ6073.T45D87 2012
860.9'006--dc23
2011042176
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
There are so many people I could thank for so many things, but I will limit myself
to those who had a direct impact on this book. I appreciate immensely the support,
advice, and encouragement I have received from Luis Álvarez Castro, Leonisa
Ballesteros León, Maryellen Bieder, Olga López-Valero Colbert, Bert DuPont, Peggy
DuPont, Tom Franz, Ricardo de la Fuente Ramón, Marie-Luise Gaettens, Luis T.
González del Valle, Roberta Johnson, Akiko Tsuchiya, Linda Willem, the
decimonónicas research group, the regulars at the Universitas Castellae-McGill
University annual conference in Valladolid, and most of all, Ricardo de la Fuente
Ballesteros. Southern Methodist University provided an invaluable sabbatical in the
early stages of the project. I would also like to thank Greg Clingham and Kate Parker
at Bucknell University Press, as well as the anonymous readers who greatly improved
both Writing Teresa and my earlier Realism as Resistance.
The beginning of chapter 5 has appeared in Siglo Diecinueve 16 (2010), as part
of my “Blanca de las Ríos, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Francisca Larrea y Cecilia Böhl de
Faber: hijas, madres, y la creación de un modelo de mujer estudiosa, o ángel de
archivo.”
Introduction
An Hour with Teresa: The Saint and Her Interpreters
For centuries, Teresa de Jesús has attracted attention from writers. Among the
non-Spanish, her literary fans include Richard Crashaw, George Eliot, Joris-Karl
Huysmans, Catulle Mendès, William James, Gertrude Stein, Jacques Lacan, Simone
de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Abraham Verghese, all of whom incorporate her into
their own work.[1] Teresa’s complexity and the contradictions she embodies have
inspired philosophers, poets, and novelists to analyze or borrow from the events of
her life, and to use her as a model for fictional characters. The intriguing paradoxes of
the saint from Ávila go far beyond her dual identification as mystic-hysteric, probably
the most famous Teresian dichotomy. Teresa de Jesús was not herself enclosed,
although she fought for strict cloistering for her order. She strategically placed herself
under male control, and yet she also maintained autonomy, at times by playing male
authority figures against each other.[2] Teresa found her own path, but still argued for
community and the absorption of the individual by the group.[3] She was an idealist
and a realist at the same time, with ambitious dreams achieved through her practical
plans for action. Although chronically ill, her illness did not derail her efforts as founder
or writer,[4] and determination and strength of character contrast with her physical
weakness. She was female, though “male” in her resolve and character.[5] Both virgin
and mother, the daughters of her Order acknowledge her as a maternal figure, as do
many writers whose medium is a language she is said to have helped create. A hero
for erudite authors, Santa Teresa also figures as a model for the humble and less
educated.[6] Ascetic and self-effacing, she was at the same time infinitely strong-
willed—a potential case study for turn-of-the-twentieth-century followers of
Schopenhauer, though no less so for admirers of Nietzsche.[7]
These are some of the qualities of Teresa that have interested an international
audience. For Spanish readers of Teresa, who then became writers of their nation’s
saint, some additional issues come into play.[8] Because of her special relationship to
the Spanish language, the question of Teresa’s style was of particular importance to
subsequent Spanish authors, in a way that it would not have been for writers reading
her in translation. Artists of the Spanish language appreciated Teresa’s unique
authorial abilities, and her incomparable way of writing, which came to be labeled lack
of style, or self-creation.[9] Teresa’s stylistic manner is eminently personal, yet is
always subordinated to her religious objectives, and for that reason, conveys a
resistance to self-identify as a writer, of which these later authors stand in awe.
When writers portray or analyze Teresa, they must come to terms with the fact that
she has preceded them in their profession, and is recognized as one of the masters
of the Spanish literary tradition, even “Madre del idioma” [Mother of the language],[10]
apparently without having literary ambitions.[11] Furthermore, Teresa would also have
fascinated her turn-of-the-century compatriots because they were concerned about
their nation, interested in gender issues, engaged in complicated relationships with
orthodox religion, and most of all, passionate about the art of writing. In the following
chapters, I hope to demonstrate that Teresa’s unique combination of strong will,
Spanish nationality, Catholicism, femininity, and authorship is fundamental for these
authors’ exploration, through her, of Spanish identity, gender, religion, and writing.
Taking such ideas as a point of departure, Writing Teresa seeks to answer
several questions about a sampling of turn-of-the-century Spanish authors, selected
because of their personal interconnections and their wide range of writings on Teresa,
including essays as well as works of fiction, produced throughout their careers.[12]
What exactly were the relationships of these writers with their nation’s beloved saint,
as manifested in their written work?[13] How did their textual relationships with her
change over the course of their long and prolific careers? How do their discussions of
Teresa in essays and articles compare to their fictionalization of her, as they
appropriate her as a character for novels and short stories? The fictional characters
each author creates in relation to Teresa should not be seen as strictly
autobiographical, and I will avoid language that confuses the historical authors with
these characters, but they are nevertheless embodiments of the concerns of the
authors at particular moments in their professional trajectories, as are the numerous
essays she inspired them to compose. From the successive representations of
Teresa in each author’s writings, a story of that author’s imagination emerges—a tale
that is significant for the understanding of him or her as an individual with varied
personal experiences, as well as a witness to changes in Spanish society.[14] At the
same time, as I read their writings, I resist the temptation to interpret how the authors
“felt” about Teresa, or if they “changed their minds” about her, because I do not think
this can be determined with any certainty.[15] It seems more appropriate to analyze
the various constructions of Teresa, and to focus carefully on the details of how the
authors configure Teresa at different times, using both fiction and non-fiction. All of
them admired her, and considered her an important cultural artifact or phenomenon,
but they also recognized her complexity, and experimented with widely varying written
Teresas. As these authors portray Teresa, they also represent their own
preoccupations, in the context of a historical moment spanning the Restoration period,
the turn of the century, and for all except Clarín, two or more decades of the
twentieth century. In this study, then, Teresa is employed as a lens with which to
study the evolution of the authors’ ideas, and to examine the concerns of their
historical moment. Needless to say, while Teresa as writer (Teresa writing) is an
important aspect of this study, Writing Teresa is not so much about Teresa de Jesús
as it is about how Teresa was read and written by the authors Clarín, Pardo Bazán,
Unamuno, Azorín, and Blanca de los Ríos.
I also hope to answer the question of why so much attention to Teresa at that
particular time: Why Teresa? Why then? In the final decades of the nineteenth
century, reason, in the form of rationality, science, or positivism, competed for public
attention with idealism, spirituality, mysticism, fancy, and irrationality. Many people
were interested in scientific explanations for hysteria, for example, in mysticism as a
threat to the social order or as a response to positivism, in traditional Catholicism,
and in spiritualism as a means of reconciling a scientific vision of reality with concern
for the spiritual world. Teresa, within the context of the late nineteenth-century
preoccupation with femininity, related to every one of these topics.
SCIENCE, MYSTICISM, SPIRITUALISM, AND THE FEMININE
For much of the scientific community, mysticism was a pathology, thanks to
Jean-Martin Charcot’s linkage of mysticism to hysteria. Teresa was appropriated by
proponents of this scientific worldview, who questioned traditional, orthodox notions of
sainthood, and saw her as ill, rather than saintly. For Charcot and his followers,
Teresa de Jesús was “the ‘privileged’ target of the hysteria-mysticism interpretive tug-
of-war.”[16] Using religious terminology such as “stigmata” in his description of the
symptoms of hysteria, Charcot reconfigured the supernatural as disease, and
(Teresa) the mystic/hysteric made the transition from being under the priest’s control
to the doctor’s.[17] Teresa was later subjected to analyses more Freudian than
Charcotian, focused on the intricacies of her unconscious instead of her physical
ailments, and facilitated by imagining her confessions as directed to a psychoanalyst
instead of a spiritual director.[18] Teresa’s self-analysis conforms readily to this
approach: her confessional discourse offers itself up, open to her readers’ scrutiny,
as she requests help in the interpretation of her experience, although she carries
much of the hermeneutic burden herself.[19] The apparent openness to analysis by
others is counterbalanced by a confidence in her own interpretive skills: Teresa knows
exactly what has happened to her, and makes her own diagnoses. In this sense, even
while her body and life were dissected by non-believing scientists, she also
represented an alternative path for those who still looked for miracles, in an age in
which faith had been called into question.
In this sense mysticism, whether Teresa’s or any of the other variants that
cropped up during this historical period, was also a remedy or compensation. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, many writers rejected the implications of
positivism, and returned to an irrational, or anti-rational, idealism, thus making room
for metaphysical explanations for life’s mysteries.[20] Looking beyond Zola’s
naturalism, European novelists discovered the spiritualism of Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky, and several former naturalists, such as Paul Bourget and Joris-Karl
Huysmans, converted to Catholicism.[21] As part of this trend, some influential artists
espoused what they termed “mysticism”: “a rejection of science and rationality, a
diffuse religious faith, and a focus on the soul.”[22] In the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, this mysticism ranged from “esthetic Roman Catholicism,” to
satanism and occultism, and then finally, in some cases, such as the two mentioned
above, back to orthodox Catholicism.[23] Referring to decadentism specifically, Ellis
Hanson comments that “no other literary movement can claim so many converts to
Rome.”[24] Aesthetic Catholicism, or neomysticism, was artistic exaltation with a
markedly spiritual emphasis, as a response to fin-de-siglo doubt and skepticism.[25]
Blended irrevocably, spirituality and aesthetics potentiated each other, as turn-of-the-
century artists turned to the faith of past centuries as a source for art.[26]
Contemporary observers’ descriptions of these trends indicate how the term
“mysticism” was (over)used, with what other ideas it was associated, and what it
meant for the artists of the day. In Spain, Krausist professor Urbano González
Serrano described the development of a new spirituality, which he believed to be a
rejection of traditional religion, and a redefinition of mysticism. In 1881, González
Serrano noted in Spanish thought an aspiration toward something vague and
seductive; two years later he wrote of an inverted faith that had sprouted in reaction
to pervasive skepticism; and finally, in 1903, González Serrano explained satanism
and modernism as melancholic flights from lost faith, and an insatiable thirst for the
ideal, with secularized, heterodox mystics as its proponents.[27] Meanwhile, in 1893,
the cosmopolitan cultural critic Enrique Gómez Carrillo studied “neomisticismo” [neo-
mysticism], whose followers he labeled selfish, in their cultivation of their selves and
their dreams.[28] Reacting against the exaggerations of naturalism, neo-mystical
artists turned to God for lack of an alternative, constructing in the depths of their own
souls “mil santuarios ardientes” [a thousand burning shrines], even though they felt
that the official Church had rejected them.[29] Starting in 1892, and with increasing
momentum as translations appeared, Max Nordau’s Degeneration captivated many
readers. Under the heading “Mysticism,” in a treatment that occupies over a third of
his book and is longer than any other section, Nordau groups Pre-Raphaelites,
Symbolists, Tolstoyans, and Wagnerians, analyzing the “mystical” psychology as a
visionary insanity and excitation of the senses, “a state of mind, in which a man is
straining to see, thinks he sees, but does not see.”[30] In his in-depth analysis of the
phenomenon in the chapter “Parodies of Mysticism,” Nordau raises the issue of
gender, while accusing spiritualists of coopting hypnotism from science.[31] He deals
extensively with the “master-sorcerer” Sar Péladan, distilling his ideas into an
emphasis on the renunciation of sexuality and the transformation of the self into “a
hybrid hermaphrodite,” for the purpose of “soar[ing] into space as an ‘astral
being.’”[32]
There were many turn-of-the-century commentators who opposed this allegedly
rampant “mysticism” as irrational, hysterical, and androgynous. The list of complaints
is lengthy, and I will continue to address this topic in relation to Clarín in the next
chapter; but it is evident that one source of anxiety related to “mysticism,” particularly
as linked to hysteria, is a paradoxical hyper-femininity resistant to male control, as
emblematized by the image of the mystic-hysteric common in the press of the period.
