El sí de las niñas (Spanish Edition)

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In her novel, Austen shows a Neoclassical spirit by making her Romantic and romantic character, Marianne, constantly look bad. For example, when defining Mrs. Not every attitude proper to a character of Romantic novels, however, is criticized in Sense and Sensibility ; indeed Edward Ferrars can be considered a Romantic character because of his suffering, his melancholic nature, and his rejection of politics in favor of a small country parish.

I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a watch-tower. Marianne, who always had the romantic idea of loving just once, finally gets married to Colonel Brandon, someone whom she previously considered old, boring, and the kind of man to whom engagement is a business contract.

Nothing could be further from romantic love. Spanish politicians and moralists realized that arranged marriages went against customs and families, and were the origin of lovers and quarrels. We could say that a modern argument supported conservative aspirations.

Supporters of conservative interpretation of Austen may think that Sense and Sensibility is old fashioned in terms of couple relationships even when comparing it with a Spanish play of The big question is whether or not Austen was defending a conservative and dispassionate society Roberts. Her ideas are probably echoes of the Enlightenment Knox-Shaw or perhaps a simple matter of literary preferences rejecting exaggerated sentimentalism.

Sensible obedience before love. There is a big difference, however, in how the characters react before paternal authority. What he or she might think in private is a different matter. It should of course be stated that paternal authority is as important in Sense and Sensibility as it was in society. Elinor herself thinks that parents must be obeyed, even when they might have ill-conceived prejudices: She would have been glad to know when these difficulties were to cease, this opposition was to yield,—when Mrs. This interesting sentence announces better times, when the present son and daughters become parents.

Ferrars acts like a tyrant who must be dethroned as soon as possible; obeying her—thereby breaking a promise of marriage—would be dishonorable for the Ferrars brothers.

Confronting authority is possible in Sense and Sensibility , particularly for the men, as is the case of young Brandon or the Ferrars brothers. This difference is not restricted to sons and daughters but also extends to fathers and mothers. The submission is complete. As a king, a father must be obeyed, regardless of whether he is right or wrong. However, the authority figure should advise the enlightened subjects, never impose.

According to this idea, Don Diego says: In such delicate matters, wise parents do not order. Carlos and Francisca are not obedient automatons: In the end, however, they cannot defy authority. When Don Carlos arrives at the inn with the intention of stopping the engagement, he cannot imagine anything strong enough to intervene between Francisca and him: Once Don Carlos realizes that his opponent is his uncle, he says immediately: A young officer, deeply in love, cannot avert this personal disaster.

At the end, Don Diego renounces Francisca only because he decides to do so nobody even begs him: While the image of young Colonel Brandon running away with his lover conjures up a romantic hero, for another military man like Don Carlos, the same action would be represented as dishonorable.

Brandon failed, but the point is that he, an indubitable man of honor, challenged his father for love. We can say the same about the Ferrars brothers: Edward Ferrars has two priorities before his mother: The established order of the novel gives the Ferrars brothers the option of disobeying their mother, and they do so. In the case of Edward, that disobedience is defined as honorable.

The basic fact dictating the big difference between both books, both authors, and, ultimately, all their characters is that Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars are citizens whereas Don Carlos is a subject—and that is something not even love can change. I appreciate the suggestions made by the editors.

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Quotations are from the edition translated by Robert G. Many Spanish authors at the time wrote about pedagogical reform. Despite the religious treatises, some enlightened Spanish authors wrote about the importance of a good education for women. On the archetypes and stereotypes of women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain, see my book about the queen Maria Louisa and her dark legend Maria Luisa. The translation includes an interesting introduction by the Spanish author. Despite the interpretations of Austen as Romantic e.

This model of love was also defended by other writers like Mary Wollstonecraft Horwitz U de Zaragoza, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Jane Austen and the Theatre. U de Granada, De los Elogios a Felipe V.

The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain. Earl of Ilchester, Women, Politics and the Novel. U of Chicago P, Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. El delincuente honrado, comedia en prosa. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Jane Austen and the French Revolution. Jane Austen and the Drama of Women. After residing in Italy between and , he returned to Spain and secured a government position as Secretary of the Interpretation of Languages. Literature continued to occupy him and in he became the Director of the Group for the Management and Reform of Theaters.

Despite some bright moments for him there in coming years, his life became more French than Spanish until he died in Paris in The basic tension of late-eighteenth-century Europe is sociopolitical; there was conflict between the practical pro-democratic, anti-authoritarian principles of Enlightenment philosophy and the contradiction to that thought offered by the absolutist monarchies and courts of the Old Regime.

Following the American Revolution of and, more particularly, the French Revolution of , no one could ignore the contradiction. The Enlightenment oriented humankind toward striving for happiness in this world based on the exercise of human virtue informed by the observation of natural processes and the reasoned learning derived therefrom.

Moratin: El Si de las Ninas

Old Regime absolutism depended upon a worldview in which earthly religious and secular hierarchies were accepted as the human extension of a divine plan. To begin with, the royal couple gave rise to scandal. It is thought that two of her children, royals by birth, were in fact not by Charles IV, but by her alleged lover, prime minister Godoy, a man 16 years her junior and to whom all knew her to be attracted from onwards.

Hence on an elemental level, the broad theme of arranged marriages and their ills was a normal part of then contemporary society, as were the accompanying Bourbon familial complications which spilled over into national life.

For example, faced by the ever increasing authority of Godoy in court, in the crown prince Fernando conspired, unsuccessfully, to kill his mother, dethrone his father, and, on the way to his kingship, dispose of Godoy. In properly international and domestic affairs, Charles IV ruled no more competently than in his own family. As one of the reigning monarchs of the Bourbon dynasty, his foreign policy was broadly dynastic: Then, when Louis was guillotined in January , Charles took measures to try to reverse the Revolution.

This, however, led to a disastrous war between March and July between Spain and the French revolutionary armies and resulted in the French occupation and control of much of northeastern Spain. Between this period and that of the Spanish War of Independence from the French —known in English historiography as the Peninsular Wars because of English intervention there on the side of Spain and Portugal—Spain alternated in fighting with or against the French.

In the historical novel. Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times. It continues to be staged frequently in Spain by both amateurs and professional companies, and new editions of the play multiply. From the French perspective, alliance with the Spanish was beneficial because of the impressive Spanish fleet, which King Ferdinand VI had begun to build up tremendously in the s to use in naval operations against the British.

From the British perspective, alliance with Spain was beneficial because the British wanted to prevent French control of Portuguese and Spanish ports along the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The build-up of Spanish armed forces in the s had in fact been designed to assure Spanish neutrality in wars between France and England, and to retain effective control over the New World colonies.

But in the wake of such naval defeats as that of the combined French-Spanish fleet by the English under Admiral Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar in , imports of such colonial products as cacao, sugar, and tobacco were reduced to less than 1 percent of their prewar quantities, gold and silver ships ceased to arrive in Cadiz, and Catalonian bankruptcies mounted, especially in the textile industry. All these developments contributed to economic depression and bankruptcy of the national treasury.

On the cultural level, the reigns of Charles III and IV in Spain were dominated by the contention between those who supported and opposed the wholesale importation of French models to supplant national customs and traditions. Taking their cue from. The eighteenth-century Spanish cortejo was a practice probably imported from Italy, but with precedents in France. In a time of arranged and often unequal marriages, it organized in the upper and upper-middle classes a kind of service to married women by unmarried, younger men called petimetres.

These men constituted a kind of court in which the woman, neglected by a complaisant older or otherwise occupied husband, was queen. They assisted her in grooming, dressing, and diverting herself. While some such relations were platonic, moralists of the period, particularly clerics, viewed the cortejo as tantamount to socially sanctioned adultery. But Don Diego understands well that would be a risk. Needless to say the cortejo was abhorrent to Spanish traditionalists. Despite all its negative aspects, she argued that it not only fulfilled real female needs but also helped lay the ground for the principle of equality between the needs of men and women and their satisfaction.

French models, the afrancesados gave rise in Madrid to the Royal Academies of Language , History , Art , and what became the national library; in larger Spanish cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville, royal societies of letters, economics, and sciences prospered. But this cultural activity had a negative side for Spanish traditionalists.

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While this Enlightenment cultivation of the higher pursuits of humankind might have been harmless in itself, it became identified with its royal and aristocratic sponsors. The worldly ways in manners and morals of this elite was viewed as bad enough, but the fact that it threatened to spread widely through the upper classes caused scandal and conflict in a society dominated by the austere, other-worldly orientation of Spanish Catholicism. Only for a minority of Spaniards, those most influenced by the life of the Bourbon court, did the morally liberal, intellectually probing view of life emanating from Paris seem superior to received national ways and customs.

Hence while the Bourbon court paved the way for cultural progress in Spain, it was a way that the Spanish Church, the more independent, traditional nobility, and the common people viewed as the negation of essential Spanish values. This equation was greatly complicated by the French Revolution. The very Bourbons who had been responsible for the liberalization of Spanish thought and society were obliged to renounce the logical consequences of that process as they observed its practical outcomes develop in France, that is, the rise of the lower classes at the expense of the aristocracy and monarchy.

The liberal nobles finally decided that Enlightenment thought led to a new conclusion: By this time, however, it was too late to reverse the democratization process.

The Maiden’s Consent

Spanish traditionalists, who favored royal absolutism, came to the same decision earlier than the French. But even as these Spaniards felt vindicated in their rejection of Bourbon liberalism, the most astute among them observed that democratization was a force in Spain too. As previously noted, the Spanish fleet, along with its French allies, met with destruction at Trafalgar in Within three years the Spanish nation, without guidance or assistance from the Bourbons, perhaps most conspicuously without the new king Ferdinand VII , who let himself be placed in under house arrest in France by Napoleon, began the War of Independence.

Following the conclusion of the war, enlightened afrancesados found themselves in the most difficult of positions. Yet upon his return, Ferdinand wanted to revive Old Regime absolutism and to that end persecuted the afrancesados. The action of the play occurs in the mid s, between 7: Act 1 opens with a conversation between Don Diego and his servant Simon. The two men converse at cross-purposes concerning plans for a marriage. He is especially happy that she has been raised far from the distractions and temptations of the world.

As Don Diego discourses on the considerations of age and economic position that some might consider impediments to the planned marriage, Simon struggles with confused thoughts. As the conversation continues the spectator learns that Don Carlos is an accomplished mathematician, a decorated war hero, and a lieutenant colonel serving in the Spanish army.

Suddenly the characters and spectators perceive the misunderstanding: Don Diego wants the young woman for himself, not for his nephew! Moreover, Don Diego, who is the guardian and financial supporter of his orphaned nephew, expresses displeasure with Don Carlos because, in his opinion, his nephew has recently been spending too much money and time first in Madrid and then in Guadalajara, rather than at his post in Zaragoza, miles northeast of Madrid.

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