Fernán Caballero

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For the municipality in Ciudad Real, see Fernán Caballero (Ciudad Real).
Fernán Caballero
Portrait of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, Fernán Caballero, by Valeriano Domínguez Bécquer, 1858. Oil on canvas, 50.30 x 37.50 cm, Madrid, Museum of Romanticism.
Spouse(s)Antonio Planells y Bardají (1816-1816),
Francisco de Paula Ruiz del Arco (1822-1835),
Antonio Arrom y Morales de Ayala (1837-1859)
Parent(s)Frasquita Larrea
Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber

Fernán Caballero is the pseudonym used by the Spanish writer and folklorist Cecilia Böhl de Faber y Ruiz de Larrea (Morges, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, December 25, 1796 – Seville, Spain, April 7, 1877).

Cecilia Böhl cultivated a picturesque style of a costumbrista character, and her work is distinguished by its defense of traditional virtues, the monarchy and Catholicism. Her thought belongs to the Catholic regenerationism of the period, influenced by the ideas of her father, the German Hispanophile Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber, who introduced into Spain the German historicist Romanticism of Herder and the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel.[1]

Biography

Childhood

Cecilia Francisca Josefa Böhl und Lütkens y Ruiz de Larrea was born on December 25, 1796, in Morges (Switzerland). She was the daughter of the German consul Juan Nicolás Böhl und Lütkens (later Böhl de Faber), a businessman who, together with his brother Amadeo, managed the commercial interests of the firm Böhl Hermanos, founded in Cádiz by his late father, a well-known member of the Hamburg bourgeoisie,[2] and of Francisca Javiera Ruiz de Larrea y Aheran Moloney, called "Doña Frasquita Larrea" by her friends and family,[2] who had a Spanish father and an Irish mother.[3] Her father, the Hanseatic consul in Cádiz, was one of the promoters of Romanticism in Spain as well as a great defender of the theater of the Golden Age and of the Castilian romancero. Her mother hosted a tertulia of «serviles», where the values of the Ancien Régime were defended.[4] They married on February 1, 1796, in a Catholic ceremony, although her father did not convert to Catholicism until 1813, which did not prevent him from raising his children in that faith. After a brief stay in Germany visiting her paternal grandmother, her parents returned to Spain in 1797, where Cecilia's three siblings were born: Aurora (1800), Juan Jacobo (1801) and Ángela (1803).

After the death of her uncle Amadeo, who was the one mainly in charge of the business, and because of the instability of Napoleonic Europe, in 1805 her parents made their second trip to Germany, together with Cecilia and her brother Juan Jacobo, while the two younger sisters were left in the care of their maternal grandmother. Her father's stepfather, Martin Jak. Faber, legally adopted him in 1806 so that he would bear his surname, which also changed that of the author and her siblings. However, her mother was unable to adapt to Germany and the first marital disagreements came to light. In the end Cecilia's mother returned to Spain, so that she went through the tragic experience of the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain alone with the author's two younger sisters at her house in Chiclana de la Frontera.

During those years Cecilia lived in Germany, in Hamburg, in a boarding school run by a French lady, where she received her education in the "old style," of deep Catholicism,[4] until, after her mother's visit in 1812, the latter managed to convince her father, and the family was reunited in the city of Cádiz in 1813, when Cecilia was already seventeen years old, after seven years of separation.

Marriages, widowhood and death

Cecilia Böhl de Faber y Larrea

On March 30, 1816, she married an infantry captain, Antonio Planells y Bardají. The couple moved to Puerto Rico, since her husband had been posted there, but the marriage was short-lived owing to the husband's death; this event shook the young Cecilia, who was taken in at the house of the Captain General while she recovered from her depression, and she was able to return to Spain on June 28, 1818.[5] She then moved to Hamburg, her father's native city, where she lived with her grandmother.

Some years later she moved again, to El Puerto de Santa María, Spain, where she met Francisco de Paula Ruiz del Arco, Marquis of Arco Hermoso and an officer of the Corps of Spanish Guards, who was the heir to the entailed estate of a rich and influential Sevillian family, related to a large part of the Andalusian nobility.[2] On March 26, 1822, she married him, her second marriage, in Seville; there she and her husband held a tertulia in their palace attended by members of high society and foreign personalities such as Washington Irving (with whom she corresponded from 1828 and whom she helped with some of his works), the art historian William Stirling and Baron Taylor, who would be the model for the "Baron de Maudes" in the tertulia of the Marquise of Algar in La Gaviota. After the invasion of the "Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis" (1823) they moved to live in El Puerto because of the Marquis's liberal sympathies; they likewise spent much time on an estate the Marquis owned in Dos Hermanas, "La Palma," where she was impressed by Andalusian folklore and began to collect coplas, little tales and proverbs.[6] In May 1835 she was widowed again.

In March 1836, Cecilia traveled to England with her sister; during her stay in London she met a young English aristocrat, Federico Cuthbert, whom she had met in Spain and with whom she had a secret love affair. Because of her trip she was not able to be present at her father's death on November 9, 1836. She returned to Seville because of the bad relations she would have with her mother.[7]

A short time later she met Antonio Arrom y Morales de Ayala, whom she married on August 17, 1837; he was a native of Ronda, of delicate health and eighteen years younger than Cecilia. This marriage would be very special, since in the life of Fernán Caballero it meant her definitive encounter with the printing press, whereby all the material she had been collecting throughout her life, amid her husband's long absences and the economic circumstances in which she lived, came to light.[2] This marriage also drew criticism upon her from the Arco-Hermoso family and from Sevillian high society.[7] The couple was financially ruined, even though it was in this period that La Gaviota (1849), La familia de Alvareda (1849) and Clemencia (1852) were published. However, the failure of the last of these would make her reconsider the publication of her work, in which she displayed an intransigent and anti-liberal attitude; in fact, Hartzenbusch, a moderate liberal, did not want it dedicated to him, and she never recovered from this failure. Around 1852 the identity of Fernán Caballero was revealed, which led her to put herself forward as a public figure with a radical political project. This failure would have repercussions for the rest of her life.[7] Her husband fell ill with consumption, and serious financial problems led him to commit suicide in 1859.

Widowed once more, the writer was thus left in poverty. The Dukes of Montpensier and Queen Isabella II protected her and provided her with a dwelling in the Patio de Banderas of the Alcázar of Seville, but the Revolution of 1868 forced her to move because the houses were put up for sale, although she was able to save from destruction the altarpiece that was kept there. Opposed to the disorders of the Revolutionary Sexennium, she rejoiced at the restoration of the monarchy in 1874, but opposed the religious tolerance enshrined in the Constitution of 1874 and, despite her age and ailments, wrote in favor of the Catholic unity of Spain.[8]

She died in Seville on April 7, 1877, at 10 in the morning, at the age of eighty-one, of dysentery, according to her death certificate.[2]

She was a contradictory figure since, although she rejected politics, she wrote several novels taking a clear anti-liberal political stance that rejected the idea of emancipated women; she was likewise an ambitious writer who wrote a large part of her work in French, some in German and a good deal in Spanish. She wanted to create a new way of writing novels in Spain; though of severe morals, the main theme of several novels was adultery, besides disregarding her own personal life, since she was married for the third time to a man twenty years younger, which was a scandal in her time, all the more so as she was the widow of a marquis.[9]

She maintained an extremely abundant correspondence; in her century it is surpassed only by the letters of Juan Valera. She corresponded with Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, whom she contacted in order to sell her father's library;[7] these and other letters were collected and edited by the Hispanist Theodor Heinermann, who complained, incidentally, that Cecilia was "the most mystified author in Spanish literary history."[10] She also corresponded with Rosalía de Castro, with whom she was united by a great friendship that, however, began with reproaches. The Galician poet had dedicated her book Cantares to her, but Fernán Caballero, after calling her the "nightingale of Galicia," reproached her for her accusations against the Castilians and her use of Galician words that she did not understand.[11]

Literary work

She took her pseudonym from the town of Fernán Caballero in the province of Ciudad Real. The reason for her pseudonym, according to her, is: «I liked that name for its old and chivalrous flavor, and without hesitating a moment I sent it to Madrid, exchanging, for the public, Cecilia's modest skirts for the genuine breeches of Fernán Caballero». She was influenced either by liking the sound of the name, the town being a place she passed through, or by knowing of a crime of passion that was widely echoed in the press of the time.[12]

At first Fernán Caballero had no regard for her works, which she considered a mere exercise in the languages she knew; they had been published against her will. This, at least, is what Father Coloma relates in his Recuerdos of the author. This did not prevent her from giving her ideas about what kind of novel is preferable, opting for the novel of customs with the following elements: «usages, sayings, tales, beliefs, jokes, proverbs». The novel had to be useful first, and pleasant afterward. For Blanca de los Ríos it represented «the first attempt at folklorism or demopedia in Spain». These novels had an eminently didactic character, advocating an iron morality and praising the poor but honest life of the Andalusian people. She conceived of her novels as documents that faithfully reflected everyday life. For her the plot was the frame, because what was interesting was the setting. This is also reflected in the characters, who do not have an evolution or development but are prototypes.[13]

This eagerness for moral indoctrination was harshly criticized already during the author's lifetime, and her works aroused great controversy that responded to ideological rather than literary positions, a reflection of the situation of division in Spanish society.[4]

As Xavier Andreu Miralles emphasizes,[14] Fernán Caballero also adopted a new model of femininity, inspired by the traditions of Hispanic Catholicism, «which does not involve a mere return to the Ancien Régime, to a religious woman subjected to her husband, confined to her house and withdrawn from the world; on the contrary, it adapts to the new realities of the domestic woman introduced in Europe after the liberal revolutions».[15] In this way, women acquired an active role in Catholic and national regeneration. Her approach shows the influence of authors of post-revolutionary Catholicism such as Jaime Balmes or even Juan Donoso Cortés. This project involved the recovery of Christian values in line with Catholic spiritualism and in opposition to the materialist tendencies of the time.[16]

In any case, the role of her work in Hispanic narrative is key, since she has been considered one of the promoters of the renewal of the Spanish novel in the mid-19th century, which would blossom into the Realism and Naturalism of the following decades. Her works link scenes of a costumbrista and popular tone through a common thread with a Romantic basis, which poeticizes reality in a moralizing way. Later writers such as Antonio de Trueba, Luis Coloma and Benito Pérez Galdós acknowledged her contributions.[17]

La gaviota was written in French, translated into Castilian by the editor José Joaquín de Mora and published in installments by El Heraldo. In a letter addressed to him, she reproached him for having also included the prologue, which was intended for foreign readers. In this prologue she sets out her intention of offering a different image of the Spanish woman from that of European Romanticism, in which she was identified as sensual, independent and passionate; that is, the opposite of a self-sacrificing wife and mother. Spain was not only the cliché of bullfighters and gypsy women; the peasants and the nobles were in essence modest and virtuous.[18] The novel is structured in two parts: in one she shows the simple and virtuous life of the inhabitants of a village, and in the other the life of Seville, already partly open to foreign customs, despite the dignity of the local aristocracy. Its main character, Marisalada, is the prototype of the passionate, independent and selfish Spanish woman who will end up living a miserable life. The moral is clear, since she had renounced her femininity by being proud and a bad wife. The influence of Mérimée's Carmen, which had created a universal myth, seems clear.[18] In it she also makes plain her deep rejection of bullfighting insofar as it meant cruelty to animals. In many works she criticized this Spanish custom.[19]

Clemencia (1852) would be her most ambitious work, which she wanted to publish in book form. In it she sets out her ideal of the Spanish woman: modest, virtuous and, being educated, able to control her passions. And, of course, religious. In this way she would be not only a good wife but also a good mother. She defends the need for women's education so that they can defend themselves against the temptations of the world.[18] This education would be accompanied by reading, which seemed fundamental to the author, as she shows by including entire children's tales in her novels. Moreover, the characters who read are the best and most virtuous.[19]

Fernán Caballero uses language as an element differentiating the characters: the common people constantly use proverbs, colloquial expressions, sayings, tales and coplas, while the aristocracy, the other great group she wants to portray, uses neologisms and, above all, Gallicisms fashionable at the time. In her universe there is an evident confrontation between the noble, which springs from the depths of the Spanish people, and what comes to muddy it, whether it be the foreign and its fashions or incipient capitalism.[19]

She published her novels at a time when there was a boom in women authors, but this success would quickly be relegated by the arrival of realist authors, who would enjoy greater recognition for their intellectual «superiority». So as not to suffer disdain for her authorship because she was a woman, she hid behind a male pseudonym. She did not want to be associated with her female contemporaries.[9].

List of her works

  • La gaviota. (1849) — Costumbrista novel, described by critics as pre-realist
  • La Familia de Alvareda (1849)
  • La hija del Sol (1851)
  • La flor de las ruinas
  • Callar en vida y perdonar en muerte
  • Cuadros de costumbres populares andaluzas. Seville: Española y Extranjera de José Mª Geofrin (1852)
  • Lucas García (1852)
  • A lo lejos del río sur (1863)
  • Te gusta la toronja (1853)
  • Clemencia. Madrid: Mellado (1852)
  • Lágrimas. Seville: Española y Extranjera de José Mª Geofrin (1853)
  • La estrella de Vandalia. Madrid: A. Andrés Babi (1855) — Autobiographical novel
  • Mi abuelo Teodoro y El Secreto del Loro. Madrid: (1857)
  • Un servilón y un liberalito, o Tres almas de Dios. (1857)
  • Relaciones. (1857) - Collection of popular tales and poems.
  • Cuentos y poesías populares andaluzas. Seville: La Revista Mercantil (1859)
  • Una en Otra. Con mal o con bien. Á los tuyos te ten. (1861) - Costumbrista novel
  • Vulgaridad y nobleza: cuadro de costumbres populares[20]. (1861)
  • Matrimonio bien avenido, la mujer junto al marido[21]. (1863)
  • Promesa de un soldado a la Virgen del Carmen.[22] Madrid: (1863)
  • El ex-voto.[23] Madrid: (1863)
  • El Alcázar de Sevilla[24]. Madrid: (1863)
  • Un Verano en Bornos. (1864)
  • Cuentos, oraciones, adivinanzas y refranes populares. Madrid: T. Fortanet (1877)
  • La estrella de Vandalia ; ¡Pobre dolores![25] (1880)
  • Pobres y ricos (1890)
  • Cuentos de encantamiento infantiles. Children's tales. Madrid: Revista de Archivos (1911)
  • El refranero del campo y poesías populares. Madrid: Revista de Archivos (1914)
  • Cuentos, adivinanzas y refranes populares, recopilación (1921)

References

  1. ↑ Flitter, Derek, Teoría y crítica del romanticismo español, Original title Spanish Romantic literary and criticism. (1st ed. 1992). Madrid, Ediciones Akal, 2015.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Sánchez Núñez, Pedro (1999). Fernán Caballero y Dos Hermanas, Boletín de la Real academia Sevillana de Buenas Letras Minervae Baeticae, (27), pp. 97-125.
  3. ↑ Demetrio Estébanez, op. cit.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 María Alicia LANGA LAORGA. "Fernán Caballero: El reflejo de una época" (in español).
  5. ↑ D. Estébanez, op. cit.
  6. ↑ Estébanez Calderón, Demetrio. "Cecilia Bohl de Faber". Diccionario biográfico de la Real Academia de la Historia (in español). RAH.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Poza, Milagros Fernández (1996). "La familia Böhl de Faber Larrea y "Fernán Caballero" en El Puerto de Santa María, 1821-1854". Revista de historia de El Puerto (in español) (16). ISSN 1130-4340. Retrieved October 22, 2018.
  8. ↑ "Celebridades católicas: Fernán Caballero". La Lectura Dominical (in español) (121): 267. April 26, 1896.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Comellas, Mercedes, ed. (2010). "FERNÁN CABALLERO Obras escogidas" (PDF). Fundación José Manuel Lara, (in español). Archived from the original (PDF) on December 22, 2015. Retrieved October 23, 2018.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  10. ↑ Comellas, Mercedes (2010). ""Introducción"" (PDF). Fernán Caballero. Obras escogidas (in español). Fundación José Manuel Lara. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 22, 2015. Retrieved December 19, 2015.
  11. ↑ Internet, Unidad Editorial. "Nuevos cachitos de Rosalía" (in español). Retrieved October 22, 2018.
  12. ↑ "Historia". www.fernan-caballero.org (in español). Retrieved October 22, 2018.
  13. ↑ William Berrien. "Algunos propósitos literarios de Fernán Caballero". www.google.es (in español). Retrieved October 22, 2018.
  14. ↑ Xavier Andreu Miralles, « La mujer católica y la regeneración de España: género, nación y modernidad en Fernán Caballero »,Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 42-2,2012, 17-35.
  15. ↑ Xavier Andreu Miralles, « La mujer católica y la regeneración de España: género, nación y modernidad en Fernán Caballero »..., p. 27
  16. ↑ https://journals.openedition.org/mcv/4514?lang=es#ftn45
  17. ↑ Rubio Cremades, Enrique. "Biografía de Fernán Caballero" (in español). Universidad de Alicante.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Andreu Miralles, Xavier (November 15, 2012). "La mujer católica y la regeneración de España: género, nación y modernidad en Fernán Caballero". Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez (in español) (42–2): 17–35. doi:10.4000/mcv.4514. ISSN 0076-230X. Retrieved October 23, 2018.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 RIVERO RODRÍGUEZ, Josefa (2015). "Universos cotidianos en la narrativa de Fernán Caballero y Jane Austen" (PDF). UMA (in español). Retrieved October 23, 2018.
  20. ↑ "Vulgaridad y nobleza: cuadro de costumbres populares" (in español).
  21. ↑ "Matrimonio bien avenida, la mujer junto al marido" (in español).
  22. ↑ "Promesa de un soldado a la Virgen del Carmen" (in español).
  23. ↑ "El ex-voto" (in español).
  24. ↑ "El Alcázar de Sevilla" (in español).
  25. ↑ "La Estrella de Vandalia; ¡Pobre Dolores!" (in español).

Bibliography

  • AMORES, M. Fernán Caballero y el cuento folclórico. Biblioteca de Temas Portuenses, El Puerto de Santa María, 2001.
  • COMELLAS, Mercedes. Introducción a Fernán Caballero, Obras escogidas Archived December 22, 2015, at the Wayback Machine. Seville, Fundación Lara, 2010.
  • ESTÉBANEZ, Demetrio. Introduction to La Gaviota, Cátedra, Col. Letras Hispánicas, 4th edition, Madrid, 2008.
  • FERNÁNDEZ POZA, Milagros. Cecilia Böhl de Faber: Fernán Caballero (1796-1877) Ediciones del Orto, 2003. ISBN 84-7923-318-4
  • La pluma como espada. Del Romanticismo al Modernismo. Edited by Anna Caballé. Editorial Círculo de Lectores. Barcelona. 2003. ISBN 84-226-9864-1
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