Haberly, D. Echeverria, Sacrificial Masculinity

Male Anxiety and Sacrificial Masculinity: The Case of Echeverría
Author(s): David T. Haberly

Source: Hispanic Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 291-307
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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MALE ANXIETY AND SACRIFICIAL
MASCULINITY:
The Case of Echeverria
David T. Haberly
Universityof Virginia
In the second section of his "Afectosintimos,"datedSeptember26, 1835,

EstebanEcheverriadescribesan attractiveyoung woman and then laments
thathe cannotpursueand possessher. In a remarkable passageworth quot-
ing in its entirety,Echeverriaassertsthat his frequentand violent cardiac
arrhythmiasmakesuch a conquestimpossible,robbinghim of the abilityto
feel and act and, ultimately,deprivinghim of his masculinity:
El coraz6nme dominay tiene a rayatodos mis afectos.Ni me permite

amarni aborrecer,ni agitarme,ni moverme;ni hablarrecioparadesahogar
mi c61era,mi entusiasmoo mi indignaci6n;ni correra caballo,ni en-
tregarmea esos arrebatosfreneticos,a ese v&rtigode los sentidos,que en
otrotiempopor mediode la laxitudquebrantaban el impetude mis pasio-
el ardorde mi sangrey adormianen tanto la actividad
nes, refrigeraban
devorantede mi pensamiento.Mazzepaal desnudolomo de fieroe indo-
mablepotro que me Ilevaal travisde los desiertosde la vida:no me es
dadoobrar,ni moverme,ni soltarla riendaa la actividadque me roe;ni
vengarme,ni derramaruna ligrima;s61osi desear,lucharcon mis senti-
mientosy sofocarlos;pensar,devorarme a mi mismo,consumirme,dudar,
maldecir, blasfemar,
padecery sufriren silencio.
(Obrascompletas 547)1
1. This edition will hereafter be referredto in the text as OC.
HispanicReview (summer 2005) 291

Copyright c 2005 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania
292 HISPANIC REVIEW : summer2oo5
Particularly striking in Echeverria'sdescription of his loss of masculine ac-

tion and sexuality is his barely veiled allusion, in the last section of the first
sentence, to his inability even to masturbate.
While the passage I have just cited specifically refers to Echeverria'spersis-
tent and somewhat puzzling heart problems, problems that apparently con-
tributed to his death at the age of forty-six, I will suggest in this essay that
the crisis of masculinity the passage describes was psychological and literary
as well as medical. Further,I will argue that versions of the same crisis may
be seen in other members of the group of young writers and intellectuals
Echeverrialed, the Generation of 1837.Finally, I will propose that an under-
standing of this personal and generational crisis can serve as the basis for a
new and rather different reading of Echeverria's two masterpieces, "La cau-
tiva" and "El matadero."
Echeverria's self-identifying reference to Byron's Mazeppa in "Afectos
intimos" suggests at least a subliminal awareness that his condition, however
personal and particular,was in some way linked to a broader Romantic crisis
of masculinity. A number of scholars have begun to explore the origins of
that conflict in eighteenth-century Europe, when "the cult of sentiment-or
sensibility, as it was then known-constructed the figure of the 'man of feel-
ing' as a male body feminized by affect, a sort of emotional cross-dresser"
(Chapman and Hendler 3). A good deal of work has been done on the con-
struction of literary masculinity in England during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, and there is now a large bibliography dealing with that
issue in North American literature in the decades before the Civil War.2 In
sharp contrast, there has been almost no discussion of these topics within
the context of nineteenth-century Spanish American writing.3
The North American experience, however, seems to me particularlyrele-
vant-in both general and specific ways-to Echeverria and the Generation
of 1837.As David Leverenzhas noted, a number of male American writers in
the first half of the century shared an intense and anxious "self-consciousness
of being deviant from prevailing norms of manhood" (15). The societal mod-
els of masculinity, in the post-Jacksonian United States as in Juan Manuel de
Rosas's Argentina, were "powerful brutal people," in Ralph Waldo Emer-
2. A useful account of the history of the topic is provided by Chapman and Hendler (1-9).
3. Relevant recent studies of homoeroticism in nineteenth-century Spanish American literature
are those of Salessi, Geirola,and Ellis (31-54). Also see the article by Foster.
Haberly : MALE ANXIETY AND SACRIFICIAL MASCULINITY 293
son's phrase (qtd. in Leverenz 13), who dominated, conquered, and con-
trolled. Such men, Emerson complained, "oppress me with their excessive
virility" (qtd. in Leverenz 13). Male writers and intellectuals appear to have
had a general sense that the rules and the roles of gender had somehow been
altered-by sensibility, by political independence, by the rise of commerce,
and by the emergence of serious competition from female writers-and wor-
ried that there was no place for them in this new America.4 Washington
Irving's epigraph to his Sketch Book provides an early glimpse of the new
stereotype of the male American writer, a stereotypeboth culturally imposed
and psychologically self-generated: "I have no wife nor children, good or
bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures
[. . .]" (1).5 Margaret Fuller was quoted by William Henry Channing as
contrasting the "boyish crudity, half boastful, half timid" of American male
writers "with the tempered, manly equipoise of thorough-bred European
writers" (qtd. in Leverenz 12).
A remarkable1832article by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow not only sums
up the problem of literary unmanliness, but also recognizes a common and
potentially viable solution. Defending poetry and, by extension, all literature,
Longfellow complains that "the spirit of the age is clamorous for utility,-for
visible, tangible utility,-for bare, brawny, muscular utility" and that too
many Americans associate the solitary and sensitive "scholar and man of
letters" with "effeminacy and inefficiency" and are convinced "that literature
begets an effeminate and craven spirit" (59, 62).6 Longfellow admits that in
North America the gushing stream of classical verse has "spread itself into
stagnant pools, which exhale an unhealthy atmosphere, whilst the parti-
colored bubbles that glitter on its surface, show the corruption from which
they spring. Another circumstance which tends to give an effeminate and
unmanly character to our literature, is the precocity of our writers. Prema-
ture exhibitions of talent are an unstable foundation to build a national liter-
ature upon" (77). The discretely symbolic referencesin this passage to non-
4. The bibliography on this topic is vast. Among the most important texts are the works of
Rotundo, Leverenz, and Derrick (for masculine anxiety in general and its literary expression);
Nina Baym (for the Indian as topic for male and female writers); Newbury (for the economic
context of the anxiety of male writers); and Romero, Gilmore, and Gould (for the literaryconnec-
tion between masculine anxiety and the Indian).
5. The epigraph comes from Robert Burton's Anatomyof Melancholy(Irving 305).
6. To counter the idea that literature was inherently unmanly, Longfellow-the first serious
American Hispanist-cites Ercilla,Garcilaso, and Cervantesas warriorwriters.
294 - HISPANIC REVIEW : summer2oo5
reproductive male masturbation and premature ejaculation are, in fact, typi-

cal of discussions of problematic masculinity in early nineteenth-century
America.7
Longfellow closes by insisting that the solution to feminized irrelevance is
to make "our literature [...] as original, characteristic,and national as possi-
ble" and recognizes that one typical route to both cultural nationhood and
literary masculinity is to utilize the Indian to achieve both goals, thereby
moving back and forth across the unstable frontiers that separated white
from Indian and sentimental effeminacy from primitive masculinity. Paul
Gilmore's notion that Cooper and others imagined Indian masculinity as a
performance is particularly useful in understanding this process: primitive
manhood serves as a mask that writers and actors alike can wear within the
context of the performanceof a text (26-30). Moreover, despite his utility in
the immediate task of creating metaphorical manhood, the Indian was also
fundamentally non-threatening because of the widespread belief, particularly
in the years just before and after the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act,
that the natives were doomed to disappear without posing a serious challenge
to white American control and expansion.8 This view of the Indian's future
dominated the literary "cult of the Vanishing Indian" (Dippie 2; Romero
385), which described the actual or potential disappearance of the native in
elegiac terms. The Vanishing Indian enshrined in these texts, of course, was
very much a myth that to some extent represented wishful thinking on the
part of white Americans-the hope that Indians would simply fade away, to
the West or to death.9 More specifically, such texts implicitly asserted the
innocence of their white authors and readers by presenting the disappearance
of the Indian as a natural and inevitable process. And, as Renee Bergland has
pointed out, many of the Vanishing Indians of nineteenth-century American
literature do not disappear for good, returning at night as ghostly forms to
haunt those who have dispossessed them.
Another option for young male writers anxious about the manliness of
their calling was to seek national authenticity and manhood in the Puritan
7. See Ashworth's articlefor a more detailed discussion of this topic.

8. For the controversyover Indian Removal and its literary context and consequences, see Mad-
dox 15-49.
9. As Lora Romero has noted, government efforts to eliminate or contain American Indians by
military means actuallylasted until the early 188os, about the same time as the Argentine "Cam-
pafia del Desierto" (385-86).
past, as John GreenleafWhittierdid in his 1831Legendsof New-England.

Whittiersharedhis generation'sfearof unmanliness,complainingthat "we
are becomingeffeminatein everything-in our habitsas well as our litera-
ture" (On Writers26). A gentle and bookish Quaker,a life-long bachelor
constantlyafflictedby mysteriousillnesses,Whittiermay well havefelt par-
ticularlyanxious about his masculinity.He refused,however,to acceptthe
idealizationof the Indianas a literarysolution, and severalof his Legends
enthusiasticallycelebratethe Puritandestructionof utterly immoral red-
skinneddemons, as deadlya scourgeas rattlesnakesor wolves and equally
deservingof extermination.Whittierpresentsthe brain-spattering violence
of that exterminationboth as a justifiableresponseto the contaminationof
the landscapeby Indianevil and as the core of New England'shistoryand
character.ThatPuritancapacityfor violence,moreover,had createdand de-
fined Americanmasculinityin the past and, if recoveredthroughliterature,
could restoretrue manhoodto the present.
"The Mother'sRevenge,"one of Whittier'sbloodiestlegends,is the first
nineteenth-centuryrewritingof the 1697captivityof HannahDuston (Leg-
ends 125-31).1oHe first presents Hannah as the perfect domestic figure:
"Woman'sattributesare generallyconsideredof a milderand purercharac-
ter than those of man. The virtuesof meek affection,of ferventpiety, of
winningsympathyandof that'charitywhichforgivethoften,'aremorepecu-
liarlyher own" (125).Afterher husbandfails to save her duringan Indian
raid, Hannahis capturedby diabolicalsavageswho smash her baby'shead
againsta tree. The sacrificeof her child masculinizesher, awakening"all
those dark and terriblepassions,which madden and distractthe heart of
manhood"(125),and allow her accessto the white maleviolenceWhittier's
volume celebrates.Thatnight,while the Indiansaresleeping,Hannahsteals
a hatchet,killsthem, and scalpsten of her captorsbeforeescaping.Hannah's
conversionfrom angelicwife to angelof death,I would suggest,represents
Whittier'sfantasythat in a more heroicpast,despitehis feminizedstatusas
io. See Weis for the historical backgroundand other nineteenth-centuryversions of this captivity.
Weis reads this text as an implicit attack on women who move outside the female sphere. Such an
attack clearly is explicit in Hawthorne's later revision of Whittier's account, but I simply do not
see it in "The Mother's Revenge."My own reading is that Whittierwas not satisfied by fantasies
of extreme anti-Indian violence by white militia men, as in "The Midnight Attack" (Legends
7-14), since his anxiety about his own masculinity made it difficult for him to identify with their
unquestioned and powerful masculinity, and that he therefore needed to project such violence
onto a female subject.
296 HISPANIC REVIEW : summer2005
a writer and his own physical weakness, he too could have performed mascu-
line ferocity.
I have brought Whittier's legend into this essay because it so closely mir-
rors the basic attitudes and structure of "La cautiva," encouraging me to
suggest that Echeverriashared some of Whittier's anxieties about masculin-
ity, independently developing somewhat similar solutions. The crisis of aes-
thetic manhood, in fact, appears to have been even more intense for Eche-
verria and the other members of the Argentine 1837 group, "una facci6n
juvenil de la elite letrada" (Sarlo and Altamirano xlvi), than for their North
American contemporaries. They were one generation closer to the moment
of political independence, and saw themselves as the natural leaders-by ed-
ucation, intellect, and sensibility-of a divided and chaotic nation that had
not yet organized itself politically. While male writers in Boston or New York
were lamenting their alienation and grumbling about female competition,
their counterparts in Buenos Aires faced exile, torture, and even death.
In his opening speech to the Sal6n Literario in September of 1837, the
same month he published his Rimas, Echeverria described the task of his
generation: "ser hombres y mostrarse dignos descendientes de los bravos que
supieron dejarles en herencia una patria" (OC 201). He admitted, however,
that he and his colleagues were not yet viewed as real men by their society;
they were "cansados de oirse Ilamar nifios" (OC 201). In the same speech,
Echeverriasuggested that his generation had been prematurely weaned from
"nuestros juegos infantiles" by military and political conflict (OC 199), but
at the same time worried that generation and nation alike might be doomed
to "permanecer siempre en infancia" (OC 202). Juan Bautista Alberdi,
Echeverria's most self-aware colleague, attacked his whole generation as
"hombres de estilo, [. . .] hombres de forma, forma de hombres [quienes]
hablan como hombres, y no son sino nifios [...] "(o108-09). Echeverria was
thirty-two years old in 1837,and Alberdi and Juan Maria Gutierrez, the other
leaders of the group, were about four years younger; but a number of their
followers in what Marcos Sastre called "la marcha de la juventud" (qtd. in
Sarlo and Altamirano xxviii) really were almost children in 1837,ranging in
age from seventeen to twenty. All were prepared to follow Echeverriain pur-
suit of his visions of Argentina's future, "visiones risuefias que le rodeaban
perpetuamente y le Ilamaban con seducci6n irresistible. Hacia ellas [Eche-
verria] caminaba inocente como un nifio, pensador como un sabio, inspi-
rado como un poeta, [...] personificaci6n de todas las perfecciones posibles"
(Gutierrez, "Noticias biogrificas"; in OC 145-46).
One reason the "nifios"of 1837definedthemselvesas marginalizedand

immaturewas their intense feelingthat they had somehowbeen robbedof
their rightfulinheritance,the "gloriasde la naci6n y de nuestrasnotabili-
dadesrevolucionarias[que] nos tocanpor herencia,pues formanla esplen-
dida corona de nuestraPatria,"as Echeverriaput it (OC 265). Sarloand
Altamiranohave noted that "Laidea de perdida,de caida, de privaci6nde
una herencia"was a standardRomantictrope, but one which "bienpodia
sertraducidaen terminosde vidapfiblica,en un espaciodondelos miembros
de la JovenArgentinajuzgabanque la politicaencarnadapor Rosaslos habia
privadode un poder que hubierandebido ejercer[. . .]" (xvii). National
dispossession,moreover,paralleledpersonaland generationalloss:Argentina
had been robbed of the Banda Oriental; the pampas-"nuestro maispinguie
patrimonio" in Echeverria'swords-had been taken over by savage Indians
and uncultured gauchos; and foreign merchants allied with Buenos Aires's
new commercial class, the tenderos, threatened the social and economic
status of the traditional elite."
If the participants in "la marcha de la juventud" defined themselves as
prepubescent and dispossessed, they were also clearly marked-in their own
eyes as in the eyes of many of their contemporaries-as feminized: they were
foppish, dressed in the latest Paris fashions (Echeverria,for example, used a
gold monocle and always wore a frac); they enjoyed playing and composing
music, as well as dancing; their readings in European literature had taught
them to admire and at least to feign an intense if unmanly sensibility.'2Only
Jose Rivera Indarte appears to have been openly homosexual (Sommer 88),
but the two most important members of the group, Alberdi and Echeverria,
both appear to have situated themselves on the frontier between sentimental
and cultural feminization, on the one hand, and effeminacy.'3 The major
members of the group participated in the publication of Alberdi's weekly
women's magazine La Moda (November 1837-April1838),an exercise in jour-
nalistic transvestitism; this "gacetita semanaria de mfisica, de poesia, de
literatura, de costumbres, de modas," as Sommer notes, "was correctly sus-
ii. The Echeverria quote comes from the prologue to the Rimas (qtd. in Rotker 83). For the
enduring impact of the belief that Argentina had been robbed of its rightful territory,see Dodds;
especially324-26.
12. For male feminization and the origins of Argentine feminism, see Masiello (21-36).
13. RiveraIndarte's friends and colleagues referredto his orientation only in vague terms, and by
the end of his short life he was ostracizedby the group, one of whom describedhim as "husmeante
y humilde en apariencia como un rat6n cuya cueva nadie sabia-tenia mucho talento y un alma
de lo maisvil que pueda imaginarse" (Vicente Fidel L6pez, qtd. in Mayer 58-59).
pected of frontingfor the unmanlyEuropeanized'fops,' [. ..] a womanly

voice as the men's public organ"(88). And when the group and its allies
turnedon each other, as they often did, their diatribessometimesexplicitly
questioned the masculinityof their opponents. Sarmiento,for example,
calledAlberdi"'an old maidin searchof a husband,'a shysterlawyerwith a
woman'svoice, [...] a politicaleunuch [. . .]" (qtd. in Lippii). Alberdi,the
"dandymimadode la hauteportefia"(Oliver98), didn't hesitateto declare
his entirely feminine characterin letters to friends, although "this self-
portraitdidn't suppose a confessionof sexual ambiguity"(Tulio Halperin
Donghi, qtd. in Sommer351).Alberdioccasionallyexpressedconsiderable
misogynyand nevermarried(Speroni27;Masiello24-25), but did fatheran
illegitimate son in 1838(Oliver 98-99).
Most of what we know about Echeverria'spersonal life comes filtered
throughhis highlyprotectivefriendand editor,Gutierrez,presentedboth in
the latter'shagiographicbiographyand in the autobiographicalor pseudo-
autobiographical texts Gutierrezrelied upon for that biographyand which
he included-and perhapsredacted-in his edition of Echeverria'sObras
completas.The masterlife narrativethat Gutierrezprovidesoften simultane-
ously assertsand undercutsEcheverria'smasculinity.First, that narrative
stresses-and perhapsexaggerates or mischaracterizes-theprecocioussexu-
ality and moral dissipation of the young Echeverria,whose fatherdied in
1816.It also describeshis intensesensibility.The narrativegoes on to suggest
that his scandaloustransgressionsended with the death of his mother in
1822-an eventhe blamed,throughouthis life, on his youthfulsins.Accord-
ing to the chronologyof the "Afectosintimos,"which are datedSeptember
and October of 1835,Echeverria'sheart problems began in 1822or 1823,
closelycoincidingwith his mother'sdeath (OC 548). The passagefrom the
"Afectosintimos"quotedat the beginningof this study directlylinksEche-
verria'sarrhythmiasto physicalimpotenceand to the sedentaryand solitary
life of the mind, suggestingthat Echeverriasaw himself as desexualizedby
illnessand that he viewed writingas inextricablylinked to his pathology.14
The "Afectos"also revealthatEcheverria's arrhythmiasvirtuallydisappeared
duringhis five yearsin France.Echeverriawrote almost nothingabout his
14. The more practicaland energeticGuti&rrez

believedthat Echeverria'sheartproblemswere
caused,ratherthancured,by the medicalcarehe received,assertingthat withoutsuchcare"se
habriarestablecido
nadamasquecon ayudade unabuenahigieney de un parentesis a sustrabajos
sedentarios"
(OC120).
personal life in Paris, a "curioso silencio" (Sarlo and Altamirano ix) that
almost all of the poet's biographers have noted. The arrhythmias reappeared
and worsened after Echeverria came back to Argentina. He never married,
but he did father an illegitimate daughter at some point (Knowlton 68).
Whatever the exact nature of their private sexuality, Echeverria and Al-
berdi both framed their shared anxiety about manhood in terms of a central
concern with sterility that was inextricably connected to their sense of per-
sonal, generational, and national dispossession. In one of Alberdi's articulos,
an elderly veteran of the Wars of Independence doubts that the new genera-
tion, "los hijos de los fuertes [...] condenados a nacer raquiticos," are manly
enough to succeed the Founding Fathers of 1810o,telling his bored young
companions that "Los hombres que tienen sangre en las mejillas no duermen
de zozobra cuando se ven llamados a reemplazara los gigantes" and that "La
grandeza se prueba por la fecundidad [... .]" (111). As the rightful, if dispos-
sessed, heirs to an Argentine nation consistently metaphorized as both female
and maternal, the members of the "joven generaci6n" themselves had a civic
and masculine duty to marry and engender legitimate heirs to the national
patrimony, a task neither Echeverria nor Alberdi accomplished. In their
works, moreover, a personal sense of unmanly sterility is sublimated into a
vision of all of Argentina as a political, cultural, and ultimately moral de-
sierto-potentially fertile but nonetheless profoundly and perhaps perma-
nently unproductive.
Alberdi described Argentine sterility in very specific, physical terms. In his
later Bases, he argues that the nation's men should be replaced by more
suitable European males, who will eagerly marry Argentina's "hermosas y
amables mujeres." Alberdi then suggests, however, that national sterility ulti-
mately derives from the nation's women rather than its men, since unspeci-
fied "impedimentos inmorales [. . .] hacen esteril el poder del bello sexo
americano [... ]" (qtd. in Sommer 103-o4). Even more striking is Alberdi's
"Predicar en desiertos," which appeared in La Moda in March of 1838.Al-
berdi describes Argentina as an intellectual and moral desert: a few refined
members of his own group can understand and appreciate European culture,
but all other Argentine men are mentally sterile tenderos or uneducated
urban and rural workers. Women, he suggests, are the most culturally sterile
of all: "Escribirpara las mujeres, es predicar en desiertos, porque no leen, ni
quieren leer, y si Ilegan a leer, leen como oyen llover" (63). However, the
problem with Argentina's women-the putative readers of Alberdi's text, it
should be remembered-is not only their ignorance, but their immoral re-
fusal to procreate. His analysis of their willful infertility contains what must
be the first Spanish American description of an abortion: "Vamos bailando
y paseando, y despues una de dos, o secaindonos en el trabajo, o secandonos
en el deleite, y despues, mas tarde, encerrandonos, y despues ilorando, y
despues vomitando sangre, y despues entregando al cielo una vida recien
comenzada: jesto es bello, natural sin duda!" (63-64).
In Echeverria's case, the desert is both personal and national. It is, first,
his own existence, the "desiertos de la vida" he traverses as Byron's Mazeppa
in the "Afectos intimos": the "desiertos que Echeverria atravesabaenfermo,
menesteroso y extranjeroen la vida" that Gutierrez described (OC 145). It is
also the Argentina of Rosas: he and his followers, Echeverria wrote, awoke
from childhood dreams of the nation they deserved to inherit only to find
"en lugar suyo un desierto sembrado de cadciveres y ruinas [. . .]" (OC 277;
Dogma Socialista). And it is also the landscape of "La cautiva," where the
natural "gala verdosa de la llanura" is turned to dust by the horses of the
Indians who have stolen Argentina's "mais pinguie patrimonio." Literature
may have seemed, to Echeverria,the only possible antidote to personal and
national sterility; Gutierrez, writing about his friend several decades later,
declared that misfortune and marginality "proporcionan a las inteligencias
fecundas ocasi6n para concentrarse y para producir frutos sazonados" (OC
145),allowing Echeverriato create works that are "el fruto entero de la cabeza
sazonada y del delicado coraz6n [...]" (OC 103).
In September of 1837,Marcos Sastre urged Echeverria to accept the presi-
dency of the Sal6n Literarioand to actively lead his generation and its cru-
sade: "Ya es tiempo de que Ud., que reuine a la instrucci6n, el don de la
palabra,el cr6dito literario y la edad juvenil, ponga en acci6n estos poderosos
resortes [. . .]" (qtd. in Sarlo and Altamirano xxviii). Echeverria,however,
was a man of words and feelings, physically and psychologically unprepared
to lead the "ninios"in their struggle against forces both led and personified
by a fully adult and procreative man of action, such as Rosas: a man who
had defended Argentina against the English in 1806, who had a very visible
wife and daughter, who had exercised legal or de facto control over Buenos
Aires since 1829, and who had personally killed Indians and freed their cap-
tives. By 1837,Echeverria,at least, may have realized that the anti-Rosas cru-
sade of the "nifios" was already lost. Some members of the group had gone
into exile, experiencing physical as well as emotional dispossession; others,
including Echeverria,would soon follow. In his Dogma Socialista,he consis-
tently uses a Biblical vocabulary of suffering and redemption to describe the
noble cause and its failure, writing that "No hay bailsamoalguno que calme
los corazones lacerados, ningminremedio a la inquietud y desaz6n de los
inimos, ninguna luz que guie a los hijos de la patria en el abismo espantoso
donde los ha sumergido el desenfreno de las pasiones y los atentados de la
tirania" (OC 262). The only honorable and Christian choice, he concluded,
was martyrdom:"Vamos a sacrificarla vida que nos queda en beneficio de las
generaciones venideras. Si triunfamos, ellas bendecirin nuestros nombres: si
perecemos antes de tiempo, daran una ligrima a nuestras malogradas pero
nobles intenciones, y continuaran la obra que iniciamos" (OC 266).
Echeverria himself did not die in action, although he may well have
dreamed of a heroic, fully masculine death like that of Byron at Missolonghi.
In an 1844 letter, Echeverria looks back at his career and admits that he has
been a man of words rather than deeds, and has not contributed physically
to the anti-Rosas struggle. He nonetheless denies any sense of guilt or failure,
insisting that he has always been the literary and intellectual leader of the
movement, and that because of his ideas and words a "multitud de j6venes
han buscado el martirio en los campos de batalla, o se ha ido a mendigar el
pan del extranjero" (qtd. in Sarlo and Altamirano xxix). As this letter sug-
gests, a key component of his leadership of the crusade-and of its ultimate
consequences, the martyrdom and exile of those he influenced-was Eche-
verria's ability to textualize his generation's sense of unmanly weakness and
dispossession, transforming feminization into a heroic and ultimately sacri-
ficial masculinity he could only accomplish in writing.
Such textualization was far more difficult for Echeverriathan for his con-
temporaries in the United States. While North American writers could per-
form masculinity through Indians or through backwoodsmen like Natty
Bumpo, such performances were politically and even culturally impossible
for Echeverria,who could identify with Mazeppa but not with Argentina's
Indians, who were encroaching rather than quietly disappearing into the
west, or with the gauchos associated with Rosas.We can see Echeverriatrying
to resolve the problem of textualizing both masculinity and the national real-
ity in two early prose texts, the "Peregrinajede Gualpo" and the "Cartas a
un amigo." In both of these fragmentaryand mediocre works, he is working
out a basic plot, envisioning a central character more or less like himself,
and exploring potential settings. In these texts, moreover, self-absorbed and
unmanned heroes are offered opportunities for action but fail to rise to those
challenges, thereby evading the humanitarian and patriotic duties of adult
males.
302 " HISPANIC REVIEW : summeraoo5
The unfinished "Peregrinaje de Gualpo" was probably written in 1825,

when Echeverriawas departingfor France (Sarlo and Altamirano 46). Gualpo
is a mysterious and blighted figure, who may trace his ancestry to "la cuna
de los Incas" and has "echado un velo" over his turbulent and dissipated
youth. His friends, recognizing his talents, "a veces le reprochaban su in-
acci6n y que pasase su juventud en silencio y la obscuridad, cuando podia
emplearla con ventajaen bien de su patria o de sus semejantes" (OC 447-48),
but he chooses to avoid responsibility. The first stages of his ocean voyage
present him with three possible arenas for patriotic or humanitarian action:
the Argentine struggle to free the Banda Oriental from the "ursurpador del
Brasil," the overthrow of despotic monarchy in Brazil, and the noble cause
of abolishing Africanslaverythere. Gualpo, a sensitive but completely passive
observer, does nothing; "se entrega de nuevo con regocijo a las inquietas
ondas" and continues on his way (OC 449-50, 454-55).
A similar pattern and a similar central character appear in Echeverria's
"Cartas a un amigo," a text that is far more fully developed and more per-
sonal-or, at least, closer to what I have referred to as the master narrative
Echeverria and Gutierrez created. As a number of critics have pointed out,
moreover, elements in the "Cartas"clearly prefigure "La cautiva."'5The au-
thor of the letters, a sensitive and well-educated young man, blames his own
scandalous behavior for his mother's death; before she dies, she tells him that
"El hombre debe abrigaraspiraciones elevadas. La Patria espera de sus hijos:
ella es la finica madre que te queda [...]" (OC 518). He first seeks solace in
the campo, where he meets Maria, whose brother and fiance have gone off to
defend the territory against Indian raids (OC 524). Despite his mother's ad-
vice, the author does not volunteer to join in this patriotic and masculine
duty and later learns, after he has moved on to Buenos Aires, that the two
men died heroically in an Indian attack and that Maria has gone mad (OC
531). He sends some money to her widowed mother, but his depression-
which the narrative does not explicitly relate to his failure of will in the
campo-becomes so severe that a year later he decides to kill himself. His
15. The text as a whole is undated, but the dates on the letters themselves cover a twenty-month
period starting in June of "182 . . .". Because the first letters describe the death of the narrator's
mother and his subsequent visit to the campo, Leonor Fleming has suggested that the "Cartas"
were written "entre 1822 y 1823" (20). Echeverria's mother did die in 1822, and shortly thereafter
he spent time on a ranch owned by a brother. Nonetheless, the relatively sophisticated language
and structure of the "Cartas,"as well as the influence of the Walpurgisnachtsection of Goethe's
Faust found in letter 24, lead me to believe that the text itself was written in 1832or 1833.
mother's spirit appears in a vision, saving him from death, and he promptly
recovers completely; a few days later he is courting an attractive young
woman (OC 536-40).
The fundamental difference between these early efforts and Echeverria's
two most famous texts is that, in the latter, the challenge to act is accepted
and a redemptive sacrifice is performed. Both "La cautiva" and "El mata-
dero," in fact, are versions of a single story. The details of setting and charac-
ter vary, but the story does not change because it is Echeverria'sstory-his
allegory of dispossession and redemption, his fantasy of masculine action
and moral victory, his use of the power of words to perform the heroic
martyrdom he urged on others but which his own physical frailty made im-
possible. Those details, however, can mislead us. In the case of "La cautiva,"
for example, the poem is not specifically about women, male fears of women,
or fear of miscegenation, as some recent criticism has argued; neither, in fact,
is it even about Indians.16Maria and the grotesquely savage natives, rather,
are simply symbols Echeverria uses to explore his personal and generational
obsessions; Maria could be male, the Indians could be gauchos, the setting
could be Buenos Aires rather than the pampas, but the story would be the
same.
That single story, in both "La cautiva" and "El matadero," contains five
basic elements. Because both texts are so well known, I will not reference
page numbers and will only provide brief, parentheticalexplanations of sig-
nificant details in the shared plot.
1. A civilized female or feminized male is taken captive within a space-
the pampas, the slaughter-house and, by extension, Buenos Aires as a
whole-unjustly appropriated and occupied by the barbarous and violently
male Other, and is there threatened with sexual violation by the Other. The
male Indians in "La cautiva" are emblems of a primitive, uncontrollable,
and threatening masculinity; they not only fight and defeat their white male
opponents, but then turn upon each other in a chaotic and bloody drunken
brawl the Indian women are unable to stop. In the background, the female
cautivas tearfully wait to be raped. The male butchers in "El matadero" are
16. My discussion of Echeverria and "La cautiva" has been greatly influenced by the work of
Masiello, Sommer, Gruesz, and Rotker, and by Opere's book and article; but is also written, to
some extent, against those sources. My view of "El matadero"owes much to three ground-break-
ing studies, those of Foster, Salessi (54-74), and Skinner.
304 HISPANICREVIEW: summer2oo5
similarly brutal to animals and humans alike and menace the unitario with
both physical and sexual violence.
2. Mature male figures of civilized authority are unable or unwilling to
help the captive. Brian, a veteran of the Andean campaigns for Indepen-
dence, is the acknowledged leader of the cristianos but cannot help himself
or others; in his impotent delirium in section eight, he calls repeatedly for
the lanza he is no longer able to wield. In "El matadero," the English busi-
nessman symbolizing foreign commercial interests falls off his horse into the
mud; the juez who should represent civil authority participates in tormenting
the unitario.
3. Two preliminarysacrifices at the hands of the Other prefigure the final
sacrifice in each text. An animal is killed (the mare whose blood the Indians
drink "como sedientos vampiros"; the novillo in "El matadero"). An inno-
cent male child is also killed (Maria's son, in whose blood the Indians wash
their hands; the boy accidentally beheaded by the lasso and barely mourned
by the inhabitants of the matadero). Both kinds of sacrifice emphasize the
bloody brutality and inhumanity of the Other; both also suggest a broad
range of religious connotations.
4. Because the Other mistakes femininity and sentiment for weakness, the
heroine or the feminized hero contradicts and confounds expectations-the
expectations of the brutal and masculine Other, of the mature male figure of
authority, of the reader-by performing a violent, masculinizing gesture that
leads directly or indirectly to martyrdom. Maria protects her honor, avenges
the deaths of her son and her parents, rescues the helpless Brian by killing
two Indians, and almost manages to get him to safety before she dies; the
young and foppish unitario would rather die than be feminized by penetra-
tion. "El matadero" in fact prefigures its ending earlier in the story, through
the resistance of the presumed steer who turns out to be a bull. The mascu-
linizing gesture is moral, even when it leads to the death of others, since-as
Echeverriawrote in 1844-all acts are moral "cuando nos compele a obrar
una creencia intima y racional" (qtd. in Sarlo and Altamirano xxix). Maria's
moral violence is thus clearly contrasted, in the fourth section of "La cau-
tiva," to the indiscriminate and immoral violence of the troops-perhaps
intended to represent those of Rosas in his campaign against the natives-
who slaughter defenseless Indian women and children.
5. The heroine or hero dies, but martyrdom is presented as a moral victory
over the Other and the appropriated space is symbolically redeemed, restored
to its original state or ownership. That restoration is easy to see at the end of
"El matadero," where the judge and the butchers abandon the slaughter-
house. In "La cautiva," Echeverria clearly felt it necessary to refeminize

Maria before her death; the third section makes it clear that she is aware of
her son's death, but she has to be overtly reminded of it, in the eighth and
ninth sections, so that her earlier violence can be justified and she can die in
a state of restored maternal grace. In the epilogue to "La cautiva," the peace
and fertility of the land is restored (the "agresteflor y hierba" have returned,
and the ombu tree grows to giant size), a cross has been planted in the desert,
and the Indians, terrified of the ghosts of Brian and Maria,will not approach
their graves.
In both works, this single basic structure is carefully overlaid with refer-
ences which imply that martyrdom and redemption should be viewed in
terms of Christian history and theology, a technique which universalizes the
specifically Argentine context and inserts the events described into earlier
traditions. The plot, however, does have a fundamental flaw: it is inherently
self-defeating because Echeverria's fantasy of performed masculinity and
moral victory did not-perhaps could not-include procreation, and the ef-
fects of sacrifice are therefore temporary. Maria and the young unitario both
die childless, and their deaths, however redemptive, do nothing to engender
a civilized, white Argentine future. At least at the symbolic level, the future
generations who "daran una lagrima a nuestras malogradas pero nobles in-
tenciones, y continuarin la obra que iniciamos" will never be born (OC 266).
"La cautiva" differs from the North American tradition in a particularly
striking way. In Whittier's version of Hannah Duston's story, the heroine
loses a child but returns to her husband and their surviving children to con-
tinue married life and, possibly, to produce more offspring. The very differ-
ent ending to Echeverria's poem in fact inverts the American Vanishing
Indian tradition: the white race fades away, while the native world survives.
At the end of "La cautiva," the pampas Indians are still there-still hunting,
still fighting, still taking captives. It is white Argentina that is vanishing, dis-
possessed of land and life alike and surviving only at night as the ghostly
lights,
Que salen, y habiendo errado

Por el desierto tranquilo,
Juntasa su triste asilo
Vuelven al amanecer.'7
17. There is a line missing from this section in the 1951edition of the Obras completas.The
standard version given here appears on page 121 of Echeverria'sObrasescogidas,edited in 1991by
Sarlo and Altamirano.
306 HISPANIC REVIEW : summer2005
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Male Anxiety and Sacrificial Masculinity: The Case of Echeverría

Author(s): David T. Haberly

In the second section of his "Afectosintimos,"datedSeptember26, 1835,

El coraz6nme dominay tiene a rayatodos mis afectos.Ni me permite

1. This edition will hereafter be referredto in the text as OC.

HispanicReview (summer 2005) 291

Particularly striking in Echeverria'sdescription of his loss of masculine ac-

reproductive male masturbation and premature ejaculation are, in fact, typi-

7. See Ashworth's articlefor a more detailed discussion of this topic.

past, as John GreenleafWhittierdid in his 1831Legendsof New-England.

One reason the "nifios"of 1837definedthemselvesas marginalizedand

pected of frontingfor the unmanlyEuropeanized'fops,' [. ..] a womanly

14. The more practicaland energeticGuti&rrez

The unfinished "Peregrinaje de Gualpo" was probably written in 1825,

house. In "La cautiva," Echeverria clearly felt it necessary to refeminize

Que salen, y habiendo errado

Fleming, Leonor. Introduction. El matadero. La cautiva. By Esteban Echeverria. 2nd ed.

Longfellow,Henry Wadsworth. "Defence of Poetry."North AmericanReview34 (1832):

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