Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Author(s): Ana Peluffo

Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 32, No. 64 (Jul. - Dec., 2004), pp. 63-78
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119929
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 LATIN AMERICAN OPHELIAS:
THE AESTHETISATION OF FEMALE DEATH
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY1

ANA PELUFFO

In nineteenth-century LatinAmerican poetry, metaphoric repre

sentations of "women who as analyzed
kill," by Josefina Ludmer in her

path-breaking study,2 are significantly less pervasive than representa

tions of women who die. The topos of the dead beloved appears with such
frequency in the poetry of Jos? A. Silva, Jorge Isaacs, Rub?n Dar?o,
Juli?n del Casal, Jos? Mart? and Amado ?ervo, among others, that by the
end of the century it becomes an id?efixe bordering on clich?. My aim
in this essay is to catalogue and examine the imagined corpses that
circulate through nineteenth-century Latin American poetry. By scruti
nizing the poetic obsession with a Latin-Americanized version of Ophelia,
I hope to demonstrate thatfin-de-si?cle writers used the poetic version of
the pre-Raphaelite pictorial ideal both to respond to the emergence of
modern female identities, and to sentimentalize masculinities at a time
when sexual arrangements were in flux. In a century marked by a desire
to construct national cultures and identities, aesthetic trends (naturalism,
symbolism, romanticism, Parnassianism, Victorian Sentimentality) and

gendered poses (the fl?neur, the new woman, the angel in the house, the
femme fatale) traveled from North to South, becoming something other
in the process. It was within this context of transculturation that Latin
American poets appropriated the morbid figure of the "dead woman as
muse" (Bronfen) from different and sometimes conflicting European
traditions.3
The topos of the dead beloved has a long genealogy that goes back
to Classical mythology. Orpheus' celebrated Eurydice, to name one of
the most ancient examples, becomes incarnated in Edgar Allan Poe's
64 Latin American Literary Review

phantasmagoric lovers, or in the tubercular "dame aux camellias" by

Alexandre Dumas. According to Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity
(1983) it was the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that mythologized the
morbid figura for an England deeply traumatized by the advances of
industrialization. Admired by fin-de-si?cle Latin American poets, the
pre-Raphaelite painters were themselves in constant dialogue with the
poetry of Tennyson, Keats and Shakespeare. Ophelia's suicide in an

aquatic tomb surrounded by floating flowers was depicted over and over '
again in thepaintings of themembers of thebrotherhood. Arthur Hugues
"Ophelia" (1852) presented an infantilized version of the character,
throwing petals into the lake into which she would later throw herself
(See fig. 1). In John Everett Millais' "Ophelia" (1852), the corpse
appeared floating on the lake face up, in ecstasy, with half opened eyes
and her arms outstretched into a crucifixion position(See fig. 2). It is said
that themodel for this painting, Elizabeth Siddall, who would latermarry
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, posed during several days, dressed in velvet in
a tub full of water heated by lighted candles from below. Immersed in the
difficult task of trying to reproduce themorbid effect of the model's
floating hair (an important fetish of pre-Raphaelite femininity) Millais
was oblivious when the candles went out. Legend has it that the model
chose to suffer and be still rather thandisturb the pose, and thather health
deteriorated rapidly leading to sickness and early death (Hawksley 46;
Copplestone 39).

Arthur Hughes (1830-1915), Ophelia. 1852.

fig.1
Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death 65
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Ophelia. 1851-52.

fig-2
Gabriela Mistral, in a very perceptive reading of Jos? Mart?'s
"Poema IX" from Versos sencillos, was the first poet-critic to remark on
the extraordinary similarities between this poem, "La ni?a de Guate
mala," and a pre-Raphaelite frieze (Gonz?lez 263).4 Most scholars,
however, seem to have read it as a poetic transposition of a biographical
anecdote. According to ?ngel Rama, Mar?a Garc?a Granados, the
Guatemalan girl who inspired the poem, had had a relationship with
Mart? in 1876-77 (Rama 64-66) before he abandoned her to marry
another woman. In order to justify the biographical reading, Rama quotes
the following quatrain:

Ella dio al desmemoriado

Una almohadilla de olor:
El volvi?, volvi? casado:
Ella semuri? de amor. (188)

The most necrophiliac tableau in the poem occurs in the cemetery

when themasculine self goes down on his knees to kiss the hand of his
dead beloved.5 At a time when poets were obsessed with voyeurism, a

concept thatMolloy calls "lujuria de ver," literally the lust of seeing ("La
politica" 130), the corpse is turned into an aesthetic artifact to be
consumed, visually, by both the lyrical subject and the reader. Far from
being repulsed by the sight of a decaying corpse themasculine self feels
the need to caress itwith his lips:
66 Latin American Literary Review

All?, en la b?veda helada,

La pusieron en dos bancos:
Bes? su mano afilada,
Bes? sus zapatos blancos. (189)

The reader, argues Mistral perceptively, experiences a certain

uneasiness at the un-sentimental nature of a poem that is built around the
tension between
the tragic referent and the melodic-cheerful tone that
trivializes the trauma of loss(Gonz?lez 263). It is only post-mortem that
the "ni?a de Guatemala," previously rejected by the masculine subject,
replaces his wife at the apex of his sentimental pyramid:

Como de bronce candente

Al beso de despedida
Era su frente ?la frente
Que m?s he amado en mi vida! (188)

Mart?'spoetic depiction of his lover's death is un-sentimental in its

a
lack of tears. And yet, there is sexual longing for his object of desire that
eroticizes necrophilia. The fact that "la ni?a de Guatemala" is lifeless,
mute and in a horizontal position inflames rather than decreases the

poet's desire for her corpse. Providing a counterpoint to the flamenco

dancer, the femme fatale whom Mart? fearfully desires in "Poem XI," the

girl from Guatemala becomes more attractive on account of her passivity

and inaccessibility. In the case of "La ni?a de Guatemala" the tension
between form and content that fractures the poem from within finds a

pictorial parallel inMillais' "Ophelia", a painting in which a flowery

spring landscape acts as a misplaced frame for the morbid theme of

aquatic death. Thus, concerning the intersection between poetics and

"
aesthetics, Mart?' s poem follows the Horatian dictum "utpicturapoesis
according to which poetry appropriates visual techniques from its "sister
art".6

It is generally believed thatMart? was one of thefew fin-de-si?cle

poets who remained unaffected by E.A. Poe's hemispheric influence
(Contardi 108).Nevertheless, inThe Philosophy of Composition (1846),
Poe had anticipated "Poema IX"'s lugubrious theme in his assertion that
the death of a beautiful woman was a romantic literary topic bordering
on the sublime.7 Poe himself had put this idea into practice in "Annabel
Lee" (1849), dedicated to the memory of his recently deceased wife, and
in "The Raven" (1845-49), a poem that had a huge impact in Latin
America when itwas translated into Spanish in 1887 by Arturo P?rez
Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death 67
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Bonalde.8 Poe's canonization in Latin American lettered circles came in

1896 when Ruben Dar?o featured him in his biographical collection of
"raros" [eccentrics] as the "sad swan who has best known death" [II,
259].9
In a poem
titled "El poeta pregunta por Stella," published in Prosas
profanas, Dar?ofollows Poe's example when he casts his dead wife,
Rafaela Contreras de Dar?o, as Ligeia's Latin American double. Dar?o's
beloved, in her silent role of dead muse, is almost as spiritual and chaste
as the pre-Raphaelite white lily towhich the lyrical subject addresses a
series of bereaved apostrophes: "?Has visto acaso el vuelo del alma de
mi Stella, /la hermana de Ligeia, por quien mi canto a veces es tan triste?"
(V, 804-805). In one of Dar?o's chronicles, the ghost of Stella reappears
in a different form when the poet remembers his urbanfl?neries around
"hirviente Broadway" ["boiling Broadway"]. Once again, the supernatu
ral female other becomes an excuse for Dar?o ?after all a poet from the
periphery? to establish cultural ties to a more prestigious cultural
tradition:

?Por qu? vino tu imagen a mi memoria, Stella, Alma,

dulce reina m?a, tan presto ida para siempre [...] t? eres
hermana de las liliales v?rgenes cantadas en brumosa

lengua inglesa por el so?ador infeliz, pr?ncipe de los

poetas malditos. T? como ellas eres llama del infinito
amor.( II, 259-60)

It becomes evident from this passage that Dar?o's dead beloved is the
poetic inscription of a sign mediated through multiple mis-readings of
Poe's texts. The celebration of the dead muse in Dar?o's oeuvre stems
more from a desire to imitate Poe than from the hope of being historically
faithful to his biographical referent. Read in the context of Dar?o's
chronicles, the need to resurrect Stella' smemory in a foreign metropolis
articulates itself as an impulse to modernize Latin American letters,
making them au courant in terms of literary influences.
The memory of an idealized lost love becomes part of a gendered
strategy to exorcize the emergent power of the suffragettes, the female
"
political activists thatDar?o caricatures so harshly in Estas
? mujeres !"(II,
539).10 In this chronicle, Dar?o expresses horror at the fact that the British
"new woman" is spreading to France, a country that he depicts as an

empire of "feminine charm and beauty." Thus, it is the

ways"masculine"
of new women that become the target for his critique when he refers to
the fact that even in Paris women want to vote and to be members of
 68 Latin American Literary Review

congress (II, 549). Following Mart?, then, Dar?o' s Stella, too good for this
corrupt world, can only achieve "sentimental power" (Tompkins) through
the act of dying.
When Jorge Isaacs wrote his elegiac poem in memoriam titled
"Elvira Silva," he sent it to her brother as a gift, accompanied by a brief
note saying that he "still had in his heartmany tears" [Arciniegas 80]. In
a process of "sentimental collaboration" (Kete) that sought to counteract
the grief of loss by deploying homo-sentimental bonds, Silva sent Isaacs
in return a portrait of his sister, and two perfumed handkerchiefs as
memento mori (Arciniegas 82). The gesture reveals that Silva had read
Isaacs' Maria (1867) ?a tearful Latin American best-seller about the
death of another young and beautiful woman? and that he knew how

important those fetishes were for Isaacs. He would have certainly

remembered the locks of hair that Efrain and Maria exchanged in the
novel, and that almost erotic tableau in which Efrain, lying in bed, wets
his dead lover's handkerchief with his own tears:

[...]E1pa?uelo de Mar?a, fragante a?n con el perfume

que siempre usaba ella, aj ado por sus manos y humedecido
por sus l?grimas, recib?a sobre la almohada las que
rodaban de mis ojos como de una fuente que jam?s deb?a
agotarse. (Isaacs 1867, 272)

In a poem that follows the meter, rhyme and neoclassical accents of

funeral poetry, the masculine poetic subject presents himself as a
member of an imagined affective community that is formed by "those of
us who remain in this wretched world" [266]. Thus, by virtue of her
as muse, Elvira Silva becomes a shared object of desire who is
celebrity
mourned collectively in the poetry of Jorge Isaacs, Eduardo Villa
Ricaurte, Jos? Asunci?n Silva and Rafael Pombo.11
Masculine tears figure prominently in La amada inm?vil by Amado
?ervo, a collection of funerary rhymes written to commemorate the

untimely death of Ana Cecilia Dailliez. According to the prologue,

Nervo wrote the poems "tear by tear, sob by sob" [14] in search of
consolation for his grief. He refers to the collection as a necklace of tears,
a figure of speech that renders tears valuable by transforming them into
In one of the funerary poems the lyric subject fantasizes his own
jewels.
death while clutching the lover's braid, a synecdoche of a passionate
love: "De un gran querer, noble y fecundo /[s]?lo una trenza [le] qued?"
(120). Just as his dead beloved's hair is still growing after her death, so
is his love, in spite of, and one could add precisely because of, the
Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death 69
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

disappearance of her body. Consequently, the braid becomes a symbol

of an erotic union in which the sweat of her agony and the tears of his

suffering merge into an amalgam of bodily fluids:

Su noble trenza de oro:

amuleto ante quien oro,
?dolo de locas preces,
empapado por mi lloro
tantas veces.. .tantas veces... (61)

By casting himself in the role of an abandoned lover who has shed more
tears in the lastmonth than stars exist in the sky (16) the lyric subject uses
his muse's death to construct a sentimental persona that will deviate his

poetics from the hegemonic Parnassian trends of the modernista move

ment.

In the case of Nervo the loss of his beloved allows him to feminize
amasculine poetic persona by invoking the residual
ideology of the "man
of feeling."12 An equally spiritualized model of male subjectivity lies at
the core of Jos? Asunci?n Silva' s poetic corpus. In El libro de versos, the
first link in a long chain of dead and sickly girls appears in "Cris?lidas".
The poem depicts a girl on her deathbed, while soon to be mourners "[...]
looked at her with eyes/ clouded by tears" [10]. In allegorical terms, the
title of the poem, "Cris?lidas", refers to a sustained metaphor by which
the beloved's body is a chrysalis that contains an eternal feminine
represented by a golden butterfly about to set itself free from material
constraints. In this poem, the sentimental mode represented by tears
outweighs amore decadent impulse that seeks to find beauty in processes
of degeneration and decay. And yet, in "Poeta, di passo", another poem
by Silva haunted by the invisible presence of the dead beloved, the
"camitablanca", that functions as a deathbed in "Cris?lidas" metamor
phoses itself into "a heraldic coffin" [29]. Thus, the Becquerian feelings
of compassion for the souls of the dead give way to an aesthetic

jouissance triggered by the Parnassian spectacle of a dead body turned

into a prestigious cultural artifact.13 The mortuary tableau is staged in a
dark and bleak interior that provides a stark contrast to the more luminous
and pastoral setting of Mart?'s "La ni?a de Guatemala".

?Ah, de la noche tr?gica me acuerdo todav?a!

* * *
70 Latin American Literary Review

T? mustia yerta y p?lida entre la negra seda,

La llama de los cirios temblaba y se mov?a,
Perfumaba la atm?sfera un olor de reseda,
Un crucifijo p?lido los brazos extend?a
Y estaba helada y c?rdena tu boca que fue m?a! (29)

In this mortuary vignette the memory of the gelid kiss of death puts an
end to an emotional crescendo orchestrated by an excess of visual
stimuli. With very few variations, the funerary scene is re-staged in a
poem titled "Del libro negro," inwhich the dead beloved is turned into
the revered object of a necrophiliac cult. In one of the most memorable
scenes of the poem the coffin advances on the shoulders of the mourners:

En f?retro luciente, tachonado

de brillantes estrellas de oro y plata,
en hombros el cad?ver conduc?an
de mi hermosa adorada. (1-4)

* * *

Por sus vidriosos y entornados ojos,

traspasando el fest?n de sus pesta?as,
un tr?mulo fulgor aparec?a
que me lleg? hasta el alma. (17-20)

The corpse is on display on the coffin as one of those treasured decorative

bibelots that were dear to the Latin American belle ?poque. Artifice is an
"essential part of the decadent sensibility" since nature should be altered
and improved (Carter 12). Consequently, the dead body is glamorized in
the poem to satisfy the desires of the refined aesthete.
Some Latin American Ophelias are better dressed than others, but
what they have in common is that they all die at the peak of their beauty
and youth. While Mart?'s Guatemalan Girl cultivates a more folksy
fashion style, Isaacs' Elvira sports a high couture demeanor: "[.. .]yace/
lujosa con las galas de la tumba" ("Elvira Silva" 267). In this last elegy
the braids figure prominently, not to dry the poet's tears as in Nervo's
case, but rather to protect the dead beloved's body from the coldness of
the grave. In what starts to resemble a macabre fashion show, Casai's
dead lover, covered in jewels and vaporous fabrics, becomes an undis

puted prima donna.

Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death 71
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Su inanimado cuerpo revest?a,

de raso y oro espl?ndida mortaja,
cubierta con un velo vaporoso
de transparente gasa. (61)

Poets frequently resort to ekphrasis in their efforts to create literary

portraits of their dead queens, a technique that Isaacs also uses in his
novel Maria. In this fictional treatment of the dead woman motif, Maria' s
dead body is depicted in the coffin as a work of art, a silent Mona Lisa
with a timid smile on her face: "aquellos labios p?lidos parec?an haberse
helado cuando intentaban sonre?r: pod?a creerse que alentaba aun"
(Mar?a 314). Isaacs portrays Mar?a as if she were alive; Nervo does the
same when he uses prosopopeia to animate a lifeless beauty placing a
smile on her dead face: "[...]y en la gentil/ boca breve, una sonrisa/

enigm?tica, sutil/iluminando indecisa/la tez color de marfil" (175). In

the formulaic imagery that poets invoke to portray the cadaver, they
frequently fragment it into separate fetishized parts. The lips cannot be
anything but purple, blue or crimson red; the skin is usually pale or
"discolored"; the hands are elongated; and the general appearance of the
body makes us think of anorexia.
In all instances, the corpse is represented prior to the decomposition
of the flesh to preserve the memory of its morbid beauty. This necessity
of aestheticizing death explains why the pre-Raphaelite painters pre
ferred to depict Ophelia's death by drowning rather than the death of
Juliet, another Shakespearean character who dies out of love, but in a
bloody and violent fashion. In most of the mourning poems the dead
object of desire is a passive Ophelia whose magnum opus is the staging
of her own death. And yet it is not rare to find instances inwhich the "dead
woman as muse", apparently passive and benign, turns into the feared
figure of her double; a femme fatale or Salom? who punishes the
bereaved poet turned Orpheus with indifference, disdain and silence.
Thus, in the last quatrain of Isaac's elegy "In memoriam", the lyrical

subject constructs for the reader a love triangle in which the poet's rival
for Elvira's love is not a human but
the angel of death. Elvira's ghost
becomes, then, a heartbreaker, a cold and insensitive muse who abandons
the poet to fall into the Angel's arms. If apostrophes are "prayer-like
invocations to an absent abstraction", as Kete claims in Sentimental
Collaborations (44), in Isaacs' "Elvira Silva" the lyrical "I" apostro
phizes death.

Te vas!... y para siempre! sorda, muda...

 72 Latin American Literary Review

insensible a gemidos y lamentos

de los seres que amaste! ?Y as? pagas
la ternura y el amor? ?Qu? su existencia
ser? sin ti, la gala y alborozo
en ese hogar de tus encantos nido,
donde pasan las horas,
lentas cual las de dicha voladoras,
y en que todo es dolor porque te has ido?
("Elvira Silva" 269-270)

The has given his dead beloved

poet tenderness and love and she has

responded with the coldness of the grave. In the powerful emotions that
shape the poem, anger precedes grief in the restorative mourning
process.
Jos? Asunci?n Silva
appropriates the modern mask of the dandy
fl?neur from Baudelaire's decadent poetics. And yet, Suva's poetical
conception of death is inflected by a sentimental mode that contrasts

sharply with the sadism of the Baudelairian gaze. Toexamine the

multiple ways in which decadence becomes sentimentalized in Latin
America -in Suva's case via B?cquer- Baudelaire's "Une Charogne"
comes to mind. It is a poem about death in which the lyric subject stops
on his walk to observe the carcass of a dead cow that is decomposing ?
plein air with its legs stretched towards the sky. As David Weir has
shown, the spectacle of death is eroticized when the cow is compared to
a prostitute or "femme lubrique" and when the "mon ?me" of the poem
is asked to imagine her own dead body being kissed by worms in the heat
of the sun (Weir xii-xviii). While Baudelaire turns the putrid flesh of a
dead animal into erotic beauty, Suva's more sentimental idea of death
follows the concept of "la belle morte" that Philipe Ari?s develops in The
Hour of Our Death to historicize death in nineteenth-century France.
Ari?s explains that, contrary to twentieth century cultural perceptions of
the bodily realities of death as taboo, Victorians "cultivated and desired
death becauseit was a step towards the reunions of eternity" (452).
In the case of Jos? Asunci?n Silva' poetics, "tanatofilia" becomes
a distinctive trait that stretches like an arch over his entire poetic oeuvre.
Silva' s "Nocturno III" is inmany aspects a commemorative poem that is
structured as a lament over a sentimental loss caused by death. This

consolatory process, in which the poet seeks to relive the traumatic

experience of death in order to overcome pain, is, according to Freud,

what distinguishes "the normal affect of mourning" from the "pathologi
cal disposition" of melancholia (243). Paradoxically, the obsession to
Latin American The Aesthetisation of Female Death 73
Ophelias:
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

remember is what places the poet on the path towards forgetfulness.

Formally speaking, the poem structures itself as a semantic opposition
between two nocturnal spaces: A first night in which the lover is alive,
and a second night inwhich the poet walks by himself, tormented by the
memory of his deceased beloved. In order to establish a separation
between the two nights, a third night is recollected in which the cold
weather brings back memories of the temperature of the corpse the night
of her death:

Sent? fr?o, era el fr?o que ten?an en la alcoba

Tus mejillas y tus sienes y tus manos adoradas,
Entre las blancuras niveas
De las mortuorias s?banas. (32-33)

These allusions to physical intimacy between two bodies (one alive and
one dead) engendered, at the turn-of-the-century, multiple critical specu
lations about the nature of this poem. It was read over and over again as
a biographical proof of incestuous love. But going back to the semantic

opposition between these two nocturnal spaces, it is worth mentioning

that the shadow of the dead beloved, as reflected on the solitary path, has
a semantic productivity that her alive double lacks. This effect is

produced by two action verbs "se acerc?

y march? con ella" that are

repeated anaphorically three times, and by the word "?gil" [agile] that

qualifies the shadow of the corpse in the poem's second half.14

In a similar vein, one cannot fail to notice that the happy memories
of the beloved are quickly overshadowed by the more powerful remem
brances of the lover's death. Hence, the sentimental power that death has
in the poem coincides with the pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal that Silva
embraces in De Sobremesa, through the appearance of two ghostly
female characters: Helena and Maria Bashkirtseff.15 In a much quoted
scene from De sobremesa Mar?a
Bashkirtseff, the Russian muse of the
Parisian fin-de-si?cle, is playing Beethoven on the piano to distract
herself from her physical illness and imminent death. What she envisions
in the penumbra of her room is no more than the macabre future of the
many dead muses of Latin American poetry. It is the body of Ophelia
floating down the waters of the "assassin river":

[....]al vibrar bajo sus dedos nerviosos el teclado de

marfil, se extend?a en el aire dormido la m?sica de
Beethoven, y en la semioscuridad, evocada por las notas
dolientes del nocturno y por una lectura de Hamlet,
 74 Latin American Literary Review

flotaba, p?lido y rubio, arrastrado por la melod?a como

por el agua p?rfida del r?o homicida, el cad?ver de Ofelia,
Ofelia coronada de flores ... el cad?ver
p?lida y rubia,
p?lido y rubio coronado de flores, llevado por la corriente
mansa... (242-243).

The catalogue of "women who die" reveals a discontent and a

malaise in the republic of letters. After all, Latin American poets were
themselves in a marginal position at the turn-of-the-century due to the
recent professionalization of politics, and to the lack of a reading public
for their works. This situation was aggravated by the emergence of new
female subjectivities in the public sphere, and by the increasing power
that the domestic angel exercised within the home. IfDar?o felt anxious
about the globalization of gender identities in the form of the suffragette,
Mart? felt equal uneasiness at the increasing sentimental prestige of the
angel in the house. In the case of Mart?, misogynist phobias were

responsible for the erasure of the mother in "Ismaelillo", a symbolic

death that allows him to form sentimental bonds with his four-year-old
son. Finally, behind the mask of these powerful female identities lurks
another threat: the sexual power of voracious femmes fatales who place
the masculine subject in a position of vulnerability. Here, it is not a
coincidence to find that Jos? Asunci?n Silva thought that poets should
embrace the "almost mystic cult of the Eternal Feminine" because they
were "weak for the battle of the sexes that we call love" [366]; and that
Mart? used a bellicose terminology to refer to the interaction between the
sexes in "Poem XXXV" from Versos sencillos:

Qu? importa que tu pu?al

Se me clave en el ri?on?
?tengo mis versos, que son
M?s fuertes que tu pu?al!(204)

In order to win the uneven battle of the sexes, poets turned their pens
into swords in a cultural war of gender that claimed the muse as one of
its first casualties. In a similar one could assert,
fashion, inverting
Ludmer's formula, that the configuration of a pantheon of dead muses
was a symbolic response to a series of social changes that took place in
a chaotic fin-de-si?cle. If the poetic ideal of the dead beloved neutralized
the threatening figure of some of her more active doubles (Salom?, the
New Woman, the angel of the house) it also allowed poets to usurp a
plethora of feminine values (compassion, tenderness, refinement, spiri
Latin American The Aesthetisation of Female Death 75
Ophelias:
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

tuality) that Latin American cultures placed on the side of the feminine.
One could even argue that the elimination of woman's sexuality, as
located in the materiality of the body, purified a sentimental surplus that
poets desperately needed to stretch the limits of the masculine sphere.
Poets appropriated these sentimental values to construct a secular reli

gion of art, a feminized "ivory tower", that acted as a refuge and an armor

against the deep blows of peripheral modernity.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

NOTES

This article was supported in part by aNational Endowment for the Humani
ties Summer Stipend Grant. Iwould like to thank Silvia L?pez, Kathleen O'Brien,
and themembers of the Interdisciplinary Women's Faculty Research Group atU.C.
Davis (Claire Waters, Seeta Chaganti, Elizabeth Constable, Emily Albu, Sophie
Volpp, Margherita Heyer-Caput, Ruth Caston, and Jocelyn Sharlet) for their
generous and thoughtful comments on themanuscript.
1
An earlier and shorter version of this essay titled "Decadentismo y necrofilia:
El culto a la amada muerta en la poes?a de fin de siglo" appeared in Spanish in
Ficciones y silencios Literaturas y culturas en
fundacionales: poscoloniales
Am?rica Latina.Ed. Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/
Iberoamericana, 2003: 239-251.
2
I'm referring here to the title of Josefina Ludmer's essay "Mujeres que
matan" [Women who kill] as it appears in El cuerpo del delito. Her excellent
observations about the construction of gender identities in the anarchic context of
the Latin American fin-de-si?cle were a point of departure for my ideas.
3
See Elizabeth Bronfen's Over her Dead Body, a crucial socio-psychoana
lytic study about aesthetic and narrative representations of female death in the
Anglo-american tradition. For a more historical perspective on cultural attitudes
towards death see Ari?s.
4
What Mistral says about Mart?' s poem isworth quoting in full: "Llevo, pues,
clavado el interrogante de esta composici?n. Aquella muerte de la muchacha
guatemalteca ?qued? enMart? s?lo como la vi?eta floral de un cortejo mortuorio que
m?s parece friso prerrafaelista? (Gonz?lez 263)
5
The same necrophilic image, of an almost formulaic quality, is depicted in
a poem by Manuel Guti?rrez N?jera titled "Mim?". The poem ismore sentimental
thanMart?' s "La ni?a de Guatemala" because the spectacle of female death makes
the lyrical subject cry. However, tears become eroticized in the poem when the
masculine subject tries to kiss and caress the body of his dead object of desire :
 76 Latin American Literary Review

"Llenad la alcoba de flores/y solo dejadme aqu?;/quiero llorar mis amores/que ya

est? muerta Mim?.[...]Sobre su lecho tendida,/inm?vil y blanca est?;/parece como
dormida/pero no despertar?. [.. .]En balde mi mano toca/ sus rizos color de te,/Y en
balde beso su boca,/porque Mim? ya se fue !" (48)
6
See R. W. Lee. and Jean Hagstrum for a discussion of the the ut pictura
poesis controversy (as painting so is poetry), an aesthetic theory that stresses the
similarities, and not the differences, between the visual and the literary arts.
7
At the beginning of the essay Poe dictates that the tone of poetry needs to be
melancholic and that the theme of death, in conjuction with that of beauty, is the
most suitable topic to construct a sentimental reader. In themost quoted part of the
text he says "[.. .]the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, themost
poetical topic in the world -and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited
for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." (535)
8
For more information about Poe's reception in Latin America, and for a
study about different translations of "The Raven" into Spanish, see Nunez.
9
All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
101would like to thank Graciela Montaldo for having directed me to this text
by Rub?n Dar?o.
11
The poem by Rafael Pombo poetizes the night of Elvira Silva' s death as she
is killed by lightning when she opens the window of her bedroom. The poem says:
"Venus, del cielo la vestal m?s bella/extrem? su belleza una ma?ana. /Prendada
Elvira de su excelsa hermana/madrug? alegre a embelesarse en ella./Alumbr?ndose
al par mujer y estrella,/la celeste a la par mir? a la humana./? Y ah! El rayo helado
de lamuerte mana,/del ?sculo de luz con que la sella." (Concha Mel?ndez 210)
12 In
the eighteenth-century European sentimental novel, the display of
masculine emotion was evidence of moral virtue. See The Man of Feeling (1771)
by Henry Mackenzie and The Vicar ofWakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith. Also
in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Earl of Shaftesbury the cult of
feelings is frequently placed on the side of the masculine.
13
Literary scholars have frequently mentioned the impact of B?cquer' s poetry
in Silva's works. The topos of the dead beloved appears in one of his most
sentimental poems published inRimas. "Cerraron sus ojos /Que aun ten?a abiertos;/
taparon su cara/Con un blanco lienzo/Y unos sollozando,/Otros en silencio,/De la
triste alcoba/Todos se salieron. [...]?Dios m?o, que solos/Se quedan los muertos!"
(154)
14
For a reading of this poem see Eduardo Camacho Guizado, "Po?tica y
poes?a de Silva" inH?ctor H. Orjuela's critical edition of Suva's complete works.
15 in her excellent reading of De Sobremesa,
Sylvia Molloy, talks about
Suva's sexual ambiguity and his need to "do woman" in an almost operatic process
of "voice snatching". Particularly thought provoking are her observations about the
intersections between a decadent obsession with female maladies and the need to
elaborate different models of masculinity. Pertaining to the construction of gender
in the novel Molloy observes: "Silva' sDe Sobremesa is a novel conflicted not only
about constructions of femininity but, more precisely, about new formulations of
 Latin American Ophelias: The Aesthetisation of Female Death 77
in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

masculinity. In 'doing woman' and 'doing disease' jointly, in Fernandez's voice

and in his body, De sobremesa is, above all, 'doing' the work of gender". ("Voice
snatching" 23)

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